The weight of riches!

[Cantousent]

I know the weight of coin, cash, and booty in the game is a sore point for a lot of folks. After all, even dollar bills start to have real weight in sufficient numbers, let alone a stack of gold coins. How do we make the game playable with huge sums of swag while appeasing to folks who want 'realism' in their fantasy adventuring?

 

I'd like to say that my debit and credit cards all weight less than an ounce each. Hell, probably three or four of them could barely get up to an ounce. Give the PC an atm card! Why not? If we're going to have guns and cans of sardines, why not an atm card?

 

On the other hand, the 'realism' crowd doesn't demand that we have potable water with which to wash our hands after every trip to the head, right? We don't see the latest copy of Sears catalogue, let alone toilet paper, at every ten penny merchant in our travels.

 

I'm kind of joking, but I'm also curious about weight altogether and inventory specifically. I don't want inventory to turn into a mini-game. Sure, attribute weight to the booty. Make us drop stuff if need be. That's all fine, but don't sacrifice a working system that allows us to enjoy the adventure with something overly burdensome in the name of realism. ...And I wouldn't make money weight anything.

 

Sorry if there's a topic on this already. I didn't see one at a glance, but things are moving so quickly here it's hard to see.

[HansKrSG]

I am a pack-rat, and solutions like Gothic (Just ignoring weight and space altogether with no real reason voiced), or Stonekeep (Having a magical scroll where all items held against it became a picture until needed) are interresting to me. On the other hand, when I played Fallout NV the first time, I just had to do the "hardcore" mode and I still loved the game to pieces. For those of you who haven't played Fallout New Vegas, the hardcore mode made it so you needed water and sleep to survive and ammunition weighed something.

[dlux]

I don't like micro-managing cash. Just imagine that the gold coins are small, like 3g or something (these actually exist). So if you have a few hundred gold, then it weighs about a kilo all together and fits in your pocket.

Edited September 17, 2012 by dlux

[Cantousent]

I actually don't mind ammo weighing something, but the biggest thing it did was make for more trips and spreading out inventory between a few different safe places. I do honestly think they should ignore money weight, but anything else seems more reasonable to me. On the other hand, once the PC has established sufficient influence, he might not need money at a large number of places. In fact, ol' skool Fallout had a lot more of bartering on my first few runs. Once you figured out how to get tons of caps, you were filthy stinking rich, but maybe bartering should be the norm rather than accumulating riches. If they do it that way, then attribute weight to money because you won't necessarily need tons of it at any one time. Also, if you are powerful enough to have a stronghold, you could probably arrange for payment through your steward. Of course, that assumes that the merchant is in some sort of proximity to your stronghold and trusts you to make good on the funds.

[Berdrin]

I've never played in a single tabletop game (D&D, Pathfinder, and others) where the weight of gold was taken into account for inventory limits. The simple reason is that it is tedious, and requires more maths than most people are comfortable with handling during their spare time.

 

That said, one of the things I most enjoy in RPGs (and this says a lot about me), is inventory micromanagement...So, hopefully PE will maintain at least part of that, even if there's nothing wrong with making the system streamlined. I still enjoy being able to quantify my acquisitions of items and loot by shifting them about my bags.

[evdk]

Attribute weight to cash and then design a banking system with notes of credit.

[AutoReiv]

If you just changed the "gold coin" symbol that you see next to how much you have of it into an image of a pile of mixed valuables like coins, paper money, and gems, it would be more obvious that "gold" is an abstraction and not actual gold coins.

 

I also vote for keeping it weightless.

Edited September 17, 2012 by AutoReiv

[Delterius]

Paper money doesn't make sense, but neither does the daily exchange of hundreds of gold coins. I myself was always intrigued by the idea of minimizing the role of money and mostly bartering, but also bringing the prices (and the pure agregation of pure gold coins) down. Instead of selling that diamond you got and then buying supplies, you could exchange the diamond for supplies at a trade post. Making gold pieces weight then shouldn't be a issue to the player.

 

This could even add a twist where the owner of the estabilishment doesn't have enough potions/food/healing kits or whatever to pay for the gem you have, but you still need the swag so you agree.

 

Mind you, this is not a priority by any means.

Edited September 17, 2012 by Delterius

[Amentep]

Its relatively easy to get bogged down in micromanagement with making cash weigh what it really should weigh. I suppose its possible to create a system where it'll work, but it'd be easy to create a system where you're constantly trying to shift coins around the party to make their pockets weigh the right amount, which is really just a variation of Inventory Tetris, IMO.

[FreezingShock]

No, no, definitely not. This is nothing but an inconvenience which adds nothing to the game, in my opinion. I hated how I constantly had to make my way back to the dungeon exit in Daggerfall simply because I had managed to gather twenty thousand gold coins and exchange all my money in banks for letters of credit all the time..

[entrerix]

cash should have no weight. ammunition and other supplies should. i'd guess this is what we end up with as well

[Shadenuat]

Just add platinum coins or something?

Then again, enemies or seemingly innocent NPCs suddenly making small pile of shinies dissapear from one of party members purses would add something for players who like quests about thieves.

[Cantousent]

I was actually kind of joking for the most part about money, which I agree with Del about being a low priority. However, inventory in general, while not the end all be all, is important. I seriously doubt they go out on a limb regarding money, but I'm curious to see what they do about inventory. A limitless list of stuff without weight like KotOR2, a list of stuff with a weight attribute and a limited capacty to carry them, or items that fit into a limited number of slots in a pack? ...Or something else. Like I said, I saw something funny about money, and I know some of the grognards get bent out of shape about it, but I'm not entirely serious. It's still an interesting aspect of the design.

[Gorth]

I think it added to the challenge of STALKER, that everything had weight. You had to make some seriously hard choices, sometimes while being surrounded by enemies, what gear to use, what to keep for spares and what you would have to leave behind, despite being perfectly usable and you knew you were going to regret it later when your current gear breaks down.

 

Rent a mule if you need to carry more gear (and gold coins) around. Plan B, start writing IOU's

 

[Troller]

Yeah just have gold have no weight, and then haul everything with you, makes the thieves work way more easy

[Paul D]

I'd rather not carry around an infinite amount of gold/coin because it is weightless; was always part of the inventory system which didn't make sense to me.

 

A banking system could work if there was a Federation (or something similar) providing the deposit taking, with a presence everywhere (akin to the ATM analogy earlier). Alternatively there could be Guild/Faction/Region banks and , if you were a member, you could get a discount rate banking with them, if you were not a member, you were charged fees to access your cash. Inn's could be a logical distribution point (they are everywhere), and you affiliations could help determine the ease/cost of accessing / depositing your loot.

[Gorth]

...a banking system run by malicious gnomes, lining their own pockets while playing caravan with their savings customers money in the hope of lining their pockets even further... *insert mustache twirling idle animation*

[Volourn]

"I've never played in a single tabletop game (D&D, Pathfinder, and others) where the weight of gold was taken into account for inventory limits. The simple reason is that it is tedious, and requires more maths than most people are comfortable with handling during their spare time."

 

That's weird. In my 2+ decades of playing pnp I have never played a campaign where coinage weight wasn't taken into account. And, nobody ever complained about. It just seemed like common sense to use it.

[HangedMan]

Paper money doesn't make sense, but neither does the daily exchange of hundreds of gold coins. I myself was always intrigued by the idea of minimizing the role of money and mostly bartering, but also bringing the prices (and the pure agregation of pure gold coins) down. Instead of selling that diamond you got and then buying supplies, you could exchange the diamond for supplies at a trade post. Making gold pieces weight then shouldn't be a issue to the player.

 

This could even add a twist where the owner of the estabilishment doesn't have enough potions/food/healing kits or whatever to pay for the gem you have, but you still need the swag so you agree.

 

Mind you, this is not a priority by any means.

I second this.

[Cantousent]

In my 2+ decades of playing pnp I have never played a campaign where coinage weight wasn't taken into account. And, nobody ever complained about. It just seemed like common sense to use it.

 

As a DM, I rarely take coinage weight into account. ...But, then again, I'm pretty stingy with loot. Most of my players in the campaigns I've run would hear the description of survival horror and think there were a lot of peculiar similarities. Computer games aren't pen and paper games. I know you were responding to someone specifically and I cut that out. I'm not being tricky, I'm just saying that I think things can get bogged down too easily in computer games. As a DM, you can teach the players the ins and outs of how you run the campaign. Players know whether they should fret a little over dragging every bit of loot away. You can have them do things in game time in an expedited manner. You can eat chips and joke during the lull while folks decide whether to head back to town or not. In a computer game, that's real life time that I honestly believe most folks will simply resent taking. That's why moola always gets the quick and dirty no weight treatment. In some games, nothing has weight or even dimensions. It's simply items on a list. I want something a little more robust for inventory, but I don't want it to be absolutely soul grindingly boring to deal with it either.

 

...And what about something non standard? Different types of currency for different realms? I ran a campaign once where the characters could find black weightless tokens (They were interplanar so they had shape and hardness but not weight). Anyhow, there were machines left over from an extinct empire that took the tokens. The players never knew what they would get, but I kept track of their conversations they'd been having and I ran the machines as being able to take images and make them reality so that the players would get things along the lines of what the characters desired. Never too terribly powerful, but then again nothing in my campaigns is until at least level ten. After they got into the twelve to thirteen levels range, I upped the power significantly. I run pretty meager in terms of items, but you have to reward players somehow. Anyhow, to get back to topic, something like those tokens or pieces of some exotic metal or anything like it could add a different dimension to the game. I don't know that it's worth it to the devs, but it's an idea.

[Gorth]

If souls have no mass, we could use them as currency?