Vehicle combat and regular weapons?

[arcady]

Are there special rules anywhere for naval or other forms of vehicle combat that would address the issue below?

 

Last session of my fantasy hero campaign involved a large naval battle in which we discovered you can destroy enemy vessels with regular bows, crossbows, ballista, and even thrown knives...

 

We used the 'Junk' (vehicle sourcebook) on one side, and a 'Carrack' on the other.

 

They had very low def scores, and fairly low body, and there didn't seem to be any rules about needing 'vehicular weapons' in either 5er, ultimate vehicle, nor the other vehicles book.

 

By the time the two vessels were in boarding range, they were both at negative multiple of their body core, and merely subsisting of 'floating wood' kept up by magic...

 

And I began to think 'if I ever run another vehicle combat, it's going to need some major rules tweaking first'...

[AmadanNaBriona]

Re: Vehicle combat and regular weapons?

 

Are there special rules anywhere for naval or other forms of vehicle combat that would address the issue below?

 

Last session of my fantasy hero campaign involved a large naval battle in which we discovered you can destroy enemy vessels with regular bows, crossbows, ballista, and even thrown knives...

 

We used the 'Junk' (vehicle sourcebook) on one side, and a 'Carrack' on the other.

 

They had very low def scores, and fairly low body, and there didn't seem to be any rules about needing 'vehicular weapons' in either 5er, ultimate vehicle, nor the other vehicles book.

 

By the time the two vessels were in boarding range, they were both at negative multiple of their body core, and merely subsisting of 'floating wood' kept up by magic...

 

And I began to think 'if I ever run another vehicle combat, it's going to need some major rules tweaking first'...

 

This has been a bugaboo of mine for QUITE a while now, and one I've been working on. I'm off to go try and have fun, so I don't have time to explain my ideas fully, but for a start your simplest approach is to assume that anything built with the "Real Weapon" limitation simply does NO body damage to something in that scale.... the weapons still do full effect to whatever object/bulkhead/wall or what not, but there is no effect against the overall body of the ship unless the attack is deemed appropriate by you to do so... and even then, any attack with the real weapon limit may be subject to arbitrary Damage Reduction depending on the nature of the attack. In fact, without going into my ideas for scaling attacks, suffice to say that you could safewly write up most Ships with 3/4 resistant DR vs. non AOE attacks, and most boats with 1/2 or 1/4 DR.

 

There should be some extensive discussions about this on some older threads as well.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Vehicle combat and regular weapons?

 

Aren't there already mentions in the Rules of anything made with Real Weapon that wouldn't work against an inappropriate target just fails?

 

Like the gun that can roll enough Body to blow a door to splinters, but common sense says a bullet hole appears instead?

 

I don't blame the rules for that naval battle ... I blame the lack of application of "Common and Dramatic Sense"

 

That's what it's bloody there for!!

[Lord Liaden]

Re: Vehicle combat and regular weapons?

 

Well, for situations like this I prefer some of the options listed on p. 188 of The Ultimate Vehicle. I've long applied the suggestion of using the wall-damaging rules from Fifth Edition to engagements between large naval or space vessels, at least for attacks that aren't Area Of Effect.

 

That same same page also suggests adding the difference in Size between vehicles to the BODY total for attacks from the larger vehicle, reflecting the greater damage potential from its bigger guns. Although it specifically forbids the reverse, subtracting damage for smaller vehicles against larger ones, to me that seems pretty logical and realistic. I've found that this immediately lessens the problems with some of the Defenses of vehicles as written in published HERO books, versus some of the weapon writeups.

 

Given that, there's no reason you couldn't apply the principle to handheld weapons. Treat all normal people as Size 0, and they're going to have a lot of trouble damaging that Size 13 galleon with their bows.

 

BTW I've also found this to be a great simple fix for the old HERO paradox of a normal human eventually beating a car into scrap with his bare hands. Human Size 0, average car Size Four - do the math.

[Sean Waters]

Re: Vehicle combat and regular weapons?

 

Aren't there already mentions in the Rules of anything made with Real Weapon that wouldn't work against an inappropriate target just fails?

 

Like the gun that can roll enough Body to blow a door to splinters, but common sense says a bullet hole appears instead?

 

I don't blame the rules for that naval battle ... I blame the lack of application of "Common and Dramatic Sense"

 

That's what it's bloody there for!!

 

 

No, it's the rules.

 

 

There have been some interesting threads on this very point. Personally I put it down to several things:

 

1. I don't think Hero ever quite got the balance between damage and defence right for real world objects

2. Large objects like many vehicles should have some sort of 'compartmentalism' mechanic so that, even if one bit is sompletely destroyed it doesn't necessarily destroy the whole unless it is a critical component.

3. What ghost-angel said (only a bit less stridently). Mind you I think this is a fault of the rules too to an extent. It is a bit of a cop out to say 'you bought the game, now you finish writing it...'

 

In essence there is a dichotomy here: 'anti personel' weapons are designed to do 'realisitic' levels of damage to personel. You can put a small hole in a person and get rid of all their BODY. The same is not true of a less differentiated system, like a junk. There's no easy answer in the sytem (well there is: fluff it to make it work, goddammit! - but that is a little too easy for me). You'd need to split weapon damage into penetration and damage, differentiate damage against different types of target, really ramp up the hit location rules...well, it wouldn't be Hero by the time you'd finished.

 

As a house rule you might assume that where weapons are attacking things they were not designed to damage (antipersonel weapons against vehicels, for instance) the target can be assumed to have the benefit of 75% damage reduction. You can still sink the junk with thrown knives, but now it will take all night If that is not realistic enough, apply the damage reduction BEFORE defences. That should do it...

[ghost-angel]

Re: Vehicle combat and regular weapons?

 

No, it's the rules.

 

 

3. What ghost-angel said (only a bit less stridently). Mind you I think this is a fault of the rules too to an extent. It is a bit of a cop out to say 'you bought the game' date=' now you finish writing it...[/quote']

Isn't that the essence of the Hero Toolkit that says .... here's some stuff - you decide what it represents.

 

Killing Attack has no attached SFX until you go "It's a bears claws" or "It's a gun" or "It's a quasaronical death blast"

 

I don't think it's a fault of the rules. I think it's why I USE these rules. If I wanted the system to tell me what a knife was I'd play D20.

[NuSoardGraphite]

Re: Vehicle combat and regular weapons?

 

This exact situation is what the real weapon limitation is all about.

 

I know there are a lot of people who want the game mechanics to reflect the fact that a thrown knife or a crossbow bolt can't sink a large vessel, but the game mechanics don't have to cover for every situation in the game. Thats why Steve put in a caveat about GM using "common and dramatic sense" where appropriate.

 

Now a magical arrow that bursts into flame? That doesn't have the Real Weapon limitation, thus, I'd allow those to sink the ship....

[Mister E]

Re: Vehicle combat and regular weapons?

 

The Beam Limitation should have been more liberally passed out, too.

[Zeropoint]

Re: Vehicle combat and regular weapons?

 

I was thinking about this one day as I was walking down the pier looking at my carrier. The thought of any kind of personal weapon being able to sink a ship that size is obviously ludicrous. In fact, even most superheroes' attacks would be hard-pressed to do significant damage to the ship as a whole.

 

I also thought about the DEF and BODY of the steel decks and bulkheads making up the ship, and realized that if you added up the BODY of every hex of deck and bulkhead, you'd get a total in the tens of thousands, at least.

 

That's when I understood: personal weapons and attacks DON'T affect the ship's BODY, they affect the BODY of individual hexes. Blowing a hundred one-hex holes through the flight deck won't sink the ship, or even seriously affect it (well, except for launching planes!). Blowing a single one-hundred hex hole in the ship well affect the ship's BODY.

 

My take on it is this:

 

1) personal-scale attacks dont' target the ship's BODY, they target the BODY of individual hexes

 

2) accumulated desruction of single hexes eventually affects the ship's BODY, at a rate dependent on the size of the ship

 

3) AOE attacks can affect the ship's BODY directly or by destruction of a large number of individual hexes

 

4) anti-ship weapons of the appropriate scale affect the ship's BODY

 

5) attacks applied directly to the keel may apply to the ship's BODY, to some extent

 

This way, even if you CAN punch a two-meter hole through an internal bulkhead with one shot, you're going to have a lot of work ahead of you to destroy the ship. On the other hand, a single Exocet or Harpoon missile could potentially render the ship unfit for combat. A super with an AOE, Penetrating attack big enough to affect the whole ship could destroy it completely in a few turns.

 

Combined with the size differential rules, I think this would go a long ways towards solving the problem.

 

Zeropoint

[NuSoardGraphite]

Re: Vehicle combat and regular weapons?

 

Great breakdown Zeropoint.

[arcady]

Re: Vehicle combat and regular weapons?

 

That works great perhaps for a very large vehicle with modern weapons used on it.

 

But does the same analogy carry over to a knife thrown at a Cog or Junk - which is only a few hexes wide and maybe 20 or so long (give or take).

 

Obviously the throwing knife shouldn't be blowing out full hexes, but neither should a ballista or longbow (and in Fantasy Hero, longbows often do more damage than ballista when you account for the character using them - that was at least true in the game I ran when it came to the two skilled archers on each side).

 

When firing these personal weapons, it seems the best thing to do might be to just call out 'thud! your knife/bolt/arrow sticks in a wall' when they miss a person scaled target. Of course some personal weapons will hurt the ship, such as 'molitov cocktails', but that will happen in the ensuing rounds as a fire starts.

 

It gets less clear when the mages start casting fire balls and lightning bolts.

[Fenixcrest]

Re: Vehicle combat and regular weapons?

 

I agree with Zeropoint's post for the most part. Depending on how you imagine a superhero's attacks, though, some of those 16d6 EB's can cause a lot of collateral without "Beam."

 

I think that for vehicles above a certain size category, you could probably be safe in limiting things that aren't at least AOE 1 Hex from damaging it. This is especially true in a heroic-level game like most Fantasy HERO games are.

 

For supers, though, I might be willing as the GM to make the provision that if the character is targeting the vehicle specifically, then he might put a little more "umph" into it. Sort of like how in Champions, a typical house becomes unstable to the point of non-saftey once it's sustained 30 BODY. You have to be logical for this case, and assume that that 30 BODY came from superheroic or otherwise explosive/demolition class attacks, and not some dude shooting 30 or 40 bullets through the bedroom wall.

[Zeropoint]

Re: Vehicle combat and regular weapons?

 

That works great perhaps for a very large vehicle with modern weapons used on it.

 

But does the same analogy carry over to a knife thrown at a Cog or Junk - which is only a few hexes wide and maybe 20 or so long (give or take).

 

Obviously the throwing knife shouldn't be blowing out full hexes, but neither should a ballista or longbow (and in Fantasy Hero, longbows often do more damage than ballista when you account for the character using them - that was at least true in the game I ran when it came to the two skilled archers on each side).

 

Well, if your junk is three hexes wide, twenty long, and two deep, that's a total of 120 hexes.

 

I could see a powerful longbow or ballista punching through the hull of a large boat or small ship, but not destroying a whole hex of hull with a single shot, or even several shots. An axe, maybe--you could sure chop up a rowboat with a battleaxe. Otherwise, well, that "Real Weapon" limitation can sure be a pain.

 

Zeropoint

[Zeropoint]

Re: Vehicle combat and regular weapons?

 

Maybe if you divide the total number of hexes in the vehicle by its BODY, you get the number of hexes you need to destroy to inflict one BODY on the vehicle?

[Sean Waters]

Re: Vehicle combat and regular weapons?

 

I've been looking for this thread, and now I've found it:

 

http://herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=31293

[Sean Waters]

Re: Vehicle combat and regular weapons?

 

Hero doesn't do size well: it serves too many masters in that respect, but big stuff should be harder to damage than small stuff, generally.

 

The problem is that BODY and DEF are calculated on an exponential scale and damage isn't.

 

One way to stop an aricraft carrier - or any vehicle - being sunk by a series of small hits would be to simply say that where BODY is calculated by reference to size, ignore any result that does less than half the BODY. Thus to damage an aircraft carrier you have to get about 15 BODY through defences. To damage a junk (I don't have the vehicles book, but it is - what - about 14 to 16 BODY?) you'd need to do 4(DEF) +7(half BODY) = 11 BODY damage before you needed to start recording anything. That should stop most hand to hand damage sinking it.

And it is a lot less work than recording hexes damaged

 

You MAY rule, especially for real big vehicles like aricraft carriers, that individual bits should be targetted - critical systems like the control dexk, engines, whatever, but for a general firefight this should work out OK. You can still use 'real weapon' but sometimes a weapon like an axe COULD sink a junk pretty quickly.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Vehicle combat and regular weapons?

 

You MAY rule' date=' especially for real big vehicles like aricraft carriers, that individual bits should be targetted - critical systems like the control dexk, engines, whatever, but for a general firefight this should work out OK. You can still use 'real weapon' but sometimes a weapon like an axe COULD sink a junk pretty quickly.[/quote']

If the specific intent is to scuttle it ... then yes. Random combat? no, apply common sense.

[Lord Liaden]

Re: Vehicle combat and regular weapons?

 

Maybe if you divide the total number of hexes in the vehicle by its BODY' date=' you get the number of hexes you need to destroy to inflict one BODY on the vehicle?[/quote']

 

That's one of the best suggested guidelines I've seen yet. If that calculation yields a result of 1 or less, then any normal human's attacks would inflict BODY damage directly to the vehicle's total BODY. If it's 2 or above, though, you'd have to destroy that number of hexes to inflict one BODY to the vehicle's total.

[austenandrews]

Re: Vehicle combat and regular weapons?

 

My basic rule is that, at least in a heroic game, you need some form of AE to destroy large objects.

[Fenixcrest]

Re: Vehicle combat and regular weapons?

 

My basic rule is that' date=' at least in a heroic game, you need some form of AE to destroy large objects.[/quote']

 

I agree. I would make exceptions for some magics, though, like if you had a spell that AIDED somebody's STR into the 30-40 range. I'd let the character affected by that AID break large objects, especially if they are solid large objects (boulders, vault doors, giant evil magic crystals*).

 

 

 

 

*Not that it's usually a good idea to just shatter those.

[zornwil]

Re: Vehicle combat and regular weapons?

 

I find it easiest to "fix' the DEF and BOD values to compensate for these issues, but I think the relative size of the target versus the normal size the weapon strikes would be the right way to go, as has been discussed here and elsewhere. Zeropoint has a pretty good take on it, I'll add.

[Zeropoint]

Re: Vehicle combat and regular weapons?

 

Thanks for the kind words, Lord Liaden, Zornwil.

[prestidigitator]

Re: Vehicle combat and regular weapons?

 

I think people get too hung up on the Body and Def guidelines. They are meant to be there as a quick rule for scaling things up and down or substituting different materials IMO. Not for everything, but for objects such as you see on the Object Chart.

 

For vehicles, think of the kind of attack you think is likely to just damage and sink the vehicle, and give it Body and Def accordingly. For ships especially these things can be highly variable. Can the ship be sunk with a simple breach of the hull, or is it sectioned off to prevent this? That could be represented by a simple difference in Body. Are there hand-held weapons that are likely to be able to punch a whole through? If so, Real Weapon Limitations and/or Modifiers on defenses could be an appropriate way to handle things; if not, a straight high Def is probably appropriate.

[Duke Bushido]

Re: Vehicle combat and regular weapons?

 

I was thinking about this one day as I was walking down the pier looking at my carrier. The thought of any kind of personal weapon being able to sink a ship that size is obviously ludicrous.

I'm not in the Forces; my only ship experience is commercial fleet work, but I honestly can't think of a personal weapon that I can think of actually getting through a steel hulled ship-- high DEF.

 

But that's just a record-keeping quibble, and of no real consequence. I just piped up to rep you for this:

 

 

My take on it is this:

 

1) personal-scale attacks dont' target the ship's BODY, they target the BODY of individual hexes

 

2) accumulated desruction of single hexes eventually affects the ship's BODY, at a rate dependent on the size of the ship

 

3) AOE attacks can affect the ship's BODY directly or by destruction of a large number of individual hexes

 

4) anti-ship weapons of the appropriate scale affect the ship's BODY

 

5) attacks applied directly to the keel may apply to the ship's BODY, to some extent

 

 

So, rep to you, Sir

 

We picked up something similar a few years back from a group at a con, and it works really well.

 

Rep rep rep rep rep....

 

 

The only drawback so far was a player with a growth character who thought it should apply to him as well. So we actually had to explain to him that a hole in any given area of the character was substantially worse than a hole in the side of a boat......

 

Some people.... :roll:

[Old Man]

Re: Vehicle combat and regular weapons?

 

(and in Fantasy Hero, longbows often do more damage than ballista when you account for the character using them - that was at least true in the game I ran when it came to the two skilled archers on each side).

 

When attacking non-standard targets you should ignore bonuses to damage from skill levels and maybe even magic. If the arrows cause extra damage because of the deathspell on them, then they aren't going to be doing anything special when they hit an inaminate object.