1) A leather waterskin will not fit inside a leather backpack
2)you slide a giant 20 foot poleaxe with a with a bladespan of aprox 5 metres into a leather backpack.Heh just wanted to say that
For weapons and things dont assume they are fully closed in the pack, they might be sticking out, or strapped on or something. But for waterskins, most waterskins are a gallon or more. Try fitting two gallons of milk in your pack with other assorted things, coins, clothing, food, etc.
This is a really good exapmle of Code inconsistencies that should be ignored. Like Jenred said it mught be on the outside or so. Whenever I find something like this that is ridiculously off beat I try and RP it into a more IC possible way.
Containers run off of weight...water is heavy. That's why it won't fit. Granted, you can figure out your own way to justify it IC...like it was suggested to picture something as strapped to the pack or still sticking out of the pack instead of wholly inside of it.
There are some common waterskins which are really massivly heavy. There's one I'm thinking that weighs like 11 stones when it's empty. That's like 25 pounds. It's more like 20 stones (50 pounds!!) when it's full of water.
Since all objects have just weight and no volume measurement, then that waterskin can be a whole lot 'bigger' than your bigass polearm.
At one point (as in RL years ago) there was a problem whereby some water containers progressively gained weight secondary to some mathematical interpretation problems in the code (which..to the best of my knowledge..has since been fixed). Something about dividing by zero being bad and having to put a positive numeral there and somesuch. At any rate, it's possible some of the older containers were inadvertently saved with an empty weight which is just plain wrong -- those should be "typo"'d at your leisure.
Thanks,
-Savak