Re: Fallout Rules: I just have rules I put together for one-shots. The group seems to be interested in a more sandboxy campaign with exploration, gathering resources, scavenging the wasteland, etc. In other words, I got the sense that they WANT to count bullets and beans. XD At least at first. But what I was trying to say was that I have it in mind that while it makes sense when the PCs are complete novices with barely a piece of scrap to their names, each bullet and bean might make a difference, but once they become better established, my hope would be to begin to hand-wave some things.
I did that to some extent in my zombie apocalypse campaign with some house rules I added on top of the campaign. If the PCs successfully raided a hardware store for loot, and they had a wheelbarrow or maybe even a working car to put things in, then rather than taking inventory of each and every item they might scrape off the shelves, I let them designate one "cargo unit" worth of loot (provided they had the TIME to spend to load things up and weren't just doing a quick grab-and-run-from-zombies trip) at a time.
For instance: you have a working sedan. I declare that the trunk is one cargo unit, passenger space can be converted into cargo units on (for the sake of abstraction) a 1:1 basis. (One more cargo unit, one less seat available for someone to ride.) In special circumstances, you could extend it -- hitch a trailer to the back (small trailer = +1 cargo, medium trailer = +2 cargo, etc.), find a container to strap to the roof, or in desperate times you might just TIE ON something on the outside of the car and hope for the best, but if there are any mishaps (plowing through a zombie mob, getting in a crash, etc.) it's likely to be very vulnerable.
Each "cargo" might have (let's say) $500 worth of goods in game terms -- I'd keep a note with it as to what SORT of resource it is. E.g., "tools/supplies from hardware store" or "shelf-stable foods from grocery store." That could impact (GM's call) how valuable it's seen for trade -- some other survivors might be really desperate for foodstuffs, so they'd value the food cargo more than the abstract "$500" value. Or, because you've GOT several cargo units of food, I'm going to say that we simply don't need to worry about rummaging for food for the adventure until we hit some sort of major disaster (PCs abandon the car and their food supply for some reason) or a major time skip (time passes, you get to spend Advances, but a lot of that food goes away over time in exchange for you not being in a weakened/hungry state when the action starts up again).
The other use would be if the players suddenly realize they need a rope or flashlight or replacement batteries or an empty gas can or whatever, but nobody has it in their personal inventory. Oh, you cleared out a hardware store? Duct tape sounds like a pretty likely thing you'd grab, so sure, it's in there. You can essentially "buy" items (using starting gear buy list, or my best guess as GM) from the cache. Once the $500 pool runs out, then the cache is expended -- sure, far more than those SPECIFIC items you've pulled out would fill up a car trunk, but we'll just hand-wave the rest of the stuff as supplies that turned out not to be so useful after all, or you've been using it up in the meantime on other, off-camera things, or whatever. The cache is used up, and if you want more duct tape / whatever, you'll have to do some more looting or trading. The advantage is that you grab a bunch of unspecific things so we aren't saddled with as much bookkeeping and because it's hard to know EXACTLY what you'll need later on.
Now, if someone DOES want to be specific, that's legit. Let's say someone is speculating that TOILET PAPER will be absolutely essential after the apocalypse, and people at a well-situated settlement will trade good money (or food or bullets) for it later on, so let's cram that trunk full of as much toilet paper as we can possibly jam in there. That's cool, I'm not going to feel the need to "abstract" it any, or assign it a cache value. Similarly if someone is set on it being "as many Twinkies as possible." I'd be hard-pressed to figure out exactly how many that IS, so I'll be likely doing SOME sort of hand-waving about it, but I will try to roll with whatever the players want to do. Abstraction is supposed to make things easier -- not restrict the sorts of things the players are allowed to do beyond what would "make sense" in story context.
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Anyway, sorry if that's something I've already hashed out before, but it's a certain amount of abstraction I already came up with for the zombie apoc campaign and plan to use for the "Florida" campaign, especially since one of the players wants to play a traveling merchant with a pack brahmin. Rather than requiring him to keep track of EXACTLY all the oddball items he has, I'd treat it as a "cargo unit," and if he acquires a Fallout-2-style wagon to pull behind it, likely a *second* cargo unit, in addition to whatever *specific* gear items he has on his person.
If the PCs get into a situation where they could load up on food to last them a good while (they successfully clear out a still-functioning MRE factory, run by robots, or they go on a hunting trip and bag some big game and have a *refrigerated* trailer they can haul along to keep the meat semi-fresh) then the consequence might be that they no longer have to worry about keeping their bellies full for a while. (Depending upon the food type, they still might rack up Rads along the way, but that's likely to be an ongoing struggle regardless. Of course, I need to be reasonable about it, or it will cause one to wonder why all the random NPCs are still alive and not yet ghoulified if it's SO HARD to find non-irradiated food and water sources.)
....
I really like the Rad-Away "instant vs. long-term" idea. It could be something like the "Golden Hour" in Savage Worlds -- where it's a whole lot easier to do "first aid" treatment on the scene, if you have a healer, and then we can just pretend that the injuries you took weren't that serious, but if you go on as "walking wounded," at some point we just assume it WAS a "real injury," and it's going to take serious recuperation (or miraculous healing) to deal with.
Maybe I could repurpose "Rad-X" that way. The exact difference between Rad-Away and Rad-X seems to vary depending upon Fallout game. More recently it's been that Rad-X is a preventative (I'm about to go into a radioactive area without a rad-suit, so I pop Rad-X right beforehand so I soak up Rads slightly more slowly), and Rad-Away is a curative (flushes Rads from your system after the fact). But I could treat Rad-X as the "instant/first-aid" version, as per your suggestion, and Rad-Away is for something that's gotten more distributed through your system.
I always found "preventatives" annoying in-game. I almost never used them, because the duration was stupidly short (time being super-accelerated and all) to the point where you really needed amazing foresight (or of course to have just died from radiation and then you reload the game from your last save point and try again, this time with Rad-X -- which amounts to much the same thing), AND the bonuses were just incremental rather than truly life-changing anyway. Instead, Rad-X just became something I'd collect while looting/scavenging because it was lightweight and had a good resell value to merchants, much like bullets sized for weapons I didn't use.
no subject
I did that to some extent in my zombie apocalypse campaign with some house rules I added on top of the campaign. If the PCs successfully raided a hardware store for loot, and they had a wheelbarrow or maybe even a working car to put things in, then rather than taking inventory of each and every item they might scrape off the shelves, I let them designate one "cargo unit" worth of loot (provided they had the TIME to spend to load things up and weren't just doing a quick grab-and-run-from-zombies trip) at a time.
For instance: you have a working sedan. I declare that the trunk is one cargo unit, passenger space can be converted into cargo units on (for the sake of abstraction) a 1:1 basis. (One more cargo unit, one less seat available for someone to ride.) In special circumstances, you could extend it -- hitch a trailer to the back (small trailer = +1 cargo, medium trailer = +2 cargo, etc.), find a container to strap to the roof, or in desperate times you might just TIE ON something on the outside of the car and hope for the best, but if there are any mishaps (plowing through a zombie mob, getting in a crash, etc.) it's likely to be very vulnerable.
Each "cargo" might have (let's say) $500 worth of goods in game terms -- I'd keep a note with it as to what SORT of resource it is. E.g., "tools/supplies from hardware store" or "shelf-stable foods from grocery store." That could impact (GM's call) how valuable it's seen for trade -- some other survivors might be really desperate for foodstuffs, so they'd value the food cargo more than the abstract "$500" value. Or, because you've GOT several cargo units of food, I'm going to say that we simply don't need to worry about rummaging for food for the adventure until we hit some sort of major disaster (PCs abandon the car and their food supply for some reason) or a major time skip (time passes, you get to spend Advances, but a lot of that food goes away over time in exchange for you not being in a weakened/hungry state when the action starts up again).
The other use would be if the players suddenly realize they need a rope or flashlight or replacement batteries or an empty gas can or whatever, but nobody has it in their personal inventory. Oh, you cleared out a hardware store? Duct tape sounds like a pretty likely thing you'd grab, so sure, it's in there. You can essentially "buy" items (using starting gear buy list, or my best guess as GM) from the cache. Once the $500 pool runs out, then the cache is expended -- sure, far more than those SPECIFIC items you've pulled out would fill up a car trunk, but we'll just hand-wave the rest of the stuff as supplies that turned out not to be so useful after all, or you've been using it up in the meantime on other, off-camera things, or whatever. The cache is used up, and if you want more duct tape / whatever, you'll have to do some more looting or trading. The advantage is that you grab a bunch of unspecific things so we aren't saddled with as much bookkeeping and because it's hard to know EXACTLY what you'll need later on.
Now, if someone DOES want to be specific, that's legit. Let's say someone is speculating that TOILET PAPER will be absolutely essential after the apocalypse, and people at a well-situated settlement will trade good money (or food or bullets) for it later on, so let's cram that trunk full of as much toilet paper as we can possibly jam in there. That's cool, I'm not going to feel the need to "abstract" it any, or assign it a cache value. Similarly if someone is set on it being "as many Twinkies as possible." I'd be hard-pressed to figure out exactly how many that IS, so I'll be likely doing SOME sort of hand-waving about it, but I will try to roll with whatever the players want to do. Abstraction is supposed to make things easier -- not restrict the sorts of things the players are allowed to do beyond what would "make sense" in story context.
...
Anyway, sorry if that's something I've already hashed out before, but it's a certain amount of abstraction I already came up with for the zombie apoc campaign and plan to use for the "Florida" campaign, especially since one of the players wants to play a traveling merchant with a pack brahmin. Rather than requiring him to keep track of EXACTLY all the oddball items he has, I'd treat it as a "cargo unit," and if he acquires a Fallout-2-style wagon to pull behind it, likely a *second* cargo unit, in addition to whatever *specific* gear items he has on his person.
If the PCs get into a situation where they could load up on food to last them a good while (they successfully clear out a still-functioning MRE factory, run by robots, or they go on a hunting trip and bag some big game and have a *refrigerated* trailer they can haul along to keep the meat semi-fresh) then the consequence might be that they no longer have to worry about keeping their bellies full for a while. (Depending upon the food type, they still might rack up Rads along the way, but that's likely to be an ongoing struggle regardless. Of course, I need to be reasonable about it, or it will cause one to wonder why all the random NPCs are still alive and not yet ghoulified if it's SO HARD to find non-irradiated food and water sources.)
....
I really like the Rad-Away "instant vs. long-term" idea. It could be something like the "Golden Hour" in Savage Worlds -- where it's a whole lot easier to do "first aid" treatment on the scene, if you have a healer, and then we can just pretend that the injuries you took weren't that serious, but if you go on as "walking wounded," at some point we just assume it WAS a "real injury," and it's going to take serious recuperation (or miraculous healing) to deal with.
Maybe I could repurpose "Rad-X" that way. The exact difference between Rad-Away and Rad-X seems to vary depending upon Fallout game. More recently it's been that Rad-X is a preventative (I'm about to go into a radioactive area without a rad-suit, so I pop Rad-X right beforehand so I soak up Rads slightly more slowly), and Rad-Away is a curative (flushes Rads from your system after the fact). But I could treat Rad-X as the "instant/first-aid" version, as per your suggestion, and Rad-Away is for something that's gotten more distributed through your system.
I always found "preventatives" annoying in-game. I almost never used them, because the duration was stupidly short (time being super-accelerated and all) to the point where you really needed amazing foresight (or of course to have just died from radiation and then you reload the game from your last save point and try again, this time with Rad-X -- which amounts to much the same thing), AND the bonuses were just incremental rather than truly life-changing anyway. Instead, Rad-X just became something I'd collect while looting/scavenging because it was lightweight and had a good resell value to merchants, much like bullets sized for weapons I didn't use.