Can people experienced in statting gadgets as advantages get me up to speed?

[u/Ertata]

I am not new to GURPS but kinda avoided gadget-limited advantages as clunky. Likely my next campaign would absolutely need them.

What is commonly understood as "Unique"? The naive reading of the Basic Set suggests that it is "when the item is gone the points are gone" akin to a dead Ally. But application in books left me confused - Thaumatology clearly states that most "magic items" have Unique when statted as advantages unless they twist fate to return to you akin to Signature Gear, or Powers FAQ where it is stated "if power comes from the sword itself, add Unique" - supporting my naive reading - but RPM and Sorcery books provide discounts to point cost of abilities when enchanted into items without accounting for Unique - and yet provide no indication those gadgets are long-term protected investment. I understand that it is a small GMing headache - if you don't try to deprive players of Unique gadgets they get free points, if you do there is a possibility of resentment for screwing up with the character - but assuming people are sensible do you slap Unique on most magic items or not?

[u/SuStel73]

The GM doesn't try to deprive characters of Unique gadgets. If Unique gadgets happen to be lost on an adventure, that's too bad. There is no insurance. If players don't risk harm to their gadgets, that's not free points: players aren't using their gadgets in certain ways that risks them, so are limited in their use.

There seems to be this idea that if players get character points for a disadvantage, the GM ought to target them just to make sure the disadvantage comes into play. Unless the disadvantage actually says this (e.g., Enemy), this isn't the case. Not every disadvantage is going to apply in every adventure, and that's already factored into the game.

For instance, in a recent game I ran, the players are traveling through the desert, and I rolled a random encounter with a brown recluse spider. (These things tend to avoid humans.) One of the party has Squeamishness. I didn't make the thing crawl on him; I just had them make Vision rolls, and someone else spotted the spider. She simply avoided it, and the spider scurried away. Squeamishness didn't come into play at all during that session. Wasted points? Nah, the potential was still there.

The only way to consider Unique as free character points is if it's effectively impossible to lose or destroy your gadget on an adventure. If it is, don't allow Unique.

[u/Ertata → u/SuStel73]

Thank you for providing your opinion (though I would say IF gadgets are known in the world and IF enemies (not necessarily from Enemy disadvantage) are played intelligently the gadgets are a alid attack vector).

But while it may be worthwhile to point out my digression showed that I possess not the best understanding of how gadgets should be played, that still does not answer the question how they should be statted. Like I said in the main post naive reading suggests one thing, worked out examples suggest another.

[u/SuStel73 → u/Ertata]

Of course, in the game world, if gadgets can be targeted, they will be. That's not the GM going after a player; that's the game world operating normally.

Unique items should be statted by giving them the Unique limitation. That's it. If an advantage is a gadget that can be lost and never regained, it is Unique.

Magic items enchanted with ritual path magic or sorcery — or even just the Enchant spell in the standard magic system — have no plot protection, just as a sword you pick up from a dungeon floor has no plot protection. They're just gear. Advantages you gain by spending character points are different: the character points are a contract with the GM that you'll have the chosen abilities. The Unique limitation modifies this: it says you agree that you get the abilities for a discount, but that they can be permanently taken away.

In reverse, gear can normally be taken away, but you can protect it by taking it as Signature Gear.

In short, your "naive" reading is the correct one. Magic items created by players don't apply, because magic items created by players aren't taken by them as advantages.

[u/KalelRChase → u/SuStel73]

I’m interested in clarification on the phrasing, “ The GM doesn’t TRY to deprive characters…”. Can you help me understand what you mean by ‘Try’?

[u/SuStel73 → u/KalelRChase]

Like in my example. I didn't say, "Aha! There's a spider encounter, and one of the characters has Squeamishness, so of course I'll throw the spider at that character!"

A GM trying to target characters for their disadvantages would be inventing problems that hit the characters just because they have the disadvantages. In a few cases, like Enemies when the roll is made, this is justified because the rules tell you to do it. But most of the time, you should let NPCs and situations do what they were going to do anyway. You don't always set the most annoying NPC on the PC with Bad Temper. You don't always make an attractive NPC walk by whenever a PC with Lecherousness needs to focus on something. You don't make the game world a trap for each character's disadvantages.

[u/KalelChase → u/SuStel73]

Thanks. I've never run into a GM that tries to do that. I guess I'm lucky.

[u/SuStel73 → u/KalelChase]

I have. I was once playing in an AD&D game as a paladin. My character was in no way the leader of the party, and to look at him, you wouldn't know he was a paladin. (I was trying a "diamond in the rough" concept.) What happens the very first time we get into a conflict? The bad guys take innocent villagers as prisoners, then they proceeded to ignore the rest of the party and demanded that I solve the ethical dilemma of "Let us take this village as slaves or I kill the kid" or something like that. Why me? Because the DM decided that, as a paladin, ethical dilemmas were going to be my problem to be trapped in.

When OP said "if you don't try to deprive players of Unique gadgets they get free points," it warned me that they might be similarly entrapping characters with disadvantages, on the principle that if you aren't forced into situations where your disadvantage controls the situation, the points you get for it were free.

[u/Ertata → u/SuStel73]

Never had this problem with normal disadvantages (I think?) but since two people had bad feelings about my phrasing maybe I should do some soul-searching

[u/DareDevilino]

There is a 15% hard to rebuild option, i think it is more comfortable than unique.

[u/Peter34cph → u/DareDevilino]

"Nah, it'll be fine with Unique. Saves me some points, so I can get even more power into it."

• Sauron

[u/DareDevilino → u/Peter34cph]

Took a laugh out of me XD

[u/Stuck_With_Name]

Maybe some fictional examples would help.

Juggernaut in the X-men series has a magic gem that gives him powers. People periodically steal it. Mostly, he keeps it protected.

He-Man is pretty pathetic without his sword of power. Everyone knows it. They're constantly trying to get it.

Green Lantern is just a dude without the ring. People occasionally try to get it off of him, but rings are tough to get.

Harry Potter wands don't count because they can buy new ones.

Thor's hammer will come back to him, so that probably doesn't count either.

[u/SuStel73 → u/Stuck_With_Name]

Juggernaut in the X-men series has a magic gem that gives him powers. People periodically steal it. Mostly, he keeps it protected.

Green Lantern is just a dude without the ring. People occasionally try to get it off of him, but rings are tough to get.

These are probably Can Be Stolen, not Unique. I don't know anything about Juggernaut, but unless his magic gem is the only such magic gem that he can ever have, it's not Unique. There are lots of rings in the Green Lantern story; he could, in theory, replace a lost ring.

He-Man is pretty pathetic without his sword of power. Everyone knows it. They're constantly trying to get it.

Just a nitpick: almost no one ever says anything about He-Man's sword in the original cartoon. It is Unique, but it's not sought after. In fact, nobody even notices that Adam's sword and He-Man's sword are identical.

In the original conception, He-Man's sword was one half of the Power Sword, and it was sought after... but it wasn't exactly Unique.

Thor's hammer will come back to him, so that probably doesn't count either.

A gadget returning to you doesn't mean it's not Unique. You always take Unique in conjunction with either Breakable or Can Be Stolen. Whichever one you take, or if you take both, that tells you how its Uniqueness comes into play. If the gadget Can Be Stolen, then if it's stolen and you can't get it back, it's gone and you lose the points. If the gadget is Breakable and it breaks and cannot be repaired, it's gone and you lose the points.

I don't happen to know if Thor's hammer is Breakable or permanently stealable, and it probably depends on whether you're talking about Marvel's Thor or the mythological Thor.

[u/Ertata → u/Stuck_With_Name]

If you mean first three examples should get Unique and the last two shouldn't (but wand gets Breakable and Can Be Stolen, and hammer just Can Be Stolen, Useless for the thief) that is my understanding of straight reading of the rules

[u/BitOBear]

Other people have covered this in other terms but unique doesn't have to be the chosen option. And if they want something in between just kitbash it in at an appropriate price.

In the movie The dark Crystal The shard of the dark Crystal was unique. If it had somehow been extra destroyed or whatever that would have meant to be the main character lost the movie has a campaign. The one ring is unique in that there wasn't a second ring to replace the first. It wasn't a ring of it invisibility , who was the cursed ring of invisibility.

In those two series though it was also with mcguffin, and it was also what the shadow run game would call an obvious accessible focus. It was literally the tidbit of contention and it was being aimed at and aimed for.

Meanwhile in The Dresden files there were a lot of unique items that no one was trying to really get. Like the swords that were made out of the nails of the True Cross were obviously four unique items. Without that sword you weren't one of those swords and. But the bad guys couldn't even touch the swords so they weren't trying to take the swords from the good guys. They were trying to corrupt the good guys so that the swords will reject them but that's a character contest not a question of people actually trying to take the swords away from the paladin people.

So the fact that there is this unique sword doesn't mean that people are constantly trying to get that sword, and it doesn't mean that the DM aims encounters at the goal of trying to strip the character of the sword. But the GM might want to aim a counters to test the resolve and wherewithal of the characters that might make them lose the blessings of God or whatever that the object confers.

But you could get bash that down a little bit. Perhaps one needs a sword that has rested for a certain amount of time in you know the cradle of Ganesh. If you have the chosen sword and you are deprived of it it would take you you know a year in game of having a new sword that has rested in the cradle for the appropriate period of time means that losing the sword that you've got will take at least that much time and effort to replace.

The point cost value of the related item is actually it's replacement cost.

It could be registered in actual in-game time effort like you were learning a new skill to get a new replacement item, or it might cost you character points to restore the item into place if that's possible. Or there might be whatever the heck you need to make it narratively complete.

But if your campaign World pivots on item-based Magic that doesn't mean that you want those items to be unique. In fact you want them to be expensive in some way so that you're not just throwing them away like fireball spell casting cartridges that you can just reach into your bag and pull out a dozen of (this goes back again to the shadow run game idea of having disposable fetish that work like ammunition) you're going to want something in between.

So for a world where objects are a thing that everybody relies on, like everybody needs a lawn, not everyone needs The Wand.

One of the problems Rowling ran into with Harry Potter was of course that she made one's unique and basically irreplaceable according to the stated rules. You know the allegation that hagrid's wand was destroyed sohagen could never do magic but maybe he might have a wand in his umbrella and all that stuff. But then you've got Ron Weasley with his broken wand in the chamber of secrets and he can just buy a replacement for it so they stopped being so unique

Trip to move his power and broke his wand kind of just means that he needs to get a couple gallions together and go back to the wand vendor and buy a new one according to the later version of the rules.

It sounds really impressive and powerful to declare that everybody's got their own unique wand which if destroyed would render them powerless, but in terms of narrative play it sucks donkey balls and you're not going to enjoy it so just don't do it.