Encumbrance

What Encumbrance Is

Encumbrance in RPGs means items have weight and the player character is limited by some total weight they can carry. Some games also limit the number of items (slots or grids). Arcanum used both weight and a grid system. Diablo used only a grid — no weight — which turned inventory management into literal Tetris. Arcanum even added an inventory sort button specifically because of the Diablo influence, using an algorithm similar to memory garbage collection to compact items and free up space.

The Design Space Encumbrance Creates

Once a game has encumbrance, it opens up a rich design space for character progression. Attributes, skills, and perks can interact with carry weight in numerous ways:

• Letting characters carry more weight
• Making certain item categories weigh less (e.g., armor weighs 10% less)
• Items weighing less or nothing when equipped vs. carried
• Allowing new item stacking rules
• Permitting slow movement when overburdened instead of total immobility
• Allowing or restricting fast travel based on encumbrance state

This creates meaningful choices and build diversity tied to a core system.

The Cascade of Problems When You Remove Encumbrance

Tim identifies a long list of interconnected problems that emerge when a designer simply declares "no encumbrance":

Item Balancing Breaks

Weight is a balancing lever. Heavy armor with high damage resistance is balanced by its weight — affecting movement, dodge, and carry capacity. Without weight, players just carry every armor type and swap to the optimal one per encounter. The interesting tradeoff disappears.

Economy Becomes Uncontrollable

Encumbrance constrains a major money source: players can't pick up everything, so loot left behind is money that never enters the economy. Remove that constraint and you've unconstrained a source without adding new sinks. Economy balancing is already hard — Tim has a whole video on it — and sinks that players actually tolerate (repair costs, tolls, bribes) are notoriously difficult to design.

Inventory UI Becomes a Nightmare

With potentially infinite items, inventory UI becomes the new friction point — the exact thing removal was supposed to fix. Tim cites Pillars of Eternity's "stash" system: overflow items went into an infinite stack you could only access from the top. It worked, but was its own kind of friction. Alternatives like tabbed panels or pages just create massive clutter that players have to search through.

Player Hoarding Gets Worse

Without weight limits, hoarding is fully incentivized. Tim refers to his separate video on player hoarding — all those problems get amplified.

Merchant Gold and Selling Loops

If merchants don't have infinite gold, players still make multiple trips to sell. If merchants do have infinite gold, currency becomes worthless — a whole different economic collapse.

Character Progression Shrinks

All those attributes, skills, and perks that interacted with encumbrance? Gone. You now need to invent replacements or accept that strength does less and there are fewer meaningful perks to choose from.

Realism Tension

If the game has realism as a design pillar or flavor, infinite carry capacity directly contradicts it. Tim notes he personally falls "firmly in the fun camp" over realism, so this isn't an issue in his games — but it might be in yours.

The Bottom Line

Whether to include encumbrance is the design director's choice. But Tim's strong message is: understand what your choice entails. Removing encumbrance doesn't solve a problem — it creates many new ones across economy, UI, progression, and game identity. Every one of those problems needs to be fixed or consciously accepted.

His frustration is with leads and directors who demand a change and then tell their team to "fix any problems that causes" without understanding the full scope of what they've introduced.

References

• Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnOmC1G3MPA