Here’s what I apparently do: I flog hope and fear as the pair of emotions that hit a game-player or story-reader in the gut and make any game or story worth a damn.
Many months ago, I scribbled a note to myself while I was playing in a game of Grimm
You buy that longsword because you hope you’ll get a chance to use it.
More dramatic games, and more dramatically inclined players, take it further. They go out of their way to plug the trapping into the story as well as the game.
You record that heirloom on your character sheet because you hope, at the end of the epic campaign, that it will be the key to finishing the quest that was right in front of you all along.
This idea about the dramatic function of characters’ physical trappings has practical utility. As a gamemaster, have a look at the equipment with which the players are equipping their heroes. It’s one of the most transparent places they give you clues about what they—as game-playing humans—want to see in the adventures to come.
Your task becomes figuring out what they hope their tools and trinkets will be good for, and then supplying the gut-wrenching fears for the other side of the calculation.
Make them fear that they’re going to need those longswords.
Make them fear that they’ll never see that heirloom again.
This is why I like games like Houses of the Blooded or Spirit of the Century where important equipment is recorded as a character aspect, and not just a piece of replaceable gear. It puts your “shopping list” on the same priority as your dark past and your true love when it comes to play-planning and gameplay options. At the same time, it means that you are encouraged to rely on all those other things as much as you do your weapons. If “fancy hat” has the same gameplay utility as “longsword”, then the gamemaster (and game designers) are saying something very important to the players.
This relates nicely to something I probably won’t have time to write about how the rarity of item-removing powers and the essential nature of weapons to powers, and powers to characters, in D&D 4E, makes a character’s equipment implicitly into trappings in a way that D&D hasn’t done before.
Nice post. Weapons of the Gods does this well, in my opinion.
I was talking about this kind of thing with my girlfriend recently in regards to everyday consumerism. People buy books as if they’re buying the time to read them. People buy sexy underwear as if they’re buying really great sex with someone attractive.
So, yeah, it shouldn’t be surprising to us that people spend resources in roleplaying games as if they are choosing which awesome roleplaying experiences to have. I think that was the whole idea behind the term “flags,” for things on a character sheet that indicated play preferences and desires. But it definitely goes deeper than that and is one of the strongest tools we have for guiding play.
@ Will
That’s a really good point. Although apparently Monster Manual 2 will have Rust Monsters in it, so we’ll see how long it lasts!