Ravingdork wrote:
Note that it is entirely likely that Paizo introduced an option to swap items as a single action in Remaster so that important player character items don't have to be dropped as often and risk getting destroyed by area effects and the like.
AFter they used an errata pass to point out that the problem with an effect targeting both creatures and objects is that anything that does enough damage to threaten a higher-level character is almost assured to destroy most objects and then removed said targeting of objects with those kinds of abilities because, to make an example, throwing a fireball isn't supposed to make the GM stop and check if the room this has occurred in has been destroyed and whether the nearby treasure that was planned to be given to the party upon their victory is actually useless scrap and slag now... I think it's very unlikely that object destruction has anything to do with the reasoning for Swap.
I think it's more likely that the motivation behind Swap is that players were already willing to drop their objects because action economy makes it worth it, and GMs are generally already not having anything bad happen to objects on the ground because it's not perceived as adding to the game-play, so there's no strong reason to not have Swap instead of Drop + Draw.
But there is the strong upside of things being easier to track since now you don't have to mark where an item got dropped just in case someone does pick it up during the battle, and of not having any room for a GM to try and hardline the "but you didn't say you picked it up after the battle, so you didn't" line of reasoning even though part of why the player didn't specifically say that is likely to have been not interrupting all the other after-battle talk like looting, healing, refocusing, and plot development so saying the item is now lost is just bumming a player out for being involved enough in the game to get distracted and polite enough not to now derail the game play on purpose to go back to the site of the battle and get their item instead of doing whatever is meant to be going on now.
