Huh. Ok, gaming hybridization time.

Swords of the Serpentine and Quest both put their gear lists FRONT AND CENTER as part of defining characters.

Quest constrains the number of items to force the player to make sure each one is interesting.

Swords also constrains the number, but blows the doors off of the constraints surrounding what constitutes "gear". It might be a sword, but it might also be the chip on your shoulder. Or it might be your ineffable sense of style. In SotS, those are all gear.

Both games clearly surface the idea that gear is a POINT OF INTERFACE with the world. That it might be useful is nice, but it's more useful for all the questions it answers and raises.

This has always been implicitly true, but it's nice to be specific.

Er, explicit. Typed too fast.

To illustrate, raise your hand (don't actually) if you had a D&D character with utterly PREPOSTEROUS gear on your inventory list because it might be the thing to solve SOME problem.

When you do that, you are telling the GM what you want to see in the game.

D&D did not teach us to listen to that. It taught us to throw things at the wall, see what stuck, and pretend we meant to do that all along. This is a good, skill, but it wastes a lot of time getting there.

In Quest of SotS, if a player uses one of their limited slots to declare they are carrying lockpicks, they are saying they want some freaking locked doors.

This is where D&D fails us. It teaches us, as GMs, NOT to give that player locked doors because they have a solution.

The CLEVER GM goes all Tuckers Kobolds on this and introduces locks without keyholes because WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE TRYING TO OUTSMART ME!?!?

Obvious antipattern, yes. But even when we stop being jerks, we don't always see the *invitation* from the players.

We've said a million times that character sheets are a love letter to the game and the GM. Inventory is a part of that, and it's nice to see games lean into that.

(Blades in the Dark ALSO does clever things with inventory, but very DIFFERENT clever things)

Anyway, the reason it's interesting to me to look at SotS & Quest side by side is that despite the similarity, there is a small philosophical difference between them. It would seem like Quest could handle SotS wildcard geaR, and it MOSTLY could, except for one small thing.

In Quest, gear is a potential target for *consequences*. This is reasonable - the game has a simple health mechanic, but can generate mixed die results, so it needs more knobs for "things to go wrong", and inventory is great for that. To a point.

It takes a bit of line-walking. The free-form and creative nature of Quest's inventory feels very liberating until it starts feeling ablative. But it also needs to have SOME weight, or its a meaningless consequence.

Surprisingly tricky to balance.

Like, tricky enough that I wish I had some simple rubric to make it easier, but I don't. All I can say is that as a GM, gear is a fair target, but can't be the ONLY target.