Making assets for a game, models and animation, and I have some questions.

I’m pretty new to blender, but I’ve gotten to the point where I can rig things fairly quickly for animation, and its time to model and animate some players and NPCs, for a standard fantasy RPG. But this leaves me wondering about best practice for some of these things.

  • How do I handle clothing?
    So, armor and clothing (and weapons) will be interchangeble also among different models, with different animations. A female player and a male player will be wearing the same thing, (adapted to their model) but obviously use different animations. The monsters will also use and wield armor and weapons that the player can later pick up (from their cold dead hands) so these item-models are the same, but obviously armor will look very different on the player then say an Orc, and then their animation will once again be totally different.
  • Animation reuse?
    Speaking of animation, is it possible to use the same animation on multiple characters? Would I have to use the SAME rig on all characters and just adjust it to the mesh of each? Could I make a bunch of animations on a rig alone, and then parent it with different meshes to be able to utilize the same animation on different models. Is there a way to transfer animation from one rig to another?

Obviously the alternative to both these questions is to just make armor and weapons for every character type and animations for every character type. But is this really common workflow when making game assets?
Any advice, or tutorial that deals with this subject in detail would be very helpful, and no I am not using the BGE. (Though I might use it to prototype)

these are a good ones on the issue of picking up objects and such…

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Blender+Picking+Up+Objects

http://vimeo.com/28012989

Hey thanks for the reply, I have already seen those, and picking something up is not the issue. But thanks for replying.