Basic Vehicles (Savage)

Context: HL Kit … Authoring Examples … Savage Worlds Walk-Through 

Overview

There are two varieties of vehicles defined within the Savage Worlds rulebook. Basic vehicles have all the standard characteristics shared by all vehicles, such as civilian cars. Complex vehicles are outfitted with a variety of weapons that must be handled appropriately and introduce a number of additional wrinkles. So we'll focus on the mechanics associated with basic vehicle in this section.

New Tags

Vehicles behave similarly to weapons and armor within Savage Worlds. As such, we'll be using the same basic approach in implementing them. The first thing we'll need to address is the assortment of tags that will be needed for vehicles. After taking a moment to review how vehicles are handled, there are three different facets of vehicles that we need to keep distinct: the type, the era, and any special characteristics. So we'll create a separate tag group for each of these facets.

We'll start with the vehicle type, of which there are three basic types defined in the core rulebook. These are ground vehicles, aircraft, and boats. Since all of our tags are defined in the file "tags.1st", open that file and locate a suitable spot to insert the new tag group (e.g. after the armor-related tags). We'll make tag group dynamic so that supplements can define new vehicle types, if necessary. We'll use an explicit order, but we'll leave gaps in the ordering so that supplements can insert new vehicle types into the list wherever they want. This yields a tag group definition that looks like the one shown below.

<group
  id="VehType"
  dynamic="yes"
  sequence="explicit">
  <value id="Ground" name="Ground Vehicles" order="10"/>
  <value id="Aircraft" order="20"/>
  <value id="Boat" name="Boats & Ships" order="30"/>
  </group>