Inventory Limits

In later Level 9 games, the "GO TO " and "RUN TO " commands made you go to any accessible room (I don’t remember if it only worked for rooms you’d already visited or not); “RUN TO” was much faster because the game didn’t describe the rooms in-between.

But you could also use "GO TO " and "RUN TO " to find any accessible object on the map (again, I don’t remember if you had to have seen it before): it just moved you to the room in which the object was. That system (well, with "RUN TO ", "TAKE ", then "RUN TO ") was actually very similar to Peter Pears’ idea, wasn’t it? And it seems to me that if the game automatically remembers all the objects (and rooms) you’ve found, it’s far less frustrating than having to explicitly type "REMEMBER "!

Another approach that hasn’t been discussed here is to occassionally remove the player’s treasure hoard through plot devices. Such an approach certainly wouldn’t be practical for many storylines, but this alternative form of inventory limit can be very effective in maintaining game balance under some circumstances while also addressing some of the issues already discussed–namely “lots of items is fun/realistic” vs “carrying lots of items is unrealistic/not fun.”

This approach need not always consist of aggressive plot developments such as “You are captured by orcs/aliens/the police and tossed into a cave/cylinder filled with green liquid/jail cell. Your possessions are nowhere in sight.” For example I am currently making a small test project to try out the new build of Inform 7 and used this approach in a way that (to me) seems fairly integrated into the “plot” of my sample project. I have an initial area where I was testing out some simple concepts, and am now ready to move on to a constructing a second area where I’ll begin testing more complex issues. I don’t want any of the items from initial area to be available in the second area, and I certainly don’t want any of the items from the second area to be available in the first area (as their expected complexity may break its simple functionality). My design approach in enforcing this division was to make a locked door separating the areas which cannot be opened by any means. At the “end” of the initial area, the player-character finds a small device which allows him to become semi-corporeal and therefore walk “through” the door in question. The device is described in pseudo-scientific terminology appropriate to the sci-fi setting; in a high-fantasy setting this item may have been described as a potion of gaseous form or ethereal travel. The duration of the device’s effect is clearly described as very brief–long enough to pass through a door, but not long enough to safely go wandering through walls in general without knowing a clear space for rematerialization will be nearby. A side-effect (in design terms the primary desired effect) of noncorporeality, however, is of course that any objects the player-character was carrying can no longer be held and any worn items can no longer be worn; all such items simply fall to the floor as the pc’s body becomes ethereal. Thus as the player advances from the first area to the second, all items from the first area are effectively removed from play in a way in a way that seems integral to the (very simple) story.

Such an approach must of course be used only after giving careful thought to how the overall story will develop. This approach would be unsuitable in a game like the old Planetfall, where much of the gameplay consists of simply carting objects back and forth across a huge map in a serious of timed fed-ex quests.

That’s a good point and a good example, Endosphere. I think that the very best situation would be one in which the PC simply won’t acquire an unrealistic number of portable objects. In cases where this is not possible, I don’t see why the game author can’t give the player a sack object, which is smart enough not to contain huge or oddly-shaped items. This thread hasn’t really broached the topic of rucksacks/backpacks, etc. Is a fairly low inventory limit really that bad, if the PC can carry all the miscellaneous stuff that the player may feel the need to take in a backpack?

Not if surplus items are automatically placed in the bag. (Both Inform 7 and TADS 3 have classes for this kind of thing in their default libraries.)

If you have to put things in manually then it’s still tedious busywork that’s far more appealing to authors than players.

What if the inventory had “soft” limits? Like, you could hold as many things as you wanted, but there might be consequences for holding toom uch?

Possible Examples:

-After a certain limit, there is a small chance that you will randomly drop an item due to carrying too much.
-NPCs remark on or act upon the strange behaviour of carrying around many objects, perhaps offering to help you carry something.
-You find yourself unable to operate doors or stationary objects due to having your hands full.
-Traversing ladders/stairs/slides/etc becomes hazardous when you carry too much

As much as players seem to hate INV limits, it seems like some of the best puzzles included them- the coal mine puzzle from Sorcerer could only be solved by removing all your held items, for example. The diamond puzzle from zork required you to move items through the basket so you could get past the drafty room.

I can see the frustration when puzzles seem to have arbitrary solutions based on objects you can’t expect that you’ll need to carry around (such as the welcome mat in mainframe zork, when a newspaper should have worked just as well). Lack of inventory limits can get pretty comical at times too (such as in Leisure Suit Larry 2 where the player picks up a garbage can sized cola and puts it in his pocket- with no lid, and safely carries it around).

Perhaps if the player had some kind of APPRAISE command, where his experience as an adventurer could tell him how useful a given item is likely to be? That might have an effect to tone down the difficulty of a puzzle game, but might ease the frustration of carrying around useless items.

Both of your examples (and their predecessor, Adventure’s Plover Room) are severe, short-term inventory limits. You can carry zero or one objects, in one location, for the purpose of one puzzle.

This goes along with the up-thread example of a game with a few heavy objects, where you can’t carry two heavy objects but there’s no limit on light ones.

In all these cases, the effect is supposed to be intrusive and highly limiting, but it’s also brief. It doesn’t apply to the general course of the game. That’s why it works.

That might be an even better way to enforce realism and immersion than to create an arbitrary inventory limit. It would cause the player’s adventuring habits to have an observable in-character effect, which would probably help the player to get into the story and identify with the PC. Probably many players would simply stop making the poor PC lug around everything they want. It would be hard to implement consistently and probably wouldn’t fit stylistically for every game out there, but for many games this could be a good solution.

Good thinking!

This is the solution I’m implementing in my Big Manly Adventure, the Conan-Meets-Gor kind of sword-n-sandal world. You don’t see those guys dragging around a life raft filled with wands, trinkets, swords, lanterns, newspapers, matches, teapots, zorkmids, leaflets, paintings, and lumps of clay with string. No, you see 'em in a loincloth with a sword.

Therefore, the game won’t allow the player to carry around big handfuls of items. However, the player shouldn’t notice, because the game won’t have big handfuls of items to be carried. The puzzles and obstacles won’t be solved by management of magic keys, or manipulation of trinkets. There will be puzzles about carrying big things with both hands — carrying a slave princess with one arm, fighting off guards with a sword in the other; or perhaps trying to figure out how to climb a ladder with the Gold Statuette of Rang-Ko in your inventory — but I’m designing around the need for Conan to carry a Sears Roebuck & Co around with him.

For the few times the player will need to carry small things around, he’ll get a (automagical) sporran or something that can fit the tiny doodads he wants to take with him.

I am totally looking forward to this game.

You had me at “automagical sporran”.

Perhaps rather than a rucksack they need a Nodwick- an NPC who carries all their stuff for them to follow them around and hand them items as needed. :slight_smile:

Actually, I’m making my list of non-item puzzles, and there’s actually quite a lot of things you can do in the scope of that world to challenge a player, all without requiring keys and material goodies. That’ll help keep inventory to a bare minimum.

Although a companion isn’t a bad solution either. :slight_smile:

How would you compare holdall puzzles to light source puzzles?

Actually that question, while it may have been rhetorical, got me thinking.

The light source puzzle, at least in Zork, was twofold:

  1. It stopped players from wandering in the dark and possibly bypassing puzzles or getting lost permanently (especially with the trapdoor being barred)
  2. It imposed a timelimit on the game (number of turns until lantern popped out).

They did the same as #2 with the hunger puzzle in Sorcerer/Enchanter.

It seems like what these puzzles SHOULD be used as, whether they’re hunger, inventory, etc, is as a method of pacing the story.

The reason we stop them from carrying around everything is to slow them down- by forcing them to move through familiar areas. This might have the benefit of making the rooms more “memorable.” For example, I can now go thruogh Zork without a map, partially because you had to move through these rooms so often on the trek back to the trophy case. Likewise, I’m overly familiar with the carosel room in Zork 2, but not as much with the further away rooms, because that was a good “central” location to deposit goods. That made the need of the map a bit lesser as a consequence.

A light puzzle would be one of the tools used to keep people out of a given area until later in the game, or to put in a sense of “danger”. If your light could go out at any time, you’d better be very careful about what you do down there. However, if you have a permanent Frotz spell, then light is mostly irrelevant. In many ways, this is like a “need a key to get into a door” type thing, though there were nice light puzzles- (Such as the gas room in Zork, forcing you to go back to your lantern- hope it still works!, or using the grue repellent instead of light).

Secondary to these are actual inventory based PUZZLES, like the long slide in Sorcerer/Mainframe Zork or the Drafty Room in Zork I, where the puzzle was getting items into places when you COULDN’T carry them. Those I think were much better than arbitrary limits.

I think the main issue here is seperating the current IF game from the typical D&D Dungeon Crawl for the main purpose of gathering treasure items. In the latter case, encumbrance was much more of an issue to be overcome, where in the former, perhaps it shouldn’t be relevant.