Stop Using Spreadsheets for Swords
TTRPG inventory is broken. The fix isn't just better tracking. It's recognizing that inventory can be a place where stories happen.
Somewhere on your Google Drive, there’s a spreadsheet called inventory_FINAL_FNIAL_V2. You haven’t opened it in months. Neither has anyone else in your group.
That spreadsheet joins a graveyard of abandoned inventory systems: the shared Google Doc that got too cluttered, the Discord channel nobody remembers to update, the physical notebook that lives in someone’s car. Most tables eventually surrender. They hand out a Bag of Holding at level 1 and move on.
The surrender costs something. An entire dimension of gameplay disappears when inventory stops mattering. The tension of deciding what to leave behind. The satisfaction of clever packing. The moment when carrying capacity becomes the puzzle that determines whether you escape the dungeon richer or poorer. All gone, replaced by infinite pockets and handwaved logistics.
None of this is your fault.
Why Inventory Fails
The failure of inventory management at most tables isn’t a discipline problem. It’s structural.
Fragmentation: Every player maintains their own version of the truth. The fighter has a note on their phone, the wizard uses D&D Beyond, the rogue has a paper character sheet, and the GM has a spreadsheet that’s already out of date. There is no single source of truth, and reconciling them takes more effort than anyone wants to spend.
Synchronicity: Changes happen at the table but get recorded later (or never). The ranger picks up a +1 longbow mid-session, writes it down on a sticky note, and forgets about it. Three weeks later, nobody remembers if it was +1 or +2, or who actually has it.
Asymmetric burden: The GM does all the work; players get all the benefit. The GM must prep the shops, track the loot, remember what was sold where, and enforce limits. Players just receive gear. The person with the least time available is doing the most labor.
Reinvention burden: Every GM builds the same blacksmith from scratch. Every GM designs the same general store. Ten thousand GMs have each independently priced a longsword, described a healing potion, and stocked a frontier trading post. The collective effort is staggering; the collective benefit is zero.
Worse: encumbrance punishes the players who engage with it. The player who diligently tracks every pound discovers they’re overloaded. The player who conveniently forgets walks away with everything. The reward for doing it right is discovering you did it wrong.
The tools are wrong for the job. Spreadsheets were designed for accountants, not adventurers.
Most “inventory solutions” stop here. They reduce the friction and call it done, and reducing friction is genuinely necessary, because nobody should have to fight their tools just to track a healing potion. But easier tracking is the floor, not the ceiling. A perfectly automated spreadsheet is still a spreadsheet. It still treats inventory as a list of stuff to maintain rather than a dimension of the game worth playing. The deeper opportunity isn’t making inventory painless. It’s recognizing that inventory can be a place where stories happen.
What Inventory Could Be
A Shared Experience
The cleric glances at their phone. “Kira has two healing potions. Borrowed one last session.”
Ten seconds. No argument. No cross-referencing three different systems.
Shared truth isn’t just about efficiency. When everyone sees the same inventory, behavior changes. You watch your teammate grab the last healing potion before the boss fight. You see the rogue quietly pocket something from the loot pile. You notice the party has three climber’s kits and no healer’s kit, and you fill the gap before it matters.
Visible inventory becomes collaborative inventory. The party starts functioning as a unit instead of five individuals with overlapping shopping lists.
The Loot Moment
The dragon dies. The hoard glitters.
In most systems, what follows is fifteen minutes of the GM reading item descriptions while players scribble notes. Then a confused negotiation about who gets what. Then everyone forgets to actually record their share.
Now picture this: the GM clicks “distribute.” Every player’s screen updates simultaneously. The fighter sees the enchanted greatsword land in their inventory. The wizard watches three spell scrolls appear. The rogue grins at a pouch of gems in their personal stash.
That’s what getting loot should feel like. Not filing paperwork about loot.
Mystery and Discovery
Most inventory systems treat items as solved problems. A +1 longsword is a +1 longsword. You know exactly what it does the moment you pick it up.
The best items are mysteries. The strange ring from the dead wizard’s tower. The sword that hums near certain creatures. The potion in an unmarked vial that the alchemist won’t identify for free.
Players remember that ring long after they’ve forgotten the rope and rations. They speculate about it between sessions. They quest to find someone who can identify it. The item stops being a line in a list and becomes a thread in the story.
Inventory can be a place where discovery happens. Most systems don’t let it.
Shopping That Enhances Roleplay
“Hold on, let me find my shop notes…” Twenty minutes later, you’re still describing dagger prices while half the table scrolls their phones.
Shopping doesn’t have to be this. Some tables love shopping sessions, and when they work, they’re pure roleplay: the merchant’s personality, the haggling, the discovery of something unexpected. What kills shopping isn’t the interaction. It’s the bookkeeping layered on top.
When inventory updates are instant and pricing is visible on screen, there’s no math interrupting the scene. The merchant’s personality matters more when you’re not also doing arithmetic. Dynamic pricing that reflects what you’ve established about this shop. Item art to show players. Real-time updates as they haggle.
Or skip session shopping entirely. Players browse the general store on Tuesday, make decisions without time pressure, arrive Saturday with gear in hand. Either way, the overhead disappears. What remains is play.
Encumbrance as Puzzle
Put something worth wanting in the shop window. Price it just beyond what the party can afford.
Watch what happens.
Suddenly carrying capacity becomes a calculation worth making. “If I drop my backup sword, I can haul another 200 gold worth of loot out of this dungeon.” The constraint becomes a puzzle with a reward at the end. The player isn’t filling out forms. They’re solving a problem they actually care about.
And different characters face different versions of this puzzle. The plate-armored fighter has the strength to haul treasure but runs out of room, because every slot is spoken for by the gear that keeps them alive. The lightly-armored rogue can carry a dozen different tools but starts feeling the weight long before the fighter does. The constraint is different for each of them, which means the interesting choices are different too, and a party that coordinates around those differences is a party that’s actually functioning as a team.
Encumbrance should create interesting choices, not punish engagement. When tracking is effortless, the constraints become part of the game instead of a chore.
How We Built It
Everything above depends on one assumption: that the system respects how your table actually plays. A D&D 5e group tracking pounds needs different math than a Pathfinder 2e group tracking Bulk. An OSR table counting inventory slots has a fundamentally different relationship with carrying capacity than a Fate table that doesn’t bother tracking it at all. The interesting-choices argument only works if the tool adapts to the game instead of forcing the game to adapt to the tool, so we built for weight, slots, Pathfinder’s native Bulk system, or no encumbrance at all. The table decides, and the system follows.
Remember the reinvention burden, ten thousand GMs each independently pricing a longsword? That effort doesn’t have to be wasted. People create items, shops, and loot tables on ScryMarket, and others find them, deploy them to their own games, and fork them into their own versions with the attribution tracing back to the original creator. The best content surfaces through actual use at actual tables, not through editors deciding what deserves visibility. The best GMs steal from the best GMs. The creativity was never in designing the 10,001st longsword. It was in knowing your table needs one.
The GM’s week has maybe four hours of prep in it, if they’re lucky, and spending one of those hours restocking the general store is a waste of all of them. Shops on ScryMarket run between sessions without intervention: auto-restocking, persistent inventory, dynamic pricing. Players browse the blacksmith on Tuesday evening, make their decisions without the time pressure of five other people waiting, and arrive Saturday with their gear sorted. Loot tables generate different results each deployment, so the GM sets the parameters once and the dungeon rewards take care of themselves. The game doesn’t stop for bookkeeping unless the table wants it to.
Your party already lives in Discord, and for a lot of groups that’s where the game actually happens between sessions. The planning, the jokes, the “what should we buy before the dungeon” conversations. The rogue checks their inventory with a slash command. The fighter buys a sword at midnight and it’s in their inventory when the GM wakes up. This isn’t a notification bridge or a login button. It’s the full platform, the same data, accessible from the place where the group already talks about the game. Tables that don’t want a separate web app don’t need one.
All of this adds up to something that goes beyond making the GM’s job easier. It lets the party take ownership of the parts that never required a GM in the first place. Players browse shops, organize their own gear, transfer items between characters, and manage their own encumbrance without waiting for permission or occupying someone else’s prep time. The asymmetric burden doesn’t just shrink. It inverts. The GM stops being the inventory bottleneck and goes back to being the person who runs the game.
That spreadsheet in your Drive isn’t coming back. You’ve tried it three times. It always dies.
Maybe that’s because inventory was never a discipline problem. Maybe you don’t need better tools, another list, or a level 1 bag of holding. What you need is something that gives inventory a real place in your story. A place where that mundane key becomes the key to your plot, magic rings glint in the windows, and hitting big on the dragon’s hoard pulls a cheer out of the phone-addicted rogue.
That’s what ScryMarket is to us. We hope it becomes that for you.
Get started free, or type /inventory in Discord.
Have thoughts on inventory systems? Join our Discord and tell us what works at your table.