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Tabletop Games - TV Tropes

  • ️Mon Dec 07 2020

Times where characters are given minimal supplies to accomplish their goals with in Tabletop Games.

  • Most Tabletop RPG setups avoid this: Dungeons & Dragons (depending on the campaign and generousness of your DM, of course) gives you at least enough starting gear to do your job — things like a decent set of armor and a good weapon for the fighter, or a mostly-stocked spellbook for a wizard, or the clothes on your back for a monk. That said, it usually takes leveling to about level 4-ish to grind enough gold to buy magic items (or be able to take on enemy encounters that would drop magic items), but that's less this trope and more the inflation brought about by every adventurer and their brother swimming in treasure.
  • d20 Modern, a game that uses D&D's basic system but in a modern-day setting, avoids this trope like the plague. It's perfectly reasonable and doable to set up a first-level party decked out in the best non-magical equipment you can find. However, d20 modern is less reliant on your equipment than some tabletop games.
  • Exalted makes this potentially a Moment of Awesome, however, in that there is a Charm (character power) that would potentially allow a character to block a thrown mountain, with a butter knife. And a combat-focused character can take this power at starting level. Needless to say, the butter knife would not survive. Also completely averted through purchasable backgrounds. High levels of Command and Arsenal allow you to start the game with an army of 10,000 men outfitted with the finest mundane equipment available. Pool points with the rest of the party and you can outfit a squadron of 20-foot tall Magitek robots.
  • Games Workshop games:
    • This can almost literally happen in Bretonnia. Knights cannot receive corporal or capital punishment, but one who is found guilty of an offense has their sentence decided by noble jury, who is allowed to require the offender to complete a quest. A quest like, for instance, "Travel to the Vaults, and kill the Orc warlord Balagran, wearing no armour and armed only with a fruit knife."
    • In both Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Fantasy all of your units come with only baseline equipment. Named characters avert this, usually with special powerful equipment exclusive to them or a combination of equipment that stock characters cannot take. It's still this trope though because you can literally field a unit of elite vanguard units armed with stuff most bread and butter troops wouldn't be caught dead with (and in most cases, it works because the points are better allocated elsewhere).
    • The Warhammer 40,000 role-playing games vary this.
      • Death Watch starts you and your battle brothers with gear that is decent - for a value of "decent" that 99% of the Imperium's armed forces would lie, steal and murder for.
      • Rogue Trader also averts this - the question is not whether you can afford a Lasgun, but whether you can afford ten thousand of them for your household troops (and the answer is usually "Sure, take it out of the petty cash!").
      • Dark Heresy was a bit worse about this, since the franchise was only slowly breaking away from traditional adventurer group RPGs and finding its own stride - thus, the agents of the most powerful organization of the Imperium are often equipped with the herring. In that case, it often overlaps with On-Site Procurement; you're supposed to be low-key investigators, after all, if they wanted to go in heavy they would have sent one of their many military forces.
      • Only War finally usually averts this, but also occasionally indulges the trope: The players can first build their regiment which gives them a good set of standard equipment useful for their troop type. Then comes the logistics roll that determines whether the Departmento Munitorum assigns you 20 kg of explosives for the sabotage mission... or 20 crates of Ogryn dress uniforms.
      • Averted in Necromunda. While in the main Warhammer 40,000 game, the Imperial Guards' lasguns and flak armor (known flashlights and T-shirts to the fandom) compare poorly to the equipment of other factions, it's usually because those other armies are immortal death machines, spore-based super-warriors, or Sufficiently Advanced Aliens. The Imperial Guard still has ten thousand years of technology and the resources of the quadrillion strong Imperium of Man. Compared to them, the gangs of Necromunda are, well, slum dwellers. The general lack of armor or sophisticated weapons in the game's underhive setting makes even basic and improvised weapons like knives, big chunks of pipe, and ordinary pistols (aka "stub guns") reasonably effective. Lasguns are actually toward the high end of the effectiveness scale, and flak armor is elite gear. A single Space Marine or Genestealer would be an One-Man Army.
    • In the background for Warhammer 40,000 the Iron Warriors suffered a case of this that contributed to their fall to Chaos. Despite being specialized in taking defensive fortifications rather than building them, they were tasked with holding worlds with ever-decreasing numbers, in one case a single squad assigned to watch over an entire planet.
  • GURPS is, as usual, flexible: you generally get a reasonable set of starting cash, you can use an equipment list to buy any items your DM agrees are available, and you can even have a regular income (assuming your character actually has a job and attends to it regularly...) But you can get better starting funds as an Advantage by spending character points or get extra character points by taking poverty as a Disadvantage.
  • Averted by Ironclaw, since there's not really anything in the way of magical equipment in the setting, and most players can easily start with decent equipment for their class. This is because in the first edition, equipment optimization was determined by weight, and in the second edition, classes came with a core set of starting equipment (so a noble class character would always have a good-quality outfit and a rapier, for instance).
  • Paranoia deliberately plays this for dark humor: players are given plenty of equipment, most of which is useless for their assigned task and some of which is likely to kill them. Experienced Troubleshooters will know that Bouncy Bubble Beverage is a better incendiary than anything in the armory. On top of that, they may have to bring back the equipment in mint condition or be accused of treason... including the grenades. Or they may get accused of treason for bringing it back unused, for not using their resources appropriately. Or both at once. And then there is experimental equipment, that must be used at least once, have a report filed on its performance, and still be returned unscuffed. And players might not have the security clearance for the instructions or even to know what it does.
  • Spycraft breaks from the "gather loot and save" setup in favor of "get stuff from quartermaster depending on the mission": a low-level mission will give you a mundane 9mm pistol, and as things get worse you can ask for Uzis, AK-47s, Browning Automatic Rifles, and if the world is really going to hell, an M2HB heavy machinegun.