E is for Equipment

For me, equipment has always been the slowest part of the pre-game character creation ritual. I always seem to have players that agonize over the differences between an Ares Predator and a Browning Ultra-Power, the relative usefulness of a length of rope vs. a bedroll and the eventual kicking of one's self when they realize that they've forgotten something.

Creating the equipment list for Assholes in Space has been an exercise in keeping things simple and modular. I wanted to minimize the equipment bookkeeping and the countless ammunition tracking from which Savage Worlds often suffers. Every piece of equipment that I have created or cherry picked from one Savage Worlds book or another is there because I think that they fit the style of the game in one way or another. Each weapon listing is genericized and ammunition has been completely broken down into action-movie style 'magazines.'

Everything may be generic, but there are incentives for making your weapons your own. If a player comes up with a name for it (say, Black Falcon), they get a +1 to hit with it. If they draw a picture of it, they get a +1 to damage with the same weapon. Since there isn't any more ammunition tracking, these bonuses easily take the place of Double Taps or Burst Fire that appear in the Savage Worlds rulebook and let the players make up some cool stuff about the world. If players aren't really artistically inclined, there's always Pimp My Gun, a Flash website that RPGnet clued me into in the past. Using the old version (since I don't really care about all the finicky bits of guns), it's a blast to do the Hollywood Sci-Fi Retrofit by taking an existing gun...

...mess around with the construction and glue some extra bits on to make a Space Gun!

Now you try it!