[Shadowrun 4ish] How to make vehicle combat not suck?

[Heisenberg]

Exactly what it says on the tin, crowdsourcing vehicle combat ideas for an SR4 fanhack, but assume vanilla SR4A for now. Imagine you are designing SR4/SR5 and you've been assigned the vehicle combat section.

I am looking for solutions that address the most egregious and serious problems without requiring overhauling the whole game from the ground up. How to make vehicular combat streamlined, cinematic, and fun, without extreme complexity that makes the game grind to agonizing halt, or rules so inconsistent no one can make sense of them?

You know who knows? I'm betting the den knows. Have at it, guys.

[kzt]

SR4 vehicle armor is broken. So we need to fix that first. Here's a general concept of what I think I'd want.

Cars doors and windows don't stop bullets. Truthfully, they don't even slow them down much. So no armor for default street vehicles. Bullets go right through them and attack your personal body armor.

Tanks need to exist and be able to survive massive weapons that blow away lighter armored vehicles, while still being able to blow up other tanks and any lighter vehicle and being in danger from really heavy weapons.

Light military armor (think Bradly or Stryker/LAV) needs to be able to stand up to machine gun fire all day long and ignore people crashing cars into it (etc) but be damaged or destroyed by weapons that tanks can essentially ignore. Things that can damage tanks do very bad things to this class.

Armored cars, (and I talking like a $150,000 armored Mercedes or Brinks trucks) need to stand up to pistols all day but heavier weapons damage them and be destroyed by anything that might actually damage light military armor.

[Username17]

First of all, you need longer combat rounds. 3 seconds is too short because it means that you have to track acceleration, speed, and direction from round to round. Also, just putting keys into the ignitions and getting your car started takes longer than 3 seconds, which means it's already unrealistic for vehicles to be brought into action sequences if you're doing 3 second ticks. So right away, before you even start working on vehicles, you have to take your lumps and move to a 12 second combat round.

Second, you need proportional damage. SR4 can't handle shooting at vehicles because of the two-shot problem (which due to the eccentricities of the hardened armor rules, becomes a one shot problem for tanks). So you need to go to an LMSD style damage system before your vehicles are going to be able to participate in combat without being invulnerable to all attacks that don't instantly destroy them.

Now we can get into fiddly bits. Vehicles are going to want to have a stat that reduces incoming damage that is not armor so that they don't all melt when you throw fire on them. Call it "size" or "structure" or something. Vehicles are going to want ramming rules that don't allow you to explode great dragons by hitting them with pickup trucks and also don't have armored vans shatter when they hit pedestrians. But the bottom line is that until you have a 12 second combat round and proportional damage, you're never going to be able to put a car on the battle map without that being incredibly stupid.

-Username17

[tussock]

Light military armor (think Bradly or Stryker/LAV) needs to be able to stand up to machine gun fire all day long and ignore people crashing cars into it (etc) but be damaged or destroyed by weapons that tanks can essentially ignore.

This is wrong, by the way. The most common weapon to soft-kill US MBTs in the invasion of Iraq was heavy machine guns. They knock the lights, cameras, and treads out, which leaves them blind, immobile, and unable to shoot (at which point anyone can hard kill them with bolt cutters and a hand grenade should close support be lacking).

Lighter vehicles can't even stand prolonged fire from GPMGs or whatever they call them these days, the 7.62mm jobs. RPGs and 40mm grenades will immobilise them in short order and usually leave crew wounded. The big 3-man or vehicle-mounted anti-armour weapons automatically hard-kill them.

Armoured Mercedes are much heavier than light military armour, stronger and more powerful, they just don't work well off the highway system. The POTUS limo compares well to an MBT, just lacking the firepower. Tanks aren't that heavy, even the oversized Israeli ones can't handle running over fairly tiny mines because treads just aren't magic, and you can't actually stay inside a tank that's on fire and not die.

[Stahlseele]

The SR3 Vehicle Rules were a bit better than the SR4 ones, if i remember correctly, but they were way more complicated as well . .

[kzt]

Lighter vehicles can't even stand prolonged fire from GPMGs or whatever they call them these days, the 7.62mm jobs. RPGs and 40mm grenades will immobilise them in short order and usually leave crew wounded. The big 3-man or vehicle-mounted anti-armour weapons automatically hard-kill them.

No a brad will take 7.62 rounds all day. It just gets loud and messes up the paint and everyone's snivel gear that is tied on the outside. A lucky hit on the optics will cause issues for that particular optic. Actual AT weapons will go through them. In theory a Brad with the full reactive armor kit is able to stand up to some RPG fire.

Armoured Mercedes are much heavier than light military armour, stronger and more powerful, they just don't work well off the highway system. The POTUS limo compares well to an MBT, just lacking the firepower.

No, an armored Mercedes stands up against pistols and some rifle fire against the metal. How tough it is depends on your budget, as they armor for a given threat. More armor also impacts handling, gas mileage and overall performance. The windows don't handle rifle fire or sustained pistol fire nearly that well. You can essentially drill through the glass. Which is why well trained drivers for these vehicles will never ever stop until they have no choice. RPGs put a hole in both sides.

Once you are stopped in these vehicles under attack you need to bail out, as they won't hold up.

The presidential limo isn't an armored car, it's a very heavy truck chassis that has been custom modified to look like a car. It has vastly more armor than the car of anyone who doesn't have a 250 million dollar a year personal security budget will have.

[hogarth]

Is there any RPG that has good rules for driving around in cars? Just curious. I can think of a lot of stinkers...

[tussock]

No a brad will take 7.62 rounds all day. It just gets loud and messes up the paint and everyone's snivel gear that is tied on the outside.

Unless you want to claim to have lived in one for a while, I'm going to call bullshit. The Bradley on the move already deafens it's occupants, the engine and tracks are poorly protected, and the side and rear armour is simply not that good (but of course, classified). It does however totally stop working when you hit it with medium weapons, which is why they sit them miles from any potential shooting with the front armour facing the enemy and using the 25mm for suppression.

They're like someone watched a movie of the blitzkrieg and thought tanks from 1939 were a good idea (which they were at the time, but now the 1940's have happened and people have figured out how to kill them).

The presidential limo isn't an armored car, it's a very heavy truck chassis that has been custom modified to look like a car.

That's what I was thinking of, they're not that uncommon in the crazy countries, but it seems the "armoured mercedes" is just 2.4 tonne, so it's not stopping anything for very long. Quite right.

[Heisenberg]

First of all, you need longer combat rounds. 3 seconds is too short because it means that you have to track acceleration, speed, and direction from round to round. Also, just putting keys into the ignitions and getting your car started takes longer than 3 seconds, which means it's already unrealistic for vehicles to be brought into action sequences if you're doing 3 second ticks. So right away, before you even start working on vehicles, you have to take your lumps and move to a 12 second combat round.

Second, you need proportional damage. SR4 can't handle shooting at vehicles because of the two-shot problem (which due to the eccentricities of the hardened armor rules, becomes a one shot problem for tanks). So you need to go to an LMSD style damage system before your vehicles are going to be able to participate in combat without being invulnerable to all attacks that don't instantly destroy them.

Now we can get into fiddly bits. Vehicles are going to want to have a stat that reduces incoming damage that is not armor so that they don't all melt when you throw fire on them. Call it "size" or "structure" or something. Vehicles are going to want ramming rules that don't allow you to explode great dragons by hitting them with pickup trucks and also don't have armored vans shatter when they hit pedestrians. But the bottom line is that until you have a 12 second combat round and proportional damage, you're never going to be able to put a car on the battle map without that being incredibly stupid.

-Username17

So right away, before you even start working on vehicles, you have to take your lumps and move to a 12 second combat round.

Actually, the base combat round I'm working with is already 12 seconds. For reasons that have nothing to with vehicle combat specifically, so it's not a matter of taking lumps for me, that's how I already had things structured. Meaning if there are four initiative passes, each IP is 3 seconds, if there are three IPs, each IP is 4 seconds, and so on. I say and so on because this is SR, and there's usually gonna be one combatant with at least 3 IPs. In any case the length of individual IPs scales to the "fastest" combatant but the length of the turn is always 12 seconds.

In general I am less worried about damage and verisimilitude and more worried about rules that let people participate in a cinematic chase scene without complexity or incomprehensibility that induces rage-based vomiting from players or the GM. In other words all that crap about maneuvering, range, crash tests, escaping, and so on. The rules for that stuff in SR4 are just plain broke.

Strictly speaking, proportional damage is not happening so that is off the table. All humans and metahumans do have 12 CM boxes, however, and are Lightly wounded at 1 box, Moderately wounded at 3 boxes, Seriously wounded at 6 boxes, and bleeding out at 12.

It's sounding like avoiding ping ping ping BOOM is one of your major priorities, but kzt really wants ping ping ping BOOM. Discuss?

Cars doors and windows don't stop bullets. Truthfully, they don't even slow them down much. So no armor for default street vehicles. Bullets go right through them and attack your personal body armor.

Not sure I can fully get behind this. 2012 != 2072. I mean in 2072 it's pretty clear that everyone wears fucking body armor all the time so, the definition of "civilian vehicle" has clearly seen some scope creep. Also keep that in mind for the discussion of LAVs and MBTs and whatnot; armor tech and weapons tech have improved so much by the time SR happens that they're not necessarily going to have a recognizable relationship to us. This is good news from a game design standpoint, because I can avoid being slavishly tied to "realism" (although I am something of a gun/military hardware geek myself, tbh).

Is there any RPG that has good rules for driving around in cars? Just curious. I can think of a lot of stinkers...

Amen brother.

[Stahlseele]

each IP is 3 seconds, if there are three IPs, each IP is 4 seconds, and so on

this sounds to me like the standard IP is 3 seconds long, but when you get a 2nd IP your IP's go from 3 seconds to 6 seconds, effectively making you slower to react even though you get to act twice as often?
And with 3 IP's it goes down to 4 seconds, each of which is still longer/slower than the standard IP with it's 3 seconds?
and if a round is 12 seconds long and 1 IP is 3 seconds long, what do people do in the remaining 9 seconds after their pass has gone by?
Or do people with more passes go untill they run out and everybody else goes in the remaining time? This would be a completely differen problem all together . .

what am i not getting here?

[Heisenberg]

No, you've got it backwards/are adding lots of things I did not say. Probably language barrier/I did not explain clearly enough.

So, a combat turn has a number of IPs in it equal to the highest IPs among all combatants. (That is, IIRC, SR4A RAW, but I don't really care one way or another about RAW. I just *think* it is.)

If the highest IPs among any combatant = 1, then the one IP is 12 seconds long.

If the highest IPs among any combatant = 2, then the two IPs are each 6 seconds long.

If the highest IPs among any combatant = 3, then the three IPs are each 4 seconds long.

If one combatant has Max IPs (IPs = 4) then each IP is 3 seconds long.

And basically, yes, if you only have one IP, it takes you all 12 seconds to do one meaningful set of actions (one complex or two simple, and one free) while the guys with wired reflexes and whatnot run circles around you. Just like in SR4. Or if it's easier to conceptualize, the one IP chumps take three seconds to do their shit, but then are on "cooldown". It really doesn't matter, all you need to understand is a combat round takes twelve seconds and a guy with 2 IPs gets to go twice, and a guy with 4 IPs gets to go four times. So basically, it's SR4A minus the ridiculously laughable conceit that a entire combat round happens in 3 fucking seconds.

[kzt]

Strictly speaking, proportional damage is not happening so that is off the table. All humans and metahumans do have 12 CM boxes, however, and are Lightly wounded at 1 box, Moderately wounded at 3 boxes, Seriously wounded at 6 boxes, and bleeding out at 12.

It's sounding like avoiding ping ping ping BOOM is one of your major priorities, but kzt really wants ping ping ping BOOM. Discuss?

I'm not sure what you mean here. You shoot a car with an anti-tank rocket you should get burning debris filling the street. You shoot it with a pistol it makes a hole in one or both sides, but random bullets don't tend to do anything to the important mechanical/electrical parts of a car. Enough hits will do bad things, but I suspect the driver's head is an easier target than the ignition control computer.

"Cars doors and windows don't stop bullets. Truthfully, they don't even slow them down much. So no armor for default street vehicles. Bullets go right through them and attack your personal body armor.

Not sure I can fully get behind this. 2012 != 2072. I mean in 2072 it's pretty clear that everyone wears fucking body armor all the time so, the definition of "civilian vehicle" has clearly seen some scope creep.

Part of the background setting for the game is that we mostly have "battery powered" cars and fuel for those few vehicle that use it is extremely expensive. Armor is very heavy, quite expensive and totally blows your energy efficiency. Cheap compact high-mileage cars are not going to have $50,000 worth of armor plate and weight 6000 pounds. Windows are going to be lucky to stop a errant baseball, much less bullets. They are going to be a lot closer to a motorized skateboard than a $150,000 armored Mercedes.

[Username17]

Strictly speaking, proportional damage is not happening so that is off the table.

Then you can't succeed and we're done here.

Proportional damage is not optional if you want to have a dicepool system and targets that are significantly tougher than a human. Your vehicle rules cannot work if you don't embrace some variant on LMSD damage.

-Username17

[John Magnum]

What exactly do you mean by proportional damage? I've seen it referred to a couple times re: Shadowrun but I don't know if I've seen an explanation on here of what it is. Writing weapons that do "X% of Target HP" instead of "X damage"? If so, why is it so mandatory?

[Stahlseele]

For example, AV Weapons would be on a Damage-Scale versus Vehicles obviously.
But one light Damage (SR3 Term, one box of Damage on te Monitor) on the Vehicle Damage Scale would equal one medium (SR3 Term, 3 boxes of Damage on te Monitor) or more if used on squishies.

[Heisenberg]

What exactly do you mean by proportional damage? I've seen it referred to a couple times re: Shadowrun but I don't know if I've seen an explanation on here of what it is. Writing weapons that do "X% of Target HP" instead of "X damage"? If so, why is it so mandatory?

This. I don't see how that *helps* model vehicle damage capacity more accurately.

But one light Damage (SR3 Term, one box of Damage on te Monitor) on the Vehicle Damage Scale would equal one medium (SR3 Term, 3 boxes of Damage on te Monitor) or more if used on squishies.

How is this not accomplished by simply having the vehicular weapon inflict 3 boxes of damage instead of 1?

[Username17]

Proportional damage means that if attack force exceeds the target's soak by one value it causes a light wound, by another value it causes a serious sound and by yet a third value it takes down the target. The key here is that the values are fixed for the proportional wound inflicted on the target. Having an attack force of 7 versus a soak of 4 has to be the same as having an attack force of 21 versus a soak of 18.

It has to be the same, because the dice pool already represents a linearization of an exponential function. And the amount of dice you are rolling is such that if the difference between no damage and all the damage is more than 5 or 6 hits, you are doing something wrong.

-Username17

[Heisenberg]

If I could, I'd like to make a good-faith effort to guide this discussion away from issues of damage and armor resistance (which is all that has been discussed so far) and towards issues of range, maneuvering, speed, tactical vs. strategic vs. cinematic vs. abstracted, tactical vs. chase combat, and so on. I'd like to table the sub-topic of damage/armor/health for another day.

Basically, procedural description of how to conduct vehicular combat in SR4 is what I'm looking for. Assuming y'all don't think that the way *damage* is handled is the *ONLY* thing wrong with vehicular combat in SR4A.

[Username17]

Moving up to a 12 second combat turn helps a lot, because it means you don't have to track vectors. If you have a combat round that is shorter than your car's 0-60, vector tracking is mandatory and that is fucked.

With a longer combat round, you can abstract all that shit. Distance traveled is simply reduced when you make turns, so starting from zero simply counts as some number of turns during the round for purposes of distance reduction. Then you only have to track vehicle facing rather than directional vector from round to round.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

Hmm, maybe if the Damage/Armor-Systeme were redone so stuff that deals less damage than the vehicle has armor simply plinks off but if the damage dealt is bigger than the armor, then the difference between the two is dealt to the vehicle with no change?
So, if the boulder is not big enough, it plonks down and the vehicle does not care. if the boulder is big enough, the armor gets bent and dented all out of shape and if you plonk it down there often enough, you will have broken through the car or simply flattened it by some time?

yes, i realize that Heisenberg wants to discuss the actual movement and combat, but there's a reason why nobody uses these rules . . they are so frigging bad, annoying and complicated that most people read them once and then simply discard them from their brain cache again . .

edit:
huh?
i could have sworn there was a post by Whipstitch in here just before i posted?

[Whipstitch]

Oh, I had deleted it because heisenberg apparently didn't want to talk about that crap.

[Stahlseele]

ok, quick show of hands:
who here actually knows the SR4 Vehicle Combat Rules aside from the Damage stuff?

[Username17]

ok, quick show of hands:
who here actually knows the SR4 Vehicle Combat Rules aside from the Damage stuff?

Sigh. Hand.

It actually keeps looping back around to the shitty vehicle damage rules though, because crash tests generate crash damage, and the crash damage calculation is batshit fucking insane.

-Username17

[kzt]

I read them. They are terrible and stupid. They can't be fixed, they need to be replaced by something totally different.

[Stahlseele]

i read them once when SR4 first came out . . and then after reading them my brain cache wiped because of FUBAR.
they were one of the reasons for my whole group deciding that we were going to stay with our modified SR3 version.