Adventurer's Vault Excerpt: Airships

[That One Guy]

Vehicle rules this early in 4e's lifecycle?

Two thumbs (looks around for some more) up.

Offers a left thumb to the person w/ a Xenogears icon. Citan was the best.

 

[Starbuck_II]

Oh sure. In a similar vein, I could also see how it would cool for a PC to fight his way across a battlefield with a broken arm so he can engage the Orc King in a duel, but this is D&D, so arms can't, by the RAW, break. We sacrifice certain things for ease-of-play.


Which is how I would handle things. Never use a system when an ad-hoc ruling (or two) will do.

Do what Dragonmech does for its mechs/Vehicles:
Add a Crit table. It has a seperate table for each one.

Yes, that is what they do. It works great. Sometimes you break an arm so the mech can't use it or a leg.

Hit points only target one total. Simple, elegant, and adds the Crit table for more complexity.

 

[That One Guy]

If I were playing 3.5, HERO or Shadowrun? Oh hell yeah I expect me some complex vehicle rules. The airship as presented would be wholly unacceptible for my needs.

4e? This is *all I want*.

Man... Shadowrun. Good stuff.

So, I was thinking when I looked at that, "Man, it'd be so easy to add a few rules like armor to certain areas, cannons, having weak points that cause certain effects..." The thing is... I actually like coming up with those rules myself. Stormwrack was so useless to me because we already had a mechanism for naval combat in play (that I liked well enough to keep using).

My point is that it's a decent foundation. It fits in well with 4e rules. I personally look forward to making it a little more complicated (assuming there are no more rules that alter this thing).

 

[ProfessorCirno]

Do what Dragonmech does for its mechs/Vehicles:
Add a Crit table. It has a seperate table for each one.

Yes, that is what they do. It works great. Sometimes you break an arm so the mech can't use it or a leg.

Hit points only target one total. Simple, elegant, and adds the Crit table for more complexity.

I swear, I cannot use steam powered mechs. I somehow ALWAYS get the crit that causes my crew to get boiled alive. Freaking dice. Freaking me never going with Mech Jocky.

 

[Toras]

Honestly, I like the idea of a critical table for something that large. One that replaces the extra damage of a critical with a more...interesting result. Hell, I've liked them since way back when so long as they didn't get too complicated. (1 table max).

I think the simple system is quite sufficent for a skiff or sailing vessel, something of minimal size and crew. However, I would hope that larger vessels would have a bit more complexity (or at least that the 50 hit is not a hard and fast). It would also prove sufficient for a horse, a carriage, or any other basic small vehicle.

Any idea what they are going to use for piloting, building/repairing said ship, or any of the other crew duties? Given that they are giving us the vessel one would hope that they are giving us the rules to do things with them.

And on a more cinema and in tune with the 4e design principles, I wonder if they will be giving sample skill dc's for swashbuckling and the like? I also hope that there are chase rules.

 

[Hussar]

It's funny. When I set about making ship to ship combat rules, I tried using templates in 3.5. A ship was treated as a gargantuan or collosal construct and went from there with damage and attack bonuses and hit points and all the rest being calculated based on crew, crew experience, materials used in construction, on and on and on.

Here, we've got what I wanted summed up in a short stat block.

That's just made of win.

One can hope for chase rules. I would hazard a guess that chases will use the Skill Challenge system or some variant thereof.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

One can hope for chase rules. I would hazard a guess that chases will use the Skill Challenge system or some variant thereof.

Isn't that what Hot Pursuit is for? I just re-skimmed it and it looks relatively easy to convert

 

[jaldaen]

I can't speak to any classic books with airships...

One classic book with airships that I know of is:

Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz (1939).

 

[Ahglock]

I'm not seeing any need to push the envelope here; it hits on every important point I think of when I think of implementing airships. It flies. It takes damage. It doesn't work as well when damaged or shorthanded. It drops from the sky when problems arise without plummetting straight down instantaneously. Its implementation is consistent with the rest of the game. It's extensible (as in the aforementioned case of adding cannons).

Everything does exactly what it needs to and nothing more. It hits all of my important parts. That's efficient. That's elegant.

What you are proposing is... nothing really. You have yourself said that you cannot be bothered to come up with something better. As far as I can tell, you haven't even identified a particular complaint beyond "I don't like it." The only word that comes to mind to describe your actions is "whining." And I don't think you're going to garner much agreement by speaking down to us without putting up even the vaguest of support for yourself.

Until you actually mention why this is an incomplete solution or what isn't robust, you're just threadcrapping. And I'd rather like to not have to deal with that.

So on that note, what needs of yours does this fail to fill?

It works. I would not call it elegant or efficient. A HP grind is not something I'd call elegant. It somewhat fits into the simple easy to use rules of 4e, but that does not make it elegant. And it does not make it fun or dynamic, it just makes it a boring HP slog. Who dies through attrition first would not be a catch phrase I'd want to hang onto my new airship combat rules.

And voicing disagreement does not seem like threadcrapping to me.

 

[jadrax]

And voicing disagreement does not seem like threadcrapping to me.

I think there is a difference between simply voicing disagreement and making statements like "I am disturbed by how wow'd people are by this solution." which essentially is having a go at every prior poster saying how much they liked it.