Toying with Fabula Gear
I spent a non-trivial amount of time designing items for Fabula last weekend. Awarding interesting treasure is consistently one of, if not the, most frustrating part of running a Fabula campaign. Each session you are expected to handout a fixed amount of treasure, but the cost for any given item, especially at the start of a campaign, is frequently limited to the point all that treasure feels the same and doesn't excite anyone. I don't think I'm alone in feeling like this, either - the GM for our CERoW game complained about how boring early-game treasure was and skipped ahead to handing out items from the next tier of treasure, and I've commiserated with Scampir in the Table Shapers Discord about how our players consistently ask for higher-damage weapons over every possible reward. Intended or not, only a narrow range of items are valued by players and everything else feels useless or uninteresting.
I've tried a few solutions to mixed effect. Crafting materials were a failure - my players would forget about them, and if reminded they had some, dither about using them. Adding items that are essentially money with descriptive text on it has worked better, but mostly serves to make it feel like I am not just giving out cash each session.1 And experiments with making unusual items for the mini-game we incorporated into our game has been a mixed success, with most items being ignored because the party want to spend funds on clear upgrades instead of novelties. Eventually I just asked my players what they wanted and that's when it became clear by-and-large they desire pure upgrades. Which is a problem, because they got those upgrades three levels ago and the rules instruct GMs to not hand out the next tier of upgrades for at least three more levels.
So what took up my weekend if all I need to do is throw-up my hands and give players the expensive multi (2) weapons and "treat your weapons as arcane" armors they want? I decided to do two things: drill down into the math of upgrades in Fabula and to start designing for different modes of play. Fabula items, specifically weapons and armor, upgrade in two different ways. The first is budgeting for increases to baseline stats like damage or accuracy, adding elemental damage, or even changing the dice you roll to attack with a weapon. This takes-up less than a page in the rulebook and is all text, so tends to get overlooked by the more obvious, and often more interesting, upgrade - qualities. These are your modifiers that will protect you from status effects, increase your situational damage, or let you do cooler things with your already cool combat skills. The trick is the first kind of upgrade, the boring, statistical kind, are economical and frequently are a pure upgrade. So I went through the items my players favor and priced out the various combinations of those upgrades and built some items with those combos, with the goal of making players ask stuff like "Do I want the weapon that does fire damage, or the one that lets me roll my better ability scores when attacking."
As for the second, I built items specifically for use with the travel part of the game. If you look at the hundred or more items in the core rulebook and three Atlas supplements, you can count the number of items that engage with travel on one hand and maybe not even use all five of your fingers. If the game expects GMs to hand out bushels of swords and baskets of accessories2, then why not make some of those items useful for more than combat? The hope is players will start saying "I want to switch to my Travel set before we make a Travel roll." If that works, I'll extend this design to other parts of play - I already have ideas for items that improve camp actions and interact with the aforementioned mini-game.
I think this will be healthier for my game, and if the players embrace it, will really open the type of items I can design and fill out treasure drops. It does increase the amount of work I have to do, but honestly, that's a larger problem with Fabula for me and nothing new.
And after playing a few sessions of CERoW, where the GM has been just giving out straight cash instead of adding treasure management to the big pile of things she has to prepare, I'm convinced you should not do that. Four sessions in, I have enough money to buy what effectively are "best-in-slot" weapon and "best-in-slot" armor and now will sit back and twiddle my thumbs until we reach level 10 and can find and buy better items.↩
And it might not. The intent really might be to hand-out piles of zenit and not think too hard about it!↩