Personal Equipment

[Cdnwolf]

While bored I was rereading my copy of TWL2013 and ran across this.

Does anyone use something like this in their TWL2000 games?


Benefits of Personal Equipment

A character is assumed to have a certain familiarity with
his personal equipment, as he’s probably been carrying it and
relying on it for the better part of the Last Year. Accordingly, he is
intimately familiar with how it functions in a variety of situations
and knows what level of performance to expect from it. Personal
equipment thus grants a minor but useful benefit in game terms.
Whenever a character uses an item of personal equipment for any
task, the total penalties imposed on the task are reduced by 1 (in
addition to any bonus the equipment may provide normally).

Forexample, if a character is performing surgery with a total penalty of
–5, use of surgical tools from his personal equipment reduces the
penalty to –4. At the GM’s discretion, use of personal equipment
in a situation where no task check is required may grant a similar
minor benefit, such as reduced time or enhanced quality of work.


Because this benefit relies on extended familiarity, a character
can’t simply pick up anything, call it “personal,” and instantly
receive this effect. The total weight that can be considered personal
equipment is always restricted to the character’s initial limit of his
overload encumbrance capacity. In addition, the character must
regularly carry, maintain, and use a newly-acquired item for three
months of game time before he attains sufficient familiarity to
consider it personal equipment. Finally, an item may only be part
of one character’s personal equipment at a time. Sharing a radio or
a spotting scope doesn’t allow multiple characters to spend enough
time using it to develop intimate familiarity with it.

Example: Matt has acquired a new anti-material rifle and
wants to designate it as personal equipment in order to receive
the mechanical benefit. The rifle weighs 16 kg. First, Matt must
consistently carry and use the rifle for three months. At the end of
this time, he must “abandon” enough existing personal equipment
to add 16 kilograms of mass to his personal equipment list. This
represents the fact that Matt has neglected certain other items in
favor of his new gun and has lost the slight edge in proficiency
that he once had with them.