Alternate Treasure Rules

[Glorelendil]

it may be 5 gold and jewel incrusted goblets, a chest of silver coins, a box of spices from Dorwinion, a handful of cloak broaches, etc.

Or it might be a single gem that fits in your pocket. Or a ring you wear on your finger.

I'd rule those single gems or rings worth a full Treasure or more are Precious Objects and have a set Enc of 1 (Rivendell source book).

Yes, the rules say that, but that still leads to several paradoxes (in my opinion):
- That acknowledges that 1:1 Treasure:Encumbrance is highly variable.
- It's still bizarre that a Wondrous Artefact has 0 Encumbrance, but the identical item as a Precious Object has 1 Encumbrance.

Rich: I agree. If you're going to use the 1:1 Encumbrance rule then "emotional baggage" the only possible way to fluff it to make any sense whatsoever. But the imaginative gymnastics required to do that without constantly stumbling over the logical inconsistencies is, in my mind, not worth the effort.

(Note to Francesco & Co.: based on my criticism of the treasure encumbrance rules, my attempts to "fix" virtues, and various other threads in which I've enthusiastically participated, one my conclude that I think the rules are a mess. Quite the opposite. Even verbatim RAW I think TOR is the most beautiful and elegant RPG I've ever played or even read. Take my ideas in the spirit of, "It's too bad Frank Lloyd Wright didn't put a nicer kitchen into Fallingwater.")

[Deadmanwalking]

Hi, new guy here. Started playing a game of TOR a while back, and finally getting on the forums.

The LM of our game lets us put Treasure (or indeed, anything else we want) 'on the ponies' rather than making us actually carry it. The catch is that anything carried that way is stowed away in saddle bags and basically inaccessible in any quick or easy manner...so a terrible idea for most stuff, but not a bad idea for treasure.

Also, at least for me, this really helps verisimilitude. I mean...if you have pack ponies, why couldn't you put stuff on them and thus avoid the fatigue of carrying it personally? If I ever get the opportunity to run TOR, I'll likely do the same.

This necessitates having at least one pack pony (and I doubt we'd ever put a truly unreasonable amount of stuff on a pony...though strong people can carry 25 encumbrance fairly readily, and ponies thus more than that logically), but that hardly seems particularly restrictive. This is obviously much less of a system change than that proposed in the OP and doesn't solve all the problems mentioned, but it does solve the Encumbrance issue, and is something our group has just been doing, so I thought I'd bring it up.

[Glorelendil]

Deadmanwalking: On my list of "objections to Encumbrance for treasure" I meant to bring up ponies. The usual effect of ponies is to reduce the Fatigue gain of failed travel rolls by 1, with the premise that they are carrying some of the load. So it's a nice thing to have, but you can get by without it.

The problem (in my mind) with keeping the current rules for treasure encumbrance and then saying, "But if you have a pony then it's zero" is that it suddenly makes a pony worth as much (or possibly far more) than a virtue. A pony in that case is straight up equivalent to having lighter armor.

Again, I would keep it situational. How are you going to get all that valuable Dorwinion wine (or Marsh Dwellers' treasure) back to Esgaroth? Find a boat or a few ponies. The LM can rule "it will require two ponies" or whatever seems appropriate to the situation.

[Deadmanwalking]

Eh, since one pony can carry so much encumbrance (speaking logically), I feel like it's only 'having one pony in the group' that's more valuable than a Virtue.

I'm okay with that being better than a Virtue since the state of 'having one pony in the group' is an assumed part of the game, IMO, and many assumed parts of the game are better than individual Virtues taken in isolation.