AWB of course has several projects on the boil at any one time and two of them currently revolve around the Fallout franchise of computer roleplaying games. First is playing Fallout as a miniature tabletop game using Ambush Alley Games 'Tomorrow's War' and the second a traditional pen and paper roleplaying using the 'Heavy Gear' rules published by Dream Pod 9.
Most of the ideas to make these projects work are relatively straight forward. Tomorrow's War is already a flexible open set of rules designed to be used in any setting, the main stumbling problem being the well know slow pace AWB takes to paint figures. Playing Fallout as a roleplaying game takes a slight more bit of ground work. All equipment and beasties that might be used in the campaign need to be converted from computer stats into the roleplaying system. Not really that big a deal; guns are guns, humans are humans and there is no magic system to worry about. After all, roleplaying is a group activity and as long as everyone has a reasonable idea how an object works then most groups can run with it.
Which brings us to the Pip-Boy.
Now for those readers who are not familiar with the Fallout Universe, and seriously, AWB is currently frowning at you in a concerned and angry manner, the Pip-Boy is the wrist mounted portable computer the main character wears that doubles as the game's main player interface. Think of it as a large smart phone with rubbish graphics and a few health monitoring aps. There is some implication that they are bonded for life to their user, or at least cannot be removed without the owner's permission (ref the Fallout 3 add on Operation Anchorage) although it is probably safe to assume they can be removed or none of our heroes would ever get in and out of those skin tight suits of stealth armour.
The problem is V.A.T.S.
Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System is a game mechanic that allows Fallout 3/Fallout New Vegas players (where the game is 1st person shooter for the most part) to conduct limited points based targeting in the same way that Fallout 1 and 2 (which were action point based 3rd person isometric style games) allowed the player. With a handy press of a key the game player could pause the action, carefully assess the tactical situation and target enemies for violent destruction. While never stated as such, perks such as 'Maths Wrath' within the game strongly imply that V.A.T.S. is controlled by the Pip-Boy, but how?
Clearly if V.A.T.S. and Pip-Boys really existed they would not be able to physically freeze time. If they could then, well, those powers would no doubt be used for evvvvvvillllllll(tm) and not improving your next shot with that 10mm pistol you are carrying. Within the game, the down side to V.A.T.S. is that weapons degrade faster. How this is meant to work AWB honestly has no idea. Let's just all assume the increased weapon wear is simply a play balance tool and move on. What is probably the best guess as to how the system works is that the Pip-Boys uses a combination of it's built in sensors and some motion prediction aps to track the immediate targets, calculate existing weaknesses based on detectable injuries and then offer up predicted travel paths and offset aiming points. Or something. It strikes AWB as to be similar to the predictor gunsights that started to come into service late in WW2. In theory they offered up a lot of useful targeting aids, but only after the user had entered in a reasonable amount of data first. In practise they seemed to make an average shot better, while the good shots who already knew how to judge deflection ignored them completely.
So, getting back to putting V.A.T.S. into other gaming projects.
The great danger is to make it a super weapon. In Tomorrow's War the scope is not the hero character but the movement of squads and fireteams. Tomorrow's War uses a buckets of dice type system where the higher the roll the better, and better troops get to roll bigger dice. Elites for example may roll D12s, while scum play with D6. Middle ranks get D8s or D10s. Since the system involves opposed dice rolls where one side must beat the actual number rolled on the dice, the difference in dice size can be very powerful.
So making V.A.T.S. increase dice size, which was AWB first idea on the subject, is probably not the way to go, especially since in universe the only people with Pip-Boys are Vault types and, player character excepted, most of them are pretty rubbish fighters.
The feel at the moment therefore is that V.A.T.S. gives reaction bonuses. Tomorrow's War has a reaction test mechanic where the side must test to see if they successfully 'react' to oppositions moves. In this a natural '1' is 'Bad' and the (non play tested) feel is to allow units with Pip-Boys to re-roll any 1s.
Which may work. Like we said, it is non play tested and a work in progress.
Our second project in the Fallout Universe is the old school pencil and paper Roleplaying game. Here the problem is both trickier and easier. First we can just solve the problem by ensuring all players never get to wear a Pip-Boy in the first place. If that fails, or we decided we do want to have our PCs wear the blue and yellow jumpsuits, the size of the problem will probably depend on how flexible the players are and if they are around your table to role play or roll play. A good role player could just state 'I am going into V.A.T.S.' and the skilled game master inform them, 'stuff happens'. A roll player would probably want to know the dice roll modifiers. Here we have some options - bonus to hit, bonus to crit chance, bonus to initiative or maybe just bonus intelligence about the target to be given to the players.
Personally AWB is thinking that 'if' the Fallout RPG campaign ever gets off the ground it might just be the easy escape with 'Plan A', but should the campaign start and RobCo's most famous wrist watch gets an outing, then AWB will keep you posted.
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