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As an aside, I ran a Caster for a while with 5 Str. It can be done with a light load (16lbs), but your equipment is certainly limited. You'll start to take advantage of items with no listed weight, like Wands. The main loss is that you can't make melee touch attacks worth beans.

Great point, it can be done for sure. It is a lot more doable for caster of course, since you don't necessarily need to carry weapons or armor. Also 5str sounds like you may have been small which is VERY doable since it cuts your armor/weapon weight in half and your clothing/bag weight in quarter.

PS: Regarding the weight of clothing, my understanding is that basic clothing, not armor, equipment, or wonderous items, but normal clothing, does not count against your encumberance (when worn, not when carried). Mainly, it's a rule in place to keep characters clothed...

Is this raw or just a house rule? I thought RAW was that it counted because nothing says it doesn't.

Encumberance should be enforced, but like a lot of things, it's often left up to the player to self-enforce. I try to make sure I keep mine up to date, and I definitely have characters that are right on the line. i also tend not to dump STR, though I may leave it at what it is after racial adjustments. I don't think I've ever put it to 7 or lower. A Masterwork backpack is usually one of my early purchases on low strength characters.

As a GM, I'm probably not going to say anything unless it's a clearly questionable situation.

Yeah, at strength 7 your encumbrance is so low that wearing a masterwork backpack costs your 4 lbs to gain 3.

It isn't ignored but there is very limited time during a game to check characters.

Are you sure those characters don't have ant haul, a bag of some kind, maybe mithral? There are plenty of ways to not be encumbered.

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discovered there is often not a single meaningful skill check and it's all about combat

I too wish it was 2013 again.

Thanks for the Response

It Seemed to be just that no one ever actually checks or cares about encumbrance. None that I saw had heavy load belts or cast ant haul. Some were using dark leaf or mithril. Some even had donkeys or handy haversacks.

Saw one doing tons to reduce weight that was over that i can still remember. Keep in mind max light load for str 7 is 23lbs. He was medium size.

He was carrying dark leaf cloth studded leather (10lb), handy haversack (5lb), Peasant’s outfit (2lb), Rapier (2lb) shortbow (2lb), Instrument (3lb)… at this point he is into medium capacity. He also had 3 quivers of Stone arrows 20each (6.75lb), a belt pouch to hang on that rag belt he is apparently wearing (.5lb), spell component pouch(2lb) and two bandoleers he pulled something from at least once (0 weight themselves… but most items have weight).

Even if he kept either a weapon or his instrument in his sack along with 2 of those quivers of arrows, which he didn’t do, he would be over by a couple pounds.

Side note but the outfits drive me crazy BTW. Everyone not wearing a hot/cold outfit or an expensive outfit for that one trait should be in rags if they are smart apparently? Why have an 8lb explorer outfit when you can explorer just as well with your feet wrapped in cloth. Anyway…

I wasn't trying to tattle on anyone or anything so I mostly stayed quiet about it. When I did ask folks about it afterwards very gently there seemed to be confusion. some seem to think clothing doesn't count or that armor doesn't count, or that backpacks they are wearing don't count, or that it doesn't apply to PFS.

Also had a GM try to check encumbrance once when someone seemed fishy, but he got bogged down in the math and relented to 3 players telling him "it doesn't matter in PFS".

My experience with PFS is admittedly mostly limited to watching at this point, but I have noticed that no one seems to enforce encumbrance. Is this a PFS rule I missed or something? I have been observing at a few different shops recently and noticed a pattern. There are tons of medium characters with 7 strength whose clothing + armor + weapons alone should have them encumbered, taking 30-foot moves. This seems to be par for the course at the different locations I have gone to.

I’ve been trying to figure out what to create for my next character since my first turned out to be mostly useless, and I need to know if I should worry about encumbrance. My last human rogue had something like 12 str to avoid taking encumbrance penalties on all his important skills. After all, for my skill monkey 16 dex and no encumbrance is far better than 18 dex and -3 from encumbrance. Of course, I also made the mistake of trying to play a skill monkey in PFS where I discovered there is often not a single meaningful skill check and it's all about combat. Therefore, I want to make sure I get it right with this next character.

Does tower shield specialist's Tower Shield Training really do nothing to the dex bonus of the tower shield, only changing the max dex bonus of worn armor. If so it seems useless. Is this a typo or as intended? Or are all shields armor, and if so can we get a clarification says as much?