The sword you cannot draw
In one campaign the character picked up a second two-handed sword — exactly like the first, which was already in his bag. Then he lost the weapon in his hands and went into his gear to fetch a replacement. In the weapon slot the game offered him a rusty cleaver and nothing else. The two swords sitting in that same bag were not on the list.
The item is there. You cannot take it. And the button is not even greyed out with an explanation — it is simply absent.
Two rules, each correct in its own way
Our inventory is not lines of text but typed items: each has a name, a quantity, and a flag for “in hand or in the bag”. One of the first rules of that system: one name, one line. Pick up a second healing herb and the line’s quantity becomes two; no new line appears. That is convenient and right — a bundle of arrows should not sprawl into twenty lines.
The second rule: only a single item can be equipped. If a line’s quantity is greater than one, it cannot be equipped. The point was to make sure there were never two lines with the same name in different states — otherwise it is unclear which one to take from when something is dropped.
Each rule is reasonable. The problem surfaced where they met.
A false assumption
In the design document, next to the second rule, sat an explanation: “worn gear is always a single copy anyway — a bundle of arrows is not equipped”. At the time that was written, it was true. The starting kit is assembled from single items, and nobody was trying to equip a stack.
But in the game it is the Master who hands out items, and it hands them out by name. Pick up a second identical sword and the first rule fires: the quantity becomes two. And immediately the second fires: a line with quantity two cannot be equipped. Worn weapons stopped being single at exactly the moment there were two of them — and the whole protection rested on that never happening.
The result is an item that cannot be used. Not broken, not lost — it sits in the bag, you can see it, and you cannot take it in hand.
It is not the interface
It would have been easy to decide the screen was at fault — that it simply was not showing the button. But the screen was telling the truth. It builds the list of what can be equipped by the same rule the server uses: quantity greater than one, skip. The interface honestly reflected a prohibition that lived deeper. What needed fixing was not the display but the rule itself.
Drawing one at a time
Now, when you try to equip an item from a stack, the game splits one copy off it: that copy becomes a separate “in hand” line, and the rest stays in the bag. Two swords — draw one, the second stays where it was.
We lifted the prohibition, but the thing it stood for has not gone anywhere — so instead of one blunt “no” there are three precise rules:
- a picked-up item is added to the bag, not to the equipped line — otherwise what is in hand would grow back into a stack that cannot be removed;
- equipping what is already in hand is a no-op: there is one slot, and you cannot swing two identical swords;
- after all of this, identical lines in the bag collapse back into one, so no two rows of the same thing appear there.
We checked it on the very campaign where it surfaced: the character equips one of the two swords — the pair splits, the previously equipped one-handed cleaver goes back to the bag (a two-hander occupies both hands), and the mail shirt stays where it is.
What to do with this next
We amended the design document separately. The old rule and its reasoning are not erased — they are marked as superseded, with a note of what replaced them. The assumption “weapons are always single anyway” was true right up until the day the game started handing out loot itself. That is worth leaving in plain sight: not “we were wrong”, but “the assumption stopped holding here — and this is why”.