The GURPS PDF Challenge Reviews: Tricked Out Rides

So, in the beginning of July, Warehouse 23 ran a Kickstarter, the "2020 PDF Challenge" which included 12 PDFs.  I'm going to try to review all twelve (in the order they were released).  If you missed the challenge and want to pick them up, I think you still can, and I believe the price is around $3 apiece.

The first to drop was Action 6: Tricked-Out Rides.  TL;DR: This is totally worth getting for anyone who follows the Action Line.  It's not GURPS Vehicles by any stretch, but it's more than enough for most action games. It has a few holes (it really should have jump jets for cars), but by and large, it'll let you build almost any car (not motorcycle, tank or fighter jet) that you'd like to see in an Action game.

Tricked Out Rides is a 10-page PDF by Sean Punch, whose work is always impeccable. It has two sections: the Introduction and the Body Shop. It's short, but dense, and it packs a lot. Think of it as like a very long and very detailed pyramid article.

The book gives you a series of "standard" vanilla vehicles, from a sub-compact car all the way to an HMMV, and then has rules for upgrading them with a variety of options including:

• Improvements to the core statline
• Integrated Upgrades
• Electronics
• And cool gadgets

This is not a replacement for GURPS Vehicles: it will not give you realistic stats.  But it doesn't want to. In GURPS Action 1, they gave you the option to take a standard vehicle and "downgrade it," for the hero who wanted a beat up, rusty old Chevy. This does the reverse, and gives you the options to improve things.  A lot of options are patently unrealistic if you stop and think about them.  For example: any upgrades to armor or the mass of the vehicle would reasonably slow it down, but they don't; similarly, upgrades to speed would likely come along with measures to reduce the weight of the car, but nothing stops you from doing both at the same time, having both a heavier, tougher, faster and more agile car.  The book even discuses this in a sidebar on Modifications and Weight, and I happen to agree with this approach.

"I'm going to need you to get all the way off my back about this, sir."  

--Ryan George, Pitch Meeting

Look, this is GURPS Action, the realm of things like "Knight Rider" and "Air Wolf." The writers of Knight Rider didn't stop and think "But where do you fit the advanced mainframe on which the AI is installed into a Pontiac Trans Am?" It just does, okay? The point of these vehicles is to be cool, not to break them down into their core components, blue-print them, work out their aerodynamics in a wind tunnel, run some complex calculations through excel that involves the dreaded cube root, and then come up with the actual top speed to three significant figures.  It's for people who just want a super cool vehicle now. When you pair this with the standard Action rules for weaker vehicles, you do get something of a substitute for GURPS vehicles.

So can you build KITT with this? Alas, no.  I looked. You can install a computer, but it caps out at Complexity 3.  There are (rather shockingly) no rules for jump jets that I could find, which I'm definitely going to give it a bad mark for, as for awhile, "cars that jump" was all the rage in the 80s, so not having that is a huge oversight; it's also not something I can easily work out myself how that should operate, so it would be appreciated! But you can make what amounts to a race car with turbo boost (NOS) and you can armor the vehicle, and you could probably use the same basic rules for gadget installation to install some UT gadgets, if you really wanted a robotic car.

So most of these vehicles that you'll make with Tricked-Out Rides will either be a facsimilie of a real-world vehicle if you want some sort of system to build out an actual vehicle, but you don't want to use GURPS Vehicles or GURPS Spaceships, or you'll use it to build a more subtle-than-KITT James-Bond gadget car, or a suped-up Fast-and-Furious car.  Other than oversights for icons like KITT, this is a pretty thoroughly good book and I'd call it a must-have for any Action game unless cars really don't matter to your game. I will also note that it doesn't support non-cars.  There's no motorcycles, tanks or fighter jets in here (though I don't think it would be a problem to assign these rules to motorcycles).  There is a sidebar on the dangers of high-octane military weaponry and how it can wreck a campaign, but given that Action 2 discusses nuclear weapons, I feel like a sidebar warning against the dangers of a Heavy Machine Gun is a little narrow-minded.

Another downside to the book is that it uses the standard rules for Signature Gear, which makes these vehicles ridiculously expensive.  The example spy-car clocked in at 39 points.  I'm not sure if you bought it as signature gear, you'd get 39 points worth of advantage from that car, as in a lot of cases you wouldn't be able to leverage it.  Contrast this with a tricked out gun that's going to rarely run you more than 1 to 5 points... Of course, you can just pay for the vehicle, or requisition it from your organization, but I think the hefty character point price on these vehicles will make players hesitate to get them. Mind you, you need some sort of limitation there, to explain what Billy Bob gets for taking his discounted, beat up truck intead of a sweet ride like Damien Swift's street racing spy-car.  I'm just concerned that the signature gear rules would overly punish Damien Swift given the utility of his spy car.  But that's not something that Tricked out Rides can really address.

I'll definitely be looking through this for how to apply it to Psi-Wars.  I thought about going with something like this, but the problem I ran into is that we expect fighters and capital ships to vary too much from one another.  We don't expect there to be "a generic capital ship" and "a generic fighter" and then trick them out, we expect wildly different designs and bespoke experiences.  Even so, I can imagine people might want to tinker with their vehicles and get "the most out of them that they can."  But given that I've stepped away from dollar costs for signature gear for ships, I'm not sure what that would practically look like.  If you allow it "for free" then people will take all the upgrades you allow.  If you put a character point limit on it, that needs to be applied by some consistent measure.  While I disagree with the implications of the Signature Gear system that Action 6 uses, it does mean you know exactly what 1 character point can buy you!

Overall, it's a great book.  It belongs in the collection of any Action gamer.  No, it doesn't cover every possible vehicle you'd want in an Action game and indeed has a few glaring holes, but what it does offer is dense and useful, and even where it has holes, those holes tend to be pretty obvious as to how you could fill them (add some ultra-tech, apply this same idea to motorcycles, maybe even the fighter jets from Dogfighting Action, etc). It's better for people who want to run games inspired by James Bond, the Fast and the Furious or Dukes of Hazard than it is for people who want to run Knight Rider, Air Wolf or Top Gun, but I think that's a perfectly acceptable scope (with the inability to properly stat up KITT as a noted exception).