kevperrine wrote:Lindharin wrote:
Or presumably, if they are piloted by a minion then they have minion-scale hits (10-50 depending on "quality" of the minion).
So...
If #24 the Minion is driving (bright yellow) M.O.D.O.K.'s A.I.M. VW-van, with the dangly fuzzy dice and hula-girl on the dash... it's got 10 Hits.
BUT...
if M.O.D.O.K. himself takes the wheel, it shifts to 100 pts because of his ultra-villainary uberness?
Sorry for the delay, I've been trying to figure out how to articulate an answer here. I know you were teasing, but it raises a really good point that might be worth discussing further. This is probably going to be really long winded, so sorry in advance.
Let me start by saying I get what you're saying, and it is totally valid to treat the vehicle as an objective element, so a VW van with hula girl bling is always 10 hits, regardless of who is driving it.
But that isn't the way I personally would run it. There is a conceit (for lack of a better word) in gaming and many other types of storytelling, including comics and action movies, that I think of as "script immunity". It's always been there in RPGs in one form or another, but the first time I really saw it articulated in that way was the first D20 edition of Star Wars RPG. Vitality was described as, at least in part, a form of "script immunity".
Does the 12 year old, 100 pounds, acrobat who puts on a red robin's outfit to help his guardian fight crime really deserve 100 hits, when the seasoned mercenary soldier who weighs 250 pounds (all muscle) gets 20 or 30 hits? Hits aren't just about actual physical ability to withstand damage, it is about story importance. More than many other games, Bash seems to embrace something like script immunity when it comes to the hit system. Robin gets 100 hits because he's a hero, and it is his story. The deadly mercenary gets 30 hits because he's basically an "extra" in this story. Now, maybe that deadly merc has some terrible things happen in his personal life and he becomes the Punisher, and then in his story he has 100 hits. He's not really any physically tougher, just his role has changed.
Getting back to vehicles, when Luke Skywalker is attacking the first Death Star, he's in an X-Wing that is no different than anyone else's. Yet all the nameless pilots who are with him get shot down in one hit. Even most of the named pilots who are with him get shot down in one hit. But Luke gets hit, and it just damages a "stabilizer" that his trusty R2 unit can "lock down".
Sure, that can be explained in other ways. Maybe his attacker rolled poor on his damage, or Luke rolled well on his soak. Maybe he used a hero die to "never surrender". There are lots of ways each of us can choose to handle that in our games within the rules framework Bash provides us.
In my game, my default assumption would be that the character's role in the story is the driving factor for determining Hits. If he's in the same vehicle as some nameless extra, his vehicle will still have more hits because he's the one in it.
The quality of the vehicle will still play a big part in any conflict, though - after all, its stat block affects it's defense, soak, attack and damage rolls. Luke will be much happier going into a firefight in an X-Wing than an unarmed, unshielded shuttle. But even if he's stuck in that shuttle, he's probably not going to be simply blown up in one hit.
Having said all that, I guess I should add that really is just my "default" approach, but I would tweak it to fit the story. I probably wouldn't give 100 hits to the VW van from your MODOK example, either. I'd probably say the heroes can disable it for a fraction of that, but MODOK walks away from the crash with no more than scratches or something. But that is because I can easily believe MODOK could survive a car crash; trashing the VW van doesn't really * up MODOK himself, and it is MODOK who has script immunity, not the van. The scene just proceeds with MODOK mind-blasting the fool who took out his favorite fuzzy dice.
Change your example to MODOK in a VW unarmored space shuttle, in space, and I would be more likely to give him the full 100 hits for that shuttle because destroying the space shuttle means really screwing over the character. If that is how the fight is going to take place, he deserves his full script immunity, unless I have some other way in mind to believably continue the scene after the shuttle's destruction.
