If I have a short sword, and an enemy we defeat had a long sword, can I pickup and swap my short sword for the long sword? In other words, can we keep weapons/armor that we find?
You can only use them until the end of the session, and only if the item is in the official stat block of the foe/NPC. At the end of the session such items disappear.
At the end of the session, or at any time between sessions, you can spend the necessary gold to purchase any mundane item.
In this case, you could pick up and use the long sword during the adventure and at the end, if you wanted to keep it, you could pay the gold piece cost to purchase one. AL is a shared world environment and some of the weapons/armor/other mundane items have a significant cost associated with it. Making sure everyone has to purchase mundane items ensures that some characters don't have a significant advantage playing modules with lots of mundane items available to pick up and use. The easiest example is picking up a suit of scale mail, breastplate (400gp), half-plate (750gp) or plate armor (1500gp) from an NPC in a module and then getting to keep it ... which might not be fair to folks playing different content. So if you want plate armor, save up your gold :)
However, under season 9 rules, if the module contains a magic item then everyone in the party can keep it at the end of the module as long as they don't exceed their magic item count cap which depends on the character's tier. So if you found a magical sword then you could keep it at the end of the adventure as long as you did not exceed the maximum number of magic items which you are allowed to possess for your level.
If I have a short sword, and an enemy we defeat had a long sword, can I pickup and swap my short sword for the long sword? In other words, can we keep weapons/armor that we find?
You can only use them until the end of the session, and only if the item is in the official stat block of the foe/NPC. At the end of the session such items disappear.
At the end of the session, or at any time between sessions, you can spend the necessary gold to purchase any mundane item.
In this case, you could pick up and use the long sword during the adventure and at the end, if you wanted to keep it, you could pay the gold piece cost to purchase one. AL is a shared world environment and some of the weapons/armor/other mundane items have a significant cost associated with it. Making sure everyone has to purchase mundane items ensures that some characters don't have a significant advantage playing modules with lots of mundane items available to pick up and use. The easiest example is picking up a suit of scale mail, breastplate (400gp), half-plate (750gp) or plate armor (1500gp) from an NPC in a module and then getting to keep it ... which might not be fair to folks playing different content. So if you want plate armor, save up your gold :)
However, under season 9 rules, if the module contains a magic item then everyone in the party can keep it at the end of the module as long as they don't exceed their magic item count cap which depends on the character's tier. So if you found a magical sword then you could keep it at the end of the adventure as long as you did not exceed the maximum number of magic items which you are allowed to possess for your level.
Thank you