Moving Items Between Actors

Dragging & Dropping Items

Internally, items are divided into three types:

1. Character Properties: ["ability", "lasting-damage", "power-shift", "skill", "recursion", "tag"]
2. Unique Items: ["armor", "artifact", "attack", "cypher", "oddity"]
3. Quantifiable Items: ["ammo", "equipment", "material"]

Depending on the type, dragging & dropping items between actors and the sidebar does different things:

Character properties aren’t things that can be shared between characters in-game. That’s why only GMs can drag character properties between actors. They will simply be duplicated at the target. Players can’t drag character properties between actors.

Unique items can only exist once in-game, so when dragging & dropping them between actors, you are being asked what you want to do with the original item. You can archive or delete it. GMs can duplicate them by dragging them into the sidebar first and so create a new unique item in the world when dragging it to the actor sheet.

Quantifiable items exist in a certain number in the world. When dragging them between actors, you are being asked how many you want to move to the target actor. The quantity is then subtracted from the origin actor. When dragging them from the sidebar onto the actor sheet, the quantity is not limited (although the max indicates the usual quantity for that item). GMs can duplicate them by dragging them into the sidebar first and so create new quantifiable items in the world when dragging them to the actor sheet.

Skills, abilities, and equipment can further be dragged & dropped between categories, if they are set. If they are being dragged from the sidebar, they can also directly being dragged into the category, with the exception that if you are dragging an already existing quantifiable item onto a character, the quantity of the existing item is increased and it stays in the category it’s currently in.

Trading Between Players

Players can only drag & drop items between actors they own. That means that players can’t trade their items easily unless all players own all characters. A workaround would be a trading actor which is owned by all players. A Token actor (Trade) for that purpose can be found in the marker compendium. Example: If player A wants to give an item to player B, A would give it to the Trade actor first, and B would then take that item from the Trade actor.

There are two reasons why you can’t directly drag & drop items between actors owned by different players. The first is so that not all players need ownership permission for the other characters. The second and more important reason is autonomy over your own character sheet. I don’t like the idea that someone can just drag and drop items to or from my character sheet. A trading actor is a simpler solution than a series of pop-up dialogs in which you need to confirm the trade for all parties, I believe.

Nice(TSY) Cypher System Add-ons [↗︎] adds a trade button to character sheets, with which you can trade directly between characters.