Encumbrance Effects in the Real World

 I recently bought a weighted vest to enhance my strength-building from walking and basic calisthenics, and wondered what data is out there on the effects of different loads. My vest has spots for 10 six-pound weights, so is adjustable up to 60 lbs in six-pound increments. Too much? Not enough? A quick search led me to this very well-written article containing more information than I had hoped for.

https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/the-soldiers-heavy-load-1

RPG systems often ignore encumbrance because tracking it and calculating movement speeds detracts from fun gameplay for a lot of folks. Some systems (D&D) break encumbrance down into levels along the lines of "unencumbered", "light", "moderate", and "heavy", and describe how each level affects movement. Sometimes there is a label for the amount a character can lift off the ground that prevents any movement.

Heaven forbid a TTRPG track fatigue! I have on-and-off worked on developing my own system that simulates the real world better than other systems, and I have incorporated fatigue and recovery based on effort and fitness. I have to say that I managed to make a fatigue-tracking simulator that no one would enjoy playing. As many complaints as I have about D&D's class and level mechanics, I like the creative compromise between tracking fatigue or ignoring it (fire-and-forget spells/abilities). It is practical and playable to say that some activities (sprinting, max lifting) can be done "once per scene" or "once until a short rest". 

The data I used for movements speeds all assumed being unencumbered, especially at higher speeds and distances. Elite runners wear shoes and clothing carefully designed to cut grams off of weight in order to provide a competitive edge. Competitive runners get lean. This soldier data is a treasure, showing realistic expectations for encumbered movement.

Valuable take-aways from this article: 

• Characters should consider having an "approach" load and a "combat" load.
• Encumbrance causes initiative, reaction, awareness, concentration, and other penalties.
• Caloric intake, fatigue, and recovery time all scale with encumbrance.
• Encumbered people are easier to hit.
• There is a large increase in the time it takes to start moving from a standstill to 5m. 
• 1/3 bodyweight is often used as a benchmark for the high end of a reasonable burden for a soldier.
  

 

Here are useful images from the article:

Thanks to Lauren Fish and Paul Scharre for their work.
 

Link - Characters Lifting a Rock

This thread on RPG.net is a very humorous (and non-mathematical) approach to comparing a lifting action across systems.

Aberrant: Of course you can lift the rock, and everyone is in awe and/or terrified of you for now.  Ultimately, it won't matter because all your works will be undone and you can't have children.

Mind's Eye Theater Vampire: You bid a strength trait and play RPS, then get distracted when your ex walks by, and gossip and complain about the other players behind their backs until the session ends and everyone gets drunk.

Probability of a Fatal Fall in Aberrant

I've done a bit on the probability of death from falls from heights in the real world, and the average height a character would have to fall in order to die in various simulation systems.  Here is a closer look at how the Aberrant system specifically compares to real life. 

If you can even see the short blip at 30+ meters, you can understand how spectacularly Aberrant fails to simulate death by falling.  The average person has 8 health levels, but there are two types of damage.  Bashing damage hurts, lethal damage kills, and additional bashing damage becomes lethal damage after all 8 health levels have been damaged.  Damage from falls under 30 meters is bashing.  1 die is rolled for each 3 meters fallen, and there is a 40% chance of each die resulting in damage.  So, a 3 meter fall results in rolling 1 die with a 40% chance of suffering 1 level of bashing damage.  A 29 meter fall results in rolling 9 dice with a very tiny chance of taking 9 levels of bashing, which converts to 7 bashing and 1 level of lethal damage, but a still-alive character.  At the 30 meter level and above, however, 10 dice are rolled and all damage is lethal.  This gives us a whopping 1.4% chance of death for everyone for all heights over 30 meters.  This game is notorious for needing house rules, and I encourage game masters to crank up the falling damage in their campaigns.

Marvel Super Heroes - Strength and Lifting

It is time to see how Marvel Super Heroes weighs in as a simulator of human lifting abilities. Marvel includes the character creation mechanic of randomly generating the strength attribute such that half of characters are Typical, 20% are each of Poor and Good, and 5% are each of Feeble and Excellent. 

Marvel is another system, like Shadowrun, that requires a roll to determine how much a character can lift in a particular moment, and there is wide variance.  On average, a character of feeble or poor strength in Marvel can not lift anything, which is quite unrealistic.  On average rolls, characters of typical and higher strength can lift about as much as real people can.

The above graph shows the maximum amount that Marvel characters can lift given really good rolls on d100.  The maximum lift is a rare event in the game.  In the game, 5% of people have a 6% chance in any given moment to lift 2000 lbs, which is double the most that any real person has ever lifted.  The top quarter of Marvel characters is able to lift 800 lbs sometimes, which only a bare handful of men in the real world can accomplish.  It is also easily possible (45%) for a stronger than average character to fail to pick up a measly 50 lbs, which is ridiculous. 

Again, I am opposed to such wide variance within a character's moment-to-moment lifting ability.  Marvel may even be a worse simulation than Shadowrun.

Shadowrun 4th Ed. - Strength and Lifting

In Shadowrun 4th Edition, how much a person can lift or carry is based on the character's Strength, modified by the successes from a Strength + Body roll.  Human Strength and Body attributes lie on a 1-6 scale, and the manual says that average humans have scores of 3.  With the average person's STR + BOD = 6, it is possible to roll up to 6 successes to modify his base lifting amount (though very unlikely to get all 6 successes).  Each success rolled adds 15 kg to the amount that can be lifted.  Here is a graph of the average lifting abilities (after rolling) for characters of average Body and any given Strength:

We see here that the average real-world person is as strong as a Shadowrun character with a Strength of 2, one level below average given an average Body.  The perfectly average Shadowrun character will (on an average roll) be stronger than about 70% of real people.  With the randomization in the game mechanics, it is possible for characters with strength of 2 to lift more than shown on this graph about 26% of the time.  So, it gets a little messy comparing the probability distributions of game characters to the single limits I have for real people.  Real people just do not have wide variance for how much an individual is able to lift.  A person's max lift will fluctuate a little based on factors like rest, warm-up, time of day, and how long it's been since working out, but the fluctuation will not come anywhere close to the 90 kg variance an average Shadowrun character has.

Shadowrun's mechanics have the typical trend that average characters are stronger than average real-world people, but on average the difference is not as severe as other popular systems.  What is quite deviant in the mechanics is the huge variance within a single person due to rolling so many dice to determine lifting ability during each attempt to lift something.


Here is a table of probabilities of successes based on die pool:

Here is the table of base lifting amounts and modifiers:

Rolled successes add 15 kg to lifting, and 10 kg to carrying.  I would prefer the system to have less randomization.  It is also unfortunately messy to use the real strengths that I have in comparison to Shadowrun characters all of Body 3.  I have no clear way to break real world people into six Shadowrun-equivalent groups by body size to create separate graphs by Body and Strength.  This is one of the least clear comparisons I'm making for strength, but I hold to the opinion that less randomization is better in a simulation mechanic.

Mutants and Masterminds - Strength and Lifting

Mutants and Masterminds is one of my favorite systems.  The mechanics made excellent improvements on the d20 system.  Since it uses a point-buy system, there is no real distribution of strength.  Since it is based on the d20 system, though, which originally determined strength with a 3d6, I am using the 3d6 curve as a proxy of the distribution of strength within M&M.

It is accurate enough at the far bottom and top of the distribution of lifting ability, but, as with nearly every other system, it overestimates the abilities of most people in the average range.  The average person in the M&M system is stronger than 75% of people in the real world.  The average person in the real world is only stronger than 10% of people in the M&M system. 


Here is the lifting/dragging table for M&M 2nd ed.  Weights are in pounds.

I'm Not Dead

I am still gradually recovering from the loss of my last computer.  I decided to try Open Office on the new one instead of buying MS Office or using my super old version, but Open Office makes my graphs uglier than they already were, so I am just going to install MS Office 2000.  My workplace is no better. 

This site got over 600 views in August.  I've got visitors from over 30 countries.  Eastern Asia is especially interested in the Principals of Recreation.  Many of you are looking for probability tables for Shadowrun 4th edition and World of Darkness, and for strength and intelligence information for D&D.  Many of you are also looking for the probability of death from falls of different heights, adult weight distributions, and adult deadlifting capabilities.  I have very few return visitors, as most of you tend to be searching for something in particular, find it and leave.

My personal favorite posts do not turn up in people's searches, and have very few views: RPG mechanics taxonomy, determining if dice are lucky, and a taxonomy of action success probability systems.

Projects I have in mind for the future are to finish out the deadlifting series, revisit death by falls for each system individually with greater detail, interviews with RPG designers, commentary on intelligence simulation, and the most comprehensive list of possible in-game effects.