LUDONARRATIVE DISSONANCE IN SIMULATIONIST LOGIC 01: TELEPORTING ITEMS IN RPGS

Solution: Don't use items.

This has never bothered me, though I can see why it would annoy some people, but yeah it's never disrupted immersion for me.

However I've wanted to address this in my game (it isn't an rpg, but anyway). The simplest thing to do is just make sure two out of three of the characters can't use the items, so they're greyed out in the menu. They're still visible though, so it's still somewhat illogical... For items that aren't unique, like medical kits or whatever, I'd just make duplicates of those for each character to use (because they would never appear on the same maps as the others anyway so there is no risk of them picking up items meant for the other two). So yeah, that's my lazy solution.

One game that comes to mind is Grandia - it sort of avoided this, by having each party member have their own small inventory space, although there may have been a larger pooled inventory, I can't really remember.

Dragon Quest IV, of all things, actually handled this properly. Four times in the game, you start playing as a brand new character (or set of character). Each time, you start with no items and no gold. Later, when that character finally joins the main party, everything that they have gets added into your main character's inventory. (Their gold is lost forever, which is dumb.)

Now, this is easy when it's done in that order - party member fighting alone at first, and then later joins the main party. Combining two inventories is easy. However, when your party splits into multiple groups, it gets a lot crazier. How do you even do that with a shared inventory? CAN you? In a typical RPG, where you are carrying tons of shit, the only sane way I can think of is to let the player pick and choose which items (and how much gold) to give to each party. That would frankly be kind of obnoxious, especially if it happened every two dungeons like in FF13!

Several of my games, including the one I'm making right now that's ostensibly my main project, involve two main characters that your perspective switches back and forth between, who are in the same party about half the time and apart from each-other about half the time, so this is a problem for me. They split and rejoin many times throughout the game, too many to force the player to go down through their inventory one by one each time.

I've been thinking about giving each of the two main characters their own stash, and when you open a treasure chest while they're both in your party, you have to pick who to give it to. No one else really needs one; one of these two characters will (probably) always be on your team. That would at least be somewhat better since it would be one item at a time instead of your entire inventory all at once. But this still seems obnoxious and micromanagey. I'm not happy with the idea, so I'm sticking with the wormhole inventory for now.

That's quite the topic name you got there.

Can't say it bothers me, I'm not a stickler for stuff that goes on "outside" of the game making sense, like in menus.
There are probably hundreds of small things in every single game that isn't realistic. Why do you and the enemies take turns attacking? Why do enemies appear from nowhere? Why can I stop time (also called pause)? If your immersion breaks over every little thing in games that doesn't make 100% sense, you're not going to have a good time playing games.

Small thought prompt while I procrastinate: It gets harder to solve this as the playable party's size shrinks.

As Fire Emblem demonstrates, it's easier to track 5 items per unit over 30 units than it is to track 30 items per unit with 5 units. Why is that, maybe?

probably because at least three of those items per person are vulneraries in fire emblem

I will note that, if it's just a set of temporary characters you're using for a few battles, you can cheat by not giving them an Item command in battle, and then locking their equipment.

The illogic really does bother me though. At least when it's physical objects and stuff. One clever way I've seen many games get around this is, instead of having physical items bought with physical gold, they have "passive skills" bought with "stars" or something really abstract like that. The only difference between a +36 defense augment you bought for 1500 points and a +36 defense hat you bought for 1500 gold is that the latter makes way more sense to transfer between characters. Because it's a really abstract videogamey concept in the first place, you can say "this belongs to the player" instead of "this belongs to the party."

...Unfortunately I refuse to do this in my own game, because although the illogical teleporting items bother me, they don't bother me as much as not being able to have equipment like "Brand New Jordans", "Bagpipe Hat", "Mullet-Proof Vest" and "Bubblewrap Kickboots".

I've rarely notice this. In fact I've found that this doesn't happen all that often. When it does it is part of a game with such huge dissonant things already that this is sort of the least of the issues.

I mean when it comes to inventories MY issue tends to be stuff like "so yeah, let's carry 50 swords around because that's something that every person does" even games with encumbrance limits are technically ridiculous. In Fallout I get encumbered but only after putting five or so miniguns in my backpack.

I also know that I've played games where I've had to offload all items from a person that I'm getting out of the party when recruiting another members. Just so I don't lose any of the sweet stuff the guy was carrying.

The games which handles this well is games where characters have separate inventories. In those games however, this is handled automatically, the developer doesn't even have to think about it. It's for games with shared inventories that this is an issue.

If characters start apart, but then later joins, you can have separate inventories and then merge them. However, things becomes trickier if they later split up. The only way I can see that handled reasonable is to let the player choose how to distribute the items and make it start distributed 50/50. However, if the inventory is large, then either the split is pointless since the player has more than it needs anyway, or if the item management is a big thing, the player will probably have to manually shift trough the whole inventory and choose how to split it.

Chance is it's not worth it.

It really doesn't bother me, since I see it as a gameplay convention rather than considering the 'in universe' reasoning. For example, if a player stocks up on healing items for a group, only to suddenly find that they're controlling another group. Or they buy equipment upgrades for their entire party. The player is going to be annoyed at the wasted effort, right? At least temporarily.

author=Zephyr
The Golden Sun-series handles this problem quite well with each character in your party having it's own respective inventory. It also pushes you to priorities items in your inventory, cause it's limited.

Individual inventories is probably the best logical solution, though it has its own pitfalls. Imagine your designated item monkey leaving the party and taking all those items with them. If it's temporary, you get the items back, sure, but if the character doesn't show up again until the items are outdated?

author=Zephyr
The issue of prioritizing your items also rises as you obtain more key-items(like Psynergy-skill trinkets). You're bound to have all slots filled out sooner or later unless you sell your old crap.

And that's another potential problem. The player has to dedicate inventory space to equipment and healing items, so every key item will take away a valuable slot, depriving the player of a resource simply for advancing the plot. (I'd recommend that plot important items don't take up inventory space, personally.)

On another note, if verisimilitude is a major concern, there's the "An herb takes up the same space as a suit of armor" aspect. Or a single gem taking up the same space as a pile of gold. (Curse you, Diablo.)

In summary: I don't think there's a perfect way of handling inventories. It's probably best to just use the method that fits the game.