TSoY Resource for Weapons & Armor

[Clay]

I've got a game coming up on Sunday, and I realized as I was going over my prep that I don't really have a uniform way to deal with weapons and armor.  Rather than have to make this stuff up on the fly while I'm playing, I thought that I'd create a handy cheat sheet.  If anybody else needs it you can get a copy at http://www.lazarusid.com/~clay/WeaponsAndArmor.pdf

[Eero Tuovinen]

How were you thinking of using this? I can't right out connect it to the process of acquiring weapons and armor in the game. Does this mean that if I want my character to use a dagger, say, I have to spend three Advances for it?

[Clay]

No.  My thought was more as a matter of arming NPCs.  I don't treat weapons and armor as part of a character, but items in the game that can be acquired through various means involving role play.  In my session (soon to appear in Actual Play) the characters started without money or weapons, but very quickly managed to acquire both through effective role play (mostly by beating up people who did have such items).  Currency is a pretty loose thing in my game, so buying arms and armor isn't practical.  But it will certainly be around and I wanted a solid mechanic for handling it.

[Clay]

I went back and reread the rules after reading weapons, and while I don't seem to be outside the rules, I do wonder what other people do about weapons.  How do people get weapons in your game?  Are they an integral part of the character and require advances to earn?  Are they simply a commodity item that can be picked up on the street for enough filthy lucre?  Although I hadn't thought about it before, it occurs to me that the way weapons are handled would have a strong influence on the flavor of a game.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Well, you actually seem to be outside the rules. Which is of course your pregorative. But by the rules, weapons and armor in TSOY work this way:
- In general, the quality of tools does not affect conflicts. I have a large sword and you don't, I have a wooden shield and you have a bronze one, no matter.  Character skill is much more important, because the rules system strives for a cinematic quality.
- However, if the difference in arms becomes so large as to be "interesting", the GM may at his discretion assign either side a +1 bonus to weapons or armor on a conflict-by-conflict basis. This is separate from actual equipment bonuses, and mostly useful in depicting dramatic deviation from the norm. For example, if my character is stripped of arms and thrown to jail, it's reasonable that my opposition would get the bonus against my attempts to escape, being that they're so much better equipped than I am.
- The only way to get higher ratings of equipment is to buy it with Advances. Secret of Imbuement, to be specific. Each value of armor or weapon costs one Advance. There could also be other Secrets that affect the equation; I tend to have two or three Secrets that concern themselves with equipment, simply to make it a bit more feasible for players to play equipment-focused characters.

The point of these rules is that superior equipment is not actually bought with money (of which there is precious little in Near, anyway), but with character investment into the equipment. This is not a realistic principle so much as cinematic: spending Advances on equipment is telling us that this is an important tool for the character. Perhaps it has a name, or history. Perhaps it's made in some special way that's not easy to replicate. Furthermore, the rules structure of the game suffers from allowing players to garner unbound mechanical advantage by mere in-game factors such as money. In TSOY characters should only grow in power by earning experience points, which is done by being open and mutual about character growth activity via Keys and Key scenes. Adding vague GM-controlled mechanical advantages from fulfilling certain conditions in the fiction doesn't seem like it'd do the recipe any good. I'd imagine that playing an Ammenite landowner becomes a much more powerful proposition if you can expect your character to get 10 Advances worth of equipment just by being one.

However, you're of course free to experiment, and let us know how it works for you. I'd expect that having weapons and armor available on the basis of soft accomplishment would cause the game to focus more on violence (because your list only has equipment for violent conflicts), as well as make BDTP shorter and grimmer, as almost everybody has some kind of equipment bonuses (as opposed to norm, which seems to be that equipment is pretty rare).

[Clay]

You're definitely taking a different reading of the rules than I am.  The closest that I can see to your statement is in the last paragraph of the weapons section, which I'm interpreting as "Storyguide can declare weapons to have harm benefits".  But in any event, your are correct in that we each need to interpret the rule as appropriate to the flavor of our game.  So far feats of arms have been significantly less important than fleetness of foot and treachery in our game.  In fact I don't think that weapons have been used, other than as something to protect from thievery.  Arms will probably play a factor in our next session, but my players are definitely scrappers and not soldiers.