Equipment wear

Does your equipment ever wear out? Not break, but wear out? Do batteries die? Does a blade get dull? Probably seems like a stupid question, but if you don't age, why would your equipment? Are there penalties after a while for using older equipment? I imagine I would use my Leatherman and Kabar every so often in my blacksmithing work. Are there points for normal wear and tear?

My answers would be these: No, your equipment does not age. Yes, your batteries die. No, I'm not going to penalize you for wear unless I think it's getting excessive or part of the difficulty of a scenario is that your ability to maintain your equipment is inhibited.

Your batteries die for the same reason your car runs out of gas: the battery is expendable by design, and thus use of the battery expends its potential. However, if you keep your fresh battery in a duffel bag for three thousand years, it should still be fresh when take it out and put it in your flashlight, because, like you, it does not age.

This is handled on a case by case basis, really, for two primary reasons:

1. There are too many variables to impose standard rules to anything;
2. The real point of not having you age is so that the referee doesn't have to track total time in the verse, how much things have aged; the same rationale applies to the equipment.

Now, some "battery powered" devices obviously have to be handled as running down--weapons which use batteries instead of bullets have to run out of ammo, vehicles are limited in range before recharging. With the former, it's usually handled by treating the battery as having "charges", that is, each time the gun is fired it uses a fraction of the total available power which leaves a measurable number of additional firings. If we wanted to be strictly technical, either the power level or the fire rate would decrease with each use; but that's too technical for what we're trying to accomplish in a game.

With vehicles, it's generally treated something like running out of gas--we know about how far you can go on the "fuel" you have and about how far you have to go to get where you intend, so we combine these two factors and use a general effects roll (usually) or relative success skill check (rarely) to determine whether you make it and how much fuel you have left. We don't worry about it under normal circumstances, since of course you can gas up your car as part of normal use, and you can charge your electric vehicle the same way. Power supplies on spaceships are usually envisaged as self-regenerating, so even if they can run down under extreme demand, we assume that they will recover on their own, unless we have particular design parameters that say otherwise.

It's too much trouble to track the age and condition of each item in your equipment, so we don't. If you botch with the Leatherman tool and I know you've had it for centuries, I'll probably say it finally gave out from age and broke. It might break if you try to do something extreme with it even now and botch. On the other hand, a good tool can last several lifetimes if it is well tended, and I've no way to adjudicate the care you give to each piece of your equipment other than to note when you do state you are caring for it (as Graeme has done on occasion, such as with his sword) and assume that you give your things ordinary care otherwise.

As far as batteries in things like radios and flashlights, you've the added complication of bias--you land in a low-tech world and turn on the flashlight, and it might not work. It might not work because under this bias your batteries just don't have the power to operate the bulb, but they might be able to do so under a higher tech bias. (One of the factors in tech bias is the ease with which electrons transfer between molecules.) Thus eventually I'll decide you need new batteries, but it will be based more on your failed rolls than my assessment of battery life.

--M. J. Young

So if you use the equipment, it wears out. If not, it will stay in pristine condition forever. Pretty cool.

Only because we can't be bothered to tell you it's getting dusty.