I’m new to the game and the community so I might have missed this in the book or on the + page but I have a question.
I’m looking to have power armour in my game so I’m trying to figure out the best way to handle it. Right now the most obvious to me is using drones with a profile but I’m wondering if I’m missing a better way.
Not sure if The Sprawl is the best choice for a game involving power armour. It’s more about the gritty cyberpunk stuff than big stompy robots or mechs.
Someone has hacked PbtA to provide a mecha game at https://github.com/SteveWallace/World-of-Mecha
Might be worth checking out to see how he’s done the genre.
The podcast Friends at the Table are playing The Sprawl lightly hacked for mecha anime. They use the vehicle rules for their mecha; that could work for powered armour as well.
Depending on why you want power armour, you could write a move or two that covered the notes you wanted to hit.
Why do you want power armour? Is there some particular source material you want to emulate?
Someone raised a similar question a while back – the consensus was to give everyone a vehicle according to the rules from the Driver playbook (and give the driver some extra compensation if necessary). Remember, that vehicle can already represent anything from a motorbike to a gunship, so power armour is certainly not outside the rules…
But how important is this armour going to be in the game? If this is about having one character – a Killer, perhaps – with some fancy kit, then letting him take some of the Driver stuff is a simple answer.
On the other hand, if you’re going to have everyone stomping around in space-marine armor, it might work better to just let them describe themselves that way, with no mechanical weight. It doesn’t need to give them any mechanical benefits, because it’s balanced by the opposition being equipped appropriately for the threats they have to respond to – if power-armored assailants are something corp-sec encounters, they’ll be packing anti-armor weapons, etc.
It is primarily that they exist in the world so if they manage to snag one just want that mechanical effect to work with. They be of the Bubblegum Crisis variety
The variety doesn’t mean anything to me, but from what you’re describing, treating it as a Vehicle and letting them take some Driver moves as advances might be the easiest thing to do.
You’d also want to consider whether your characters would be capable of operating such a suit if they find one. Presumably this would normally require a lot of training, so you want to think about whether they could fire it up immediately for the current mission, or if this is something they’d need to haul away as loot, and figure out how to operate it during downtime. Depends on the tone of your game, naturally.
Simon Geard I never needed any training to fire up my power armor with a sweet fusion core in fallout 4. How hard can piloting advanced military-grade technology actually be?
cortex jackal
Yeah, I can’t picture it being that easy in reality though. You put on the armor for the first time – you’re suddenly taller, stronger, maybe faster-moving than your brain is accustomed to. You’re going to break stuff – probably including fellow trainees – if you don’t take it slow. 🙂
And can you picture scaling it up to mechs instead of suits? I’ve tried operating heavy construction machinery, and if that’s any guideline, it’s gonna be “oops, sorry about your house” for days.
I was being sarcastic 😛 Also commenting on how it’s silly that 3 minutes into fallout 4 you get power armor and automatically know how to use it even though you’ve been frozen for a while and would have almost no concept of how to use power armor.
cortex jackal
Yeah, I got the sarcasm, don’t worry… and I agree it’s silly.
But a lot of RPGs do enforce that kind of element, since if you’re trying to jump into a mech and fight a battle without possessing the “drive mech” or “gunnery” skills, it’s not going to go well for you, especially if the game also has untrained usage penalties…
cortex jackal I know its terribly out of context, but in Fo4 you were a soldier previous the the bombs going off. You have worn power armor before.
Oh shoot. You’re right! Good catch.