Armored Vehicles

[Bober]

Hello! The party I'm playing with owns a Medium-Wagon, and is doing some improvements on it. One of them is reinforcing its sides, with the help of a blacksmith to add some metal bars and maybe some thicker wood.
I noticed the Wagon by default has 9 AC (10 - 1 Large Size), but I couldn't find anywhere how much you can improve it by reinforcing it.

Is there any rule that explains how much AC you would gain by reinforcing it (or any other large object, like a gate for example)??? At first we thought to use the "animal armor" rules, but it wouldn't make much sense since the kind of armor is very different from what you could put on a horse or a humanoid (you wouldn't put a chainmail on the sides..)

Thanks for the help!

[Wheldrake]

I would treat it more like a battlement or tower shield against ordinary missile fire - partial cover or total cover, depending on the height of the walls and your position behind them.

Against siege weapons, fireballs and the like you would be better served using the hardness/hitpoints system of static obstacles than the armor class as such.

Aren't there already provisions for such stuff in the vehicle rules?

[Scott Romanowski]

Besides the rules in Ultimate Combat, the Jade Regent Player's Guide has rules for caravans and wagons.

One weak point of wagons is the horses. What do your characters do if they're 200 miles from civilization and the enemy has killed your horses? You'll be stuck with a big, heavy, valuable armored wagon and no way to move it.

[Bober]

This are the defensive stats for a basic medium wagon:
AC 9; Hardness 5
hp 90 (44)
Base Save +1

I couldn't find anything about reinforced sides or other upgrades. I guess we will use the hardness/hp system; since we wanted to add metal bars to make it stronger, we can use metal stats instead of plain wood..

The horses are not an issue.. we have more than we need, and in the worst case scenario someone can go buy more while we settle where we are stranded and wait for them..

Thanks

[Claxon]

I suggest taking a look at the rules for Skull and Shackles ship customization and adapting them.

So, in your specific case it sounds a lot like you're doing the Armor Plating customization which they have as increases ship hp 15% and increase hardness by 4, which sound like reasonable things to apply to your wagon too. It doesn't increase the AC.

However, if any of you actually have the profession(driver) you get to add that skill (not a skill check just the flat skill bonus) to the AC.

Quote:

AC and Hardness: This is the AC and harness of the vehicle. The AC assumes the vehicle is in motion and the driver has not modified the AC with his driving skill. If the vehicle is not in motion, it has an effective Dexterity of 0 (–5 penalty to AC), and an additional –2 penalty to its AC.

Edit: Just realized Jade Regent has a specific Armored Wagon which instead of increases hp and hardness increases the AC of the caravan by 3.

Regardless, the most effective way seems to be to invest in profession(driver).

However, it's worth noting that according to the rules the AC of reins on your horses is only a 14 (which doesn't appear to be increased by skill). So if someone starts attacking your wagon, they probably are just going to attack the reins and leave you dead in the water, so to speak. Each set of reins destroyed (I'm assuming each horse has their own) increases the DC of driving checks by 10 and if they're all destroyed you can't pilot the wagon at all.

Also, they can just attack and kill your horses.

While you might have more horses or more reins that you can replace the damaged ones with, you will not be able to continuing driving and will have to fight.

[Bober]

Thank you, that's a lot of useful information!

I do realise that we might have to stop and fight eventually, but we decided to reinforce it anyway. Between those of us with mounter combat, and those who can use loopholes or stand on top of the wagon and shoot arrows/magic, we have a good dmg output while moving, just in case we can't stop..