VeloCITY Racing
""
An in-progress overview of Game Mechanics in VeloCITY
Overview
This section will talk all about building, using, and interacting with races, parks, buildings, and all types of zones in VeloCITY
- Zones: The overall areas your characters can explore. Think of them as world maps.
- Nodes: Nodes are the bits most important to your character's interaction in the world. If you're a programmer, you might consider them metaphorical Entities.
Zone Mapping
A 'Zone' is the overall area your characters are currently in. It can be any size, from City-scale, to District-scale, to Neighborhood-scale, to Building- or Park-scale. A Zone by itself has a few simple statistics that measure it
- Name: The name of the Zone
- Size: The scale of the Zone
- Faction: The faction of Velo that currently controls this area. If none, it falls to the Police, or it is a Neutral area.
Nodes
A Zone by itself is fine and dandy, but what can your players do in an area? Node maps are the solution. With Nodes, you can define the actual chunks of the zone that matter. Every 'Node' is a possible element of the map that players can interact with. For this reason, node maps are extremely fluid and can change quite easily. It's best to keep the nodes in a map to only things that players currently want to interact with: During a race, you're going to want to define the race stretches as Nodes, possible alternate routes, and any relevant areas for tricks.
Nodes have a few defining features:
- Every Node should have a default interaction roll, unless it seems unnecessary. If you're going to use a computer in a net cafe, you don't need to roll. If you want to use it to access obscure info from St. Altitude's outdated computers systems, that'll be a smarts roll.
- You should also define the default type of roll involved. An average rail will probably be an average Test. An extremely long, downhill rail? Likely to be a Challenge. A node cannot by itself be a duel, however, characters can likely duel on Challenge nodes if they are both on the same node.
Canny MCs will allow their players to interact further with their environment. If it's a schoolyard, there will probably be a flagpole. It may not be stated in a node map, but a player can invoke its existence if the MC gives the go-ahead. This is called 'Tagging' Nodes, bringing them out of the background into the interactive grid.
Example Zone: Skyway Park
- Skyway Park, Park-scale, High Fliers territory.
Skyway park is a verdant skate park with numerous opportunities to break something. Run on the rooftops of Skyhigh Apartments by an old skater called Hind, who uses it to scout talent for pro-am competitions.
Sky Jam Contest
The Sky Jam is iconic of Skyway park, it's almost a coming-of-age ceremony for High-fliers to participate in the Sky Jam.
Race Section
Skyway Park uses its full size for this relatively brief race section. It's all about how explosively you can get from point A to point B.
Characters are considered to be starting at their max speed
- NODE 1: Starting Ramp, Muscle+Power+Vertical Moderate (TN3) Test
- NODE 2: High Rail, Grace+Maneuverability TN10 Roll Challenge
- NODE 3: Short Gap, Momentum+Power+Vertical Moderate (TN3) Test
- NODE 4: Wall Ride, Agility+Grace+Maneuverability Difficult (TN5) Test
- NODE 5: Long Dash, Max Speed TN13 Total Challenge
- NODE 6: Low Rail, Grace+Maneuverability TN13 Roll Challenge
- NODE 7: Finish Dive, Momentum+Grace Simple Test