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Just been reading your latest on . My mantra on Stats is that they must do one of two things:

1. Make interesting tactical decisions.
2. Track the state.

Given that, I would include the following from the list:

HP. Vehicle takes damage in exactly the same way that humans. They have more boxes. I would recommend four speeds: Top Gear, Running, Crawl, Immobile. Top Gear means that you can go as fast as you like. Running is the pace at which humans can keep up. Crawl is good for long distances but forget losing anyone and immobile is important because the vehicle may still remain useful even when it can't move. Once you've run out of points then it should be useless.

SDI So the GM knows what dice to use when rolling damage dice (funny that you missed that!).

Abuse. As you say but I would say that it drops a dice only when they fail a roll or they do something fabulously stupid. Like running at full speed over a home-made stinger.

Fuel Yes. Yes. Yes!

Agility - for all driving rolls, we're using Technique. Agility would be good as a +d6s added to this roll. Nice and simple. A difficult to drive vehicle would have no bonus (in our game, a box-van turned APC) a well maintained pickup +1 (in our game they have a pickup truck).

Bonuses to weapons / skills - good for specialist vehicles. Nice.

Ones I'd ignore:

Speed - so very difficult to judge the speed of something because of the terrain and abandoned vehicles all over the place. Most vehicles get modified by the scavengers (normally to lose speed), so this one is a bit moot. Really, a player will decide on one of four speeds: flat out, fuel economy, cautious or stopped. The speed their going at really sets the difficulty level when doing driving rolls.

Crew and passenger capacity - I've seen 8 people get into a car meant for 4. This is a bit moot. PCs will hang onto the outside. If there are descriptions of how big something is and what type it is, that should be enough. The PCs should be encouraged to modify the vehicle (tear the roof off) and a capacity stat suggests a limit. I'd rather leave that as a common sense ruling. Some for Strength/Towing capacity - I think it's a step too far.

Wits / Initiative modifiers - Starting to feel a bit kitchen-sinky.

HP thresholds - This should really be part of HP at the top.

Most of this stuff was carry-over from when there was no scarcity, and vehicles were simply like characters, just bigger rather than having their own set of rules.

I'm not sure how I forgot SDI, but thanks for reminding me.


It seems that in the original rules, You lost 1/3 of your speed for each of the tracks lost from the diagram, with the final track an indication it was still fixable or at least good for parts. After the last of the HP was gone - everything of value was burnt up, scattered to the four winds, or twisted beyond recognition. I was thinking of making it slower degradation, but the KISS principle should be applied. While I hadn't intended my argument for simple stats to be so strong, it will be going back to rough speed estimates.


Since High DR increases the chance of doing damage, not the amount inflicted - most vehicles don't have radically more HP than a human - even a tank is only about 16-20 animus. Most people only have a ranged score of three - so combat to deplete ten or twelve tank hp would take a while. Of course, with an SDI of six or seven it can mostly ignore things the players run from.

At some point I was thinking of vehicle scales. People and most other things are level two, small creatures are level one, and three/four/five wold be light armor, tanks, and giant things like ships. However, getting the ratios and modification of damage was a bit difficult and the players probably won't be getting their hands on cruise missiles, so it doesn't particularly matter.

The threshold idea was a way of instituting critical hits rather than just adding more dice. Modern missiles have between a 60 and 90% chance of killing tanks in one shot, after all. Even with improvements and acknowledging D&B isn't a simulation, an ATGM should do some telling damage in one or two shots, even if it doesn't kill without three more.

Adding would probably be the simpler solution. On one hand, the DR/SDI system was supposed to remove the to hit vs to damage, but with guided weapons, it does seem to make sense to have "guidance phase" vs "warhead". Some better range rules might be needed, but now we're on combat, not cars...

Maybe if you take a hit from a weapon equal to or greater than your SDI, it forces an abuse roll, in addition to any HP lost. Possibly lowered by either certain Special Abilities (tank hunter?) or the difference between SDI and DR (Bigger gun, more likely to penetrate).


I came up with a new idea about Special Abilities. Rather than apples to oranges choices of clout or nano-medicine vs sniper, I was thinking of making all or most of them various ways of altering scarcity rolls. Psychological hardening enlarges the die used in the fear rolls you mentioned in the other thread. Other attributes would affect how much food you get or luck finding spare parts.

When it comes to vehicles, there were a few possibility. Trained X Operator would let the vehicles computer's or on-board equipment act as skilled - anyone can push around dirt, but using a backhoe properly does take some training. Tank Hunter would force the enemy to roll a smaller threshold (or abuse) die when a vehicle takes a hit, while something like stunt driver would let you increase the size.


Perhaps rather than a set weight or person limit, they should have open slots a bit like human pack & up-rise. These would be about 75kg/one person sized and might be split into interior vs stored/towed similar to the division of the human carrying attributes.

Critical hits
I like this idea too but I don't want my players to do much more thinking. How about having a critical depending on the number of 'top rolls' you make. For example, on a D6, 5 and 6 is a success but if you roll a bunch of 6s... that's special. If you're shooting an assault rifle at a tank and you roll 4 20s on D20 - you should get something for that! It's a wild long shot but it gives the players hope. False hope but hope. And that hope is fun. On D8s, it's more likely but it's still madly hard.

Revising Special Abilities
I love the idea of bumping up the scarcity dice. Our characters are burning a lot of deadening and lucidity at the moment - you could have special abilities for regaining it a little faster too. Deadening comes back pretty quickly and a couple of days of rest can refill most of the team but a special for getting it back faster would be cool. You might want to assign AP costs to those sorts of abilities because they're powerful.

Slots is better
I prefer slots. Just easier. Who knows the weight of anything? We don't. In the UK we're so mixed up between stone, lbs and kg that we can't actually estimate anything anymore.

Generally speaking, I like that things are more descriptive. When updating the ruleset, ensure you give the GM some support there. Plucking words out of a thesaurus in a little call-out box list can be really helpful.