Inventories: Strategy vs Flexibility

[Tamerlane]

I don't really like how most RPGs do inventory.

 

This isn't a grid vs list thing. I don't really give a **** about that. What I'm talking about is a thing regardless of whether your inventory is a sheer wall of item names or a mountain of tetris pieces.

 

RPGs have a lot of items to play with. And to facilitate playing with them, developers give us nice, big inventories, far larger than any human could carry.This is a Good Thing; I get enough "I'm not sure if I can carry all this stuff up this mountain path" in my real job. At the same time, inventories can be a source of strategic depth. Developers use things like weight and encumbrance, stack caps, limited grid space, etc. to force players to make choices about what they want to take. This is also a Good Thing.

 

And these two Good Things hate each-other, and when combined - as they usually are - you get the strengths of neither and the weaknesses of both. You're carrying fifty potions and two sets of just-in-case armour ("... and this shield gets +5 damage resist against disembodied moose testicles..."), and you spend the last ten minutes of every dungeon dividing every item's cost by its weight and ditching the losers. Or you end every room-looting session with two minutes of redistributing everything the thief grabbed to the people that are actually capable of carrying it. Or you're just... generally inconvenienced, but never to the point of rethinking how you play. That ain't a Good Thing, if figure.

 

Y'know what RPG does inventory half-way decently?

 

 

A ****in' console JRPG.

 

The basics of it are this: each character has a small inventory. Like, a few weapons and a few potions. Small. But then you've also got your camp inventory, which is unlimited. When a character picks an item up out of the field, it enters their inventory. If their inventory is full, they have the choice of either sending it straight to camp or putting it in their inventory and sending a different item back to camp in its place. When in camp, you have access to your entire inventory and all your characters. No massive stacks of potions for every occasion. No swords getting lost under pages of alchemy ingredients. No thousand-pound backpacks.

 

Of course, you can't just copy-paste. Fire Emblem makes no distinction, for example, between equipped items and unequipped items, which works there because they don't deal with armour or accessories, but in an IE-style game, those things would clog you up something turrible. Swapping items between characters would have to be easier. And there's the risk that it might exacerbate the "but I might need this rocket launcher in the next fight..." syndrome. And Obsidian would have to carefully choose when to give players access to the "camp inventory" (Do you restrict inventories in towns? Do you un-restrict it at a town store? Or when crafting? Stuff like that.) to maintain any depth without becoming annoying.

 

I dunno. I just really haven't been impressed with inventories in... well, most any WRPG. BG, Witcher, Elder Scrolls, KotOR, Fallout... maybe there has been a game that's done something else like this - or has approached this thang from some other interesting angle - but I ain't seen it.

 

So, y'know. It'd be cool. I think. Also, I really want to replay Fire Emblem 9 and 10, but my ex-roommate nicked 'em from me.

[Osvir]

The basics of it are this: each character has a small inventory. Like, a few weapons and a few potions. Small. But then you've also got your camp inventory, which is unlimited. When a character picks an item up out of the field, it enters their inventory. If their inventory is full, they have the choice of either sending it straight to camp or putting it in their inventory and sending a different item back to camp in its place. When in camp, you have access to your entire inventory and all your characters. No massive stacks of potions for every occasion. No swords getting lost under pages of alchemy ingredients. No thousand-pound backpacks.

 

Like having a pack mule

[Tamerlane]

Yes, like a pack mule in function, though I generally prefer keeping it more... abstract. I don't really see the need to explain the mechanism by which those items make it in to storage.

 

EDIT: And now that you say that I guess there have been games that have done inventory like that via mules or dogs or whatever the **** so I guess what I'm really asking for is just "something like that, but without the mule or the dog and pretty restricted inventory space per character".

Edited November 2, 2012 by Tamerlane