Hello all,
I've been working on my drone rules again and presented them to my players. So far they seem moderately happy with them except for a few points. One of those issues is the idea that a character trained in a skill to pilot a vehicle while in the vehicle has a small penalty while piloting one remotely, and visa versa. My players don't have a problem with the idea of the penalty but rather with how I proposed it could be bought off.
My original idea was that the penalty would be -10 which could be bought off using the Multiple subskill talent. The issue this seems to raise with my players is that it essentially doubles the number of vehicle skills. Additional subskills also complicate things in other ways, such as if a character has the remote space pilot pod subskill, what would they have for local pilot spacecraft ( the normal subskill penalty is -20, but the remote is -10).
I would like to remain within the standard rules set as much as possible. So while just saying the -10 penalty stacks with the normal subskill penalty is easy, it doesn't have any other example in the base rules.
Other ideas I've had include:
1) Create a new talent (5 point) to specifically buy off the remote/local penalty. It would apply to the skill itself and not the subskill, so you would have one for driving, one for marine pilot, one for space pilot, and one for air pilot.
2) Create a combat style to buy off the penalty. This would be slightly cheaper than the talent idea (4 points vs 5) for characters with combat skills as a favored category. But for characters without combat as a favored category it would be more expensive (8 points). And that doesn't quite make sense to me.
3) Drop the -10 penalty altogether. That eliminates the issue entirely, but also eliminates the idea that remote piloting isn't quite the same as piloting locally.
4) Use the multiple weapon proficiency rules for vehicles. This would treat the local/remote portion as a specific proficiency. The problem with this is that the vehicle skills as written don't exactly follow the weapon skills. So this doesn't fit inside the current rules perfectly.
5) Keep the penalty and don't have a way to buy off the penalty.
Does anyone have any ideas on this?
Regards,