Quote:
Originally Posted by Acacea 
Likewise, inventory weight... some people hate weight limits and space limits, I prefer them in the setting of realistic/roleplay. But on the flip hand*, if you go that route, you have to take it into account when you make your drops, CNR, equipment weight, stackables, etc.
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I wouldn't mind it so much if there was at least some equipment weight on the enemies as well which acts to their detriment. It's rather unbalancing that a player character can be encumbered by crippling strike or negative energy burst, but not an enemy. Each of them should have at least 50-100 lbs on them just for their armor alone.
Crafting weight encumbrance isn't so bad if there's some form of storage available which meets the current needs of the CNR system. However, thanks to all the nifty new bottle-necker ingredients like threads and sandpapers, we created an economy which PUNISHES the light traveller, and incredibly so. Forget about smithing unless you can either lift an "extra" 300 lbs or a buddy with some spare crates, what with the 11.5lb boxes of 35 molds, the 12 lb nuggets which suddnly you need two or three of them for a single ingot on a 10 ingot fullplate or a 7 ingot shield, and you have a pretty hardcoded glass ceiling on the crafting biz. Whine about how eveybody has too much inventory, then set the stage for them to buy 10packs of lion and malar bags, etc. its counterproductive. And that old line of "hey, not everybody needs to be a crafter!" is immediately offset by the fact that Earl's had 17k in his bank gathering dust, and not a single crafter out there feels it worth his time to make 17.5k overnight, to make him one bloody doublesword.
Encumberance, while nice, is seldom enjoyed by the enemy, nor by the main populace. Only the Bjornigars who can bench 650 unspelled and invest over 100k into lion bags. Where does that leave the rest of the populace?
Stockpiling, Hoarding and Muling. The only way one can craft with so many nitpicky little ingredients scattered across 3 continents. When you have to climb 3-4 mountains, slay several hundred tribesman and return 3-4 times to the same mine just to make one bloody fullplate, then crafting no longer becomes a hobby or RP experience in game, it becomes a RL job. Let an old man just pick up a log and whittle wood! Why does he need to grind wood, make paper, dig sand, pinch sand, bake paper, and manke sure its all the right kind of paper because some ooc mechanism causes yew or mahoganey to explode when touched by hickory sandpaper? then you need to fight spiders to collect silk and sew them with your kit into a bowstring, attach the bowstring, set it with yer carpenter tools, and wham, for one bow you just lagged up the server with 3 pieces fo pinched sand, one bag of sand before it was pinched, two logs, one for the two sawdusts and the other for the shaft, a bucket, a sheet of parchment, a sheet of paper, a sheet of sandpaper, a stave, two bolts of silk, 1 bowstring and a set of carpenter and tailor tools each, not to mention an axe for the lumber and needle for the tailoring. 1 simple magohangey bow comes from the net combination of 21 unique CNR items. And that's only if one assumes a 100% success rate! as we all know,t hat rarely happens, especially while training, so double or triple that figure to around 50 items.
But back to the main topic of lowering combat effectiveness by hp, I like this idea a bit. Its funny when you run around badly wounded and not a single ability of combat is lowered. On the flip side, if this is implimented for players, please also impliment this for all monsters save for undead possibly. It's rather annoying if one suddenly cant run and the monsters swarm him to death, but the same monsters sprint off full speed at will with 1 hp. Already Bjorn and Willy marvel about how willy can hit elves with platemail about 20 times with crippling strike, and they run around the field fullspeed, while only 2 of the same kinds of strikes seem to slow us to a crawl.
Shadowrun had a similar system to what you're suggesting, where all die rolls whether skills, attacks, defense, or stat rolls we all shifted down by 1 for every 20% of damage. The gamplay was then less about slugging through a long hacknslash like D&D's infamous 20 round combats that took hours to roll, but more of how well you prepared sset up the ambush, put the enemy at a disadvantage and got the first shot. After people started getting injured, combat seemed to speed up since people who were dying weren't dodging as well, or fighting back as well either. People would actually flee after being shot once, vs. the Rambo-like stand there, grin and bear it HP system of D&D.