hello

in one of the campaigns i play in, small vehicle combat will probably be quite prominent (think landspeeders and speederbikers, drive-by action, maybe even melee combat on them), so i thought of some vehicle actions that i'd like to get some feed back on. in the following, "Speed Advantage Difficulty" refers to the difficulty that the Gain the Advantage action uses, and i should mention that we basically use 1:5 instead of 1:10 for personal/planetary scale conversion:

Board

When two vehicles are engaged, a character may try to jump onto the enemy vehicle. He rolls Athletics or Coordination vs Speed Advantage Difficulty. On a succesful check, the PC may spend a Triumph to immediately perform a Brawl, Melee or Lightsabre check, targeting a crew member of the boarded vehicle.

Shake off

After being boarded, a pilot may try to shake off the boarder. He rolls an opposed Piloting check vs the boarders Athletics or Coordination. On a succesful check, the boarder falls of the vehicle and suffers damage equal to the vehicles current speed times 5. The boarder may spend 2 threat from the check to land on an allied vehicle engaged with the boarded vehicle.

Ram

A pilot may try to ram or run over his opponents. He rolls a Piloting check vs Speed Advantage Difficulty. On a successful check, the target suffers damage equal to the silhouette of the initiating vehicle times 5 plus the successes rolled on the check. If the target is a vehicle, the initiating vehicle suffers damage equal to the armor rating of the target. If the target is a character, for the purpose of the Speed Advantage Difficulty the target counts as having speed 1.

Penalties

Targeting a crew member of a vehicle requires the aim maneuver.

Closed vehicles grant Defense 1 to crew members.

Armored vehicles grant Defense 2 to crew members.

Firing an unbraced personal scale weapon adds 1 setback die to the check.

Firing a one-handed personal scale weapon while piloting adds 1 setback die to the check.

Firing an unbraced personal scale rifle while piloting is not possible.

Bracing a personal scale weapon requires a maneuver.

Ummm the rules already handle all of this with out adding needless complication. Many of your examples of setback die useage is basically rules as intended. Also firing a rifle from a vehicle you are driving is totally doable. They even had an attachment in WWII to fire a thompson from a motorcycle you were driving. So totally doable you just need something to be able to brace the weapon to. 2 setback would be totally reasonable though.

Closed and open vehicles are already covered in the rules. I would reread the vehicle rules I think you will find all of this is already handled in the rules.

1 hour ago, Daeglan said:

Ummm the rules already handle all of this with out adding needless complication. Many of your examples of setback die useage is basically rules as intended. Also firing a rifle from a vehicle you are driving is totally doable. They even had an attachment in WWII to fire a thompson from a motorcycle you were driving. So totally doable you just need something to be able to brace the weapon to. 2 setback would be totally reasonable though.

Closed and open vehicles are already covered in the rules. I would reread the vehicle rules I think you will find all of this is already handled in the rules.

maybe i accidentally skipped over it, but i neither found defensive values for crew members of closed/open vehicles, nor the actions mentioned above (i know theres a nonexhaustive list of additional vehicle actions, which is why i wanted to write those up), so if you have a page number for those, that'd be great. i know there's a rule on how to handle collisions, but i don't think it covers how hard it is to instigate a collision, and since the vehicles we will use are mostly shieldless, i wanted to try an alternative to the "everyone suffers a crit minus their shields" stuff.

the rifle thing was meant to be for unbraced rifles, i'll edit it for clarification.

2 minutes ago, Klort said:

maybe i accidentally skipped over it, but i neither found defensive values for crew members of closed/open vehicles, nor the actions mentioned above (i know theres a nonexhaustive list of additional vehicle actions, which is why i wanted to write those up), so if you have a page number for those, that'd be great. i know there's a rule on how to handle collisions, but i don't think it covers how hard it is to instigate a collision, and since the vehicles we will use are mostly shieldless, i wanted to try an alternative to the "everyone suffers a crit minus their shields" stuff.

the rifle thing was meant to be for unbraced rifles, i'll edit it for clarification.

it is called cover. Vehicles give you cover. They have rules for cover in the game already. A fully enclosed vehicle gives you complete cover meaning you can't be shot at directly. read all the rules with vehicle combat in mind. Everything you want is already in the game. The rules are flexible so you may have to read between the lines. but everything you need is already in the game. You don't need a special maneuver to jump between vehicles. Consider it difficult terrain and it takes a maneuver to move anywhere with in short. A failure means they get to make a athletics or coordination check to not fall off.

This is not D&D you don't need a special rule for every little thing. The rules are made flexible so as to be easily adaptable to what you are doing. This is why they have a setback boost system. they can be applied in many ways to represent many different problems.

10 minutes ago, Daeglan said:

A fully enclosed vehicle gives you complete cover meaning you can't be shot at directly.

which is why i would have ruled it that vehicles give soft cover (Defense 1) or hard cover (Defense 2). of course you wouldn't be able to shoot the crewmembers of an enclosed starship, but i'm talking open landspeeders and so on. closed might have been misleading, but i meant more like half-open, instead of fully revealed as if you're on a speeder bike.

also, i'm still looking for feed back on those vehicle actions...

So I haven't done much in the way of personal scale combat between vehicles, but here's how it looks to me at first glace.

Your Board and Shake Off rules look feasible. That being said, as Daeglan says, the system is flexible enough that they're unnecessary. Consider this:

Player: "I want to jump onto his landspeeder, can I do that?"

GM(you): "Sure, that'll be a Hard difficulty athletics check based on the speed difference, with setbacks because both vehicles are twisting through the canyon (or whatever)."

or:

Player: "I want to shake off this thug that just jumped on my ship"

GM: "Sure, it'll be a Piloting check opposed by his coordination (because he's a ninja) or athletics (because he's a big brute of an enforcer) with a boost because he hasn't got firm footing yet (as an example)."

This system is made to make situations like that relatively easy to GM. When you codify actions like that you open the door to rules lawyering and (in general) paint yourself in a corner.

BUT. If codifying the rules as such makes it easier for your or your players, I'd say go with it. Nothing game breaking there.

Ram on the other hand...

It looks like you're setting up for a game of Star Wars: Bumper Cars. You definitely need to have some better mechanism for damage to the ramming vehicle. I know physics in Star Wars are iffy, but there's no way a landspeeder should be able to smash into an identical landspeeder, damaging it for half of its hull value, without taking a scratch. Equal and opposite reaction and all that. I'd personally make the damage equal for both vehicles, with maybe a SMALL reduction for the ramming vehicle. As an example, even when a car hits an individual size object (say a deer) nobody is going to argue that the car wins, but there's definitely consequences to the car.

Also, the rules for ramming should (in my opinion) include an opposed check, either piloting or athletics/coordination (if the target is an individual on the ground). As you've written it, hitting an individual is an easy check doing at least 10 damage + success on the target, while having no damage or drawback for the vehicle. WAY too powerful.

Also don't forget silhouettes! Ramming a person is going to be harder than ramming a sandcrawler.

Last (and probably least), you may want to tie setback of shooting personal weapons to differential speed. ie: Scout trooper shooting at Luke+Leia on endor = no speed differential, no setback, drive-by at vehicle speed 4? 2 setback dice.

This may be something that is better played by ear, but if you MUST codify it, I'd suggest differential speed 1-2 = 1 setback, 2-4 = 2 setback, 5+ = 3 setback.

Those are just my thoughts, YMMV.

You know that there's already a mechanic for ramming right? And it's already just as nasty as what you propose.

I'm gonna side with Daeglan and say that much of what you've got is just a hard set version of what's already in the game. So they work fine, but may not need to be as solid as you've got listed.

I do think you may want to take another look at the book, especially damage modeling and Critical hits.

2 minutes ago, Ghostofman said:

You know that there's already a mechanic for ramming right? And it's already just as nasty as what you propose.

I know there are rules for collisions, but that doesn't include how hard it is to instigate one afaik. Also, my problem with it is that both parties just receive a random critical hit, so the instigator could very well be way more screwed than the target, especially since the vehicles I'm talking about have no shields to mitigate the crit. And I think skill should matter, it's not just about driving head on into your enemy hoping the best, just like police officers also know how to ram a fleeing car to take it out (might not be the best example, but you know what I mean).

2 hours ago, oneeyedmatt87 said:

You definitely need to have some better mechanism for damage to the ramming vehicle. I know physics in Star Wars are iffy, but there's no way a landspeeder should be able to smash into an identical landspeeder, damaging it for half of its hull value, without taking a scratch. Equal and opposite reaction and all that. I'd personally make the damage equal for both vehicles, with maybe a SMALL reduction for the ramming vehicle. As an example, even when a car hits an individual size object (say a deer) nobody is going to argue that the car wins, but there's definitely consequences to the car.

Also, the rules for ramming should (in my opinion) include an opposed check, either piloting or athletics/coordination (if the target is an individual on the ground). As you've written it, hitting an individual is an easy check doing at least 10 damage + success on the target, while having no damage or drawback for the vehicle. WAY too powerful.

Also don't forget silhouettes! Ramming a person is going to be harder than ramming a sandcrawler.

That is some valuable feedback right here, thanks.

Regarding damage, it might be better like this: Both vehicles suffer damage equal to silhouette times 5. The rammed vehicle additionaly increases damage suffered by the number of success rolled, while the instigating vehicle reduces damage by the rolled advantages. That way, it's not that uneven, but a good piloting skill still pays off.

For the difficulty, I looked at how Gain the Advantage is handled with speed difference, which should arguably also be an opposed piloting check. Athletics/coordination sounds good to me for people, but I don't think it's WAY too powerful damagewise based on how rarely you have the opportunity to actually run someone over, at least without repercussions. Imho it's similar to having a restricted rifle, it does good damage and it's easy to hit at short range, but you just can't do that every single fight.

And silhouettes, I'm a bit torn. On the one hand you're right, a smaller target is harder to hit, but if you're bigger, you also have more to hit the target with so to speak, so it could go both ways.

Lastly, to all the times it's said "the rules are flexible enough" etc. I know that, that's why I love the system, but imo it always depends on how often these situations come up to decide when it makes sense to solidify a rule. There's a whole list of additional starship actions which in my experience hardly get used, yet they have hard and fast rules for it. Heck, if combat rarely comes up in your campaign, you probably wouldn't even need strict rules for initiative and combat. But if a goup's going to play Mad Max Simulator 3000, it very well makes sense to be prepared for these situations.

1 hour ago, Klort said:

I know there are rules for collisions, but that doesn't include how hard it is to instigate one afaik.

Because the rules for ramming are in a sidebar in Stay on Target, page 65, and it's very close to what you've written.

1 hour ago, Klort said:

Also, my problem with it is that both parties just receive a random critical hit, so the instigator could very well be way more screwed than the target, especially since the vehicles I'm talking about have no shields to mitigate the crit. And I think skill should matter, it's not just about driving head on into your enemy hoping the best, just like police officers also know how to ram a fleeing car to take it out (might not be the best example, but you know what I mean).

Actually it's pretty good, this is what I was getting with about how you need to hit the books about damage modeling and Critical hits. Crits on vehicles are far nastier than you seem to comprehend. Far nastier.

And the thing is ramming is far from an exact science. Even things like the pit maneuver can not work quite right, I've been on the receiving end of it...Long story... When done perfect it's smooth, but the slightest error can still damage the police vehicle or throw everyone into a spin or other collision. The point is that ramming is risky. You can ram me and dent my tailgate doing not much to me, but also put my trailer hitch through your radiator. I win even though you were the rammer.

Now, the ram attachment will help this, and maybe you want to make that available to your players...

Still, it all gets back to you probably needing to hit the books and run the numbers.

38 minutes ago, Ghostofman said:

Because the rules for ramming are in a sidebar in Stay on Target, page 65, and it's very close to what you've written.

Thanks for telling me where to find it, but seems I was not far off after all.

39 minutes ago, Ghostofman said:

Actually it's pretty good, this is what I was getting with about how you need to hit the books about damage modeling and Critical hits. Crits on vehicles are far nastier than you seem to comprehend. Far nastier.

And the thing is ramming is far from an exact science. Even things like the pit maneuver can not work quite right, I've been on the receiving end of it...Long story... When done perfect it's smooth, but the slightest error can still damage the police vehicle or throw everyone into a spin or other collision. The point is that ramming is risky. You can ram me and dent my tailgate doing not much to me, but also put my trailer hitch through your radiator. I win even though you were the rammer.

I comprehend quite well how nasty vehicle crits can be, though it could be argued what's worse, hull trauma or crits, depending on the type of vehicle. What I am getting at, is that imo the skill of the drivers should reflect the outcome, and this is a game after all, where spent experience should benefit you, and not screw you over for succeeding on a check. There is already a random element in the skill check itself without adding 2 more crit rolls, and as you said, when done perfect it's smooth, and that is what the piloting skill should represent.

2 minutes ago, Klort said:

What I am getting at, is that imo the skill of the drivers should reflect the outcome, and this is a game after all, where spent experience should benefit you, and not screw you over for succeeding on a check. There is already a random element in the skill check itself without adding 2 more crit rolls, and as you said, when done perfect it's smooth, and that is what the piloting skill should represent.

And why can't the Advantage/Triumph system be used to this end? Instead of saying that success=damage, why not allow advantage/Triumph effect the crit total or something?

Now that is actually a good idea. I think -10/advantage on your own crit roll, and maybe +20/triumph on the enemy's sounds feasible enough (or +10/success, but that 'd be a tad strong I think?). A good pilot can then mitigate some of the damage, but rarely outright negate it.