Fast and Furious
By Cape Rust
I have been playing RPGs for a few years now and I have noticed yet another trend in many of the games I’ve played. No matter what the genre, most groups I have gamed with don’t do much mounted combat and if they do. We are all so rusty on the rules that it ends up falling in the “too hard to do ” category. Some games have extensive rules for mounted combat and some revolve around it, but in most cases it seems like a necessary evil.
There is a trend for many RPGs today to require minis, and this is truly a blessing and a curse. They are a blessing because these minis can give the Game Master and the players much better situational awareness, especially during mounted and dismounted combat. The curses come in with the cost of buying minis and the fact that minis and the associated maps that go with them can quickly turn an RPG into a tactical war game. Vehicular combat is much easier to run if you are using minis, but it can be done without them. I think it is best to look at vehicular combat by time period. Why don’t we start from the future and work our way back?
Spaceships, hover craft, personal submersibles, and Mechs; in the future they’ve got them all. In futuristic games, it is hard to avoid these forms of conveyance. Because there is so much easy access to these vehicles, most futuristic games involve at least one vehicle chase and a bunch of starship combat. The biggest problem with these situations is that if you roll up a character that is focused on being a pilot, unless most scenes involve vehicles, your character will be of limited use and might not be much fun to play. Star Wars: Saga Edition does a good job at allowing a mix of role playing and starship tactics, but it is still tough to give those pilots as much spotlight time as they may want. Shadowrun has Riggers who are focused on operating all sorts of vehicles. Riggers in Shadowrun have a bit more utility than your normal wheelman because they are adept at controlling drones and other mechanical do-dads as well. By having a wide variety of vehicles to operate, players are given a better chance to enjoy the game. I have to give Battletech a shout out as well. It is designed as a tactics game, but the developers where kind enough to add a role playing version of their tactical game as well. Battletech is unique amongst the examples I gave in that mechs are characters unto themselves. The future isn’t the only place with vehicles though. Let’s take a few steps back in time and look at present day and recent historical vehicles.
Planes, trains, and automobiles are all viable modern vehicle options with trains being the most limited of those options. Let’s face it, in a game set in current times a train race or even playing chicken with two trains is good for a cinematic ending but not much else. However, if you are involved in a western themed game, trains become more important. Speaking of westerns, horses and carriages drawn by them are wonderful for chases, and nail biting drama. Remember, it isn’t a good western if there are no stage coaches getting flipped end over end. Carriages are great but the horseless ones are even better. The great thing about cars is even Vampires need to use them sometimes. Car chases are loads of fun, but to flow well they require the game master to know vehicle rules really well. A high speed car chase can quickly fall flat if it gets bogged down by rules. Motorcycles are the modern day equivalent of horses and give an even greater cinematic feel than two trains playing chicken. The key to all of these vehicle encounters is speed. If players don’t have a sense of reckless danger then rethink it, re-do it, or just forget it.
Why not finish up with the past. I’m not talking about the 1920s, I’m talking about the time when dragons roamed the earth. There is the normal horse solution for transportation, but what about those dragons? If you want to include flying mounts, remember there are extra dimensions to in-flight combat. As a player, I have been involved in a few fights where dragons were our main mode of transportation and the biggest problem I had with the whole experience was that at no time was I afraid of my character falling off of his mount or plummeting to the ground with his injured mount. This fear would have completely changed how I fought. This fight was only one small part of a campaign so spending talents or skill points on riding skills would have been a waste. I know there are plenty of magical items that can negate the inability to ride, but where is the fun in that? Jousting is loads of fun but if the players have no proficiencies in it, it can quickly turn into a situation of lots of rolls to see who doesn’t mess up the most. These jousts complicate things as far as rules go even more than normal vehicle activities do.
Should you include vehicles in your tabletop RPGs? Yes, but you have to plan for it. I have been in too many games where the feeble attempts at integrating vehicles has crashed and burned. There are three options for dealing with vehicles as far as I’m concerned. The first is to avoid them completely and automatically give every character the ability to ride a horse or drive a car or spaceship at the most basic level. This solution will get rid of many headaches. The second option is to read, reread, and learn the vehicle rules before you throw in a rousing game of chicken between two trains laden with explosive chemicals. This might be a good time to bring your group’s rules lawyer out of retirement and have them help you run the encounter, use their love of all things rules to you advantage. My preferred method is to establish a few simple house rules at the beginning of the encounter and get everyone involved to agree to them. Keep those house rules simple, ensure that they will provide a sense of tension, and always increase the difficulty of activities as the speeds get faster and the maneuvers become more complex. Stress your players out, make them worry about their next action, and make them remember that no matter what vehicle they are riding on or in, it can crash and when it does, it might hurt.