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I just asked Rob in the Icar forum about a must have piece of equipment that my players don't leave home without. Their must have is parachutes. All of them wear them. It's not a piece of equipment that I know of any other group using and their obsession with them has been confirmed several times by getting them out of tricky spots. So does anyone else have this kind of tradition in their group? An odd item that suddenly became a big part of play? Especially if the whole group insists on them, but even if it's just one player that always carries an item.

And no "Guns" and "Grenades" don't count.

one of my tricks when GMing is to force players to go without items they grow over reliant on. I suppose this is because I play alot of horror.

when I say force. I mean the circumstances of the story generate events which render them useless. This happens alot in TV and movies, how often have you seen the lead run action hero run out of bullets, or the torchlight going out at a really inappropriate time?

It depends on the setting as each setting will be very different. In my last Icar campaign, it was lemon cake or drugs. Once it was environment suit (perhaps when I ran Scavenger). I wouldn't say it was a tradition.

Mr E, I do tend to run that way also, my players will tell of tripping traps by taking off their boots and throwing them at suspicious spots on the floor because they didn't have anything else. What's even worse for the players is when they have all their equipment and something simple they could have picked up for a few bucks (screwdriver) is what would make things a cakewalk but all their equipment they're carrying doesn't help them. So yeah I've had that fun too but it gets old for the players after a while.

I'll give you an example and as all games examples can be really complicated and hard to explain so strap in if you're reading any further.

The PCs were in a fortress that was protected from the outside world by being in a vacuums inside a pocket dimension just big enough to hold the fortress. I know I know, that probably barely makes sense but it made sense in game. Alien monsters were being experimented on in this fortress but things had gone badly and were starting to escape. In short the equipment that maintained the pocket dimension was about to fail, at which point the fortress would fall several hundred meters and crash into the ground. "Aha! We have our parachutes!" The players say. "We'll float to safety! Take that GM!" "Ah, but you forget that there is no air outside the fortress, your parachutes won't work." Sullen faces from the players all around. Now did I mention that one of the players carries a live missile around? No? Oh, well he does. Anyway, normally that would be pretty useless in this situation except that part of the game is a piece of equipment that allows an individual to enter a pocket dimension themselves. I understand if you stop reading at this point, really, go ahead and look for a different thread. So the plan they make is, just as the fortress starts to fall, they set the timer (a small block of plastic explosives with a timer actually) on the missile for three seconds, go into their pocket dimensions for three and a half seconds and then come out and release their parachutes. The blast will push the small amount of remaining air that is in the fortress area outward and catch the parachutes, the resulting lift will slow the PCs decent (into madness) so that their waiting ship (sentient) can pick them out of the sky.

It was so insane that I let it happen with a few very necessary timing rolls. It's one of those special moments that you can never share with anyone else because they'll all look at you like you're looking at me right now but the gaming group never forgets.

So yeah, parachutes.

Oddly, back in the day when we did a lot of fantasy gaming I remember always carrying a bunch of things that were never useful. Rope, iron stakes, wooden stakes and a silver dagger come to mind. I'm pretty sure every character I had owned those items and I'm equally pretty sure they were never used.

The ten foot pole thing was one that always flummoxed me. Who the heck carries a ten foot pole around on the off-chance that they'll stumbled across a suspicious flagstone. It's a common obsession in DnD groups though, far as I can tell.

Now, in retrospect, I wonder what the obsession was.

Chris

As you may know, I used to play Rifts. The starting equipment for characters contained all sorts of useless useful stuff. What good are nano-surgeon health kits (ie high-tech healing potions) when the average weapon encountered can vaporize your torso at the lowest setting? Knives and conventional handguns did not come into play all that often either - well, silver bullets might have shown up occasionally - when the mage and psychics weren't frying vampires with their minds.

Fusion blocks (ie Thermonuclear C-4) were pretty popular, though I only recall using them in one notable incident. We were hired to kill a warlord, who in turn made a counter-offer to kill our employer. I agreed to the double cross and handed him a block with the timer running, and gave him a guarantee - we are such efficient assassins that when that hits zero, our enemy will be dead...

There was a definite tendency to acquire some sort of large truck-like vehicle for transporting everything as soon as the funds were available. We had power-armor, welders, energy-clip chargers, and all sorts of stuff to move after all.

A towel.

You know you're a real hoopy frood if you can keep track of your towel.

By some bizarre quirk, this was in a game of AD&D. It was Planescape, but still AD&D.

That SheikhJahbooty, he knows where his towel is.