I've been seeing some things crossing my Twitter feed about somebody making up a magic combat wheelchair (see the #CombatWheelchair hashtag) for the current edition of The Other Game (tm). So, naturally, I thought about how GURPS would handle it. GURPS being GURPS, it potentially handles it in several ways. I'll delve into how to deal with it as a piece of equipment intended for use in Dungeon Fantasy-flavored campaigns and using the basic magic system.
Wheelchairs are addressed briefly in the core rules. A wheelchair (p. B142) provides ground Move = 1/4 ST, with limitations like movement on staircases, through narrow doorways, and so on. High Tech (p. 226) has full weight and cost stats as well as rules for powered ones, but let's consider the fantasy chair.
The first issue is making it self-propelled. Hard to fight if you're rolling your chair around with your hands. However, it can probably be made self-rolling with the Dancing Object spell (Magic, p. 144). I'd regard pushing or rolling the wheels of a wheelchair as a suitably repetitive motion. The Effective ST of 15 only gets you a Move of 3, but that's not worse than doing it yourself and it keeps your hands free. At 400 energy for the enchantment, that tacks a cost of $8000 onto the chair if we're using DF's enchantment cost rules of thumb.
That also allows self-propelled movement in only one direction. The user will have to turn and reverse on their own. That said, a very fancy self-propelled fantasy wheelchair might have multiple Dancing Object enchantments, one each for forward, back, turn left, and turn right. I'd allow that at a cost of $8000 each and further allow voice or other suitable commands (say, touching or biting control spots) to invoke them as necessary.
But what about stairs? Ideally, there'd be an enchantment for Apportation, but since there isn't, we're looking at Levitation, or a Levitation variant which affects the chair. That's 800 energy, or an extra $16,000 to the cost. That's not self-powered, though, so the user needs to spend some Fatigue to go up and down stairs; that's also helpful for traversing swamp and other very unfriendly terrain. More optionally, Haste adds an extra $5000 to Move for every point up to +3, useful for moving quickly and Slam attacks.
Based on weight, the chair itself has either 12 or 24 HP, depending on whether you think vehicles are unliving or homogeneous. I'd probably call it DR 7 for attacks on the chair itself; we're talking about a fairly open framework here, so no protection provided to the user for the default chair.
Alternatively, a magic wheelchair might serve as a Mitigator to one of the same movement-related disads which would lead one to obtain such a device in the first place. Indeed, one could take a Powers-based approach with a package of abilities (extra Move, enhanced Slams, increased carrying capacity, flight, etc.) based on it. Or it could be built with GURPS Vehicles. I'll leave those as an exercise for the student. One or the other of those approaches is probably better if one intends to armor the thing.
LATE ADDITION: Peter's post made me think about adding things like spikes and scythes for more fun running down enemies. Alas, they wouldn't actually do a lot. GURPS Vehicles: Transports of Fantasy (p. 7) has rules for blades attached to vehicles. That's based on collision damage (p. B430), and that, for a wheelchair, isn't a lot. At a typical pace of Move 3 and assuming 12 HP for the chair, that's 1d-2 cutting damage. Even cranking Move up to, say, 6 with Haste, that only picks up an extra point of damage. Spikes out front would give you impaling damage of similar magnitude. So, then, things like that might look scary, but wouldn't be particularly effective.
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