Multiple equipped items at once?

Is it possible to have multiple items equipped on a character at the same time in the same slot?

What I’m picturing is this; a cyberpunk mercenary is equipping two weapons, a handgun and a combat knife, so that he boosts both his melee and ranged combat abilities. Both would have to be in the same slot (hand) so that it would make sense (since melee weapon + ranged weapon gives no deterrent against, say, using a sledgehammer and a rocket launcher at the same time). In addition, cyberware that had to be activated would be “equipped” (Skull guns, anyone?), so that it could be given as a thing and alter statuses. This would also encourage alternate playstyles; you can carry a lockpick and a handgun, but you’d be hard pressed to fight with those precious precision instruments.

In addition, this would allow me to make a condition for “Signature” and “Visible Contraband” that show how likely someone is to run into complications by lighting up on radar or by carrying enough guns to supply a SWAT team due to having multiple things at once.

EDIT: It looks like you can’t have multiple things in one slot, according to the documentation it says if you have more than one it does nothing, so disregard this, though I would like to know if there’s a way to make items switch slots from what they “should” do.
edited by Kyle Willey on 11/18/2012
edited by Kyle Willey on 11/18/2012

[quote=Kyle Willey]Is it possible to have multiple items equipped on a character at the same time in the same slot?

What I’m picturing is this; a cyberpunk mercenary is equipping two weapons, a handgun and a combat knife, so that he boosts both his melee and ranged combat abilities. Both would have to be in the same slot (hand) so that it would make sense (since melee weapon + ranged weapon gives no deterrent against, say, using a sledgehammer and a rocket launcher at the same time). In addition, cyberware that had to be activated would be “equipped” (Skull guns, anyone?), so that it could be given as a thing and alter statuses. This would also encourage alternate playstyles; you can carry a lockpick and a handgun, but you’d be hard pressed to fight with those precious precision instruments.[/quote]

thinks

It occurs to me that even if someone has both a ranged and a melee weapon handy (pardon), they’re not going to be using both at once. In fact, they’re unlikely to be able to use both in a fully efficient fashion at once. At that point, can I ask why you’d disallow the sledgehammer and rocketlauncher combo? Yes, they’re both two-handed weapons; but both handguns and combat knives are designed to be used in the dominant hand; no matter what’s “equipped”, as long as it’s more than one item, there’s presumably a certain amount of background shuffling around and switching between dominant hands anyway.

Mind, if you’re making switching items difficult (for example, you need to be in your safehouse to equip a set of lockpicks, and you can’t ditch them or carry anything else in that hand until you’re back in your safehouse), or making the dominant/non-dominant hand choices matter, I do understand; just not entirely clear on how the game runs and where you’re drawing the lines of player-required effort, so I thought I’d ask?

L&c,
F

Actually, while I gave the dual-wielding of weapons as an example, it occurs to me that it’s kind of obtuse. Going back and looking at it, there are very few situations one wouldn’t be able to switch on the fly, and it’s not worth worrying about, especially since a psychic/hyper-perceptive cyborg probably knows what to have out.

My larger question, though, is if it would be possible to have multiple things switched “on” or “off” at once using the same slot type (i.e. every cybernetic enhancement falls into the Cyberware slot and can be used or disused at will).

[color=#009900]Because all slots are also qualities, and because all qualities are a value, at one point I was considering allowing the quality level to determine the number of equippable slots; and/or adding a size value, so you could equip eg 4 size 1 items or 1 size 4 item (it wouldn’t necessary be physical size - eg if you were equipping a Job, you could equip two part-time or one full-time roles).[/color]
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[color=#009900]Immediately after this point, I realised I was heading down the design rabbit-hole, it’s already a big complex bit of functionality, and the vast majority of creators would be more confused than excited by the extra layer of configuration.[/color]
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[color=#009900]So, not now; but maybe some day after the functionality has bedded in and we’ve seen how people use it.[/color]

[quote=Alexis Kennedy][color=#009900]Because all slots are also qualities, and because all qualities are a value, at one point I was considering allowing the quality level to determine the number of equippable slots; and/or adding a size value, so you could equip eg 4 size 1 items or 1 size 4 item (it wouldn’t necessary be physical size - eg if you were equipping a Job, you could equip two part-time or one full-time roles).[/color]
[color=#009900]
[/color]
[color=#009900]Immediately after this point, I realised I was heading down the design rabbit-hole, it’s already a big complex bit of functionality, and the vast majority of creators would be more confused than excited by the extra layer of configuration.[/color]
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[color=#009900]So, not now; but maybe some day after the functionality has bedded in and we’ve seen how people use it.[/color][/quote]

I think many people would actually really like being able to equip multiple items in the same slot for a variety of reasons: simply because dual-wielding is such an iconic image in so many genres. Besides, it’s not exactly unintuitive to think to yourself: “well if I have Weapons 1 that means I can equip 1 weapon; Weapons 2 for 2 weapons” and so on. =)

Could you achieve something similar using storylets attached to the items? So, a “turn it on” branch which giveth, and a “turn it off” branch which taketh away? You could give the branches a zero action cost, if you wanted it to be “free”.

It might not do quite what you want in relation to pyramid qualities… your awesome stuff would get comparatively less awesome as you got more awesome. Though I suppose that could conceivably be made into an interesting plot device :-)

You could make the item in question inherently dual-wielded (dual-wielding?)? Just make the item a “pair of gold-plated Desert Eagles” or a “pair of katanas” or a “Mouser’s Special”{1}.

L&c,
F

{1} A one-handed sword in one hand, a dagger in the other.

Yeah, I considered doing that, but the system breaks down when you have something like, say, “Longsword and Pistol”, “Longsword and Dagger”, “Longsword and Longsword”, “Longsword and Shield” etc. =)

I don’t guess you can have two slots, one for main hand, one for off hand and give a penalty to off hand if a weapon is in it. You’d have to specify items only go in one or the other. I guess you could make Cybernetics Slot1 Slot2 Slot3 and give a person three different versions of the item to go in each. That would be unwieldy, however.

A workaround would be giving each item an item-specific storylet that lets you remove the right version and replace it with the left version, or any other slot that you’d like to put it in. As a bonus, you could restrict this to slots a player has access to, meaning that they can’t mount the weapon in their shoulder unless they have a shoulder weapon mount (and turn BWARK off so they don’t notice).