[GUL] Gear

[thrash]

GURPS Ultra-Lite handles character gear thus:

Skills include relevant gear. Levels in combat skills (like Knight) give superior gear that improves weapon damage and armor. Heroes can put one level in Wealthy, a capability that adds two levels to combat skills for the sole purpose of weapon damage and armor.

Are there any variants (Pyramid articles, etc.) in the GURPS corpus that address doing away with strict accounting for gear? Obviously, the Gizmo advantage and Doodad perk are heading in this direction. I'm interested in what game mechanics it would take to implement something like those traits for all campaign gear, to mirror and/or quantify the approach in GUL. (The trivial response -- "just don't worry about it" -- is not relevant here.)

I'm familiar with Jason Brick's "Abstract Wealth" from Pyramid 3/44, but it focuses on how to acquire gear that still needs to be tracked.

[thrash]

After most of two weeks and 90 views, I infer the answer is, "no, this hasn't been attempted before." So, let's see what can be done. Based on "Trading Points for Money" (B26), the monetary part of Starting Wealth is worth 10 character points. We'll take this as our goal.

Gizmos (B57-58) is the closest Advantage to what we're trying to do here, but there are a number of differences that need to be addressed. Of the three potential criteria for using Gizmos, the middle one is most appropriate:

You always seem to have just the piece of gear you need… [a]n item that you probably own, and that is in keeping with your character concept, but that is minor or ignorable enough to leave unspecified.

We need to get rid of the "minor or ignorable" restriction. Since this version is not intended to be a deus ex machina (we have unmodified Gizmos for that), we will replace it with the Accessibility limitation, "reasonably foreseeable," and call it a wash (+0%).

More specifically than "in keeping with your character concept," we want to explicitly tie the items to skills from GUL, with Aspected (Powers, p. 110) -20%.

Once per game session per level of this advantage, you may pull out one small item of equipment that you could have been carrying.

We will change the "once per game session" limitation to "items totaling less than ~20% of campaign Starting Wealth (GM's call)" with Cosmic +100%.

This “Gizmo” remains undefined until you reveal it. It does not even “enter play” until you take it out; thus, it cannot be damaged, lost, stolen, or found in a search.

This is unnecessary for ordinary gear, which can be rendered unusable by circumstance (at GM’s discretion), so we add Gadget -30%.

A Gizmo must be small enough to fit in an ordinary coat pocket…

Removing this restriction is Large Items (adapted from Snatcher, Powers, p. 76) +50%.

The result is this:

Abstract Gear: Gizmos 1 (Accessibility, Reasonably foreseeable but not necessarily minor or ignorable items, +0%; Aspected, Relevant to wildcard skill, -20%; Cosmic, Limited by cost rather than uses, +100%; Gadget, Can be damaged, lost, stolen, or found in a search, -30%, Large Items, +50%) [10]. Character is assumed to have gear appropriate to a specific wildcard skill (or similar skill cluster), sufficient to avoid negative Equipment Modifiers (B345) and provide standard capabilities, up to ~20% of campaign Starting Wealth (GM's call). There is no element of Foresight involved, however, so the gear must have met needs that were reasonably foreseeable the last time the character had the opportunity to go shopping. Each wildcard requires its own copy of Abstract Gear. The initial copy includes ~80% of campaign Starting Wealth for non-adventuring gear (B26). Additional copies are 1/5 cost (Powers, p. 12). 2 or 10 points.

The intent, then, is that each "level" in a revised GURPS Ultra-Lite based on wildcard skills includes the 2 points for Abstract Gear. The initial 10 points is paid for by selling off the monetary component of Starting Wealth; it is tied to the ubiquitous Adventurer! skill (which I'll define elsewhere, based on Kromm's list).

Let me know what you think.

[KarlKost]

I think there's nothing else to add here. You sir, did a good job in this, congratulations! I for one like this a lot!