I've been working on an item system for a post-apocalyptic RPG, with diablo as inspiration, and it would be awesome if I could visually represent an item that can be equipped on the player sprite. I was thinking you could have a player sprite with certain animations, then the equipped item would be drawn as if it was on the player with the same animations, so it syncs with the player animations but that couldn't work very smoothly, I imagine there's a better system.

How can you graphically represent an item worn on the player, which moves like he does, and looks as if he's wearing it? I'm not asking you how to do it in framework X or platform X (altho if you REALLY need it, I'm using Allegro 5 with codeblocks on win XP) but instead I'm asking you how to generally program such an idea.