Hi everyone. I’ve been a fan of The Sprawl for a while, about to GM my first session this week, and the discussion on this board has been a big help in wrapping my head around the game. That said, I have a couple questions regarding drones and vehicles.
Are there guidelines anywhere about how much punishment drones and vehicles can take? I have a Driver in my PC group, and I don’t want to take his toys away too easily. Vehicles are listed with either 1- or 2- armor, which makes it sound like they can be damaged with handheld weapons, but I can’t see anything about when they should be pronounced disabled, or nearly anything about drones in combat for that matter.
And on a related note, should a Driver linked in with second skin take feedback damage when his metal buddy gets shot?
Any help is appreciated, thanks!
There really aren’t guidelines for vehicle damage. The GM damages vehicles as a GM move. You kind of assess the weapon and the drone and figure what happens. An assault rifle might demolish a FelID cat spy drobe, but only slag the tires of a Mitsundayi Goliath pickup.
More guidelines: I use something I think of as the 1-3-2 Layaway Rule.
One: Anything established in the fiction to be fragile can be taken out without warning (1).
Three: Anything known in the fiction to be especially tough needs to be stripped of its tough status (1), then put in peril (2), then it can be taken out (3).
Two: For anything else neither especially fragile, nor especially rugged, you should move once to put it in peril (1), and then you’ve established the tension necessary to take it out (2).
Layaway: The story can buy destruction on layaway. If you foreshadow something’s destruction, (or if PCs in an RPG do a lot of prep), you are making a layaway deposit. You’re basically saying “actually, it’s really NOT that tough” – you’re telling the audience about the chink in Smaug’s armor. That lets you take something out in one shot later, no matter how rugged. The “layaway” deposit needs to be commensurate with the thing’s toughness.
The 1-3-2 Layaway Rule works for just about everything from writing fiction to running any RPG from OSR classics to storygames and everything in between.
This works for PCs and NPCs. The PCs can’t just take out the gang’s armored battle bus in one shot, or even two; but if they pay the Layaway deposit to get a stinger missile, then yeah: They can just take out the battle bus in one shot. The NPCs shouldn’t be able to just take out the Tech’s rapid combat drone, but they can strafe it with machine gun fire and hurt it real bad, and THEN take it out the next turn. Or they could pay the layaway deposit and show a corpsec badass taking out an assault cannon, then blow it up later in one bazooka shot.
Jon Lemich That actually makes a lot of sense, thank you.
That’s a great guideline, Jon!
I definitely thing of the standard as:
* First MC moves puts something in danger and compels the PC to take action to save it.
* If the PC does nothing to remove the danger, the second MC move can take it out.