Alternate starting equipment for B/X and adjacent games

I’ll be honest: as a DM I dislike the equipment buying phase of character generation. It slows down the game and players generally seem overwhelmed by the possible choices and not knowing what they could and should buy. Or they end up buying only basic stuff like armor and weapons and then find themselves missing torches, rope or other utility items.

In Mausritter, this is solved by comparing your mouses HP with your starting pips (the games’ currency). X HP and Y Pips gives you Z equipment. Generally, the lower your HP are, the better the equipment is, to boost your mouses survivability and give them something useful to play with. What B/X also notoriously lacks are character backgrounds, their occupations or careers they had before heeding the call of adventure. You know, something to give the players a hint of who this character is and how to roleplay them.

So, for my planned B/X home campaign, I wrote down a list of backgrounds and the range of attainable HP on B/X level 1. Comparing the two gives a set of starting equipment, with lower values getting more and possibly more or less useful items. I also included quite a lot of pets, because what player doesn’t like to have a dog or cat accompanying them? Since reading Mausritter, I also fell in love with slot-based encumbrance rules, with which the list also comes in handy, as it contains 3-5 items (plus possible additional slots from extra bags or backpacks) and still leaves enough space for gathering treasure while exploring the world.

Starting Equipment Table

If you want to copy it, you can find an html version of the table here.

As you might have noticed, there are a lot of possible cooking ingredients in there, because I also recently fell in love with the manga Delicious in Dungeon (or Dungeon Meshi) and the idea of making cooking up meals a part of the game. In my game, I’ll be using a variation of the suggested mechanics described by Skerples.