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That said, especially if some form of base system is in place for trying to reestablish civilization, books and a calculator will be invaluable

Agreed, but beside the point.

If you are a white-collar manager when war breaks out, all you get is a pocket calculator, some food and water, and 2D6 empty casings. This is all you are deemed to have after three years of surviving WWIII.

Not even a pocketknife.

That's not well balanced.

Yeah. A lot of my characters have ended up with civvy backgrounds. Half of them just have a pistol. That can be fun and exciting, and yeah it's my role to balance the game for them... but it also means the first time they face down bandits with AKs, it has a real chance to be very deadly for them. And I think it's shortchanging the players to fudge that too much. With the gear they have, they don't even have an opportunity to just pay the road toll and get by. They have no leverage whatsoever, gear-wise.

(meanwhile there's other civilians like Farmers who get their own pickup truck)

Like I said, I'm hoping for at least one or two meaningful gear choices to go along with each character path that will diversify the value.

I think we're back to the confusion on team gear, then. Give Bob the manager the shotgun, for example.

This, if course, means we need to revisit the group gear options. There are no assault rifles, for example.

I don't think equipping a character from the group gear is really the answer to incredibly limited starting gear for certain career paths -- as if three years of survival never happened and our manager just stepped out of the office carrying (of all things) his pocket calculator. I like limited gear, but that's taking it a bit far, especially given that the civilian career paths also suffer on skills.

I have an image of Eli in The Book of Eli arriving at Alcatraz and dictating the Twilight saga to the stunned archivist. Not all books are useful.

Funny you mention this... I made some art for our own Twilight Saga.



I'm not even sorry.

Tell that to your player who made a Liberal Arts grad student and then rolled a 1 for the war to start:

"You also have 1D6 books, but they're all by Stephanie Meyer."

I believe it was in here that we were having the discussion about foraging/hunting/etc within the same hex. I've just gotten a copy of Forbidden Lands and noticed something particularly interesting. That game (from which of course all of this stuff is derived) has the same rule, but with one pretty critical difference as I read it: it says that characters cannot for instance hunt in the same "location." It does not say "hex," it says location. Which is not a term used generally elsewhere as far as I've seen. The game consistently uses the word "hex" for other purposes.

That clearly implies to me that multiple foraging parties, etc can all go out in different parts of the same hex. The consequence being that they are too far apart to communicate or intervene if an encounter comes up or something happens.

I do wonder why T2K worded this differently, thus far.

If you are a white-collar manager when war breaks out, all you get is a pocket calculator, some food and water, and 2D6 empty casings. This is all you are deemed to have after three years of surviving WWIII.
...
That's not well balanced.

Don't you automatically get the military grunt gear?
Page 38 and 39 reads as follows:

THE DRAFT: If your final term before war breaks out was spent as a civilian, and if your character is not a local of the country where your game is set, your At War term will be spent as a draftee or volunteer in the military. In this case, one of the two skill increases for the At War term must be RANGED COMBAT – unless you already have a level of D or better in the skill – and you roll for your specialty using the Military column. Also, in this case you get starting gear as if your final pre-war term had been Combat Arms (page xx) instead of your civilian career.

You can be a local, and would use the Civilian starting gear, but I feel like that would be a conscious choice. An all Civilian survivor group is definitely playing the game in Hard Mode, hell even the Kid/Civilian archetype is a hard mode when the rest of the party is military.

Yes, my point was that if you were a Polish character with a civvie career as a manager. All you get to start with is a pocket calculator, regardless of the fact that you've spent the last three years in a country at war and that either (a) you've been surviving for months and should have accumulated some useful equipment, or (b) you just had to flee your home, which presumably contained more than a pocket calculator.

Yes, that's playing on hard mode. But really, could we at least give him a raincoat or something else of value?

I feel like that would be up to the Ref and other players. if it's not something picked during group gear or gained as session 0, then once again i feel like it'd be a conscious choice to play that way.

The current Start for the game is having the players be part of 5th Infantry Division in some way, even if they are civilians. My group has some polish civilians that joined the 5ID as a local translator/Advisor squad. They are not military but were embedded with the military. Most Civilians that weren't recruited by the military divisions after the winter of 1999/2000 are dead or exist in survivor camps and are the ones the players will meet during the various encounters the referee will draw. I don't think civilian players will just start the game on April 17th "Hmm, that sounds like a lot of gunfire outside my house in Kalisz, maybe I should go check it out!" -grabs calculator and biology text book-

If that's their start and how they met the group, then once again, that's probably the type of campaign they and their referee are playing and was already discussed before session 0.

Don't get me wrong, they should absolutely get more than the listed starting gear, but I don't think it necessarily needs to be balanced with the military paths. The people who are surviving to this point would have more than a pile of books or literally just a truck (looking at you Driver). I get that group gear will help, unless the campaign starts before the 5ID's failure to defend Kalisz. Doing a campaign set during the early parts of the war would be fun. I could see more lootable items and the militaries being less trustful of the civilian populace.