The year is 2019. COVID is but a twinkle in the eye of some far-off bat or pangolin. A gaming group is huddled around a table, playtesting a new science-fantasy RPG.
After an opening vignette in the big city, the band of bold explorers head out beyond the environmental shields, into the toxic wasteland where a few minutes without your rebreather can spell doom. Their destination: an ancient underground laboratory, newly accessible after a recent earthquake. They and their employers hope that the facility contains valuable technology from a time before the divine Judgement that left the world broken.
As they approach the entrance--more of a cave, really--the party is set upon by rabid subterranean beasts. They gun down the animals in short order, and advance to the mouth of the tunnel. One of the characters, a young Primas-ika mercenary, steps forward and shines the beam of their flashlight into the depths.
"Wait a minute," the Narrator interrupts. "Since when do you have a flashlight?"
"Uh, I have a whole spelunking kit," says the Primas-ika's player. "We all picked them up back in the city."
"Read the item list," says the Narrator. "A spelunking kit has rope, pitons, bandages, and a blanket. No flashlight."
The player is incensed. "What kind of spelunking kit doesn't include a light source? I mean, come on. We all knew this adventure was going to be underground. Would I really have left on a month-long wilderness trip to explore a bunch of caves, and not have brought a flashlight?"
"If it's not on your character sheet," the Narrator says, "you don't have it."
At the risk of angering the OSR-verse, I don't care for this kind of situation. There are games where careful inventory management--making sure you have exactly the right tool for the task at hand--is a core part of the fun. That's fine. But it's not the kind of game I want to make.
But how to get around this problem? If the exact words on their character sheets don't control which items the party has access to, what does? When a player says they're taking out their reinforced handcuffs, ten feet of titanium chain, and eight-inch iron stake, should a Narrator protest or shrug their shoulders?
No one is well-served if every interaction with inventory turns into an argument that grinds the game to a halt.
SUPPLY
My preferred solution is one I first encountered in the game Marrow. I don't know if they invented it or not, but like the Picasso of the tabletop I have stolen the concept.
SUPPLY is quantum inventory, the equivalent of a blank tile in scrabble, an item whose nature is uncertain until it is needed. Marrow phrases it like this:
SUPPLY. Spend SUPPLY to have something clutch, but ubiquitous; a coil of rope, a flask of oil, a piece of jerky. Spend SUPPLY to negate a wandering monster encounter; your torchlight repels the darkness and frightens the monsters therein. Spend SUPPLY to rest easy for an evening; a full belly and a roaring fire is enough to soothe your aches.
"Clutch, but ubiquitous" is such a turn of phrase I want to weep for joy. A rope, when chasms yawn. A ten-foot pole, with pressure-plate traps ahead. A flashlight, at the threshold of the ancient cavern.
Put it in your game. It's great.
Going Further
So is that it? Have we reached into the social web of indie RPGs and plucked out the perfect bandage, fit to pack away this problem with a bow and never think of it again?
Well, ok, no. That's never how it works. Adding any amount of subjectivity to the rules is tricky business. What counts as "ubiquitous?" Rope and torches, sure, but what about those reinforced handcuffs? No? But maybe the character is a bounty hunter--surely they'd have such paraphernalia to hand. So the argument begins again.
The confrontation at the beginning of this blog post is just a symptom of a larger, eternal quandary: how to make sure that both players and Narrator feel like their respective conceptions of the game world are being respected. SUPPLY is a piece of the puzzle, but it's still just a patch over that fundamental tension. Is the responsibility of the Narrator to adjudicate game reality as they see it, or to aim for outcomes that will be satisfying to the players?
Ok, this post isn't really about abstract inventory anymore. But hark! I am not some armchair philosopher, tossing out thorny issues just to make my readers squirm. Balancing consistency, believability, and fun is a hard problem, true.
But I think I've solved it.
Stay tuned for more on how my next system, THAUMOS, turns GMing on its head...
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