What has been said about Encumbrance giving -1 ongoing across the board, rather than only to physical stats?
This is aimed more at Freebooters on the Frontier, where you can carry up Load*2 with the penalty, vs Vanilla DW where you can only carry your Load+2 with the penalty.
I think it makes sense across the board. It’s hard to be charming when your giant backpack is making you sweaty and you have to grunt and gasp between words. Also harder to think when you’re doing heavy work constantly.
Not sure what others have said, but I’ll chip in a few thoughts. Mechanically, a broad -1 is easier to keep track of and it does help give the Encumbered mechanic a bit more teeth. Fictionally, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to consider pain due to overloading as being distracting, though that opens the can of worms of why there are no HP loss injury penalties (would probably not balance very well mechanically.)
As I read it in the base rules, it’s intended to be a fairly severe penalty to enforce the resource constraints. If it was just physical, for example, maybe just load up the poor Wizard who doesn’t use this physical stats as often? The idea is that limited resources makes dungeon crawling more interesting, so basically just set fairly hard limits and run with it. I’m not sure of the intention of the change in Freebooters; I’m guessing it’s to encourage longer journeys where you consider over-loading on supplies early to survive longer?
I agree with the Above points, you can’t think straight if your exhausted and tired. You can’t be charming if your barely able to breath and are completely sweaty and smelly. Wasn’t a wise decision to carry all that weight in the first place embedding on that section and the rest are obvious physical retrains.