Fun with Items

Our latest release include a series of changes around items and equipment. The changes include:

1. Shopping. Buying and selling equipment made simple, including the construction of shops.

2. Containers. That backpack, chest, or wagon can now have a list of items it contains.

3. Encumbrance. Shard now calculates your character’s carry capacity and displays their encumbrance level.

4. Managing Quantities. Twelve Daggers are now displayed in one row instead of 12.

5. Mysterious Treasure. The properties and descriptions of items can now be masked until they are identified.

6. Custom Currencies. Silver and Gold aren’t always right in every setting.

Each is explained in detail below and in a series of how to articles found in the learning section of this site.

Shopping

Shopping for equipment can be a fun and entertaining part of playing D&D. Whether it is finding equipment to build the personality of your character, stocking up on key equipment to prepare for an adventure, or just figuring out what to do with all of that loot that you just acquired, buying and selling is an important part of the roleplaying experience. Even while you are having fun roleplaying the shopping experience, it can become a bit tedious keeping up with what everything costs, doing coin conversions, and recording what just happened. In keeping with our core principles, minimizing the housekeeping while keeping the design simple was our focus.

Instead of just picking items to add to your character sheet, you can now buy them. Buying items sums up the costs allowing players to choose a percent of list price, ranging from 10% to 10X, with the cost automatically calculated, including coin exchange and change. Gamemasters can build lists of items that players can use to shop from a limited list of items, making it easy for players to find out what items are for sale in that weapons shop. See Buying Equipment and Building Shops.

The character sheet now includes a much richer selling model as well, providing similar tools to the buying experience. Players can set target percentage of list price for selling and see what percentage of list price they are selling. See Removing Equipment for details on selling.

Containers

Container item allow items to store other items, supporting backpacks, bags of holding, saddle bags, and wagons. You don’t really always need to see what’s in those containers or have them clutter your weapons list. See learning article for more information about containers.

Encumbrance

Characters can’t really carry an infinite amount of items and many games like to track carry weight and apply encumbrance penalties. Now characters can label what is actually carried and have the character sheet compute the total carry weight. Items that aren’t carried also don’t clutter weapons and actions. See article about encumbrance and carried equipment for more details.

Managing Quantities

Managing quantities for items that are the same, has been a challenge. If character has a bunch of daggers you don’t want see them individually, but at the same time you want to be able to equip one in each hand. If you have more than one wand of fireballs, they don’t have the same use count. The character sheet now tries to collapse equivalent items and only separate them when needed. See article about Item Quantities for more information.

Mysterious Treasure

One of the fun things about finding magical treasure is that characters don’t always know what they have found or how it works. That strange dagger with the green gem they found in the ogre’s cave? Maybe it’s a +1 dagger…or maybe it’s cursed. Until now, Shard has struggled with how to handle these types of unidentified items, since a GM may still want the item’s features to apply to the player’s character sheet, while still being able to hide what they do. Now, instead of telling players to pretend not to know what the item does, or having the GM remember so that an item could later be revealed, items now support hidden attributes. See article about Hidden Items for more information.

Custom Currencies

Using the standard coins of copper, silver, gold and platinum can make for a convenient global currency standard, there are many cases where alternate currencies provide a better flavor for different settings. Shard now supports creating your own currencies and using them for item value. See article on Custom Currencies for more information.

Final Notes

Changes to your equipment list including buying and selling are now recorded in chat rather than the session log (“Hey wait a second, where did you get that Vorpal Sword from?). This allows everyone to see the changes and reduces the size of the character sheet for faster load times.

Several items, including starting equipment packs like the Explorer’s Pack and Dungeoneer’s Pack, have been updated as a result of these changes. Items on existing character sheets will not automatically update, so if you want the new versions, swap them out. Maybe try the buying and selling functions while you are at it.

Have fun fully equipping your characters and as always let us know what you think of these new features in any of our social media forums or by contacting us at shard@shardtabletop.com.