Hello, long time lurker first time poster. I've got questions about encumbrance, especially when it comes to storing equipment in a personal room on a ship. I've already read most of the search results about how it applies to cargo (and I do like some of the ideas about cargo crates), but I feel this is different enough. I'll start with one:

My general input on the matter as below. If you disagree that's okay, just explaining my decisions to rule things and hopefully some of it helps you get an idea of how your group wants to run it.

Vehicles themselves do not count the encumberance of the allowed crew/passengers but they should likely count passengers past the crew+passengers limit for encumberance, any pets and all items on the ship that are not currently being carried by players.

Let's take the first part. Vehicles don't count encumberance of crew+passengers. This is evidenced by the fact that swoop bikes can carry an encumbrance of 4-5 and every Player Character is at least 6 Encumbrance of weight (Brawn + 5). This means that the total encumbrance of the allowed passengers on a swoop (1 person) should be ignored and anything outside of that (crate of cargo, another person) should have their encumbrance tracked and applied to the vehicle, likely resulting in a slower speed or several setback dice when piloting it.

So if small vehicles don't count the weight of crew and passengers then starships should do the same. The reason I would track weight of anything not currently carried by each individual player is because when they are carrying it, it is part of the "ignore until you're past max people on the ship" precedent. Once they stop carrying it, it's separate and should be tracked.

So say your players have a room setup as a dedicated armory. I would count the encumbrance of every single item in that armory on the ship. Shouldn't be too difficult; players likely only swap out a weapon or two for each session and you only should have to worry about tracking it when the players take on a huge amount of cargo.

Tracking pet encumbrance would be due to the fact that any ride-able mounts, anything above silhouette 1 are pretty large and heavy and ignoring their weight would be kind of ridiculous. I would also personally count them as a certain amount of passengers depending on their silhouette for tracking consumption of consumables, with silhouette 0 either counting as 1 person or 0 people for consumables (depending on GM's preference).

Speaking as a GM, it would never occur to me to count the encumbrance of the player characters' personal equipment towards the ship's encumbrance capacity. Having three heavy repeating blasters under your bed isn't going to make a difference to a YT-1300 or similar ship. I figure ship encumbrance to reflect how much cargo you can load aboard it, as in "metric tons worth of goods to sell on another planet", not personal gear. That's just way too much bookkeeping for my taste.

Im with Kreiger22. Thats a whole lot of book keeping for not a lot of story. Every ship is going to be different, be Luke took a heck of a lot out of his X-Wing on Dagobah and they are one of the small ships. Because encumbrance is a measure of more than just mass the encumbrance of a stored item can be very different to that of an item loosely stored.

As a great example lets look at Blasters, something a party could easily end up with a lot of. 100 Blaster rifles thrown in a pile on the floor of a cargo hold makes the room practically unusable, its becomes the Star Wars version of a 10 year olds Lego minefield. But as soon as you load those 100 Blasters into gun lockers you clear the room out and can store a whole heap more in there. If you go even further and get a shipping crate you have even more space to fill.

Next i'm going to point out the number of months of food/water/spares these ships carry, are you going to let the party dump half their food to fit more cargo into the ship? i doubt it. Heck we don't even have rules for how much a swoop takes up, why would a couple of rifles some spare clothes and an armour rack have anything to do with how much spice the Falcon can carry?

Now there are times common sense is definitely kicking in, 3 Swoops, 2 Mounts and an Air speeder into a Firespray? i don't think so. same stuff into a YT-1300, yeah sure, but its going to take you a while to pack it in and unload at the other end. What about a Wayfarer? just drive those puppies right in there and spend 2 minutes strapping them down in their own parking spot.

TL;DR So its ship dependent, its group dependent, its story dependent, its even dependent on the specific Players and GM. I would ask myself this question: Does it bring something to the story? Does it Enhance the story ? Don't let it just be that annoying thing you have to manage, why should you have to drop a couple of blasters out the airlock when you raid that Pirate ship and pick up a fresh set of Laminate armour?

But if you do want it to be part of the story then make sure the GM and Players are in agreement, there needs to be a reason to carry all this stuff lining the corridors, filling the rest room and on the mess hall table. then use it in encounters as part of the environment;

• The ship is taking strain and the Mechanic is taking Setback on their checks to fix it due to the ship being so full of stuff.
• The Grav Plates shut down... look out flying objects!
• Slavers board the ship, plenty of cover now
• Perhaps if its very overloaded then reduce the handling a point or 2

Given the personal encumbrance rules state for normal sort of circumstances encumbrance shouldn't be bothered with, I most certainly would not bother with what's in a player's stateroom unless it was going from room to ridiculous.

Also consider that room/space sizes for people differ greatly from one ship to another.

In some cases, you might have racks of bunks and a drawer under each bunk is the only storage space they get. They might even have to “hot rack” and share that space with someone else.

In other cases, each person might get their own stateroom, but then how large is that stateroom?

I’m with the others that I wouldn’t make a big deal of it unless it seems to be getting ridiculous, or advances the story somehow, or somesuch.

EoE CRB p.152

" In general, players and the Game Master won't need to track a character's encumbrance (how much he's carrying on his person) . Occasionally , however, it may play an important part in the story, and a player needs to know if the weight, mass, and collective bulk of the items his hero is wearing inhibits his actions."

Translation = Don't worry about it.

You all make very good points! Thanks!

"...unless it gets ridiculous" -- well yes, this was my original question. What point is ridiculous? We're new to the game so we don't have a good feel for what is normal yet. I'm clearly overthinking it, haha. (It may come up in the story how much my room is a mess. For context, I'm the Technician/crafter, so I have all sorts of tools, droids, equipment, parts, materials, and finished projects.)

You can get a lot of guns in a room and function just fine in that room.

Now that last one there is taking hidden storage to a whole new level!

EoE CRB p.152

" In general, players and the Game Master won't need to track a character's encumbrance (how much he's carrying on his person) . Occasionally , however, it may play an important part in the story, and a player needs to know if the weight, mass, and collective bulk of the items his hero is wearing inhibits his actions."

Translation = Don't worry about it.

For myself I know I do have to worry about it. The majority of my players are packrats and corpse looters so I let them collect all they want... and then make the appropriate roll to carry it all. Getting into the nitty gritty isn't always necessary though.

This. I am such a player, but trying to curb it myself. And maybe I like keeping track of the encumbrance even when nobody else cares, haha!

2P51, wow, thanks for the illustrative examples. I hadn't mentally pictured being able to pack THAT much into a space. So! For story purposes maybe I will spend a little time and credits to add shelves/racks.

Turns out I've been barking up the wrong tree anyway -- I'm using my room as a crafting area, when there are actual rules I hadn't gotten to in Special Modifications for shipboard workshops.