After Douglas
Wojtowicz's ideas for Vehicle Rules were published
on the Feng Shui Mailing List,
Chris Meadows (the Robotech Master) was looking for a way to combine Doug's ideas with Chris' own Transformers Conversion (found here on Comrades In Arms) |
Ahhhh.... but the Transformers usually have no pilots. They are special creatures in their own rights. As such, your rules are for sentient, bigass beings. Mine are for mooks and vehicles. As such... Transformers and Power Armor are completely different.
Even though, in the episode "Only Human", the "Rebirth" miniseries, and in the Japanese Transformers series, Transformers are used essentially as "power armor" for the humans and/or smaller robots? :)
Yours are Player Characters and GMC's... mine are glorified guns and movement platforms.
But... think of it this way... Just have your characters permanently listed as +5.
(Well, for the full-sized ones. +2 for the Beast Warriors, since they're smaller.)
Now that the system has been stretched to accept
megadamage beings, Transformers with states of 10 - 20 are a stretch on
the regular universal system... but not obnoxiously so.
Incidentally...I've been trying to reverse-engineer
this from your rules for Supernatural Creatures, but couldn't quite get
it. Assuming that one converted the TFs "back into" mega-damage critters,
using the reverse of the process in your RIFTS conversion rules, how much
MDC would they have? :)
Alright... what it boils down to is this. Size and weight matter enormously.
A 500 - 1000 pound power armor can have around 250 MDC (SAMAS, 600 pounds with fully loaded rail gun). Also, this suit posesses a Str of 30. It's under 10 feet tall.
Meanwhile, you have the Skull Smasher. 28 feet tall, so +2 Toughness and 80 tons for a Body 16, Tough 18. Yet... it's 990 MDC. I didn't go straight with the Engineering, however, use the already printed RIFTS robots. Find one in the right size frame to your actual Transformer. Then, apply as appropriate. Even among similar heights you have a load of variation, which is why Weight/Mass is the determiner of Body. That's where I stated it in the text. Reverse Engineering can be tough.
So, in general... find a robot of the right general weight to match it. With the Japanese comics data you have, the Japanese love printing things like heights and weights. Find a power armor or robot which is to scale, and put it in the same ballpark.
For example...
Optimus Prime, classic. I'd put him at 10 meters tall, (30 feet, already +2 Tough). Looking, I find the Skull Smasher, 30 feet tall, thick bodied. It weighs 80 tons total and has 990 MDC. Optimus Prime, however, seems about a third of that mass. He'd be 25-28 tons, and thus in the Body 14 range. I ead somewhere Optimus had a ground move of 200 miles per hour... so Move 20. He's only -1 to Dodge, has a Tough of 16, and at least a power 17 weapon.
Checking the book, I find, weighing in at 25 tons, the IAR Hellfire.
480 MDC. Much more mass is devoted to heavy weapons and ammunition than
Optimus, so, we an see Optimus' height going towards the weight savings.
Since this IS Optimus, we put him with 500 MDC. Autobots have several
advanced features though, including full artificial intelligence, transformation,
possibly regeneration (internal nano-bots and perhaps absorbing of local
materials). Optimus is wise and charismatic, so factor that into his stats.
Converting FS to Palladium and Back Again |
To convert Palladium stats to FS, divide the stat by 5. Add 3 for named
characters.
If a mental or physical substat is sufficiently higher, each +3 is
+1 to that substat. Same for negatives in reverse.
Reversing FS to Palladium | |||||||||||||||||
Well, first of all, its harder than a lot of
this other stuff has been.
You need a d6, and roll it as a d3 and add it to the 2 or 6 values like 6,12,16,22. Unless you're talking about Supernatural strength... then use the table previously shown and fudge the values. Or, you can simply do this: MDC = Tough x 30. Granted, that Tough 18 Skull Smasher now only is limited to 540 MDC.
However, for Player characters, it works, and Transformers can always have
snap-on armor just like Valkyries from Robotech.
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Reverse
Engineering MDC
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It's a mathematical
progression.
It works for Robots... don't fret with it. When you go up one level from 8, just add 2.5 for each level to the Multiplier. Base is 8 = 240 MDC
Math is ugly... but hey... why not?
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