Alright, I'm not sure if this would work or not, but I'm throwing it out there. First and fore most, I hate corpse bags. They annoy the hell out of me. Let me explain why.

Let us say you are in a hostile area. Someone dies, they have their corpse as well as a bag next to them. (I'm assuming it's their backpack because thats what it looks like.) You need to grab their body and their things and run like hell. So what do you do? You grab their body, then you open that backpack and begin taking the items they have on them one by one.

That does not make sense. If they can carry everything they own in that backpack, I should be able to pick that pack up and move with it - along with their body.

My suggestion is simple really. Have an item called "Soandso's Backpack" spawn when they die that will hold all of their items that they are not currently wearing. Allow someone to pick that bag up, with everything in it, and then move around.

If they want to look inside, have them use the item, and have the corpse bag appear on the ground as it currently does.

I ask this mainly for sanity purposes. I try and throw all my things into boxes so that if someone has to loot my body they can quickly get the things that they need. However, you are faced with several problems with people who don't do that.

First, you may run out of inventory space. Second, all the stuff you grab gets mixed up. If more than one person dies and you grab their things how do you know what belongs to who? Nothing sucks more than spending hours sorting out their stuff from your stuff, from someone elses stuff. Then the inevitable hearing of, "X is missing" and feeling confident that you grabbed everything.

Third, and perhaps most important, it makes perfect role-playing sense. It is, after all, a backpack. The items aren't laying all over the ground. Logically speaking - unless you had very low intelligence - you'd simply pick up the backpack and search through it later. Even if you were going to rob someone, it is easier to steal their pack and then search through it, rather than search through it right at the scene of the crime.

Can something like this even work?

It can, but it makes full looting your companions easier and tends to be misused on servers where its in effect. Many that use systems like this actually forbid looting other player's corpses.

True but in the same way it also makes things more difficult. The pack should, after all, have the weight of all its contents. If you are lugging a corpse, its equipment and their pack that could easily be nearly 300-400 pounds. You're not going to be running very far or very fast. The average pack will likely be AT LEAST 75 pounds, but more likely closer to 100-120 pounds.

I mean, think of this scenario: Someone attacks and kills someone in Upper Sanctuary right in the street. They are killing them for a very specific item that they have on them. Are they going to stand over the corpse and dig through their belongings for the item, or are they just going to grab that pack and run?

Of course the downside to this is that people can't be nice and can't just dig through your stuff taking what they want. Instead they'll grab everything, but if someone wants to be OOC nice they can arrange it OOCly. Or dig through their items like we currently can.

One issue is that all of the items stored "on" a backpack item will disappear over server crashes/resets, in the same way that equipped items "on" a corpse do. Since one could conceivably carry around somebody's backpack for much longer than one would ordinarily carry around a corpse, and as the backpack has far more stuff, this could be a significant issue.