VDR

No, this isn't a dyslexic post about the glories of video cassette recorders.

It's a post about a much overlooked element in many games, often referred to as vehicle design rules.

Within the hobby, we rely on army lists and points to try to ensure that the game is fair on a competitive front. As such, we constrain ourselves to vehicles and units that have preset rules and stats when building our forces. Turning up to an organised event with something with home brew rules and stats rarely goes down well.

That being said, the diversity of vehicles that exist in the real world is huge, even before we start adding alternative weapons to existing tanks and such. During wartime, most countries have developed new technologies to try to outdo the enemy. Even the "tank" name we use to refer to a wide range of fighting vehicles has its origin in wartime counter espionage. These new vehicles often would see little action due to flaws in design that manifested only when they were put into service. Thus there are numerous battles fought with weird, often temperamental vehicles, and games designers can't be expected to create and test rules for each of the failed experiments; they have their work cut out keeping the Tigers, Churchills and such up to date with the rules and meta.

This is where vehicle design rules come into their own. For the most part, any home brew vehicles will be a weird anomaly, so, in those systems with codified VDR, any metric tends to rate them too high deliberately, since the opponent will have no idea what to make of them. In most of the others, it takes some lateral thinking, and is generally best left to narrative games and games within an established group, where your opponents know the reasons for the weird vehicles.

I'll take, as i often do, 40k as an example. In its third edition the company realised that there were numerous licenced models and variants of models that were legal in the previous edition or editions, but weren't covered by the new format army lists. To satisfy the hard core who wanted access to Imperial Grav-Attack skimmers and such, they produced a VDR, published in both White Dwarf and Chapter Approved. This was a basic breakdown of how they, roughly speaking came up with ballpark points values for new vehicles, and was a long and complicated process (as there were no vehicles in the original 40k releases, there was a similar arcane ready reckoner in Rogue Trader). Thus, those of us who liked making weird and wonderful models could do so. There are even rumours that some of the vehicles with official kits these days began as fan creations using these VDR.

Of course, that was 19 years ago, and the game has moved on. The 2017 Chapter Approved, however, did give us a modernised take on a VDR, giving rules for creating custom Land Raiders. As before, they were over pointed (well lower-level, but that's harder to make into a verb), and only for use in Open and Narrative games. The system though, got me thinking: when the now ubiquitous Chimera first appeared, in Epic, there were 4 versions, the Chimera, the Chimedon, which lost its arrays but got a short range battlecannon in the turret, the Chimerax, which swapped the turret for autocannon (plural), and the Chimero, which mounted a hunter killer missile on a standard Chimera.

Taking the principles from the Land Raider article and applying it the Guard, i quickly came up with workable forms for the 2 Chimera variants that aren't available in the rules as they stand. A Chimerax mounting an Exterminator Autocannon or Punisher Gatling Cannon, but losing half its transport capacity and the ability to take a hunter killer missile, and a Chimedon, mounting a Conqueror Cannon, but losing half its capacity, the arrays and the option for a pintle or hunter killer. It could even be taken further, ditching the transport entirely to fit a battlecannon and making it a Fast Attack option. I even rattled out some rough points costs. It'll take some work to get the models made up, but it's a fun thing to be looking at doing down the line.

Basically, so long as you don't try to work the system in your favour, the games we play, for the most part, are boxes of paints that we can play with. Custom vehicles can really add character to a force, and be a lot of fun to play with. The chances of actually winning a game with something weird adds a whole new variable, which is half the fun itself.