New Month, New Inventory Mechanic

I have been plugging along on work related to The Grand Bazaar and The Curse of Doors. In the meantime though, it's a new month and I have had some ideas for a new inventory system so I thought I would share that here. My players and I still enjoy the tetris based grid system and we will likely continue to play that one in our campaigns, but I will be the first person to admit that adding on a tetris minigame is a bit of a hard sell in teaching a new RPG to someone.

My favorite inventory system after my grid based system is a slot based system. I also tend to want to take mechanics and concepts way past the point where they make sense anymore. I had also read this article recently, that talks about the idea of skills of a character being defined by what they are not carrying. So here is a system where almost everything is defined by your inventory:

Characters have 20 inventory (this term may be changed) slots, numbered from 1 to 20. Inventory slots may be used for abilities and items. Items or abilities may take up more than one slot. Certain items can be stacked in one slot. For instance, up to 100 coins or 10 supplies may take up one slot. Items can take up empty inventory slots or slots with an ability or scar. 

Scars are gained when a character takes damage that brings their HP (this term will likely change) to 0 or below or takes another hit while their HP is at 0 or below. A d20 is rolled and the correspondingly numbered slot takes a scar. Any items on that slot are destroyed or dropped as makes sense to the GM for the situation or damage received.

Abilities are only considered to be active if there is no item in the slot as well. If an ability occupies a slot with a scar it works at its improved, scarred form.

If a scar is ever gained in an inventory slot that already contains a scar, that character will die. They will get to perform one last death action or a special death action from the ability on the inventory slot where a scar can not be placed.

Items may be freely moved around a character's inventory when it makes sense. The top two items are what are in the character's hands and are freely available to use during combat or other stressful situations that make free access time consuming. Otherwise, during these stressful situations, a character may try to quickly grab something out of their inventory. To do so they roll a d20 and may then take and use anything under or meeting the inventory slot of the number they rolled. They must then use the item and replace it in its original slot or swap it with one of their held items.

 

Abilities can be moved between inventory slots only when in a safe location such as a village, city, or the characters' mercenary encampment.

Armor prevents scars from being placed on the locations the armor occupies and sometimes extends its protection into other slots around it. Instead armor will block the scar and then be disabled until that character is able to get out of combat and rest for a full dungeon turn (about 10 minutes and a roll of the encounter dice).

Combat, for context with this inventory system, is pretty simple and takes a lot of inspiration from Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland. 

Initiative is determined by rolling a 6 sided dice for each side of combatants. Highest dice roll wins and that side gets to go first. 

On their turn, a character may make an attack against someone within range. Other characters from that side decide if they are also helping attack that character. They offer a combat trick, such as tripping the enemy, disarming them, subduing them, or anything else they can think of. The character being attacked decides if they will take the potential damage from the attacker's damage roll or if they will take the combat trick. If the combat trick is chosen, that occurs to them, if not the damage dice is roll and they take that damage. Every extra person attacking adds +1 to the damage taken.

There is no to-hit roll. Once a character has decided to take damage, they will take some damage. After a fight is over the party can rest for 10 minutes or more (and roll the dungeon encounter die) or spend 1 supply each to regain all of their HP back. There is no way to remove scars.

With a system like this I am hoping to integrate items, abilities, and health into one unified mechanic. We will see if this is something worth pursuing further here.