Personally, I like the idea of encumbrance in general to help discourage the Bethesda "strip the bodies of everything with a halfway decent selling price" approach early on. Obviously Bags of Holding can make that viable again, but hopefully by the point players have those, they're not trying to scrounge every silver they can from encounters.
Personally, I like the idea of encumbrance in general to help discourage the Bethesda "strip the bodies of everything with a halfway decent selling price" approach early on.
Generally speaking a game that doesn't track encumbrance will also have an implicit or explicit "but don't be silly" rule, and likely a generally casual attitude towards equipment so strip the bodies just doesn't work.
Personally, I like the idea of encumbrance in general to help discourage the Bethesda "strip the bodies of everything with a halfway decent selling price" approach early on.
Generally speaking a game that doesn't track encumbrance will also have an implicit or explicit "but don't be silly" rule, and likely a generally casual attitude towards equipment so strip the bodies just doesn't work.
Speaking for myself, I generally say that most armor and weaponry from generic enemies is in poor condition (either because it wasn't properly maintained or because of the damage inflicted during the fight- you didn't think you could stab someone a bunch of times and have their leather armor be intact, did you?) and will only get a pittance if you try to sell it.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
I enforce it in way thats mostly short term value, in order to reign in loot goblins. Party loot is at camp, and is basically infinite storage. The group has a bag of holding, and they have to manage it.
It makes it their choice to bring more gear or have more loot capacity. Suddenly pockets feel important. Items become sorted by usefulness. I had the DM let us melt metal to craft other things as a gold cost substitute. . At the start we were filling it with whatever we could find. Now its mostly extra potions, niche magic items, and the rest is things we are going to recycle.
You find out pretty fast casters use spells to fix problems, so they don’t carry much…… unless its a necro that wants spare bodies. Thus the rest of the party doesn’t need much either. But it has stopped needing record tons of trash loot to paper, because they keep the interesting stuff on them, and turn the rest into gold at camp.
Personally, I like the idea of encumbrance in general to help discourage the Bethesda "strip the bodies of everything with a halfway decent selling price" approach early on. Obviously Bags of Holding can make that viable again, but hopefully by the point players have those, they're not trying to scrounge every silver they can from encounters.
Generally speaking a game that doesn't track encumbrance will also have an implicit or explicit "but don't be silly" rule, and likely a generally casual attitude towards equipment so strip the bodies just doesn't work.
Speaking for myself, I generally say that most armor and weaponry from generic enemies is in poor condition (either because it wasn't properly maintained or because of the damage inflicted during the fight- you didn't think you could stab someone a bunch of times and have their leather armor be intact, did you?) and will only get a pittance if you try to sell it.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
I enforce it in way thats mostly short term value, in order to reign in loot goblins. Party loot is at camp, and is basically infinite storage. The group has a bag of holding, and they have to manage it.
It makes it their choice to bring more gear or have more loot capacity. Suddenly pockets feel important. Items become sorted by usefulness. I had the DM let us melt metal to craft other things as a gold cost substitute. . At the start we were filling it with whatever we could find. Now its mostly extra potions, niche magic items, and the rest is things we are going to recycle.
You find out pretty fast casters use spells to fix problems, so they don’t carry much…… unless its a necro that wants spare bodies. Thus the rest of the party doesn’t need much either. But it has stopped needing record tons of trash loot to paper, because they keep the interesting stuff on them, and turn the rest into gold at camp.