Writing Every Day 10: Vehicles, man.

With this post I'm crossing over into the double digits with the Writing Every Day series. Hopefully I can keep my momentum up and the series improves over time.

Since I've had some harrowing experiences on my commute over the past two days, I've been thinking about vehicles quite a bit. I thought a brief observation about vehicles in RPGs was warranted.

In traditional fantasy RPGs, the Game Master doesn't often have to worry about vehicles. Sometimes you'll see the players get involved in a high(ish) speed cart chase or take a ship from one port to another, but they aren't often a major component of the setting. There's an exception to every rule, of course. Airships are a recurring trope, and D&D's lightning rail was an interesting way to get trains into the game, but vehicles are far less common in fantasy than many other settings.

Historical, Modern, and Sci Fi RPGs have vehicles by the truckload, and for good reason. High speed chases through crowded city streets are awesome, as are white-knuckle dogfights between fighter planes or spaceships. You can't run a good Akira homage without fleets of motorcycles buzzing around. But vehicles present a challenge to the Game Master. What do you have everyone do?

This issue crops up more in games where all the PCs are on the same vehicle. For a quick example of what I'm talking about, let's consider the scene in Star Wars when the Millennium Falcon escapes the Death Star as if it were an RPG. (Skip to 2:30)



Luke and Han get to man the turrets to fight off the attacking TIE fighters. Chewie gets to fly the ship; admittedly his maneuvering is pretty prosaic compared to later installments, but it's something he gets to do. Leia only gets to say, "Here they come." Poor R2 only gets to put out a fire, and Threepio doesn't get to participate at all.

Of the characters in that scene, who's going to be the most invested and have the most fun? Probably Chewie, Han, and Luke's players. They get the most interesting stuff to do. Chewie rolls to maneuver and evade the fighters, Luke and Han get to blow them away. The Game Master throws R2 a bone by giving him the opportunity to repair damage—his player chose an astromech, after all, and probably wants to do some engineering and repair. Poor Leia and Threepio, though. Their characters just have to sit and enjoy the ride.

Now, not every character needs to have a huge part in every scene, but they should have something to contribute. A player who has no choices for actions to take is going to get bored, fast. You can offer up critical tasks to the other players, like R2 putting out the fire. Leia in the cockpit has access to the scanning and communication on board and can coordinate the actions of R2 and Threepio to deal with critical damage as it occurs. Depending on the capabilities of the Falcon, she might even choose to leave the cockpit and strap on a toolbelt herself, or help with the calculations to jump to hyperspace. Something. Anything.

Some systems have a selection of roles aboard larger vehicles. Rogue Trader has complex rules for each role contributing to the overall result. For Pathfinder, the Admiral of the High Seas supplement does something similar. No matter if your game has a system in place to handle these situations, read through those games to see how they deal with the problem of giving every player something to do during these vehicular engagements. It may help keep everyone's attention during what should be a tense and exhilarating action scene.