seems like all my questions lately are Armorer questions but they tend to be the ones that come up that i cant answer. Can a character straight upgrade a weapon with a new trait instead of making a new one.
i.e. The character wants to add the Deadly trait to his sword, giving it a wicked jagged hook or serrated edge or something.
Crafting the Useful, Deadly sword from scratch would be Useful (2) + Deadly (3) = ob5. Upgrading the sword to deadly would only be an ob3. Would piecemealing together a weapon over time work with the system like that? so far i have been forcing him to re-create the weapon as a whole, while gaining the benefit of his old weapon as an equipment bonus.
I would really hesitate on doing this. For one the weapons are pretty balanced and each have a different set of traits that make them attractive. Doing this will make all players run for a Blacksmith.
A second point would be Swords as they are are perfected as much as they can be while still being useful. And those fancy looking blades with all the jagged teeth at the gun shows are really not good swords.
If you look at an example, the Black Ax, making a distinct weapon is not only hard but legendary. So if you wanted a special sword the ob would be more like 10 instead of 5.
I like Murphy’s response and it’s the one I’ve already given to my players: no, you can’t buy weapon or armor upgrades and you can’t make your own without extraordinary difficulty. In my mind, upgrading gear just runs counter to the MG esthetic: it’s not your stuff that’s important but what you do with it. In most traditional fantasy games, the priority of importance on your character sheet is basically 1) gear, 2) skills, 3) attributes, 4) ‘flavor text’ about your personality. In MG, this list is completely reversed. Your mouseguard’s personality is most central to the game mechanics and your gear is the least important (and ultimately unnecessary). So, making a character’s sword a more important factor changes the spirit of the game. At least, that’s my interpretation.
I don’t have the book on me at the moment, but I believe the new adventures book in the boxed set has stats for the Black Axe. That might be something to use as a guideline for what an extraordinary weapon would be.
If one of my players wanted some form of upgraded weapon, I’d make sure that it was not just a simple Armorer roll away. They should have a Goal set to obtain the weapon, and perhaps even a Belief about it. The Goal would probably even be something that could not be accomplished in a single mission (or even in a full season, depending on how bad-ass or legendary this item is), but the player would be able to make progress toward it if he or she really tried.
If that character was an armorer, the Goals/Beliefs would be about acquiring the materials and skills to create the item, rather than acquiring the item itself.
Slash’s idea is a good one for those who really want a good quality sword or other item. Just remember it is hard to just say a weapon is going to have two traits of different weapons and have them work well together. An Axe has the deadly quality becuase it has a lot of heft behind its swing. A sword is useful becuase of its shape and balance. Your not going to start cutting wood with a sword becuase it is not balanced for that.
So weapons that have special qualities are going to have to be some what thought out.
But isn’t there something to be said about a mouse wanting to create such a “legendary” weapon?
Like the Black Axe, it’s creator was a simple armorer. Though should story hold true, his belief changed after"he lost his family to predators."
I also agree with slashdevnull, if this unique weapon would be created in your players imagination, why say no and squash their game? Sure it would be hard, but think of the stories your character could come up on how over a long period he fashioned his exotic weapon piece by piece.
Also you as GM could use the weapon as its own mission maker. Have your players travel to Ironwood for that “special” metal for wrought, and while your there, why not throw in a murder in the mines, with all clues pointing to the PC digging for ore.
It’s just my thoughts on the matter, but I feel like MG can handle the extreme IF it’s within reason. i.e. a sword that flies like a boomerang is stupid. But a regular boomerang… hmm…
My party talked about making weapons but I ruled that because they were not armourers professionally when scratch building weapons and armour the best they could do would be to remove traits that were penalties. They couldn’t give a weapon another type of trait. Example: sword w/Deadly trait. However, other than the “Black Axe” there were another 8 legendary weapons and armour made ( not by the same mouse of coarse).
If they were interested, they would have to quest for them and on their turn. The “Captain of the Watch” in our game had one of these legendary weapons- a spear name “Blade Encarmine.” He was an NPC.
Sorry, Luke I didn’t make myself clear. None of them had any armorer skills from their families professions and/or tutorship early in the guard before they became tenderpaws. I wanted my players to concentrate on their characters, not what
weapons they could use to gain an advantage. The great news is they took so well to it that the game really was a blast! In some of the other RPGs we’ve played some characters were just Min-Maxed towards combat. I wanted to avoid that here.
I may simply be fortunate in this regard, but I did a quick overview of the mechanics of the system, and pointed out that any conflict regardless of its type is resolved using the same mechanics, so ‘combat’ for the mice could be fighting a snake, or rallying the populace of a small town with a great speech, or sneaking past a weasel patrol. My players took that advice to heart, and they ended up focused on very different aspects. (Our combat monkey is actually the one who took Orator, and ended up rallying the troops so to speak.
In their first game, their final action on the players’ turn initiated a conflict between the mice and a pair of foxes in which neither side actually saw the other (though it was close at one point).