Character Design: Equipment

By Ben Miff

Kitting out your characters can be an interesting process. You don’t want to overburden them so that they can hardly move, but you don’t want to leave them defending themselves against a horde of angry vermin with only a teaspoon. As per usual in writing, there has to be balance.

How do you balance it? Two ways available here: either give them enough equipment to be reasonable, or give them more equipment than they need, but with flaws in every piece. The first method is simple; what is your character likely to need? You can leave the quantum singularity generator at home for a start. If your character is likely to spend a lot of time in jails, for example, give them a skeleton key, or a lock-pick, or, if you’re feeling weird, a jigsaw puzzle. However, once they’ve got one, the chance of them needing the other is lowered. With a skeleton key, lock-picks become redundant, as they perform roughly the same tasks. A small warning though; don’t exclude items that would logically belong together (e.g. face paint and camouflage gear).

What is your character’s gear apt to be like? Once you have the base set-up of what your character wields, you have to add detail. The less careful they are, the more worn, scratched and dented their things will be. The richer they are, the more up to date their things will be. If they like to customize their stuff, then they might have added a nifty colour scheme to one (or several) of their items. There is a wide range of things that you can do with a character’s gear; some may be useful, some cumbersome, some plain useless. But they are important, as they add that little extra to the tools, and therefore increase the attraction between reader and story.

The second method is just a smidgen harder. While the equipment needs to be good in some respects, it must also have its failings. This type of equipment fits the inventor quite well, as they are most likely to have fiddled with their stuff, probably singeing their fingers a few times in the process. The key to this method is choosing a list of attributes that makes the equipment useful to have, but doesn’t make it the great big whacky thing of much smiting either. Advantages will vary from different types of equipment, as they have different uses, but some that cover a wide range of equipment include good reliability, long battery life, safe use, and easy operatation. Disadvantages are the opposite of these, and as such are things like bad reliability, short battery life, unsafe and complex operation. While choosing these attributes, keep your character in mind. It is useless to have a welding torch that the character will use a lot if it has a short battery life, because if the character had been using it for that long then they would have likely done something to get rid of this problem, it being a major aggravation (who wants to carry around a few hundred spare batteries?).

Once you have kitted out your character, you then have to look again at what situations they will be in. This is so you will know at which points in your story your character will use different things, and so know how much each piece will be used. Once this is known, then you can give detail to the tools accordingly; a piece regularly used can have more detail than a piece that only comes out once. The equipment will then be more attractive to the reader, as they will not be bored about reading a paragraph full of the décor on the spade’s handle, but will receive enough information about the more commonly used things to be able to build up an effective working knowledge.

A trick that you can use for equipment that you only really want for the first, last or middle sections is that your character can “discover” or “lose” them. The method of discovery will vary between differing paraphernalia, as they will have differing worth; an industrial tool can be stolen from a nearby factory, where as ornate weaponry is likely to be given as a gift, either through gratitude or by a loved one. Detritus found lying around can also be used; that plank could easily be used as a weapon, or as part of a buttress. Losing them also has a range of methods; giving them away as gifts, just plain losing them (works best for small objects; who loses a battleaxe?), or having them stolen. Once these procedures are in place, then your character will be more interesting, in that his/her equipment will become more interesting through the variation. This has the handy advantage of keeping the reader guessing, to some extent; if the story is good, it will give them added incentive to read on as they do not know what new thing the character may receive next, and the event that will lead to this new acquisition.

With an effectively kitted out character, with a small amount of planning in place partly as a result, the character gains another “hook” with which to entice the reader, and therefore to get him/her interested.