Time, Encumbrance & Light – In defense of Book-keeping

While my game is on a week hiatus, I thought it might be a good idea to cover some topics that I still see a lot of people omit or buzz over. Encumbrance and Light sources are generally treated as bean-counting, bemoaned as tedious and often handwaved altogether. Do I really need to detract 1 cp for every horse every day? Why even bother with random encounters? Here is a passionate plea to use these elements. They are central pillars of the dungeon-crawl and as soon as you neglect one element the entire edifice crumbles and you might as well start playing Dungeon World and raping people with robots.

D&D dungeoncrawling is at its core about momentum, resource management and deliberate boldness. If you run the game as it is written players throwing themselves mindlessly at every encounter will likely find themselves taking casualties before long but one also wants to avoid an interminable slog where players take fucking 1 hour (of session time) to clear a single room, and every square centimeter of the dungeon is searched for traps and secret doors. There is a beautiful built-in rhythm to the game that enforces a natural pace to the game and penalizes players that are too slow, with a natural incentive towards pushing one’s luck if no suitable reward is found.

Random Encounters are by far the most important way of keeping time, as they exercise a toll in resources both replenishable and finite. The central concept is that in dungeon-crawling, almost all actions have a cost associated with them and that cost is time–> gold and perhaps death if one is unfortunate.  If this time-cost is not present, there is no reason not to listen at every door, search every room twice, look for traps and mindlessly hammer away at the walls in search of a chance secret door. It becomes more expedient to assume the PCs will perform all these actions anyway, mostly removing the significance of their existence.
Looking for traps, secret doors, listening at doors or even breaking open doors, these all take time, increasing the chance of an encounter, and thus restricting their use to when the player deems it advantageous.

Encumbrance is the second most important and it is underestimated how well it ties into the dungeon-bashing model. The speed at which you explore if going to directly affect at what rate you suffer depletion from random encounters, how much ground you can cover before you run out of light-sources, how effective it is to run away from monsters during a fight that seems to be going poorly and, to a lesser extent, it enforces either a discerning hand in the exploration equipment one brings, or else a greater expenditure of resources as the excess is carried by either henchmen or beasts of burden, both of which CONSUME RESOURCES and might be disabled by monsters. The idea of treasure that is valuable but hard to carry, requiring significant expenditure of initial resources to cart off, loses all meaning if such measures are not enforced. There is a layer of complexity that is immediately lost if this is brushed over.
I say hammer away: ask your players how much they can carry and where they are going to put things. The same goes with treasure that is carted out of the dungeon and then left to rot after it has given its experience value. Incentivize players to think about how they store and use their wealth. If you are consistent they will soon acclimate themselves.

There are various systems to work around the precise bean-counting that requires judicious use of the eraser or an automated spreadsheet, the most well-known of which simply reduces encumberance to a fixed number of items. This does no great violence to the general concept. As long as the system is linked into the GP value it should suffice.

At higher levels of play, the access to ample wealth to buy donkeys and saddlebags, or even objects like Bags of Holding or Spells like Tenser’s Floating Disk relegates such Encumbrance to a secondary concern, but this is proper, as additional factors and considerations come into play. Wilderness adventures increase in scope, there are tentative feelers put out towards establishing a domain, and manifold magic items and spells must be juggled.

Light-sources are similarly treated as a box to be checked but they are much more vital then they seem. Monsters have dark vision, most characters do not. Light sources are their only way of temporarily surviving a hostile alien world. Light sources determine the maximum duration of any foray but this is not all. Consider the age old trick of gusts of wind extinguishing torches, monsters targeting the single lantern bearer that the PCs have relegated to the lightly armed spellcaster. Never forget bearing a torch or lantern takes up more then mere encumbrance, it takes up a full arm, one that can be used for spellcasting, bearing weapons or shields.

Like many of these earlier considerations, light sources seem to all but vanish as a consideration once the PCs gain access to the Continual Light spell, or various magic items that glow in the dark. By all means let them! Do not forget, (as EOTB, a reader and sage wise in the ways of AD&D pointed out), there are many monsters that have access to the darkness spell, instantly nullifying such an advantage, and woe to the party that does not have a backup.  

Random encounters, light sources and encumbrance will work together to set a pace to your exploration. This pace is only relevant if living costs, retainer fees, rent (?) and ration costs are enforced. If not, there is no benchmark to a proper exploration speed and players can operate in a cowardly fashion, expending replenishable resources on 1-2 encounters and retreating to repeat the process. If, however, living costs are strictly enforced, the expedition has a solid metric by which to glean whether or not an expedition is successful, and an incentive to occasionally push their luck. Consider the use of training cost or down-time because of raise dead or sickness, and how this factors into it.

Bean-counting or keeping track of the upkeep of various animals, retainers, possible property and supplies can be tiresome. My ACKS GM used a variant rule that recognized a concept known as living costs, which abstracted all these variables into a fixed, level dependent monthly fee that had to be paid in order to cover living expenses, supplies, retainer fees (but not shares of treasure!) and so on. There are drawbacks to the method but it might be a worthwhile alternative to anyone who enjoys the idea but lacks the organizational facility for the praxis. As long as there is a natural standard, and a trade-off between protection, speed and resource depletion, the essence is maintained.

In summary: The various resources and restrictions in oldskool D&D exist to assure a cost is attached to actions while exploring, rendering them meaningful, and also provides a natural standard against which to measure progress. Omit them at your own peril.