Hmm, actually, this could work. I could set aside a few letters for
prefixed things like skills, spells and items. Then use the rest of
the letters for prefixes for character entities. I would have about 20,
giving me 20,000 possible chars. Begin all npc's with 'n' and let them
go to four digits... and have a four-digit-possible overflow prefix under
the chars, so I could have 30k chars. That should be enough.
Then I can keep the mnemonic tags for items and skills, so you can call
gold "gold" and clay pots "cp" and Detect gates "dg".
-- Rich Skrenta <skrenta@shadow.com>