In my first playthroughs I always carried a rope, assuming that it MUST be needed.
Samwise Gamgee and Betrayal at Krondor had tought me this
That is cute, Buba.=D But I share the sentiment, always good to have a rope.
One game I really enjoy is "Thief 2: The Metal Age."
And hello fellow friend of Garrett! Though I came to Thief a little late and the somewhat divisive third one will always have a very special place in my heart.
I feel inventory management is strongly connected to the incentive of the game. Thief and Dishonored, which shares the loot to coin system, are problem solving games at their core, so what you can pick up are tools for problem solving. Even the coin you gather serves only the purpose of enabling a desired play style. If you can't buy a tool or upgrade, you can't use it, if your preferred play style depends on it, you need the coin. In another favourite game of mine, the survival game The Long Dark, everything is useful. If you can pick it up, you can use it and most likely you even want it with varying degrees of desperation. The catch is that you can't carry everything, so you have to weigh your priorities and make notes about where you left stuff behind for your hour of need - coming back to that ever useful rope. Before they added safe house customisation, there wasn't any junk, there were only resources. Now that fixing up your favourite hovel has become a thing, a second consideration has entered the picture, the value of comfort - which I find very interesting as an incentive. In RPGs, I feel, you have somewhat free range, the question is less "Do I need it?" and more "Do I want it?" Do you want to collect one of every weapon in the game? Go ahead and have fun. The incentive is your own to decide.
In BG3, I thought, you could reasonably well distinguish between trash and treasure, with the caveat that you should always read the flavour text because some of the trash might turn out to be treasure in disguise.
I also find that personal incentives are a good way to manage your hoarding. If you want to solve all your problems with explosives, you'll probably want to stack up on them but otherwise you'll probably find another method to deal with your problems too. I mentioned that I collected all the books with my Gale, which I did because it was Gale and it seemed to fit. In act two, a second incentive was added because I had to decide whether or not to follow Mystra's command. Cat-mom Tara asked me to use my head, so I gathered information with the focus of discovering if self sacrifice was really the best solution to our wiggly problem. In my first play through I didn't think too hard about this, I simply didn't want Gale (and our lovely little group) to die, it was all the reason I needed, but when playing as Gale, I needed something to shatter my belief in Mystra's wisdom.
