Signature Gear - that can of worms...again.

[quarkstomper]

Yeah, in working up characters for an upcoming one-shot Thundercats game, I considered defining the Thundertank as a piece of Signature Gear. Then I thought about what defining it would entail -- heck, I'm not even sure what the Tech Level of Third Earth should be -- and how much it would cost...

...In the end I decided it was just a piece of team equipment and to not bother charging anyone anything for it. For a one-shot convention game it just wasn't worth the effort.

[bcd]

Originally Posted by Bruno

The best comparison is someone buying a Steal-able Breakable gadget - if they never get it stolen and never have it broken, then those gadget limitations are free discounts - they loose nothing for limiting the advantage.

Signature gear can still get stolen, and it can still break, you just have to give the PC a reasonable chance to recover or repair it. Which does not need to be without risk or cost.

Weapon Bond + Signature Gear strips out all the risk aspects and further tangles the character up in the failure-to-upgrade problem. It gets worse with the Named Weapon perk, which lets your weapon upgrade itself, which removes that particular control on the combination of Weapon Bond and Signature Gear.

If the weapon ugrades itself then its value increases and the player must sink more points into keeping its Signature Gear status. The way I resolved this was to say that the upgraded magical bits of the weapon were tied very closely to the PC's aura and it getting temporarily lost or broken would break this bond and the extra features would then be lost even if the item itself was recovered/repaired. Then the player can choose to invest points into fixing in place those upgrades he really likes and wants to be part of his own legend rather than just a semi-temporary boost.