Equipment as Abilities
So there are a few games recently that, basically, do not care about gear.
Daggerheart treats weapons and armor as gained by default - not fought for - and interchangeable. Your gear is there to make you look cool, and the powers it gives you are really part of your class or abilities. The choice of which weapon matters, but how you get, maintain, and risk that gear is nothing.
Die, similarly, assumes that certain classes have certain things. You’re a thief, you have a knife, done. The stats are important, but the item itself is not.
Draw Steel! does it a different way. Your kit is a big, core component of your build. Like the others, it’s about how you look and operate. Even more than the others, though, it doesn’t matter how you got your stuff - you just have it. Level up and want to change your stuff? Sure! The hunt for gear is just non-existent. This is despite how much of your character the gear enables; really because of it. You have access to those abilities, ergo, you MUST have access to those physical objects. The one is the other, we’re just going at it from a different direction.
So, all this is just to say: what if the other thing?
What if we took the sci-fi cool weapon gear fetishization and made it mechanically vital? Your class abilities are dependent on your gear. Lose the gear, lose the feature. Gain gear, gain powers. Your stats - strength, speed, smarts, etc., and your skills - may be independent, but largely your ‘class abilities’ and spells and things are derived from your kit.
Now, some caveats: the GM has to be committed to providing not the gear, but opportunities to earn the gear. You want a sweet car? Do a heist. You need an artifact sword? Complete a quest. The gear becomes a way to ‘level up.’
Why do this, tho? To allow for the OSR spirit & adage, “attack the entire character sheet.” You want your players to fear? Steal, destroy, or disable their cool guns. Not arbitrarily, but use it as another challenge built into the game. They don’t just face a cost in hit points and cash, but allies, backing, authority, and Stuff.
