Decoupling quarters and storage

[Cybren]

Grumpy suggested I post this as a suggestion, and to be honest I had been meaning to do so since before the suggestion forum reopened, I just had been putting off thinking about it much until recently.

Remove most if not all storage chests from quarters, and instead give every character a storage chest they can put down anywhere, but only pick up while empty (the fixture can only be moved by its actual owner (so you can’t just take someone’s entire chest and then steal 1 item from it every day or something absurd))

This is to alleviate pressure on quarters which right now most people want primarily as a dumping ground for their accumulated detritus. People wind up being disincentivized to sharing a quarter with a PCs spouse even if it would make narrative sense to do so, because that functionally cuts each characters access to storage in half. People sit on quarters in settlements they no longer RP in because there’s none open near where they DO RP so they don’t want to lose their 20 slot chest.

There are some concerns: it would mean you would have 1 storage chest per character instead of per account, it would mean there would be a number of more fixtures added to a lot of existing areas, and it would mean that people might get accidentally burgled more often because they didn’t realize they put their storage chest somewhere that isn’t secure. But it also means you can sublet your quarter, or more easily play as roommates, or even set up dead drop points for spies to exchange info or items, or bury hidden treasure on remote islands.

Some things might be need to be done to make it work cohesively. For example, using skills like survival or bluff to camouflage a storage chest so others can’t find it, using traps, locks, or spells to protect them against tampering and theft, using spot or search to find clues about who might have interacted with a chest recently. In order to prevent areas from being cluttered with ever increasing amounts of treasure chests, after some amount of time of not being refreshed they could become derelict (with an accompanying visual identifier) which would make them free game for looting.

[Irongron]

Sorry, I'm going to have to reject this one. Would totally upset economy and no way I'm revisiting all our quarters.