Wise Turtle Publishing

Despite my general dislike of sports-based anime, my attention was captured by the concepts proposed in Oban Star Racers. A high-powered and high-speed race scene through bizarre alien landscapes featuring all manners of weaponry and semi-magic. As such, I wanted to know how to stat this kind of thing up in the game.

The idea I have at the moment is to give the vehicle stats like Attack to determine the weaponry, and to seperate it's capabilities into several different categories, such as Flat Speed, or Burst, or Acceleration, or Manoeuvrability, etc. However I'm stuck on what particular abilities to use for the Pilot, aside from Knowledge skills representing particular techniques. It seems like any way I cut it it's almost all going to rely on Piloting, even if I shift some responsibility to things such as Quick, Perceptive, or Evasive.

Well combat expert and evasive applies to piloting vehicles as well as on foot. You don't really need a huge list of abilities. The ships themselves should have things like quick/slow or agile/clumsy. Also remember a chunk of the show had those cool between races scenes and give players a chance to do stuff outside the ship.

If you’re worried about Pilot being too “catch-all” for this kind of campaign, replace it with several separate abilities. This is touched on in the “Changing the Focus of the Game” sidebar on page 64.