Installed Items (edit. changed title)

Someone may have come up with this before, but I was brainstorming a setting that would allow the players to outfit a starship with special equipment and thought of this as a special property to represent that something was built into the ship:

Installed[1] (WL-1) Whether it requires a constant power source, alignment with ley lines, planting in the soil or some other condition, this item must be permanently installed in an appropriate location to function. With GM approval, the item can be uninstalled and moved to another location with an appropriate skill check, but doing so takes at least one hour to uninstall the item and another hour to install it in a new location.

As an example: I’m building an item I call a “Containment Field”, representing the kind of force-field wall you see in sci-fi brig scenes – it creates a Barrier 7 (Damaging (1d10 lightning), Baneful (Stunned), Impassable) – which should make it rather expensive. I thought there would be a lot of potential uses for items permenantly fixed in place – fixed cannons, magical healing trees, teleportation circles, etc.

[1] I originally called it Stationary, but Sam Pointed out that that’s already a different property for weapons that’s not exactly the same.

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This is a neat idea, but you may want to give it a different name to differentiate it from the stationary property in the Core Rules:

Stationary - The bulk and weight of this weapon is enormous. Moving it requires a focus action, which allows it to be moved up to 30 feet.

I’m thinking of something like installed or structure. I’m sure others have more suggestions.

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Ah, yes. That sounds better. I had forgotten about the Stationary property and didn’t look at the weapon properties when I was doing this.

I like Installed as the name of the property. Maybe Fixed could be another. Just the general property that it is actually attached to whatever location it’s in and takes a lot of effort to remove.

The Stationary property has a Wealth modifier of -1. Do you think it might be better for Installed to be -2, since an Installed device basically can’t be moved at all in combat? Or maybe that would only apply if it’s a weapon mounted to a non-moving location.

I’m thinking, on the one hand, my Installed items can’t be moved during combat, which sucks if they have a useful function in combat (as my containment field probably would). On the other hand, if the players found an Installed item and wanted to retrieve it, it’s an extra pain to bring it with them.

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You should always look at what already exists in the system before adding anything. A surprising amount of the home-brew rules we see suggested are just more complex ways of doing something that the rules already support :sweat_smile:

I think a WL modifier of -2 is fair, given that in combat this is most likely going to be a terrain feature and not an “item” per se. If the installed item is attached to a vehicle though then the penalty is almost totally irrelevant.

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Oh, of course. I hadn’t found anything at the moment. I’ll call it Installed for now and change it to WL -2.

So, to give the corrected version:

Installed (WL-2) Whether it requires a constant power source, alignment with ley lines, planting in the soil or some other condition, this item must be permanently installed in an appropriate location to function. The item can be uninstalled and moved to another location with an appropriate skill check, but doing so takes at least one hour to uninstall the item and another hour to install it in a new location.

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