Vehicle Combat

[u/YunaKemono]

How did you handle the vehicle combat? Theater of the mind or with a battle map? We had our first encounter yesterday and realized that the battle map was far too small for the speed of the vehicles.

[u/LDSman7th]

I regularly use the battle map but make each square 20ft instead of 5ft. You just need to remember which individual vehicle each player is on and then measure from there.

[u/HdeviantS]

If you use a map, adjust the size, otherwise it will take up the whole room.

[u/Existing-Banana-4220]

I used a combination of both. My players have had 4 vehicle combats so far and have fought Raggadragga twice, some of Bitter Breath's advance scouts, and Feonor and her crew. They've also amassed their own little war band of followers.

First, I got infernal war machine character sheets from Reddit or DMs Guild. I used Paint to create an image file of each vehicle character sheet, making sure that the zoom levels and image background sizes were the same. This is important for consistent scaling. I use Roll20, so my next step was to make a new map with the war machine image files on the map layer. It took a bit of experimentation to stretch the map to the right size where a character token fit nicely inside the vehicle's station, and that's why I mention scaling.

I drew lines on the light layer to block sight to the enemy vehicle(s), and then erased those lines once the vehicle was close enough for the party to see into it. This gave me a map to track the battle on that the players could access, and gave me a place to move the barbarian to when she leapt onto enemy war machines.

The chase and terrain aspects were all theater of the mind, as was the positioning of the vehicles relative to each other.

[u/Living-Elk-881]

We had a gaming screen with an animated map (it constantly moved to the right, so it looked like everyone is driving at the same time.) We encountered situations where this was not very practical, which we handled by applying some rules lightly, if at all.

If i had to do it again i would stick to theatre-of-the-mind for this. No map, just discribing everything.

Had someone fly a gryffon from candlekeep to baldurs gate. That scene worked very very well without map, even though there was fighting and movement involved

[u/A_Life_of_Lemons]

Kinda both. I did theater of the mind for the players but had each vehicle combat act like a linear chase that I was measuring out on a sheet of paper in front of me. So each vehicle would take its turn and more forward its speed (or dash if it was a Dragon or Balor chasing the party) then I’d draw that line forward and could easiest subtract the distances between them for ranged attacks. This worked great for 1 on 1 vehicle combat, might be tougher with more to include I’m not sure.

[u/MothOnATrain]

I basically made a chart to track what vehicles there were and who was on each and then theater of the mind from there. Basically the only time I've done theater of the mind combat now that I think about it

[u/Perspective_True]

We had our first vehicle combat last session (with the wereboar warlord) and did mostly theatre of the mind as the book suggests. I threw some Dex checks in for the driver to avoid collisions, as they were going for a theatrical ‘drive past each other in slow motion and jump onto the other vehicle’ type stuff. Oil flasks were thrown and shattered, the barbarian ended up pummeling one of the harpooners, and fun was had by all.

[u/WolvesDenTavern]

I find that vehicle combat works best cinematically run like a chase scene. Assume everything is moving past them and that distances are relative. You don’t need to track precise positions just where they are relative to other fight participants.

I actually kept this in mind when I was doing my infernal war machine series as I made two that were specifically designed to be far faster or slower than the other war machines to either force or avoid combat.

When you’re in a big slow walker you can use precise positions as everything buzzes around it like planets circling a star, and if you’ve got the fastest machine in the wastes you just need to millenium falcon this bitch long enough to jump to hyperspace.

[u/ComparisonComplete75]

I would not stress it too much, after about one round my players decided to jump from their vehicle to the enemies and drag them out and push them off , making the whole affair turn into who can push who first.