I agree that personally I think the focus should be on the user's skills and style, rather than the equipment, but I would hesitate about banning those things outright. Some characters might legitimately want to incorporate a specific weapon into their list of abilities, but I'd urge them to do it as an additional ability that they can use as an augment to their personal skill.
For example, although it wasn't played up as much in the movies or later books, the first Han Solo novels kind of portrayed him as a really really good gunslinger, and his pistol was customized. One of the subplots in the series was his reaction to another character who was the only one he'd met who was actually faster / better than him with a gun. Given that version of Han, I'd consider giving him something like "Fastest Gun In Space" at 5W2 as his primary combat ability, and then a second ability like "Customized BlasTech DL-44" at a 17 or so. It's a personal weapon, and he's customized it to give him an edge when he can use it, but he's the problem-solver, not the blaster, so it is a tertiary ability at most. If he's using some other gun the vast majority of his problem-solving capability is his own skill, not the trick gun. But if he's going into a gunslinger's duel, he could use the Customized BlasTech DL-44 as an augment to help him be the faster draw.
Personally, I'm considering a house rule that equipment can always be used as a special type of augment without needing to meet the "new and entertaining" criteria, but a it doesn't stack with the normal augment rule and it only gets the flat bonus that was included as an optional rule for quicker augments. Basically, it should be treated as a fall-back augment. If the player has an idea for a fun and creative augment, then it deserves a check and chance for a much larger bonus using the normal augment rule. But if they don't have any good augment ideas, and they have some piece of equipment that was important enough to them to put in their ability list, they can still use it as a default augment but we won't waste time on an actual contest to determine what the bonus is, we just use the alternate static quick bonus in that case. It seems like a reasonable house rule to me, we'll see how it goes.
Finally, regarding the "Blaster Pistol" vs "Blaster Rifle" vs "Hold Out Blaster", isn't that just a case of Specific Ability Bonuses? The distinction doesn't apply in most cases; any of them are fine as a weapon to shoot your average target so they all just roll normally. But if the challenge is framed in such a way that the distinction is important, the one with the most relevant specific description could get a +3 or +6 bonus. If the challenge is to shoot their way through an armored blast door, the guy with Blaster Rifle should get a +3 or +6. If the challenge is a security guard searching them for weapons, the guy with his "Hold Out Blaster" gets a +3 or +6 to hide it, the guy with a normal Blaster has no modifier, and maybe the guy with a Blaster Rifle fails the credibility test and auto-fails. That was my impression from reading the rules, anyway.
Cheers,
Lindharin
Powered by hypermail