| From: | R Andrew Hayden <rahayden@*****.WEEG.UIOWA.EDU> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | VCC: Class Assignment |
| Date: | Fri, 22 Jan 93 01:36:43 CET |
things prior to leaving. At least this thing is in New Orleans. I
can't think of a better city to spend some time in. I just hope
that after the evenings on Bourbon street, I'm able to drag mysef
to the mettings I have to be at.
------------------------------
In any case, here are a few random, incoherent thoughts on vehicle
rules. In order to understand some of where I am coming from, I
should at least explain my background.
I used to write freelance for Steve Jackson Games and was the
original designer of the rules for airplanes in the game Car Wars,
first published in Autoduel Quarterly and later edited
(butchered?) and published in Aeroduel. So any similiarity between
my ideas and Car Wars/GURPS Autoduel is purely instinctive.
In any case, here are some thoughts on Shadowrun.
Rule 1: Throw the Rigger's Black Book out the window. It is
useless.
Rule 2: Prepare yourself for long and aggrivating arguments,
sleepless nights, typing-finger blisters, no pay, no thanks,
and an addiction to caffine.
Rule 3: DO NOT let this project interfere with your work, school,
family life, love life, sex life or get you committed to an
insane asylum.
If you can follow those three rules, you will make a wonderful
addition to the team. Welcome aboard.
----------------------------------
In my view, the secrets to a successful vehicle design system is:
A) Ease of design:
Early Car Wars was very simplistic, but as the game grew in
bredth, it reached the point where it could take six to
twelve hours to design ONE lousy vehicle. You would spend
hours adding up numbers to get the last bit of performance
out the the car.
This is way wrong. A _good_ and elaborate car should take
maybe an hour (at most), so it is important that decisions
made on the vehicle are simple to implement.
Thus, the key is to make sure that each item placed in the
car (from the engine to the weapons) effects the performance
of as few things as possible
As an example: Lets say you have a car that can to 100
MPH. If you bolt a machine-gun on to the side, it just
becomes a pain to have to refigure weight, aerodynamic drag,
heat dissipation, recoil, vibration, etc etc etc. Frankly,
if you have the power in the engine to move the extra
weight, good enough for me.
2) Realism
Unfortunately, the above example is not very realistic. As
a matter of fact, unless we get a fairly complex expert
system online that can do complete 3-D renderings of
vehicles and figure all of those useless statistics, there
is no way we can be truly realistic.
But, the Shadowrun style is to logically justify
everything in some way. Cybernetics is logically
explained. The Matrix is logically explained. Even the
mysteries of magic is in some ways logically explained.
So the question is, how do you go about designing a
vehicle system that is both realistic and yet relatively
simple to implement as a user?
-----------------------
In shadowrun, we have several different types of vehicles we are
going to have to contend with. These are (in a nutshell):
Cars
Motorcycles
Trucks
Air-Cushioned
Marine (as in water, not Rambo)
Fixed-Wing Aircraft
Rotor-Craft (ie, helicopters)
LTA
Drones
Ok, that's a start, but we all know that all of these things come
in different shapes and sizes and stuff.
The next step is to say that each classification has three stock
classes: small, medium and large. This just gives us a basic
starting point. Of course, the sizes have no relation to each
other between types (ie, a small Drone is nowhere near the size of
a small Car).
------------------------
Ok, now that we know our classes, we have to find the parts of the
car, keeping our desire for simplicity in mind. My thinking on
parts of car we should be concerned with are:
Body:
Power Plant:
That's it. With this simple of a system, you get a body, throw in
an engine, and you can theoretically drive away. Can't get much
simpler than that, can we? Of course, since we are all Shadowrun
players, we aren't going to keep it that simple :)
------------------------------------------------------------
Ok, so let's pretend we have just placed an order for a body, how
do we know what we can put into it?
Well, let me throw this at you.
******************
Car Body:
Engine Space: xxx
Passenger Space: xxx
Cargo Space: xxx
Hard Points: F: X
B: X
T: X
Control Speed: xxx
Base Armor: xxx
Definitions:
Engine Space: This is a measure of the stock compartment
size for the power plant, fuel tanks, and associated
componets. Engine space can be increased by decreasing
other spaces. It costs 2 cargo space or 1 passenger space
to increase the engine space by 1.
Passenger Space: This area of the vehicle is designed for
passengers to hang out. This consists of the seats, doors,
windows, wet-bar, what have you. It costs 2 cargo space or 1
engine space to increase the passenger space by 1.
Cargo: This is, essentially, the size of your trunk. Not
the kind of place for passengers and not sound enough for an
engine. Cargo space can be increase at a cost of 2 cargo spaces
for one passenger or engine space.
Hard Points: These are unused spaces that can easily be
reinforced to mount weapons. Hard points do not have to be
used and can be allocated to cargo or engine space at a cost
of 1 for (some number -- to be decided later).
Control Speed: This is the maximum speed a vehicle can
travel without having to make an active control roll. This
number can be increased with accessories (such as spoilers)
or decreased by carrying bulky or shifty cargoes, or by
overloading a vehicle.
Base Armor: Most civilian vehicles do not have armor, but
because of their construction, the have an armor like
effect.
-----------------------
Obviously, the above example is for a ground car, depending on the
vehicle, things would change (example, a helicopter wouldn't have
a top-mounted hard-point, and a drone would have 0 passenger
space).
I also think the concept of a "firm-point" should be gotten rid
of, and instead we either allow people to sacrifice space to build
hard-points, or use different sized hard-points depending ont he
type of vehicle (example, a "large" vehicle has "large"
hard-points while a small vehicle has small ones). Although this
whole concept could be argued forever too, so I'll set that aside
till I get back and think more.
Right now, we have to just think of the very basics of vehicles and
then worry about accessories and what else we can do to this thing.
Well, I'm now at almost 200 lines written on this subject, so I'm
going to sign off for right now.
-------------------------------------
Here is your assignment, class.
Come up with a table for all nine types of vehicles. Argue a
little about what the numbers should fall into what places, and
what other things should be considered part of the body.
(Another though just hit me way down here . . . is three sizes enough?
What about five sizes: Mini, small, medium, large, x-large? You can
argue that too).
That is the ONLY thing we should talk about at this point, so that
we don't get too many things going at one time or it will stop
being Committee by E-Mail and become Committee by Anarchy.
This means, no discussions of engines, no discussions of weapons,
firm-points, hard-points, or decimal points, and no discussions of
vehicle accessories.
***
For those of you who are sitting there stunned and thinking to
yourself "what a facist bastard this guy is", I'd like to correct
you and say that I am not a facist. :)
I'm only trying to keep everyone on track so that this doesn't turn
into blind chaos. For those of you that remember the Ultimate
Dungeon AD&D project from a couple of years ago, the reason it died
such a grisly death was because there were thirty people who were
all running around blindly trying to figure out where the hell we
were going with it. I don't want to do that, so I'm going to try
to maintain some focus here. Please be understanding.
----------------------------
In any case, I'm signing off for now, and I'll talk to you all when
I get back from my trip.
Have fun, play nice, no flames, and save some coffee for me.
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