PDA

View Full Version : DM Help Starting with 10 items - is this a good idea?



CrazyCrab
2016-10-15, 04:49 AM
Hi everyone,
I've been planning my next game and, at the very start of the game, the players are aboard a commercial submarine, just having secured passage to the city where the game takes place. They are not anyone special, just yet, so the security does not want them to transport any weapons, armour etc, just in case.
Seeing how currency is all over the place in this setting, I see no point in giving them starting cash to buy things with.

So, the idea I came up with was: you have ten items in your luggage, as well as some clothes. They can be anything reasonable you could get on board, from a box of antique cigars to a brand new toaster, or something useful like a rope and a flashlight. No overly expensive items, or perhaps one per player. The setting is post-apocalyptic, early modern times.

What do you think? Is this bound to break the game as they take ridiculous stuff? Or could this be a fun starting point?

RazorChain
2016-10-15, 07:25 AM
Post apocalyptic is often about scarce resources where the PC's count their bullets so I see nothing wrong with this.

But you might want to restrict weapons instead of banning them. They could carry knives etc. The firearms might be locked up in the armoury

Grod_The_Giant
2016-10-15, 06:22 PM
"Break the game" is largely dependent on what kind of system you're playing. There are games like D&D where exact wealth matters tremendously, and there are games like Fate where it's almost irrelevant.

I will note that I'd expect everyone to have some sort of cash on them-- they've apparently paid for a submarine ride, so clearly they're not totally broke.

Xuc Xac
2016-10-15, 08:22 PM
What does "early modern" mean? For a historian, that means the ink is still wet on Shakespeare's manuscripts. If you're thinking "modern = iPhones and stuff", then it might mean disco is still popular.

Knaight
2016-10-15, 08:25 PM
Assuming that your players don't actively try to abuse the system you should be fine.

Quertus
2016-10-16, 03:54 PM
Hi everyone,
I've been planning my next game and, at the very start of the game, the players are aboard a commercial submarine, just having secured passage to the city where the game takes place. They are not anyone special, just yet, so the security does not want them to transport any weapons, armour etc, just in case.
Seeing how currency is all over the place in this setting, I see no point in giving them starting cash to buy things with.

So, the idea I came up with was: you have ten items in your luggage, as well as some clothes. They can be anything reasonable you could get on board, from a box of antique cigars to a brand new toaster, or something useful like a rope and a flashlight. No overly expensive items, or perhaps one per player. The setting is post-apocalyptic, early modern times.

What do you think? Is this bound to break the game as they take ridiculous stuff? Or could this be a fun starting point?

Ok, I'm just going with "modern".

First item: a well-stuffed wallet, probably with several types of currency.

Second item: a maglight. Whatta ya mean, no weapons? :smalltongue:

Third item: custom solar-powered battery recharger, for the rechargeable batteries in my maglight (if electricity still is a thing, this could be replaced with just a wall charger, but I like the idea of running an inventor / explorer).

#4: a tattered book of world maps, complete with scrawled notes on whatever I've found.

#5: a more recently acquired book of local maps.

#6: toolkit (complete with spare bulbs for the mag light)

#7: rope, with add-ons (yes, it's a grappling hook. It's also a poor man's kasuri-gama).

#8: survival kit. Given that the game starts in a submarine, can that include a life vest?

#9: Indiana Jones hat

#10: pipe.

How's that?

Algeh
2016-10-16, 07:31 PM
I think whether or not this is a good idea depends a lot on your players. Are your players the kind to immediately try to get around limits, or embrace them as part of the fun? The first group would be a lot of trouble with something like this where there's no existing, playtested system and you're having to rule edge cases on the fly.

Ways I could see that this could get "breaky", depending on the group:

What counts as one item? Does "a year's worth of rations" count as a single item? What about a first aid kit? A bunch of grapes? A barrel of beer? A box labelled "miscellaneous"? A chess set?
One player focuses entirely on practical things, another on 50/50 practical things versus backstory/character-building items, another only on weirdness (this can and does happen with a typical money/weight system for starting equipment too, but "lock of your sweetheart's hair" or "favorite hat" doesn't count against you nearly as much as it would in this system)
Some character concepts are inherently more "stuff intensive" than others. Unless "trunk full of books" counts as a single item, I'd expect this concept to be unkind to scholar-types and kind to bare-handed martial artists. (This may or may not be a problem depending on what kinds of characters you want, but may be a particular issue for either scholar or non-magical healer type characters.)


On the other hand, I've had groups of players who could be given such vague directions as "design a not-particularly-useful magical item that your character has for some reason" who came up with things that worked well in the spirit of what we were doing, so it really depends on how focused your players are on optimizing versus storytelling.