Writing Every Day Bonus Round: What's Your Gun's Name?

I might not have the energy to write tomorrow night and I've got an idea right now, so I thought I'd put it down.

In the past few weeks, I've been playing Fallout: New Vegas forlornly while my friends talk about their Fallout 4 experiences. In that same period I've been running my cyberpunk high-seas pirate game. The first has informed the second, because I love how the Fallout franchise treat's weapons.

For the uninitiated, there are a ton of weapons in Fallout games. Just a metric assload. They all have their respective qualities that different character types can benefit from. For almost every type of weapon in the game, though, there is a special weapon. These weapons are unique, named items that possess special qualities, higher damage capacity, and so forth.

Through my many—many—playthroughs of the Fallout games, I've gone out of my way to locate these weapons. Wielding them makes me feel like my character is special, like he or she has done something noteworthy. I think of them as measures of my character's capability and notoriety in the game. In the RPGs I run, I try to impart the same upon my players.

Back to the pirate game. Over the course of the campaign, I've dropped a number of named weapons into the encounters, only some of which the players have recovered. They range from special firearms carried by the main antagonists for the game, to suits of armor worn by the powerful lieutenants that defend them. When designing these items, I always start with something that already exists in the system and setting, then apply some minor variations to make them unique.

Why do these things matter? In short, because money doesn't.

In almost every game I've run, gold, credits, nuyen, or whatever system of currency the game uses is meaningless. It's a threshold a PC needs to cross to be able to pick up items he or she wants to own. It's a meter of how close the character is to the next cool toy, not something the player ever really worries about. Having "quite a bit," and having, "more than I can ever do anything with" are, functionally, identical.

Named weapons, unique one-offs, though, are special. You can't buy them. You have to find them, fight for them, or make them. They're not something you can walk into a store to purchase. There's only one of them out there, ever. That rarity brings with it a kind of specialness that my players appreciate.

Building these weapons doesn't take a lot of my time. In the system we're using, like in many others, there are a number of special qualities a weapon can possess. Like I mentioned above, when I decide to introduce a new named weapon to the game, I start with something common that the players are familiar with, then I tweak it by applying some of these special rules or its base stats. By way of example, the Sawtooth.

In our cyberpunk pirate game, vibroblades are common weapons. They are made of hyperdense materials with a microscopically-fine sawtoothed edge that pulse back and forth at high speed, designed to cut through dense materials quickly. Vibroblades typically have low damage output and high armor penetration.

The Sawtooth was a special vibroblade housed in a leather sheath embossed with the outline of a sawtooth shark. The weapon has the standard properties of a vibroblade, with a special rule that stipulates it gains a minor bonus to damage and armor penetration for each attack that hits the same target after the first (a common rule for weapons in the setting). Only a minor bonus to the basic weapon, with a bit of set-dressing to give the player who found it an idea of what it could do.

And oddly enough, once he had it this player decided to invest his character's advancements into the ability to use the weapon. It isn't optimal for his character, but I suspect he did it because what he found was special. No one else gets this blade. No one else can benefit from its unique rules. It means something to him, because its his and his alone.

Plenty of games have magic weapons as rewards, or otherwise powerful weapons. To engage your players imagination, I suggest taking a moment to give those weapons some character. I believe that adding implied story to special weapons results in the players being more invested in them an d wanting to acquire them more fervently. Plus? Until they kill your NPC, you get to swing those special swords around.