Gear & Loadout: Great RPG Mechanics

#RPGMechanics Week One

For the next few weeks, as a short break from the RPG Covers series, I’ll be talking about discrete rpg mechanics which I dig. These are rules, elements & systems that grabbed me when I read them. I love what each of them do to play at the table. This isn’t a cobbling together of mechanics to build a new game, but an appreciation of cool ideas designers had and how they work. 

The question of “stuff” has always been present in rpgs. How do games model equipment and gear. Usually that’s just a question of weapon and armor lists. Some games would do away with it– making it instead into point-statted equipment and gadgets. But others went with multiple page listings of all the things your characters could buy– and usually how much they weighed. Detailed lists lead to encumbrance, and encumbrance leads to soul-death-y rules. 

A bigger question is: how can you have equipment and make it meaningful and fun to interact with. Forged in the Dark’s gear system offers a solution to that. Instead of gear being charts of numbers that you go through to find effects or to use as modifiers, it’s an active thing. It doesn’t sit passively. You get to choose. 

On the one hand, when you actually call on equipment, it does something. It gives you a benefit. That makes the list feel real and important. It’s also a limited resource. In Blades in the Dark, loadout shapes how much equipment you can use. It makes for an interesting choice about equipment right away.

The second big choice is which equipment to use. For the most part the gear is the same (with a few exceptions like Special Armor). So the cool part is choosing which thing fits best with the story being told. That can vary from session to session, mission to mission. And there’s no complex calculation of weight, prices, or rarity. We have a list and we do pick ahead of time. 

Instead our choices are contingent on events, chosen in the heat of the moment, and don’t require complex calculations ahead of time. Forged in the Dark changes something basic in the game and reverses classic approaches. 

It’s why I love it– and the many variants we’ve seen of it (take Mountain Home for example). I love that we can have the *feel* of complex equipment lists but without the actual complexity of so many trad systems.