Three Items Only -- but they are ALL magical!!
I'm considering a D&D mini-campaign with a very different approach to encumbrance and resource management:
drastically reducing the number of items in the first place while making them much more useful.
The mythic underworld (or wilderness) is clearly delineated from the normal world (in keeping with Philotomy's Musings, which remind us that doors open for monsters only, monsters lose darkvision when serving a character etc.).
Here's the first draft of my rules:
(1) A character can only bring three items. If he brings more, he risks various severe complications from a random table (e.g. a curse).
(2) Provided a character follows this rule, all items brought temporarily become subtly magical.
(3) A subtly magical item "performs ideally" unless under too much scrutiny or put to the test. Some examples:
- A waterskin can be passed around to quench people's thirst and never runs out of water. However, trying to fill a bathtub with it will make it run dry normally and lose its magic.
- A flask of whiskey may reliably disinfect a wound, help a patient during an operation (i.e. cure hp), provide liquid courage (i.e. allow another morale roll) etc. This type of application uses up the whiskey.
- A sword is treated as magical for the purposes of hitting ghosts etc.
- A sandwich is not only very nourishing, but also very desirable to many monsters.
- A blanket provides not only warmth but also comfort.
Note that these effects are not set in stone.
(4) Once on the other side of the reality divide, characters can pick up or make more stuff (e.g. wield a slain goblin's weapon or sew a sack from a wolf's skin).
There is a similar limit on bringing too many people, effectively limiting party size to seven.
I was inspired by Lord Dunsany's fantastic little story "The Hoard of the Gibbelins" where the protagonist only brings a sword and a pickaxe...
