You will always find a character within the group turns themselves into a walking hardware store. Most DM’s I’ve come across in the past do not really care just how much a player carries until it gets to the stage where they are trying to walk away from a battlefield carrying the King of Jobrovia’s personal security teams power armour in their rucksack.

What has always amazed me is that they go into so much detail in what they are carrying, what it’s stats may be and how it looks that they completely ‘forget’ how heavy the item is or for that matter just how big it is.

I’ve seen players trying to go dungeoneering whilst carrying a ladder and two ten foot long poles each and then conveniently forget about them the moment they get attacked or they start off down the tiny side tunnel that leads them to the gold.
So what normal items have you found your players trying to hide upon their person or get away with carrying lots of in your campaigns?

Over the years I’ve managed to get a Top Five list of items that I cannot go a game without a player at some point trying to get away with carrying them.

1. Ten foot pole. It’s self explanatory really. I mean how many people can walk through a forest, go into a dungeon or even wander about town with a ten foot long pole in their hand or attached to their pack and not have a great deal of difficulty? There is a reason why most players do not pick pole arms as a primary weapon and it just so happens it’s the same one as why people don’t walk about with poles!
2. Ladder. For the exact same reason as the pole except that its even bigger. Unless your player is a window cleaner then he’s not going to be carrying one around with him where ever he goes.
3. 50′ Rope. OK so it’s far more portable than the pole or ladder ever will be but if they claim to be carrying it on their person you need to remind them just how bulky that rope is. You also might want to remind them that 50′ isn’t really that long once you get down to it. By the time you’ve found something to tie it to as well as tie a decent knot they will be left a lot less than the initial 50′ they thought they had. They might catch on to this though and pick up an extra length of rope. That’s when you remind them again just how bulky that stuff is. It’s a whole other ballgame in sci-fi campaigns.
4. Ammo. It doesn’t matter what your setting is at least one player will always try to find space to take 50 arrows in to combat or 1000 rounds of ammo for their assault rifle. That’s a hell of a big quiver in anyone’s books and an normal combat loadout is usually more like 250 rounds with the rest being left back at home as those bullets are heavy!
5. Sorrell Nuts. This one is actually a personal peeve from years ago whilst I still regularly played Rolemaster. One of the players favorite healing and resurrection methods involved a sorrell nut. They were expensive and hard to come by but over the years in game one of the players learned to cultivate and grow the plant needed for this item. From what I recall the weight and size were negligible and so no figures were ever given in the rule books. This meant that the player had a stash of several thousand nuts on him at any one time and sold them off to the local townsfolk. The DM read the ruling as they were that small the player could hold as many as he wanted and the only limiting factor the player ever had was on how much gold he could carry to his tavern at night after selling them that day.

So what has been your bugbear over the years with your players equipment lists?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Something I’ve been thinking about recently actually cropped up in a Darths & Droids strip I read recently. Why is it when it comes to roleplays set on outer space 99% of the time the planet will have one environment and probably only one or two exports? Where is the diversity?

Back in the days of my youth our games were very simplistic. If we were not using a pre-existing setting like Waterdeep in the Forgotten Realms or Star Trek our locations were always very simple and generic. It was until I hit my late teens that my maps became anything other than a amoeba shaped blob with badly drawn mountains and trees on it. When it came to space settings though it got beyond a joke.

Picture the scene. You’ve spent two months playing in Waterdeep for a solid three nights a week and maybe a day at the weekend. For a nice break you decide to run a Spacemaster campaign for a few weeks. You throw together some characters with the players and pull out your binder of hand drawn and very detailed ships and get them to choose one from the ‘cheap’ bundle. And what planetary system do you let them loose in? The one who’s entire chart can be described as an A4 sheet with 20 circles drawn on it with generic environment and chief export details written beside it.

It was my one bugbear with the Firefly TV series and Star Wars is famous for it but it still drives me nuts. So why do we keep doing it? I can understand that to populate countless worlds in the same detail as you would a normal one world fantasy campaign but something has to give. The one method I’ve came up with that works is to pick two places on a planet and treat it like a city on a fantasy map. Give it enough detail to play it well and use generic work for elsewhere on the planet and over time the players will much prefer the places you’ve worked on. they’ll keep returning to those same places and this allows you to slowly add new areas on planets that attract interest. So your generic sea/space port kicks off thanks to your characters falling foul of the law and having to make a sharp exit from the gaming area you had prepared. Next time they come back to that planet you’ll have had time to expand on the new location and every bit of work you do fills the game world as a whole.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Do you know the last time I had to learn a completely new gaming system? I’m not talking about jumping between editions of games here but proper separate systems. The last time was fourteen years ago when I had to learn the WOD system after a ten hour shift and several cans of lager. Thankfully WOD is basically a very simple system but it would have been a totally different ball game if the system was any more complex.

As those that follow this blog may know I’m coming out of retirement as a gamesmaster very soon to run a Shadowrun game. Now those systems we play I know off by heart but I’ve only ever played SR once and it was as a player 18 years ago.

I’ve read through the rules several times now and its a fairly simple system but I cannot for the life of me retain any of it in my head. Have I reached my limit? Have I got to the same stage as Homer Simpson and for every new bit of information that goes in two bits fall out?

How do you go about learning a new system? Do you just go with a brute force attack and sit through your evening reading and rereading the rules and playing games regardless with the books in front of you or do you have a way of remembering the differences between systems and using those as hooks for learning the new rules?

At the moment I’m going with the brute force idea but it’s failing badly. I usually go through the character creation on my own to pick up the basics and repeatedly build the same generic character over and over again. Normally this will highlight those few areas I have trouble with or can’t quite get correct in my head but I’ve drawn up three characters so far and you’d think one was from WOD, one from D&D and the other from a completely homebrew game that is based on playing germs and living with the bleach under your kitchen sink.

I wonder if you can get any nanotech that make learning gaming rules easier?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!