About Bulk in Everyday Heroes
This is a longer explanation of how bulk works in Everyday Heroes and why it works the way it does.
What is Bulk?
Bulk is an abstraction of an object’s weight, volume, and ease of carrying. A zero means it is trivial to carry an object, while a 1 represents an object too large for a normal pocket, but not difficult or awkward to carry. Higher numbers represent objects that require some thought or storage to carry without holding them in your hand.
The default Bulk system assumes you have some kind of container for whatever objects you are carrying such that you can effectively wear them, be it a carrying strap, small backpack, or what have you.
While Bulk is included for almost every piece of listed equipment in the game, it is not required that you use it in play. The rules that penalize characters for exceeding their bulk limit were designed as an optional game rule.
Why Bulk Exists
Bulk can help games feel more realistic by limiting how much equipment someone can carry and helps adjudicate situations where a character has a challenge with how much they can carry and still move quickly, such as taking gold bars out of a collapsing building. Any kind of limitation on a character offers some additional considerations for character building, which many players enjoy.
How Bulk Works
A. Every character has a bulk limit
The formula is 5 + STR modifier. Characters can carry that much bulk without any penalty.
B. Penalties for exceeding the bulk limit
There are two penalties for exceeding the bulk limit
- The character’s hands are no longer free (because you are carrying items in your hands)
- The character is encumbered (due to the weight or awkwardness of the items)
Encumbered
When a character exceeds their bulk limit, they are encumbered, making it harder to move freely. (Note: Encumbrance is an optional rule in Everyday Heroes)
- The character’s movement is Difficult
- The character has Disadvantage on Acrobatics Checks and Saving Throws
- The character cannot Dash
C. Penalties for exceeding double the bulk limit
The character is Restrained.
Restrained
When a character is tied up, or stuck in such a way that limits both their movement and the use of their limbs, they are Restrained, and:
- The character’s speed becomes 0, and the character can’t benefit from any bonus to their Speed.
- Attack Rolls against the character have Advantage, and their Attack Rolls have Disadvantage.
- The character has Disadvantage on Dexterity saving throws.
- The character cannot make use of any restrained limbs.
Carrying Cases
Carrying cases modify the bulk rules in some way for the character using them. Here are some of the possibilities. All carrying cases have a bulk capacity, which is how much bulk they can affect. Removing an item from a carrying case requires an Action in combat.
Convenient
The carrying case requires one hand to carry. It does not reduce the bulk limit, but does allow for one free hand. Also, it can be dropped as a free action, removing all its contents from the character’s bulk, which can unburden them quickly.
Example: You have a duffle bag that contains 8 bulk, and you have a bulk limit of 6. You stuff the bag full. While carrying it, you are Encumbered and have one hand full carrying the bag. Your other hand is free. You can drop the bag and have both hands free, and you are carrying 0 bulk, so you are no longer Encumbered.
Hands Free
The carrying case reduces your bulk only for purposes of having free hands. A backpack is a good example of this.
Example: If you have a bulk limit of 6 and 8 bulk worth of gear. A backpack with a capacity of 2 or more will keep the character’s hands free, but the character will still be encumbered.
Supported
The carrying case has its own support, such as a wheeled suitcase or a hand wagon. Moving the case usually requires one hand to pull, but any items put in the case, up to its bulk capacity, do not count against the character’s bulk limit.
Example: A rolling cart has a bulk capacity of 4. The character can assign items up to 4 bulk to it, which do not count against their bulk limit.
Behind the scenes
When designing Everyday Heroes, I didn’t really want an encumbrance system, as I don’t use them when I play. As a GM, I just call out when a character seems to be pushing the limits of what is reasonable to carry. But Dave really wanted encumbrance, and Goober thought it was better to have one than not, so I agreed to do one. This is how we made most decisions about the game rules, and it worked well.
We all agreed we should keep the system simple, so we went with Bulk over a measure of weight and size. Just one value to keep track of, and one value to assign to items. I also persuaded folks that the encumbrance penalty should be an optional rule, even though bulk as a statistic for items was a core rule.
We made a lot of characters in playtesting, and Dave felt like we needed some containers because the bulk system felt restrictive. I argued that being restrictive was the whole point of the system, and that the rule already mentions it assumes you have a place or way to stash whatever you are carrying so it’s not in your hands. But ultimately, I agreed to write something up for large carrying containers.
I made the containers so that they didn’t just circumvent bulk limits, and instead mitigated their effects in ways that made sense. A big backpack let you keep your hands free, but you still had all that weight, and a suitcase was something you could easily drop, but it was still heavy and required a hand to carry. So I more or less satisfied Dave while also keeping the bulk limit more meaningful than just requiring every player to load up on containers.
Unfortunately, this made the carrying cases unintuitive, and questions about them were common from fans. So the design makes sense if you explain it in great detail, but that means spending a lot of words and effort on minor exceptions to an optional game rule. Ultimately, I’m not too fond of the end result, especially given it’s a “Hollywood Action” style game.
When working on The Armory, I found my own issues with the encumbrance system. The problem I found was that it didn’t work well when you had a lot of smaller items, specifically grenades. Grenades are a bit too large to put in a pocket comfortably, so they had a Bulk of 1. But carrying 4 grenades is not all that uncommon, and would represent half a strong character’s bulk limit, or their entire bulk limit with 9 Strength. Gearing up a typical soldier became impossible without encumbering them.
I decided to do two things to compensate, breaking some of the conventions I set earlier. Firstly, I gave grenades fractional bulk, so you could have 3 grenades for 1 Bulk. The second was to add carrying cases (specifically a weapons belt and holsters for guns) that would neutralize the bulk of small items they are designed to carry.
Lessons Learned
My opinion is that strict encumbrance is still not that useful in a modern action game, and that common sense is a better tool for handling players being silly.
That said, a gritty military campaign or a classic fantasy dungeon crawl can have an encumbrance system that creates fun gameplay, provided it is focused on making and equipping a character rather than something you bring up during play. I think a system like that requires a more fine-grained bulk scale than what we used in Everyday Heroes. Were I to make one, I would expand on the container rules, making them integral to managing your inventory in the game and giving them a set of their own properties, including the maximum size of things they can contain, a maximum total, and something detailing how accessible and secure the contained items are.
