I proposed once instead of having personal inventories for each character, to just have a global "Kingdom Vault" or whatever, where everything you find goes. Then when you open a character's sheet, you can equip him directly from the vault. Would be a lot more convenient on larger maps where you might have  tons of people  running around, so you wouldn't have to look through the inventories of 30 guys to find that item you thought you had lying around.

... But, it was shot down