I second this, having reread all of PR #4833 , the intentions are clear, but it does make Play Mode feel a bit weird; assuming there is still a purpose to the item owner (usually the GM) toggling an item to Play Mode during/after editing—a toggle that resets back to Edit Mode when the world is reloaded?*

A feature to enable/disable the default sheet state being Edit Mode, or something similar, would be beneficial in pursuit of predictability and accessibility - especially for players that like to pop their owned items out, albeit that not being the designed intention.

*Originally I assumed this aspect of the PR to have been unintentional and raised it as an issue ( #5043 )

First of all i need to preference my comment saying that I understand that players have ownership of items on their player charicters this isn't a permision thing but more of a user journey prefernce thing.

Having interviewed my players (small sample only 11 people) the scenario most typical for my players is that the use the current "edit" context menu on items / spells from actor sheet inventory is usually just to see all of the details without spamming the chat window and it isn't actually to edit the item.

Having items , spells and features open up in play "read only" mode means that the user is protected from themselves and in-adverntant changes to their items, as it HAS to be a concious decision to then toggle the EDIT slider.

In my ideal world, - i'd much prefer the conext menu on the actor sheet to check if the edit slider is enabled on the actor sheet.. if it is .. display the edit option... if it isn't .. then display the view item button like :

As my ideal world doesn't exsist then i think a good compromise would be to just have a setting which could change the default behavior

1. on world load set everything open in "play" mode
2. on world load set everything open in "edit" mode

ps... i'd way prefer a "view item " context option instead of edit on the actor sheet for players.

Having interviewed my players (small sample only 11 people) the scenario most typical for my players is that the use the current "edit" context menu on items / spells from actor sheet inventory is usually just to see all of the details without spamming the chat window and it isn't actually to edit the item.

What details do they want to view that can't be seen in the item tooltip or via expanding the item in the inventory?

I know the question was addressed to a different user but I would like to add my own and similar experience, which is coming from a playgroup of 8.
For us the play mode was used frequently for popping up and grouping items on screen without having the character sheet open. This way we could view and compare multiple entries on the same screen. This was a "neater" experience similar to, let's say, browsing a deck of collectible cards. It wasnt about the data we were trying to access, but more about the presentation and accessibility; unlocked item meant we were working on it, locked one meant it was "play ready", and an eye-candy. Finished product essentially.
It was also an easy way to prevent accidental modifications and changes since every edit had to be modified with a clear intent to do so.

Of course it is in no way anything that breaks the functionality, but is more of a comfort feature, which is why I thought it may be a good optional setting to add in the future. My players were also surprised that the behavior changed, and our initial thought was also that it was a bug - seeing how drastically it changed our comfort of interactions with items in general.

Makes sense. There was some extra friction added to editing due to the details now being locked in Play mode, and we wanted to try to reduce that. But if it's not working, there are alternative solutions we can look at.

Sorry the reply has taken a few days - We lost power due to the storm and just got it back today.

I've only been able to ask 1 group of players so far as we missed one of the games due my power problems :( ...

The feedback i got from the first group was:

• Having the item "pop out" from the actor sheet made it easy to compare items as they could have them side by side
• Being able to see what mastery a weapon had
• How a magic item regains its charges (some DMG items or my own items dont have this in the chat description)
• If a magic item has multiple activities.. the expand box doesn't explain what each one does and reguarly the item descritpion doesn't cover the activies in enough details (I could probably do a better job of adding item descriptions to resolve this point)
• if an activity has any chat flavor (this doesn't apear to come through on expand)

Some of them also just had never used the expand option, so handn't looked at it.. This is probably my fault they are new to foundry and I guided them on our first session to edit the item...

Hope that helps

And to echo the other poster, please dont take my comments as anything that stops us using foundry .. its tottaly fine.. its more of a comfort / quality of life thing...

This is too niche to add a setting for, at least until we expand the settings framework. A view option has instead been added to the context menu, in addition to the edit option.

That's already a really huge improvement, thanks for looking into it!