40 is resonate for a thief, though wouldn't you agree? A warrior who smiths may carry ingots if he needs to sharpen his weapon on the go. Unless you packed them right :P

5 lock picks??!? I use over that on just 1 apprentice lock...

Well, I've played alot of Fallout and Skyrim and have a lot of experience with picking locks.  There are several advanced techniques you can use to not break as many picks.  Sometimes you're going to snap a few no matter what though. 

But if you plan on actually picking alot of locks, limiting your picks can force you to actually perk into lockpicking rather than making another generic warrior/mage/etc.  This is great for heavy roleplay builds.  Also, if you run out in the middle of a dungeon it adds to the challenge, which is great.

To each their own, but I don't think any thief has ever carried around 40 lockpicks at one time.

If I'm carrying around food, I'll always bring some ice-wraith teeth to keep things chilled 

I feel like this could be combined with some other threads about roleplaying adventurers.

Or frost salts.

I've got a few guidlines I like to keep to with my RP characters, but I'm not adamant about holding to them especially if I'm doing a bought of alchemy, dungeoning, or mining.

I carry a lot of food on my characters, straight up. Three days worth of food; about five apples, six slices of cheese, three peices of bread, whatever cooked meats or stews I've got. Now, I don't measure things by in-game units. So I'll make like four bowls of horker stew or eight bowls of apple-cabbage stew and say I filled a sealable container. I carry a lot of booze too, 5-10 bottles (again, like poured into a canteen).

I treat potions in a similar way. I limit myself to a max of ten most of the time, but I see it as like three types of potions (usually) with the quantity being number of uses in the bottle.

Carrying loot like armor or weapons, I don't have an issue unless overencumbered. I'm not wearing it, I've got it held together by rope or bundled up for my follower (or thrall) or horse to carry.

30 lockpicks max, maybe ten grand/black soul gems for enchanting, but I've recently harvested an absolute mountain of them from Blackreach and need a palce to put them.

 

OR you can install Requiem. This shit makes gold weight and reduce your carry limit to 80-120 according to your race and your stats. Oh, and raising Stamina doesn't help.

Love this guide.

Personally, I don't carry items [or collect those] that my character has no business collecting. He's a healer, not a hunter, so he doesn't have a reason or expertise to skin an animal and keep it's fur. On the other hand, he'll keep a collection of potions and poultices. With a pair of gloves for handling poisoned herbs.

I wonder what provisions there are for storing poisonous herbs in your backpack.

There's a PC mod that does something like this.  I can't imagine I'd want to restrict myself so heavily in normal (heroic) playthroughs, though.  It's already enough of a chore to find so many weapons for profitably grinding Enchanting.

What bothers me the most, though, is the idea of only carrying one pelt at a time.  How often do you run into only *one* wolf, bear, etc. while travelling much of anywhere?  Those beasts won't respawn unless you leave the region for a long time, so why waste nature's bounty?