T20: Thoughts on Vehicle Scaling

[veltyen]

I've been thinking of scaling factors. People here have rightly pointed out that Battledress is incredibly tough for how it is described, and that the arbitary nature of the scaling rules (Vehicles +5 starships +10) didn't really fit the situation.

I tried for a while to model the situation, using math and various formulas to try to find an equation I liked. Nothing was as simple as I would have liked to use.

Then I struck on an idea. The SI tables (pg 253 and pg 261 in THB 1st Ed) overlap, and cover a nice area. Bonus is that you have nice lookup tables to pencil the idea in. The vehicle band 115,000 to 1,315,000 is a close match to 100-999 dTon. If you call that the vehicle high end/starship low end that should be about 7.5, I'll call it 8. If you change by 2 up or down you end up with a nice feild of values.

Examples:
Battledress +2
Jeep +2
Light Tank +4
Heavy tank +6
Container ship +8
Free Trader +8
Destroyer +10
Cruiser/Heavy destroyer +12
BattleCruiser/Dreadnaught +14

I was going to keep 2 points of scaling as the low end (else a toaster would explode every time you dropped it). That's at the point a human can punch off an androids head (ala Alien) though it may take a while.

So what do people think? Any obvious holes?

 

[tjoneslo]

This idea has been discussed previously. It has been genrally thought to be a good idea, the only downside is it adds more math to game. The other suggestion is to match the bonus to the D20 size progression sizes. (Large -1, Huge -2, etc). It scales both ways better.

The one other exception I have is there is no similar scaling for the weapons. That is, the weapon on a heavy tank should also be 2d6 (+6 scale). But rescaling all of the weapons is a pain.