Let's get this shit on the road, shall we?

Vehicle Design

Let's go over vehicle design, step by step.

Important Thoughts

Everything that has been ignored, needs to be ignored in the redesign.

By that, I mean facing, weird vehicle movement types, and fuel.

Facing is just dumb, nothing else in d20 uses it, no sense in forcing vehicles to do so, and everyone forgets anyway.

Doing the maneuverability thing for all movement types is cumbersome, annoying, and frustrating. It does nothing but screws the vehicle-using player.

Fuel is just a PITA, and has been ignored so completely that I'm not even sure why I ever bothered including it.

Whole swaths of weird shit vehicles have - weird reactions to crits... there's just a whole ton of crap that needs to be re-thought from the ground up. We can make vehicles cool, interesting, versatile, and useful, it will just take effort.

Definitions

Let's go over some basic concepts, to begin with.

A vehicle is a rather complex entity. Unlike other technologists, the greasemonkey's devices are intended to be "plugged into" a vehicle - that is, a greasemonkey's devices are useless on their own. In essence, a vehicle becomes a device platform, capable of quite a bit of versatility in its own right, with the greasemonkey's personal skills being intended to allow them to pilot any sort of vehicle they come across.

The goal with this vehicle design system is to give significantly more freedom to the greasemonkey to determine the sort of vehicle they want. Given the immense possibilities that exist within the vehicle design space, it only makes sense to enable the player of a greasemonkey to envision the sort of vehicle they want, then allow them to build it.

With this in mind, vehicle construction is now significantly more involved. There are significantly higher points of contact with the designer's goals for the vehicle, allowing you to build anything - there is much more to this than the boring decision of go-kart vs mech.

The greasemonkey device list will resemble standard technologists' device lists. To distinguish the two, greasemonkey devices will have the [Module] descriptor, which indicates that the device needs to be plugged into a vehicle's framework to function.

What is Class

Vehicle classes are a weird concept to begin with. Let's try to redefine them here so they're mildly useful and appropriate.

A vehicle's class represents what the vehicle is constructed for. Slot layout gives a general feel for how its intended to be used, and how the vehicle is fitted re greasemonkey devices tells you what it's doing right now, but these things should be... hmm.

Anyway. VC is intended to give the vehicle inherent bonuses to various things: for instance, a vehicle with heavy Weapons class should have inherent bonuses to weapons, additional turret slots, that sort of thing. It should be better at killing things because that's what it's for. Meanwhile, a vehicle heavy in Engines should be fast, always. One with heavy Systems should have more device slots - not necessarily for weapons, but for interesting things.

I think this makes sense...

One thing that definitely needs to go away is this whole concept of the vehicle's abilities being dependent on the driver. A vehicle's classes should give it inherent bonuses that are always in play, or easy enough to activate (rather than expending greasemonkey resources). Abilities a greasemonkey can use should be in the greasemonkey class, not the vehicle class.

Slot Layout

Slot Layouts
Level	Worst	Poor	Average	Good	Best
Cost	-1	0	1	2	4
1	0	0	1	1	2
2	0	0	1	1	2
3	0	0	1	1	2
4	0	0	1	2	3
5	0	0	1	2	2
6	0	0	2	2	3
7	0	0	2	2	4
8	0	1	2	3	4
9	0	1	2	3	4
10	0	1	2	3	5
11	0	1	3	4	5
12	0	1	3	4	5
13	0	1	3	4	6
14	0	1	3	4	6
15	0	1	3	5	6
16	0	2	4	5	7
17	0	2	4	5	7
18	0	2	4	6	7
19	0	2	4	6	8
20	0	2	4	6	8

First(?) step, decide on slot layout for the vehicle in question.

Slots come in three flavors - high, medium, low - and a vehicle's progression in how many slots they have of the relevant type, in terms of base values, is dependent upon greasemonkey level.

Because apparently I'm fond of this concept, we will work essentially with point buy. A greasemonkey has 5 points to distribute in the 3 categories. Here are the values over level and their point cost.

Okay, so... this makes slot layout independent of classes taken, allows the greasemonkey to determine the chassis type and such on their own. Gives significantly more freedom over predefined advancement paths.

Me gusta.

Point costs - eyeballed - seem adequate and roughly indicative of value of more slots of a given type.

Do we give more slots later, in classes or as talents? - not sure. Given the availability of option to entirely forgo a slot of a given type, the ability to later gain slots seems self-evident from the design (as does absence of odd-numbered slot layout options).

Speed, Cargo, and Power

Design Layouts: Base Values
Points	Speed	Cargo	Power
-1	20 ft.	10 lb.	4
0	30 ft.	20 lb.	8
1	40 ft.	30 lb.	10
2	50 ft.	50 lb.	12
3	60 ft.	80 lb.	16
4	80 ft.	120 lb.	20
5	100 ft.	150 lb.	26
7	120 ft.	200 lb.	32
10	150 ft.	300 lb.	40

Once the slot layout has been configured, the next part of ship design is determining speed, cargo space, and power output.

Again, you have 5 points to spend, distributed through the three values. A vehicle with a speed of 0 ft cannot move, and a vehicle with 0 power cannot operate any devices (but can still move).

These are just base values: note that they are modified by vehicle size, and various vehicle devices can modify their values.

Design Layouts: Size Multipliers
		Modifiers
Size	Abrev	Speed	Cargo	Power
Medium	M	x1.5	x1	x0.75
Large	L	x1	x2	x1
Huge	H	x1	x4	x1.25
Gargantuan	G	x0.75	x6	x1.5
Colossal	C	x0.75	x8	x2
Vast	V	x0.75	x10	x2.5
Enormous	E	x0.5	x15	x3
Immense	I	x0.5	x20	x3.5
Titanic	T	x0.5	x25	x4
Awesome	A	x0.25	x40	x5

Speed

The bigger the vehicle, the slower its speed.

Cargo

The bigger the vehicle, the higher its cargo space.

Power

The bigger the vehicle, the more power it has.

Structure, Armor, Shields

Design notes only, here, yo.

Structure = HP
Armor = AC
Shields = DR (ablative) ... yes!

Weapons

Weapons come in three major categories: turrets, launchers, and pulse.

Turrets do direct damage.

Launchers throw projectiles, which can be independently attacked, but do AoE damage.

Pulse do damage to the area around the vehicle. Unlike the other two, pulse weapons do not require a dedicated slot type.

Turrets come in three varieties: projectile, hybrid, and energy. Projectile weapons do normal weapon damage. Hybrid weapons do a combination of normal and energy damage. Energy weapons deal exclusively energy damage. Durr.

Launchers, likewise, can have projectiles that deal normal, hybrid, or energy damage.

Pulse weapons can... also do all these types.

Hrm.

Power Plant

Electrum Power Plant
Vehicle Size	Capacitor	Recharge Rate
M	x0.5	1
L	x1	1
H	x2	2
G	x3	3
C	x4	5
V	x6	7
E	x8	12
I	x10	19
T	x12	31
A	x15	50

Every vehicle requires a power plant.

The power plant type chosen modifies: max power and power recharge.

WELP that's simple enough.

Recharge needs to be relatively maths-light... not sure how to handle it at the moment, but that's a thing.

So then capacitor-based modules will interact with recharge rate and maximum power and such.

Yay.

Electrum: An electrum power plant consists of a series of electrum plates in a vacuum-sealed structure, constructed in the power plant manufacturing plants of the city of Edge on Arcturas, the only city in the Philomena system with the ability to produce these engines. An electrum engine provides an incredible amount of power, with a strong recharge rate: however, the engine can only recharge when it is not in use. On any turn in which a vehicle moves (beyond a 5-foot step), or activates a module that requires capacitor to activate, the vehicle does not recharge any capacitor. Forced movement does not count for purposes of whether or not an electrum engine can recharge.
- Special: In the event that a vehicle with this power plant is reduced to negative hit points, roll d% (and again at the beginning of each round that it has negative hit points, or if it takes more damage). If the result is less than the absolute value of the vehicle's current hit points, the vehicle suffers a "core breach," and the electrum within the power plant has been exposed to the outside world. If this occurs anywhere other than within the atmosphere of Arcturas, the engine is immediately rendered useless, and the vehicle can take no actions. If this occurs on Arcturas, the engine will still function, but needs to be repaired and the casing resealed, otherwise the vehicle will immediately cease functioning upon leaving Arcturas.

Modules

Vehicle Weapon Capacitor Usage
Level	Blaster (Hybrid)	Railgun (Hybrid)	Pulse (Energy)	Beam (Energy)	Pulse (Pulse)
1	4	8	16	12	20
2	8	16	32	24	40
3	16	32	64	48	80
4	32	64	128	96	160
5	64	128	256	192	320
6	128	256	512	384	640

Damnit. Need to reconsider device design: do we take into account student level, or no?

Like... should there only be one instance of a ball control? Or should there be multiple, with each one having better bonuses? Without additional fitting requirements... I'm not so sure. But I really don't want to get into managing that many different resources for vehicles - this is already plenty complex.

Things like armor reps and such should have multiple versions, they do X amount of healing for Y amount of power over the same duration, and with power being a finite resource, that works, I think.

But things like ball controls, not so much. Should just be the one.

Rigs

Beginning to suspect that rigs may be unnecessary and overly complicated. Not sure yet - we'll see what happens.

Worst part about all this is going to be running some numbers through it to see what comes out the other end. With so many steps, so many decision points, it would be easy to screw up and miss something big. Wouldn't want another orc metamorph problem...

Random Design Notes

September 22, 2013

Versed in the Force applies to vehicle class level.

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