Equipment Bond for Software?
 

Greetings, all!

For many skills, 'equipment' is actually software, be it a programme for brain hacking, a word processor, or the expert system that gives advice on precision aiming. But where things get complicated is where a piece of software counts as 'mine'. Well, sure, things are crystal clear when the software was written by the character in question for oneself only. But this isn't a requirement for equipment bonds, so I wonder what counts as sufficiently individualised for purposes of equipment bonds when not writing one's own software.

Obviously brand-and-model can't be arbitrarily changed, just like with non-informational tools. Upgrading equipment doesn't interfere with Equipment bond, so apparently version increments are okay. But then what counts as required personalisation? UI customisation, relevant macros, databases and templates? That seems right for things like a spreadsheet programme, but not so much for a minimalistic editor with a same-on-all-computers philosophy such as ed or vi.

Thoughts?
Thanks in advance!

Re: Equipment Bond for Software?
 

I've seen vim and emacs tricked-out with so much chrome and decals that you'd think they were full IDEs. Changing the keystrokes for different commands might work too, but that would make the program harder to use by others. Custom kernel modules for an OS, javascript mungers for browsers...
Of course if you're dealing with ed or vi, you could have custom compilations with little tweaks in the code.

Re: Equipment Bond for Software?
 

You just cracked me up with that :)

I think bond can be used as long as you can say why it makes sense. I think computer software, was mentioned above, are easily bonded because they tend to be so tailored by the user, for the user.

Programmers in the office, for example, go so far out of the way to get software and tools to speed up every little task their own way. No two Visual Studios at our office look the same, with layout changed, color choices changed, custom macros, some use GUI tools, others are off in Makefiles.

Re: Equipment Bond for Software?
 

For the true minimalist, the Equipment Bond might represent the fact that the character's most effective way of working happens to match the tool, rather than the other way around. It may not be a matter of altering the tool to suit you so much as finding the tool that already works the way you work best. There's more than one minimalist editor, after all.

It's okay if other people could have a Bond with exactly the same tool. That just means it suits them, too. Bonded stuff doesn't have to be unique in the universe, nor does the Bond itself have to be unique, so that no one else in the universe could Bond with a copy of that item.

Re: Equipment Bond for Software?
 

Nope. If you can simply replace your tool if lost or broken you can't take equipment bond with it. I'd require at least some costumization for balance.

Re: Equipment Bond for Software?
 

Really - where does it say that?
None of which implies any require customisation.
The fact that losing the specific item loses the perk, means to replace it you have to buy the item and buy the perk again!

Re: Equipment Bond for Software?
 

Sure, if you're buying Equipment Bond again every time you download the software, there's no balance problem. But what does that represent in a non-meta scenario if not time and effort customizing it?

If a player wanted to buy Equipment Bond after the start of play, they could do so by spending 200 hours working with a particular piece of equipment. In some situations that can be familiarity, but in the case of software, every iteration of that equipment is identical--unless costumized.

You gain a bonus from "that particular item," emphasis mine. If you're a writer with Equipment Bond (Microsoft Word) you can't just use anybody's computer with Word installed and get the +1 bonus. That's not how equipment bond works.

But in game, that has to represent something--if your version of software isn't different from anybody else's, why don't you get a bonus with every version of that software?

Re: Equipment Bond for Software?
 

Other descriptions of Equipment Bond:

In the world of software, even extensive customization wouldn't qualify as making your copy unique, as you can back up the config files as easily as you can back up (or re-acquire) the main program. You wouldn't have to reconfigure the program again from scratch.

"Loss", in this case, might mean something catastrophic enough to trash your backups as well as the main installation.

There's also a possibility that there's at least some hardware component as well. People can get as picky about their keyboards as they are about their software - angle, key resistance, clickiness, positions of the secondary keys. Perhaps it's the combination that's Bonded. (That is, it's not a Bond with the keyboard alone, giving you a bonus to any interaction via those keys, but the hardware-software combination.)

Re: Equipment Bond for Software?
 

I'm going to say that Equipment Bond and Weapon Bond are totally designed to work with hardware, that is, with physical objects, each of which has a unique identity and a unique instantiation, however subtle the differences are. The conditions don't obtain for software, so you can't port them over to software.

That's not to say you can't come up with a comparable perk for software. But it should be written up in a way that (a) makes sense for the way software works and (b) requires some serious effort to get a new Bond if the old one is terminated. I'm not expert enough with software to define the relevant conditions. I would suggest that a place to look is at the distinctive places where you actually "lose" your familiar software in a permanent way, as opposed to being temporarily inconvenienced.

But in any case let's call it something different. Maybe Customized Software would be a suitable name, or maybe not.

Bill Stoddard

Re: Equipment Bond for Software?
 

Though I wouldn't require it to be 200 hours of customization, I'd require that there would be some work required to customize the software such that it would not be simply trivial to copy/backup/etc. so that if you were to lose the setup in which it was installed, it would require some effort to re-establish the level of customization required for the perk.

Re: Equipment Bond for Software?
 

This, then, would be customization at the level of altering the source code and building your own version of the tool. It's a step beyond the sort of customization you usually see, altering key bindings, window layouts, format-specific pretty-printing, and so on. Customization in a way the tool wasn't already built to be customized.

(In theory, there is no difference. Code is data; data is code. The questions are just what tools you use to modify the other tool, and what other tool is interpreting that information. So there's a judgement call here on how much effort is required, and how unique the results are.)

Perhaps one rule of thumb might be that if you can do the customization with Computer Operation skill, it's not custom enough. You have to resort to Computer Programming to reach this level of customization of software.

Re: Equipment Bond for Software?
 

Why not?. There are people who will insist an emulator is "just not the same" but be unable to tell you what is different.

If you want a bond with a piece of software, that's fine. It doesn't work with a copy, not even a copy consisting of a reinstall on the same machine from the same original disk. I don't see that as any different from a bond that doesn't transfer to the next tool from the same production line that can't be told apart by microscopic examination.

Edit: For that matter, nothing says the effect can't be purely psychological confidence boosting. You've done impossible things with this tool before, and can again. Suffer brain damage that prevents you from recognizing the tool, or blow a fright check that costs you points while using it, and losing the Equipment Bond is a perfectly reasonable place to subtract lost points even though the tool itself it exactly the same.

Re: Equipment Bond for Software?
 

I'm not talking about an emulator. I'm talking about having the original program scrambled, but having an exact copy, bit by bit, stored on an external hard drive, or in the cloud, or somewhere else where you can access it, on the same computer or an entirely different computer. The idea of "this is the one that exactly suits me, and it could be lost irretrievably" no longer seems to obtain. You can make an arbitrarily large number of duplicates.

Bill Stoddard

Re: Equipment Bond for Software?
 

I'd be fine with it. Yes, it's true that the conditions under which "loss" occurs differ between hardware and software, but I would deem the difference to be below the level of GURPS' resolution. It rounds to a perk either way, so to speak.

If rationalization is needed, I'd simply speak from personal experience: It's just about always the configuration file(s) and never the software per se that's the issue. These tend to be lost not due to data glitches and such, but because a new software version renders them obsolete. If the GM intends to allow EB to apply to software, then it would be fairest to have software evolve such that using outdated stuff gives a de facto unfamiliarity penalty. At some point, then, tasks will be at -1 or worse if using the old stuff but still at +1 for the EB.

Re: Equipment Bond for Software?
 

In a highly cinematic game, the bond would represent a highly-customized software build, possibly a whole array of programs and tools which would be non-trivial to copy onto annother computer (but moving the hard drive or whatever to a new computer, station, targeting array, droid body... that would be easy)

In a more realistic game, the PC could probably copy the config files no problem.

Either way, he can only use one computer at a time and his settings won't help anyone else, so in essence it's comparable to other equipment bonds.