I've seen both extremes where the weight of all your items is completely ignored as well as where every single thing has to be added and tracked at all times.
How do you deal with encumbrance in your game?
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Most of the time doesnt matter , unless you want to carry something trully heavy or to carry much more than a reasonable person would.
But then again , for that there are bags of holding.
Once there are bags of holding and the like, we tend to ignore it completely. Otherwise, it is more of a general survey of how much loot we are carrying and how realistic it is.
For us, there is nothing more annoying than manually tracking weight, especially for a group like our that meets about once / 3-weeks for about 6 hours.
Though, nearly everyone has hero-lab now and if that is the case, you can always just let HL take care of it for you.
I almost ignore it.
One case where I don't ignore it is the case of people who use STR as a dump stat. If you want to dump your STR down to 6 so you can be a dervish and use DEX for damage, great. Just don't expect to have your cake and eat it too - you WILL have to account for your weapons, armor, and basic gear and you WILL need to spend your time and cash to work around this (muleback cords, haversack, Ant Haul wand, whatever). I consider this to be a balancing factor - these characters get a big benefit in being able to ignore a primary melee stat, but there is a cost, and encumbrance is a big part of that cost.
Another case where I don't ignore it is when the party uses the musclebound barbarian as a mule to haul all the treasure. Fine. But first, make sure HE isn't over his encumbrance limits. Second, when he dies in the lava, I do care about what treasure died with him. This just happened in my Sword of Air sandbox (it wasn't lava but they still couldn't get back the corpse or the lost loot). Now the players are taking more time to split up the lightweight treasure and to stash heavier stuff in safe rooms rather than risk losing it all again.
Those are corner cases, and other than stuff like that, I don't really care. I trust the players to not overdo it, no anvils in their pockets and such. So far, nobody has had any problems with getting "carried" away (pun intended).
Only I care for it in my group. I keep track of mine, and get sure I can carey everything (using mulecords, etc). Nobody else do, and nobody cafés about it.
Most the time we use the old pirate saying ("gold doesn't weight") for loot. Often at the end of the adventure we sell aa bunch of +1 armors, which nobody has tracked as encumbrsnce.
I use hero labs for the games I run so it tracks the encumbrance so I don’t have to worry about. I use the tactical console to run combat so I already have a copy of all character in the game. Since the program already calculates and automatically applies the modifiers I use the full rules.
Even in games other people run I still track my own encumbrance. Again the program does it for me so it is not really any trouble.
Naturally, when your GM tracks it, you track it. We so far have as far as hauling two mules, a cart, a barbarian, and a handy haversack (not on the barbarian). It also helps that we have to be online (our party is split across three time zones!) so we're already using computer resources for this.
I tried whipping up a Str 12 combatish type, and that armour started weighing my hopes down quickly. It's a fine line to walk, tho.
Glance over it, if it roughly fits.
If on a STR 20 guy and not carrying around anthing particularly heavy, dont calculate anything. Because the margin is gigantic until any effect would happen.
If on a STR 8 Wizard i think about picking up anything because coming into medium encumbrance is not good.
Also one of the earliest group items that we usually buy is a Portable Hole to transport all the heavy and/or clunky loot out of the dungeons. 27 cubicmeters holds a lot of stuff.
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I think encumbrance is important to track for the very reason someone earlier mentioned, balance. The wizard that can alter reality can't carry a full backpack (without a spell).
Meanwhile, the fighter can have the rope and grappling hook, the sack of flour, the chalk, the twine, the candles, the mirror, the bucket, the roughly idol sized bag of sand, etc, with which they could solve any number of problems the group may face. On top of heavy armor to keep them safe and 5 different types of weapons to overcome DRs an spare ammo for the ranger and the camping gear to avoid exposure...
Just ignoring encumbrance is a bit unfair to a high strength character, as it removes one of the benefits to having high strength, while unfairly elevating characters that dumped strength to increase their abilities elsewhere.
The current character I'm playing is Strength 22, large-sized, with the Muscle of the Society trait (+2 Str for purposes of carrying capacity).
I could almost carry the entire party and their gear on my back. I could definitely pull a wagon with the party in it.
Aside from that, our group doesn't normally care too much about carrying capacity. For the most part, our GM/DM has always assumed we were being legit about our carrying capacity, and as far as I know, all of our players have always done so. We haven't had very many campaigns where it came up.
Though we did have one time where the party had a barrel of holding with all the party loot in it. It fell down a shaft and shattered, spilling the contents, and we had to figure out how to get all of our loot out of the cave system we were in. One of the players spent an hour or two calculating weight-to-worth ratios, item priority, each characters weight capacity to figure out how to most efficiently divvy everything up and leave the least stuff behind. Then when he was almost done, we got the idea to fashion a rough sled/sledge from some adamantine bars we had in the barrel. I think he died a little inside that day.
Ooh, knapsack problem! That's NP-complete. Must've been fun.
The higher your strength, the less I check your encumbrance. It really only comes up when carrying other party members. If you have a strength penalty, I'll be checking everything but the starting outfit.
I use Hero Lab and find that I need some strength in order to carry what I want.
Light armor I want a strength of 11 to 12.
Medium armor a strength of 16 is nice, but 14 can be sufficient.
I don't tend to run characters in heavy armor.
If I go below these values, it means I'm spending more time balancing the weight. It can be done, but isn't the most fun.
Encumbrance is my reason for playing. It is the single most important aspect of my play experience.
Well, not really. It makes me weary. I wish there was an easy way to deal with it, but I have yet to see one. At the same time, it gets ridiculous if you don't track at all.
I almost ignore it.
One case where I don't ignore it is the case of people who use STR as a dump stat. If you want to dump your STR down to 6 so you can be a dervish and use DEX for damage, great. Just don't expect to have your cake and eat it too - you WILL have to account for your weapons, armor, and basic gear and you WILL need to spend your time and cash to work around this (muleback cords, haversack, Ant Haul wand, whatever). I consider this to be a balancing factor - these characters get a big benefit in being able to ignore a primary melee stat, but there is a cost, and encumbrance is a big part of that cost.
Another case where I don't ignore it is when the party uses the musclebound barbarian as a mule to haul all the treasure. Fine. But first, make sure HE isn't over his encumbrance limits. Second, when he dies in the lava, I do care about what treasure died with him. This just happened in my Sword of Air sandbox (it wasn't lava but they still couldn't get back the corpse or the lost loot). Now the players are taking more time to split up the lightweight treasure and to stash heavier stuff in safe rooms rather than risk losing it all again.
Those are corner cases, and other than stuff like that, I don't really care. I trust the players to not overdo it, no anvils in their pockets and such. So far, nobody has had any problems with getting "carried" away (pun intended).
I'm very much the same as this. In fact one group of PCs I had learned that same lesson (split up the loot) when a recurring NPC that was tracking them noticed that the barbarian always had the biggest bag of stuff. He was a caster, and went: greater invisible, nondetection, fly, ant haul, and took the barbarian's bag of goodies one night when they were staying in an inn. They literally had about 225 gold pieces to rub together at that point because they just let the hulking barbarian carry everything. Lesson learned, and they immediately set out to find the missing loot.
Edit:@Sissyl, not sure how much tech you like at the table, but Hero Lab does a great job of tracking encumbrance and is very customizable in terms of what you want tracked and not tracked in terms of weight.
We track everything except for tender (which changes hands too frequently to be worthwhile) and things that weigh less than 1 oz.
We track everything except for tender (which changes hands too frequently to be worthwhile) and things that weigh less than 1 oz.
I do something similar where I have players just drop any fractions and add whole numbers only. I also give a 10% reduction for anything in a wearable container like a bandoleer.