…In my opinion

The Pip System as I use it is broadly lifted from Mausritter by Isaac Williams, which is a brilliant little D&D adjacent fantasy RPG starring mice as heroes against the evil forces of Rats, Frogs and Cats. Check it out, it’s won awards and stuff!

pip system Setup

By default, each player character should have ten item slots. You can easily just represent this as empty rows on a list. If the player buys a better bag for their character, give them 15 item slots instead.

On the right hand side of each row, you should have three empty circles drawn in pen, known as “pips”. Players mark or rub out the insides of the pips with a pencil to represent the abstract quantity or quality of the given item.

This way, each row will contain an item with 1, 2, 3, or 0 pips filled in. These amounts of pips can represent abstract quantities and qualities.

The more pips are marked, the better the situation is.

How to use the Pip System

Consumable items can stack, so that one item slot might carry multiple arrows, rations, spell components, or whatever. However the amount of things in the stack is abstracted to either lots, plenty, a few, or none, according to its pips. Never fall into the trap of allowing your players to place an actual granular value against an item as it undermines the system.

In otherwise exactly the same abstract way, non-consumable items don’t stack, but they can deteriorate, like swords or armour getting damaged with use. So such an item might be in perfect, good, bad, or destroyed condition represented accordingly by its pips.

The key message is that the quantity or quality of the item in the stack is represented by how many adjacent pips are filled in.

Depreciation

After a battle, for any item that saw some use during the battle, roll a d6, on a result of 1-3 reduce the pips of that item by 1. This is called “rolling for depreciation”. 

Outside of battle, anytime someone uses an item on a per use basis, roll for depreciation again.

In this way, player characters will find their swords starting to chip, their shields breaking with overuse, and their arrow and potion supply dwindling.

Restocking

Whenever players loot a body, they might find armour, weapons, potions, whatever. But these looted items should always be one pips worth to represent their scavenged quality.

If players buy the items from a shop, or find them in chests etc, then the items should be three pips worth.

Likewise, players can take their swords and armour to a blacksmith and have them repaired (pip restoration) for a fee.

Use my Pip System Tracker

You absolutely can (and probably should) very easily make up your own inventory sheets for this system, but if you want to support this blog, please sign up to the free Mailer of Many Things, and you’ll be given a link to my exclusive premade A5 pip inventory sheet, as well as receiving occasional news round ups from this site and the broader tabletop news ecosystem.

You’ll notice the additional sections for currency and pocket items on my inventory sheet - I basically allow for infinite coins to be carried, and as many tiny items as your player can justify fitting in their characters pockets.

For most forms of treasure that players are likely to encounter on their adventures, I like to apply some abstraction and stack them together under “valuables” on the main sheet, the pips in this instance indicate the value of your row of valuables. Once a row of valuables hits three pips, if you pick up some more, it’s time for a new item row of valuables! Players won’t know exactly how much a given row of valuables is until they sell it at a shop for currency, and that can be up to the GMs discretion.

This way, for most types of treasure that players encounter, they will still need to weigh up if it’s worth using up an item slot for.

Why Use the pip System?

You might have noticed that I gave away the juice immediately with this blog post, but for anyone who’s interested in the reasoning and theory, read on, dear reader!

Granular Inventory Systems Slow Everything Down

Contemporary official D&D suffers from a really bad inventory system, it asks players to continually be adding and subtracting literal weights of items using the near globally rejected Imperial System of measurement.

Using granular weights and measurements to track inventories further places burden on the DM to either invent an appropriate weight for things on a per item basis, or it asks them to stop the game and look up a list somewhere to get the weight of something.

This is painful, and unless you have a kink for accounting, I can’t imagine anyone ever sticking with it in favour of following the conventional wisdom of just hand-waving the system altogether and playing by “feels”.

Hand-Waving Inventory Systems Can Undermine the Game 

One of the three key pillars of D&D is exploration, and inventory is a major part of what makes exploration interesting and consequential, it creates a good problem for players to try and solve. Intrepid explorers should be asking:

• Do I have the right equipment for the job?

• Do I have enough food and water to keep going?

• Is my torch going to last?

• Is my gear going to last?

• Have I got enough arrows?

• How much should I sacrifice to be able to carry away more loot?

In addition to this, without good inventory management you have no consistent system to track the deterioration and consumption of your stuff. The logical conclusion from this is that you’ll never need to spend your loot to replace said stuff.

Now your game economy is ruined, players can just collect infinite amounts of gold without needing to spend any meaningful amounts of it, which begs the question; What is the motivation to go on adventures to collect more?

Game designers have tried to answer this by inventing subsystems of varying complexity for buying keeps and businesses as a way to try and get you to spend. It’s like they casually forgot that D&D is about running around having heroic adventures, not managing your property portfolio!

I jest of course, people do actually enjoy the power fantasy of having their dudes owning a keep or similar in D&D and that’s all well and good*, so I guess the point I’m trying to make is that the game shouldn’t have to rely upon this in order to have a game-functional economy.

conclusion

So that’s it, in the Venn-diagram of granular and abstract inventory management systems for TTRPGs, the Pip System sits nicely in the middle, occupying a best of both worlds position which supports players making interesting and impactful choices without forcing anyone to perform boring accounting tasks.

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*My own D&D character, Mendagg, is a Dwarf cleric-come-chef who wants above all else to own a pirate ship that he can convert into a floating restaurant. It’s gonna have a mahoosive shark jaw above the entrance and it will serve the finest dishes from across the land - he’s even been collecting recipes on his adventures.