Gurps Vehicles: From Chariots to Cybertanks...and Beyond! (GURPS: Generic Universal Role Playing System) [ペーパーバック]

Even more fundamental than the book's lack of organization is the utter ludicrousy of the design process itself. The "simple step-by-step process" is set up in about the most awkward way imaginable: first pick everything you want in the vehicle, then decide what kind of body you want the vehicle to have, then add more components, then determine structural characteristics, then layer on armor, then compute statistics. This system is completely backwards for players who wish to design vehicles for a particular purpose. i.e. Suppose you want to build a plane which can travel at mach 2. The first thing you have to do is decide how powerful an engine you want. How on earth are you supposed to know that *first*? Working backwards through the dozens of equations from drag to surface area to volume (which of course is largely determined by engine size itself) is nearly impossible; any attempt at building a vehicle with even vague performance parameters will take several attempts and some very good guesswork.

Most disappointing of all, however, is the fact that even with the ridiculous detail and complexity required to build a vehicle, the performance characteristics are computed using absurd and arbitrary rules with no relation to reality, leading one to wonder what the point of all that trouble really was. Multihull sailboats are defined as being much heavier and having much less usable space per volume than monohulls (opposite of reality), aeordynamics have no affect at all on the handling of high speed cars or fuel efficiency, and little effect on speed (a cardboard box with a hefty engine can outperform a formula one car), a plane's vertical speed is completely independent of its weight (if it can fly at all it can climb as steeply as you like), and jet engines take twice as much space if installed in an aircraft's body as if they were installed in wing-mounted pods (again that sneaky access space rule). There is no uniformity between any two rules and everything is a special case; one wonders if this can actually be termed a "system" at all, or if it's really just a collection of ad hoc solutions to one-time problems. Any GM who wants to use this book will have to make so many changes just to make it playable that he might as well design his own rules; this ruleset's only links to reality are the area=volume^(2/3), top speed=(thrust/surface area)^1/2 formulae available from any physics book.

The only section of the book which seems at all useful is the 3-page note on advanced maneuvering for vehicles (which of course relies on just a single simple statistic almost entirely independent of the painstakingly complex design of the vehicle); this might be appropriate for a magazine article but is hardly the basis for a sourcebook.

All in all, any gaming group is much better off agreeing on their own vehicle rules than wasting time trying to understand and then repair this brain-damaged system.

This module is not for the roleplayers of the first category. Building your first vehicles takes a looong time. But after a while you realize that these incredibly well-thought through rules are to a very high degree compatible with other GURPS rules such as those found in Ultra-tech and Robots, and you realize you can actually build that piece of equipment you need for the next scenario (whether you're a GM or player) with a minimum of fuzz.

If you like this kind of RPG engineering, this is probably the module for you. Guaranteed hours of fun and entertainment.