The Adventurer's Kit

With 4e, D&D introduced a standard "Adventurer's Kit" for PCs - a backpack, bedroll, flint & steel, belt pouch, two sunrods*, ten days of trail rations, 50 ft hemp rope, and a waterskin. Of course, that's not a terribly new idea - back when I was with my old group, it was standard for the players to simply write "the usual shite" on their character sheet, to denote that they were carrying... well, more or less this same stuff.

* And these are pretty terrible, too, but that's another rant.

And it's fine as far as it goes, but this also marks one of my key issues with the way equipment is handled in the modern iterations of the game.

Specifically, it should matter what equipment, specifically, the characters are carrying. And if it doesn't matter, and it's not going to matter, then the matter should just be ignored - don't even bother with an "Adventurer's Kit" or "the usual shite" - if they need it, they have it.

I think that what has happened, broadly speaking, is that a lot of people started the game with the old-school dungeon crawl as their guide, and started with the notion that they needed this stuff - yes, you might need chalk, or iron spikes, or... And so, when creating their character, they make sure to equip all that stuff. (And with the encumbrance rules becoming ever-more generous, why not?)

Meanwhile, the game has moved forward from that place. I would like to say it's progress, but I'm really not sure that the math-fest of 3e or the chain-of-combats that is 4e really qualifies. Anyway, over time the game has gradually dropped any situation where chalk or iron spikes might prove useful - and anyway, groups have grown used to just assuming all that stuff.

The net effect was that players spend a lot of time in character creation poring over a long list of equipment for their character's adventures, make sure to lovingly detail his equipment list... and then never look at it again.

Now, there are two ways that we can go with this. The first is to take the view that this is an adventure game, that the characters are Big Damn Heroes on epic quests to defeat legendary bad guys, and they just don't have time to worry about the minutae of whether they have chalk. (I mean, chalk! The very thought!) That's largely the direction that 4e has taken.

The other option is to make equipment matter. Now, this is actually an adventure-design issue. Dungeons need to be designed with challenges other than pure combat - adventures need to include mazes (hence the need for chalk, to mark where you've been), sheer drops that need to be traversed (rope), doors and pits that need to be wedged open or closed (iron spikes), and so on. And, since the key goal is actually to provoke "interesting choices", the encumbrance rules (yes, again) need to be made much tighter - if the PCs can just carry anything and everything they need, and they can afford to buy anything and everything they need (which, by the second adventure, they can), then there's no point - just handwave everything.

Now, I'm not actually sure whether it would improve the game to come back to a more old school aesthetic in this manner (and, actually, go even further than the old school). But I certainly don't find the current no man's land terribly satisfying.