Items not treated consistently with other (such as personalities) objects

[AidenM]

Hi There,

I'm having an issue where items don't appear to be treated consistently with other objects, such as personalities.

Here's my example.

I have two campaigns, one old, one I'm currently building, and there are some creatures in the old campaign I want to put into the new one. All I have to do in this case is open the module of the old campaign, open the personality, and drag the little link box into the new campaigns personalities list and *bang* that creature/person is now in both campaigns.


However, with items, when I do the same thing, nothing seems to happen (no new item is created in the new campaign).

I'd like to see this fixed/made consistent with the ability to do so with other objects.

-Aiden

[Tenian]

That is probably something ruleset specific...

What ruleset are you attempting to use?

[AidenM]

Hi there Tenian,

The ruleset I'm working under is 4E_JPG from four ugly monsters. It was the most recent version in January - I haven't checked to see if it's been updated, but do you think this is a ruleset issue?

P.S. The version of FG I'm using is a fully updated (as of yesterday) version of FG2 full.

[Tenian]

It is definitely a ruleset issue:

Items in 4E are designed to be "module independent". What this means, is once you give an item to the player, it actually creates a copy of the item on their sheet and stores the data there, instead of linking back to the module.

This was a design decision. If this was not the case then the item links would cease to function when you closed their source module. For the core modules (phb, av, etc) this is not a big issue. But it gets a bit more sticky when your players get specialized items from adventure modules. For example the Talon Pass RPGA adventure contains a unique neck item. If one of your players had this item, you would be forced to keep the talon pass module open, for all your games, even if you were playing a different adventure.

In short items on the character sheets are not the exact same as items from modules. So if you are trying to drag items from your characters back into the item bin, I'm not surprised it doesn't work.

Also the 4E ruleset gets updated fairly regularly. The most recent version is 1.4.4 which should be from some time in march or april of 2009. I can't honestly remember what version was running back in January...probably 1.3.x

[AidenM]

Thanks for clearing this up Tenian,

The reason I was trying to copy the items over was that I thought I had trouble with characters losing items when a module was closed. There was one period where one of my characters lost all of their magic items, and the only thing I could think of was that I had closed the module.

I would update my 4E_JPG version, but I'm quite concerned that this could cause trouble to my campaigns under construction.

Any thoughts on that?

[Griogre]

You should backup your campaign's before upgrading just in case - but I have updated my versions of the 4E rulesets through all the iterations since beta and have not experienced any real problems in my ongoing 4E campaigns. The only thing I have noticed is stability problems if I update the ruleset in the middle of fight so I would suggest you not do that.

You might want to look at that character who "lost" all his items and make sure there are not two or more versions of him on the server. If a player has a local version of the character it is not uncommon for him to select the local character by mistake rather than the server character - which typically is the older version of the character.