Part of the situation that I should have explained is that I also make this want to work for henchmen, who might have their equipment changed regularly by their PC masters.
(I'm running a virtual tabletop game that uses a lot of henchmen.)
I could handle PCs, henchmen, and town guards / monsters in three different ways, but I'd rather keep the scripts as few as possible.
I'm afraid I'll have to use the heartbeat event for NPCs, but people here often have extremely clever ways of doing things that I've never thought of.
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