Casting Shadows

The standard prompt for #RPGaDAY2024 asks us to think about great gear. It’s as ambiguous as the other prompts, but as we have already gone through questions of accessories, a person might be forgiven to think that this one leans more toward gear for the character.

I find that gear is one of the windows toward attachment to the setting and of the setting, not to mention the character’s perspective. Especially when the gear is strongly-defined in the game via useful and practical traits that we can imagine. Brand names, quirks, cool art, timelines of development, and in-world promotions – these are all things which go a long way to making gear resonate and feel not only real, but worth thinking and talking about both as player and character.

The clever, funny, and hugely influential RPG adaptation of Ghostbusters made itself easy to play and easy to love with its bright and cheerful gear cards. Grabbing a card is not unlike grabbing that item from a rack, and a quick look at the card can come to feel like a glance at a gauge, a switch, or adjusting the stream so one does not burn one’s friend and co-worker’s face off accidentally.

We are all looking at you Venkman.

I love Ghostbusters, the Ghostbusters RPG, and I love this aspect of the game, but what does it for me more are efforts in a game to make the tech feel as grounded and easy to imagine as what we see in a film like Ghostbusters, or Star Wars, or Star Trek. For original IPs the effort to find or push cool gear can often go too far or fall flat. Some games, however, nail it for me.

Can you name some?

Yes, I can. The big three I have right off the top of my head will probably surprise no one that games with me, but RPGaDAY is about sharing honestly, not what we think folks will want to hear. The first I will cite is SLA Industries. That game has always known how to talk about its gear so that we can love it like the characters do, and it has gotten better at it. The next is Mechwarrior, because nothing says cool gear like a stack of Technical Readouts as tall as a mech, and gear sections with rules ready to easily go from bolas to blasters and beyond. Finally, a newcomer to the list: The Gaia Complex. This streetwise and wily game has pushed my usual citation of Shadowrun out of the top three with its varied but accessible gear, not afraid to set its own style.