Originally Posted by
dr_venture
In playing with the Inventory tab, this has the potential to be a pretty major feature, at least to my mind. Currently (and again, my observations are limited to the C&C ruleset, though probably relate to many others as well), having draggable inventory items is a *fantastic* feature in FG, and the Party sheet and chat notification features when dragging items between characters is very useful and cool. But when it comes to gearing-up a new character, or making a between adventures trip to the local stoneWalMart, buying items is a huge hassle because individual purchased items have to be totaled and manually subtracted from monies. If the purchase is more than a few items, and the character has limited funds, it becomes a PITA (Pain In The 'sitting-region').
What would be *extremely* cool -- if it's reasonably possible -- would be to split the Inventory page into two sections, just like the NPCs page, with the bottom section being a "shopping cart" type arrangement... players could drag items from the top inventory into the bottom section, and a total of item costs would be tallied (and given the minimally structured nature of money in FG, I'm guessing that this would be the problem... but perhaps some careful price field parsing could address this and/or fail gracefully?). The items in the cart would only represent a potential purchase. When somebody wanted to commit to the purchase, you'd probably post something to the chat window indicating who was purchasing what from which store, and hopefully a price total... then all of the items would be put into the character's inventory, while being removed from the Location's inventory.
You'd have to enforce some kind of logic to deal with multiple players trying to purchase a unique item, as well as the idea that FG doesn't really deal with shared windows having unique content based on who is looking at them (i.e., I don't think you can easily have a "shared" shopping cart that has different items for different players). Perhaps limiting the store to one character at a time would solve both that issue, as well as indicating which character the shopping cart is interacting with. Basically, one at a time, folks, at least in terms of each individual business... which makes sense, too.
If that could be added, that would really revolutionize my games! I could have either specific stores with specific inventory and markups, or a handful of representative stores with basic markups and inventory that are generic stand ins for specific businesses if I don't have one prepared. Players could then put their purchases together themselves from what's available, and transfer everything at once into their inventory, easy-peasy.
I'm sure there are more issues to work out, but basically, what do you think? Not of me asking you to do a lot of work, but the idea, of course :D
