One major benifit of combining items/weapons/armor into one table is that then you code for one and you have the rest. It also makes it easy to add new classes of items later on. In that way it at least makes sense as to why you combined them all together in the inventory feild, then you don't need much modification to store/inventory code in order to add new classes of objects.

I do become more and more interested in why there is as yet no module that allows you to store items with meta data (like armor bonus, attackt bonus...ect, different attribs for each item) in a database. I know that outlook already uses some system that allows it to store different peices of information for each item in its lists. It seems like it shouldn't be to hard to wrap something around DBI that would handle the special needs of handleing the extra tables and links, and building the required queries.

/me wonders off to cpan to see if there isn't a module already

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Eric Hodges