As long as it's not the Mike Jones who goes by Mickey and sang with the Monkees, right...?
The real question isn't why you don't get to pick which stuff does and does not go with you on later verses, but why you got to pick it in the first place. The answer to that is that the referee doesn't really know what you own from which to choose, so he can't make choices for you.
If you were doing this for real, your character would not be able to select what goes with him; it would be up to the referee to make the decisions. There are some inherent guidelines to this.
- First, it's rather obvious that if you have something so large (like your van) that it alone would exceed your weight limit, it goes no matter how important it is to you.
- Second, the referee is supposed to protect the things that you have demonstrated are important by constant use--those things would have more scriff in them than other things that you do not use so much. Thus you're unlikely to lose your sleeping bag or your weapon of choice, because these are things which in the course of play you probably have mentioned using quite a bit. You are more likely to lose the book you thought might be useful but have never read.
- It is more likely that you would lose things that have never versed with you rather than things which have, unless the newly acquired things have become very important in terms of how much you use them.
- It's perfectly reasonable to decide that things that went with you because they were in a container that is no longer going with you aren't going with you--such as gear you stored in the van that was "on person" the first time but not tne next time.
On another level, part of the point of the rule is to force you to make those decisions when you are not in the middle of versing. You can sell stuff, give it away, disown it, trade it for other stuff, destroy it, consume it, secure it (if you nail something to the wall of a house, it's attached and no longer goes with you), and otherwise make those decisions while you are living. You are in the peculiar situation that when you die you can take quite a bit of it with you, but you are not in a position to sort through your stuff at that moment--you probably have something else on your mind.
In short, when you're dying you're not thinking about what you're going to take with you; the things that go with you are the things that the referee is persuaded are closely associated with you in some way. He has the option to slice off the list at the point he thinks it hits your maximum, on the assumption that the list is set up in the order in which you obtained it so if you didn't discard or eliminate something from the upper part of the list, the point at which you reached your limit would be the point at which nothing else became associated with you. We expect the referee to be fair, to take into account a lot of factors, to enforce the rule, and to keep it simple for himself at the same time.
--M. J. Young
