Hey unkated, great work on the bus stats, very much appreciated
One would have been great but
four of them (plus stats for the 4WD variants as well) is fantastic!
The UAZ 452 & 452D, Niva and Riva are a very welcome addition and the ZAZ-965 is a fun bonus!
It's exactly these sorts of things i.e. vehicles like the UAZ 452D & Zaporozhets, that give some extra flavour to the game world. We have plenty of infantry weapons and military vehicles from the game books but as has been mentioned, the civilian vehicles are sorted into nothing more colourful than generic versions. I know that there's going to be thoughts of licence issues for including "name" vehicles but that didn't seem to be a bother with weapons or military vehicles and for civvy vehicles in Dark Conspiracy and it wasn't simply that there were no Fords, Porsches or Triumphs in the game, it was the lack of utility vehicles like small vans/cargo trucks, buses and other potentially useful types like beachbuggies, ambulance and fire vehicles and yeah, even farm tractors.
The way I see it, there are many more civilian vehicles likely to have survived so it's more likely they will be encountered. However, you rob something from the game if you tell your players they've for example, come across a car-salesyard and it's full of generic sedans with a few generic sportscars in the showroom. Yeah I'm labouring the point but in most games they talk about making the world feel alive to the players, for me the lack of civilian vehicles is a good example of doing the opposite of that.
Now after all that blather, a question. I'm wondering, does anyone else include fording depth on their vehicle cards?
At one point for Dark Conspiracy vehicles, I even added a penalty/bonus for a factor I labelled as "Handling" that loosely represented how hard or easy the vehicle made it to drive. For example, the AC Cobra sportscar was heavy in the front, high powered and light in the rear making it a handful to keep on good roads let alone bad ones or twisting roads and the 3-wheeled Reliant Robin had an almost constant desire to tip over on its single steering wheel if you turned too quickly or tried to turn at speed.
This was a simple +/- 1, 2, 3 or 4 to the PC's Skill rating whenever a situation required a driving test and didn't apply to basic driving tasks. So for example, the AC Cobra was Handling: -2 while the latest luxury sedans with power steering, power brakes & computerized "everything" were typically Handling: +2.
+/- 1 or 2 was common (-1 would be your typical bad handling car/truck), +/- 3 was rare (-3 would be the kind where you needed arms like a weight lifter to wrestle the steering) and +/- 4 was extremely rare (I didn't actually find a vehicle that was so bad it rated a -4 but some PC modified cars hit the +4 rating).
It was part of an overhaul to the vehicles to allow PCs to modify them beyond just adding some armour or a more fuel efficient motor or puncture-resistant tyres. The idea was that PCs could add enhancements like power steering and so on to make the vehicle easier to control but also to offer something beyond the "a car is just for travelling from point A to point B" mentality.