Buying equipment in special ops/military type games

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

They add quite a bit to the game that would not be there.

Not least, characterization. Safisher ran down a nice list of possible reasons why the team gets some extra gear. In game, that's an opportunity for the GM to have a slender budget, for the players to ask, and then respond, "Oh? How do you go about getting some extra gear?" The players then get to invent a solution, most likely playing to their character's strengths or at least schtick, and tell a little story, rather than having the GM do all of the invention and narration.

If you shuffle that off behind a bare statement like "here's your team budget. You can have 20% extra if you make an abstract resources roll", you lose a lot. If you don't want to spend game time on that sort of background and just get to the action, then just give them the 120% budget to begin with -- or the 100%, and just let the fight be that much more of a challenge.