Can players change their characters they control?

Simple answer: No.

The Judge is the only one who can (currently) alter a PC's sheet.

Many have requested that this be an option though. I am one who would like to see this as well. It would make my life easier to allow certain changes to be made by the player on their sheet. It would really be no different than RL play with a paper sheet. It should even be a toggled permission per player, in case you have a newb that may mess up the sheet or a sphincter that cheats.

As of now, there is no option for this. Maybe in D20PRO 3.4?

We shall see.

 

Interestingly, the option to pick things up on the fly hasn't come up in these forums until recently. In most campaigns, it's a really a rare thing that can be roleplayed through.

In your case, you can either edit on the fly, go old school and just roll dice and do the math yourselves or you can go crazy and make a DM NPC with every item that might be found pre-built by you and you roll those for the players as needed.

An example of doing the latter is this: viewtopic.php?f=18&t=1746

For the rare occasion, I personally would go old school and know that combat is going to take longer to resolve. They roll d20, I determine whether it hits, they roll damage dice, I apply the damage to creature manually. As a result of the longer combat, I'd probably make mine a stealth-focused game and discourage combat but I don't know what your campaign is about.

For your situation, I would just add a few items to each character's inventory. Light object, 1d4. Medium object, 1d6. Heavy object, 1d8. And then roleplay it from there. That gives you the combat rolls and base damage and allows the players to make their rolls. You can increase/decrease damage manually from the GM side as you wish.

 

actually, I was thinking you could use a public creature with all of the drop weapons programmed in. then they could pick up the weapons to put them in inventory, and then just use the public creature for attacks until you are able to program them in to the characters.