I've posted a few times about vehicles in Hammercalled before, and they're a persistent thorn in my side so every time I've been breaking things in between.

Tarn "ToadyOne" Adams, creator of Dwarf Fortress, once (infamously) said:
> "[B]oats are the enemy of tiles, and tiles are the enemy of boats."
# The Problem
Hammercalled's vehicles are making that sentiment very relatable for me, though obviously some of the technical issues aren't there.

I'd known that vehicles had to be in Hammercalled for a long time. It was the sort of thing that you just need in a game that's aiming for a science-fantasy setting, and there are a lot of things that vehicles permit that need to be done in the system in some way.

However, Hammercalled is also pretty light (or at least **pretends** to be), so the vehicles system runs into issues because it might require things that we don't want in the game due to complexity.

So, let's go into detail about how they work.
# Vehicles are a Complication
Hammercalled is designed in a modular fashion, divided into roughly two categories: the core mechanics and the player characters.

The entire game centers around player characters in a way that many games don't. That lets us be really slick in a lot of ways, and I think that goes a long distance toward getting stuff done.

However, the result is that characters have a linear relationship outward to the mechanics. Think of each character as a container for a set of contents. You have a separate scheme with the core dice mechanic (d100) and the systems like Combat, Margin, Threshold, and so forth, and a variety of points of interaction between the two (though neither characters nor the d100 directly interface, their sub-modules do; talents can alter Margins, for instance).

Vehicles have an odd role in this. As much as possible we want them to have new, meaningful mechanical interactions.

However, we don't want these interactions to muddy the waters, and we don't want vehicles to supersede characters (if you want to play a talking car, we want you to make a character, not a vehicle).

Right now, however, this is the spaghetti we get with vehicles:
![hammercalled.png](https://ipfs.busy.org/ipfs/QmS3EyvFfquABuUWAVKSKB8JrNmCrmiRuDa8zn3ocVZGDc)

While this graph is a little confusing, it shows which things connect to which; right now characters have Gear, Attributes, Talents, Specializations, and Vehicles, and vehicles have Gear, Attributes, and Talents, albeit under different names.

Vehicles also have a new quality, Scale. Characters aren't currently set up to handle that at all. Gear winds up inheriting a whole ton of scale issues because of how that goes, and if I were finally to do a graph for all of Hammercalled it would also wind up with a nice little connection into Combat and a bunch of the other subsystems, which is not good.

This creates some issues because the vehicles steal the show from characters, to say nothing of potential balance concerns.

So, I'm trying to think of some possible solutions to this, and some are kind of radical. I'll share more thoughts tomorrow, but here's the gist:

* Vehicles as a gear type?
* Vehicles streamlined significantly?
* Vehicles as-is, but with tweaks to streamline things?

There are other considerations; will there be characters with Scale?