Hmm, another toughie, but that's good, it gets me thinking.
I suppose we are looking at games where the gear is likely to be available to the characters, not artefacts that are quest McGuffins or ultimate rewards.
For this reason I can rule out D&D, and indeed most fantasy RPGs. Standard equipment is pretty ordinary, or at least, it would appear so to the characters. I might think it would be pretty amazing to have a suit of armour, but to a character in a traditional fantasy world, that's relatively normal.
Now magic items are cool, and there are some that I'd definitely have, but they are very much optional (although there can't be many parties without at least one bag of holding*), and there's absolutely no way a player can predict what items might crop up, or there shouldn't be.
Research, crafting and deliberate questing are all valid methods of gaining that one particular item that the player wants, but it should never be a shopping list.
One of the things, in my opinion, that fourth edition got wrong was putting this choice in the players' hands.
So that leaves modern or SF games.
I've less experience of these, other than Call of Cthulhu (and a lot of the special items in that are very far from cool, downright dangerous in fact).
I recall that the True20 RPG (a simplification and derivation of third edition D&D) had a world setting where the characters were mech pilots. The game had two phases, the characters themselves investigating stuff, and then in their mechs fighting kaiju style monsters. I'm sure there are other, similar games out there. A mech would be cool. But since I never actually played this, I can't count it.
I've owned several Star Wars RPGs, and even run a few. Strangely, despite the light sabres, spaceships and blasters, the gear didn't really make the players go wow. Well, the light sabres did at first, but pretty soon everything became just another tool. I suppose that there was just so much awesome, that the gear tended to fade into the background.
I have written a couple of Savage Worlds adventures set in the Star Trek universe, where the characters are the crew on a Starship (yes I know there's an official Star Trek RPG, but see my comments on Day 6 about why Savage Worlds is great).
Having a Starship has to be pretty cool, but again, as I haven't yet got around to playing this, it doesn't really count.
So cool gear in a game that I actually have run?
I have to go right back to the early eighties.
The James Bond RPG was a game that we initially struggled with, so many of the concepts in it were very new; ideas such as variable difficulty and pushing rolls, which now seem an integral part of RPGs, baffled us at first. Once we got the hang of it though, it was fun. While I'm not rushing to go back to playing this kind of game, I'd use Savage Worlds in future if I ever did.
The game did a good job of simulating the style of the films, though it struggled, as all games based so closely on an IP do, with having to stick to the source material, while being different enough to provide a fun game experience. By far the best module was Back of Beyond, a new storyline set largely in Australia.
Anyway, the various Q Division gadgets are, by my definition, 'cool gear'.
*Sudden realisation that a bag of holding, or a handy haversack, is what I should have nominated for the 'Game Aid I'd Like to See' day
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