The Stories behind Equipment

 

In Walkabout, I'm suggesting that a really nice stick might count as a piece of equipment, but so might a nomadic convoy rig filled with everything you need to survive weeks away from civilization. There is no way that these two pieces of equipment could be considered equivalent in power.

What are the advantages of the stick...?

• You can poke someone with it.
• You can reach further with it.
• You can attach it to some string or line to make a trap or fishing line.
• You can use it to mix ingredients.

What are the advantages of the nomadic convoy rig?

• You can shelter within it during inhospitable weather.
• You can get places more quickly.
• You can gather with several allies in relative safety.
• You are protected from gunfire while in it.
• You can grow crops in a hydroponics bay
• You have storage areas for other pieces of equipment 
• If might have a built in med-bay, or workshop.
• It may have it's own story and reputation.

Those last few in bold are probably the important ones.

So that kind of brings us to the spirituality inherent in the game. However, this is a game driven by concept of stories and communication, so bear with me for a short time. Wide sweeping generalizations can quickly get people into the right frame of mind, but when getting an idea from one persons head to another, different people might have different nuances in their thoughts about those generalizations. 

I mentioned in the last post that there's some Nausicaa influence, in Walkabout, and that ties in well because of the spirituality inherent in Shinto stories and Dreaming stories. People have relationships individually to each other, they have relationships to conceptual ideas like family, community or systems of religious belief, and they also have relationships to physicalities like places and objects. 

For the most part, equipment in Walkabout is scavenged and is disposable. You gather together the bits you need for a task you're performing, and there's a chance that the various tools and supplies will break or be consumed. The items are incidental. You don't need specific details about every little thing, be cause those details can slow down play and bog down the bigger story.

But some pieces are important. Some pieces will form the core of their own stories. Tank Girl's Tank, Mad Max's Interceptor, Eli's Book, the Pip Boy in Fallout... such things need a bit more description, but the aim is not to generate a massive tome of a hundred pages or more to describe a tiny range of the potential items out there.

I always prefer to give players a few basic rules to let them bring their own ideas into play.  

I'm thinking three levels... 

Regular items are still the basic things like a sharpened stick, a packet of healing herbs, a pouch, a lantern...if one of them is useful in what you're attempting, you add a d4 to your dice pool, every additional item increases that equipment die by a degree. 

• I'm thinking that if your equipment die rolls less than or equal to the number of pieces of equipment you've used, then one of your items must be discarded because it runs out of ammo/supplies, or it breaks...so, if you're using one piece of equipment it gets used up on a roll of 1 on the d4...if you're using four pieces of equipment, you roll a d10 for the equipment roll, but one of them is used up if the die rolls a 1-4.
• Items such as these could be picked up with successful scavenging attempts, or easily traded without too much of an issue. They might not always be available, and when they are available, they might be more easily obtained by some characters rather than others (due to culture, career, or other factors...but that's just another way that helps differentiate the characters).  

Notable items are also pretty simple, but might count as two or three items pieces when calculating the equipment die. Or might increase the equipment die if the user has a specific ability...maybe an unwieldy and heavy pipe, where the damage potential is increased in combat if the character has "strength" or a physical attribute above d8... a car with engine modifications that adds a bonus if the driver has either the "Drive" or "Tinkering" abilities... a religious text that adds benefits to a character's resolve against the supernatural if they have the "Literacy" or "Religion" abilities. A character would only gain one possible bonus, and that bonus would only be attached to the item once the character had used it enough times to understand the nuances of its use. A third bonus might come from a specific occupational understanding of the item... a lumberjack gains an extra bonus if they're using an axe, a sniper gains an extra bonus if they're using a rifle, a tinkerer gains an extra bonus from using the personal toolkit they've been carefully tending for years. This basically means that an item that will be notable for one person might only be considered a regular item for someone else, and I like that idea. 

• I'm working with the idea that a character can have a number of notable items equal to the number of sides on their agency die, and a notable item might be damaged if the equipment die rolls poorly, but isn't destroyed outright. Since a player chooses which item suffers when the die rolls poorly, they probably won't choose one of their notable items to go down.
• Items such as these will gain significance in the story because characters may need to perform missions to get their hands on one, or will take a few actions gradually building one. A character might have heard about an item like this over the course of a few scenes, or even a few sessions. There will certainly be limitations to how items like these will be acquired, and the narrator of the story should probably limit such items entering the story to once or twice per session per character.      

Awakened items really push into the shamanic traditions behind the game. In Shinto it's believed that everything has the potential to develop its own spiritual guardian, this occurs when the item reaches 100 years of age. The same kind of idea occur through many traditional belief systems, where items gain significance when passed down through the generations. For these, a simple bonus or two won't cut it. So I'm working with the idea that such items would be treated like allies, with the user sharing a relationship to the item, and the item having it's own character sheet with ability aspects that might be shared with the user, or specific bonus dice that activate once the character's relationship with the item becomes strong enough. 

• A character will only ever possess one awakened item at a time, or maybe they need to develop and maintain their relationship to the item to keep gaining the benefits from it. 
• Awakened items should be pretty rare, and acquiring one should be the reward or even the objective of an entire session (or more), and even if a session is focused around such an item, there's still no guarantee that it will be acquired successfully. 
• There isn't much evidence of spiritual entities in items within Dreaming lore, instead the spirits are linked more to places and animals, so we're not going to push this idea too hard. I'll also need to work out the general character sheet before I start working on a character sheet for awakened items.

When it comes to vehicles like the one depicted at the start of the post, this is probably something that will nee to be decided in a session zero. A story with a few nomads might gain access to something like this, but there will be issues regarding fuel, spare parts, repairing damage, and regular maintenance to offset the benefits it might provide otherwise. Each of these aspects can help to drive story, and in a world where the remnants of the past are falling apart, why should things be different for the player characters.