Do you like the older RPG systems better than the newer ones?

[Aotrs Commander]

The problem with what you're describing is the shear number of variables and work you'd need to put that into a "game". What you're describing would be better as a simulation program rather than a TTRPG.

You could simulate what you're describing though, with relative ease. Rather than describing the individual variables, treat them as one that is changed per individual vehicle. Something called Agility.

Vehicles with low Speed and Agility are very easy to hit. Vehicles with high Speed can easily harass a vehicle with high Agility. Vehicles with high Agility can quickly adapt much better than a vehicle with high Speed. Speed is more important in prestine conditions (like on a road or in an empty sky) but Agility is more important in chaotic conditions (a ruin of a city, or an asteroid field).

Some vehicles have both low speed and low agility (like a tank), but most are a balance of both (like a motorcycle).


At least, that's how I'd implement something like that. The gain of tracking 5 different variables for mobility across every vehicle just seems unrealistic for gameplay. Tracking 2 streamlined variables seems...fine.

I have never seen a satisifatory vehicle combat system in an RPG. (Well, I suppose you might be okay if you played MechWarrior.) Heck, most wargames aren't very good at it and even if they are, it tends to require large, not small, numbers.

If it's any consolation, I would have agreed with you until I had some time to really digest Unearthed Arcana.

Never touched that myself - never heard anything about it that made me want to.

Sounded like the least useful bits of the Rolemaster Companions - a lot of alternative systems that were almost certainly not playtested very much.

I'm the exact opposite. Classes like the Green Star Adept are what Prestige Classes should have been, and classes like Mystic Theurge are just the laziest-possible attempt to paper over the fact that the system as designed doesn't work.

Bleakbane's First Rule of RPG Mechanics: I Don't Want Your Flavour.

I'll use it if I'm running someone else's module (and Golarion, which i run all the APs on now, helps by being the ONLY game world in my thirty-years of experience that I think is good enough to buy the source books to read for the fluff for fun), but otherwise, I'm not going to be playing on anyone else's worlds but mine, and I take a dim view of disconnected random flavour nonsense that only exists to support a load of usually-quite-rubbish abilities.

(This is why we only play 3.x and Rolemaster with regularity - many other RPG systems are tied directly to some form of genre/world and I rally don't care for that, unless it comes with a REALLY GOOD set of quest books, like Warhammer first Ed did and Paizo has with the adventure paths.)