[Stormcrow]

I've had an idea floating around my head for a while that I've never tried to realize. Suppose you track your equipment on index cards. On each card, you cut out a piece of one edge such that the remaining original edge forms a tab that equals X units of encumbrance.

For each container or carrier—including a character—you have a card with a slot near its own edge exactly Y encumbrance units long, where Y equals the maximum amount it, he, or she can carry. For characters, at various points along this slot, you make notes of encumbrance effects for that amount of encumbrance. When the container or character holds something, you slide the item's tab into the slot so that the tab sticks out past the container's edge, as if it were the encumbrance of the container itself.

When you hold multiple items, you slide the cards next to each other so that their tabs abut on each other. The total length of tabs equals encumbrance.

This system wouldn't take too long to implement for non-containers and non-characters. If you pick up a new item, just take a new card, write the item's name on it, find the item's encumbrance value, snip-snip, and you've got the new item. Anything that's a container would take more work, requiring you to cut a slot equal to its encumbrance capacity, but even this isn't too much work. A character's card, of course, would take the most work, but you'd only have to do it once so long as his strength doesn't change.