Get behind the mule!

In a recent post, I went on at some length about shields. Armour and shields, I think, should be an important part of a risk/reward trade-off in RPGs with a traditional sword-and-sorcery or medieval setting. Both should be highly effective in fights, but both are cumbersome and often inconvenient. And this should force a welcome burden of decision-making onto players.

Cliff notes
Encumbrance rules, in my experience, rarely work well - simply because both players and GM tend to forget about them in the course of a game. They also tend to get lost in the scrawl of a character sheet. A better system, I think, is for obstacles and situations to act as 'encumbrance challenges'. So, when mapping out a narrow passage or a cliff face or whatever, I'm now inclined to note penalties for characters carrying heavy or awkward objects - polearms, shields, crossbows, longbows and the like - or wearing heavy armour.

These modifiers are cumulative, of course. So, in Whitehack (the version of D&D I'm most familiar with and like best), I'd make a note like this for a steep cliff face in a cavern:

DEX check; double negative roll for non-Deft PCs; held weapons -2, long weapons -1, shields - 2, armour - AC [Whitehack AC rises from 1 to 6 for armour], bow -1, crossbow -1, longbow -2, pack -1, heavy pack -2. A sword at the waist would be -1 too, though this would be avoided by a PC who thought to sling it on his back (as no one would carry a sword in normal circumstances, film-makers of the world take note!).

So, a thief (one of the Deft in Whitehack terms) might face the cliff carrying a spear (-3) and with a short bow (-1), shield  (-2) and heavy pack on his back (-2). If he has DEX 15, he's going to need a 7 or under to succeed - and 5 or under if he's wearing leather armour (AC 2). A player, presented with those odds, is going to leave stuff at the foot of the cliff. And a fighter who faces rolling 2d20 and taking the worst is going to be stripping off his armour pretty damn quick. Add a pursuing horde of troglodytes, and those PCs are going to be scaling the cliff with just a dagger and their most portable treasures.

This is an area in which I really like 'naked mechanics' - ones for which the players are fully aware of the modifiers. Knowing the modifiers forces them into realistic decisions - or taking genuinely heroic risks.

Mule variations
Another way to deal with encumbrance in a manageable way is to mandate the use of horses or pack animals for transporting heavy stuff any distance. No one marches day after day wearing plate armour. And treasure - chests, sacks of coin, significant loot of any sort - demands beasts of burden. The default assumption should be that when a party that contains warriors of 'aristocratic' type (heavy armour, multiple weapons, big shields, etc.), horses or mules are involved. Yes, a Roman soldier could march with all his gear and a heavy pack. And, yes, so can a modern soldier. But a 15th-century man-at-arms wouldn't be waltzing through rough country with his plate armour on and carrying all his worldly belongings with him too. That's what horses (and pages and squires and their horses) were for.

This has implications for encounters: no, you weren't wearing your full plate when the ambush struck (unless you were riding); it was on the mule, of course. It also makes attacks by wild beasts more interesting, because so much more is at stake. If a sabre-tooth tiger uses the opportunity of the goblin ambush to maul your mules, you'll be reduced to just what you can carry. And in the wilds, that may not be a lot. Overburdened parties are more likely to attract further predators ...

What's that smell?
Bill the pony from The Lord of the Rings is a fictional example here. And the dwarves in The Hobbit suffer from having various ponies (with gear) eaten, first by orcs and then by Smaug. Managing and maintaining pack animals should be a big part of an outdoor adventure - and also an important factor in an underground one - if, that is, they will go below ground in the first place.

Mules might enter a goblin den, but might bridle at entering a gnoll lair. Unnatural carnivores, animalistic humanoids and common-or-garden predators can all serve as frustrations for well-equipped PCs, given a reliance on pack animals to stay well equipped.

And how would pack animals react to the presence of undead - or of sorcery? Tonight, I started reading Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising with my kids. The book - which loomed large in my childhood - has a brilliant opening in which animals start reacting fearfully to the hero as his birthday approaches - because magical power is awakening within him. Getting a pony to walk through an elf-haunted forest might be quite a task ...

Arms and the man
All of this is a means of facilitating of the GM's main functions - forcing the players to make difficult choices. A frontal attack on an orc village? Suit up in your finest plate and grasp your poleaxe! Crawling into the kobold tunnels? Maybe that gambeson will be the best compromise - and best take a dagger instead of the poleaxe.

The effectiveness of full plate armour is often underplayed by RPGs - Whitehack included - as it should render a warrior almost invulnerable. The fact that late-medieval men-at-arms abandoned shields and favoured two-handed weapons like the poleaxe demonstrates this pretty plainly: shields were only abandoned when they weren't needed. So for a fighter, giving up full plate should be a real wrench. But it just isn't designed for potholing ...