Welcome to Day 15 of the RPGaDAY 2024 Challenge. Our topic of the day is Great Character Gear. The gear for a character can be an interesting thing. It can be a micromanaging aspect of the game (Do I have enough arrows? Is the character overloaded?) or it can be a new trend that I’ve noticed. The gear is more of a temporary trait that affect the character/scene in the game. If it’s the later, then usually the rules state ‘You start with this’. Sometimes I appreciate that a lot, especially if I’m getting down to the wire on getting the character completed.
The starting gear is always an interesting aspect of roleplaying games to think about. Having created a lot of characters in the Character Creation Challenge, I’ve noticed some things. By the time I get to the “obtain equipment” section of the process, I’m either really happy to pick out the gear, or I’m really annoyed because the character creation process sucked to high heaven. Sometimes I just say “I pick the equipment I think the character would have.” Especially if the equipment obtaining process is convoluted.
One of the most weirdest (and stupid) processes of obtaining character gear came from the True20 system. Immediately I saw how the wealth bonus could both be abused by players and how the wealth system would punish players. Then when I saw how it compared to D20 Modern wealth system, I knew that I’d be using the later if I wanted to run that type of a game.
I like homebrewing for gear in games based off of Intellectual Properties (i.e. shows, books and comics). It allowed me to port over something I had seen into a RPG environment. I did this with Star Trek Adventures in a past RPGaDAY entry.
Another aspect of equipment is when the GM wishes they hadn’t given that out or forgot that you had obtained it. In a past D&D 3.5 campaign, the DM forgot that I had obtained a bottle of matter from the negative plane. In a moment of desperation, I used it as a grenade. Luckily the party survived the encounter. But it did kill the nasty monster that was kicking our butt. The DM had told his son about the encounter later and he reacted with “what was he stupid for using that?”
Do you have a memorable equipment that was given to a character? Have you had a good or bad experience equipping characters during the character creation process? Tell me about it. This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com with any comments.