You’re gonna get a bunch of door sticker “weight police” people telling you your truck can’t carry more than three people and a sack of groceries, meanwhile you’ll watch truck after truck just like yours rolling down the freeway at 60 with a nice camper on it and maybe even a boat behind it.
The short bed is a big limitation because of center of gravity issues. You also can’t (or shouldn’t) hang too much camper off the back with the floor unsupported.
In general an 8-footer is about as long as you want to use on a shortbed.
As far as weight is concerned, there’s probably not an 8 foot camper on the market you can’t haul.
The main limit on weight capacity is your rear tires. Read the weight capacity printed on them. Twice that (two rear tires) is what your real working limit is. The AAM rear axle in your Dodge is rated at 11,000 pounds by its manufacturer, which is not Dodge.
You can upgrade to larger, higher rated tires and bigger wheels if needed.
2500 series pickups are vastly under-rated by the factories, not for engineering reasons but for paperwork reasons. They need to fit certain licensing classes. The exact same hardware goes into 3500 trucks and even those are underrated.
People will say if you exceed the door sticker weight rating you’ll be in for legal liability, denied insurance claims. and various other chicken-little stories, that not a one of them can back up with real world data.
On a truck like yours, with the right tires and maybe some air bags or springs and perhaps a sway bar. something in the 8-foot range and weighing somewhere in the 3000 pound range will work.
In the working world the same 2500 and 3500 trucks haul way, way more than what RV people do with their campers, day after day and year after year.
