I am a big fan of tracking character inventory and encumbrance in game. I think its really important, like critically important, and yet I have found it hard to implement in the past. I'm sure most of my players just hope that I forget about it, especially because I hate "portable holes" and "bags of holding"- yuck, such a cop out. Encumbrance is hard to deal with, I hate using gold coins like in B/X. Computer games like Diablo really have a leg up on pen a paper games in terms of inventory menus.
For my B/X project I will assign pretty much every item an ENR (encumbrance rating) - a bag of 100 gold coins will be 1 ENR, a dagger is 1 ENR, a great sword might be 4 ENR, etc.. each character with have a carrying limit based on their strength score. There will also be a distinction between items that are carried "on belt" which are basically ready to draw or have in hand at a moments notice, and items which are "in pack" and would take a moment to recover. There would be much less room for "on belt" items so characters will need to choose carefully what they carry and where it is.
Also any sum of coins which amounts to less than 100 coins total will not count as an ENR, its only when characters start carrying around loads of treasure that I will start getting serious about tracking it.
Kind of a shitty post I know but I have been really busy, its finals.
That strikes me as a pretty good system. Honestly, I think I've generally sort of ignored encumbrance in my games--though the threat of it always existed to keep player's from getting ridiculous.
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