I still never really figured out how the RED vehicle rules worked. someone had said there was no acceleration or deceleration and it's making me wonder: if you had a grid and it was a chase, would those bad boys just be freely moving into whatever which square? that sounds kinda messed up and unintuitive but it'd also be the only way to make it work
The real Asuka; the only Asuka
- she/her
she/her, 29, low resolution brain goblin, prolonged Cinema-Media-Arts and Polisci undergrad, ongoing Gender Situation. Asuka for short, Asukapaper for long, and Jill for real
Discord ID: asukapaper (they took away the funny numbers, curses)
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in reply to @Asukapaper's post:
they are two, maybe three, pages long and everyone I've seen who's interfaced with them concludes they're a nightmare
Like most things Shadowrun, it's Too Many Stats. The chase system is somewhat abstracted so it only cares about various ranges, but then those ranges matter for things like ramming speed.
Acceleration is how many like "zones" you can move in a single full round, while speed, while things like Speed and Handling act like caps for how many successes count when you roll a Pilot [vehicle] check for maneuvers related to speed/agility, respectively.
It works in theory, but for gamefeel, it feels even slower than normal interactions, because you're often putting the Player Actions layer on top of vehicle actions, which are all dependent on the zone you're in. And while the zones are hazy for how far they are apart, your weapons are Very Specific in terms of ranges.
Oh and the Ranges change depending on whether you're in a Speed Environment or a Handling Environment. Medium Range in a Speed chase is 11-50 meters. That could classify as either Medium or Long range for an SMG user, but the game treats it as just "Medium Range" for the purposes of the vehicle specific actions.
It just has a really bad feel and I've abstracted it even further after the first time running a proper chase.
RED is like a list of highly specific procedures that are worded in that granular way that tries to avoid misinterpretation but is also in such an informal register that it's not specific at all. In theory, you get in car, you turn on car (an action), and then car MOVE is your MOVE.
What happens when there's anything stepping outside of car MOVE is your MOVE? Roll a die based on a table of guidelines. Your Nomad will probably beat all DVs on the table, which is sure a way to establish a class fantasy and a strange way to make the GM enthused they're providing a challenge for the driver (outside of punishing modifiers, I guess). I knew an anecdote where PC Nomads got themselves drunk just to give themselves a challenge on the DV tables.
anecdote: vehicles are so fragile and so easy to nail in ranged combat that if vehicle combat is going to happen, somebody is going to crash. when they crash they take 6d6 damage
now this is a bit of a plus to the system when you know about it. i think i hit my stride with it in the last ever living community session I played when Stinger busted a gangoon van's passenger seat window with her naginata and directed her wingman to lob a firebomb into the front seat. grenades deal 6d6 damage, the fire was awful for the van, and the 6d6 from the crash rounded off the equation for the occupants
That's the short version. The long version is the van hit the breaks and moved behind our six, the so the mad lad (a rockerboy and very well played despite being humble to a fault in and out of character) climbed out our truck, clambered from the passenger seat to the bed, boarded the van, and dropped the grenade in there. All the while he scrolled a BD of himself doing this. There were many problems I had with that community, but the sessions weren't one of them
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