Warcraft Vehicle Battles

MMOs give dungeon masters and players more opportunities to write their own tales within the world. World of Warcraft provides a fantastic world and history to tell stories, chart campaigns, and run events. From politics to war, you could do anything in the game, in Discords, on blogs, and in virtual tabletops.

Expanding from in-game character events, Vehicle Battles (VBs) and events can focus on hero characters, squads, armies, and units for air, land, sea, and other environments. Using extensive graphics, you can create a custom location, objectives, battle effects, and allow players a rich landscape to fight and expand on their story!

Vehicle Battles can include special objective events, large scale battles, and fun derbies. I've created many such events for players over the years and am working on guides and details for creating tokens, building maps, and running big bad ass battles!

Large Scale Warfare	Missions	Derbies
Squads, ships, tanks, and other large powerful units combat groups of units on a battlefield. Units could be restricted to available environments.	Specific mission on a moving map. These could be infiltration, stealth and scouting, stopping a ritual, battlements and towers, etc.	Wild and crazy, no holds barred, last one standing battle for humor and silly prizes. Epic arena attacks and surprises, can include chariot races and audience participation.

Token Libraries

See the following helpful libraries to find and build tokens:

• Sonceri Token Library
• Grid Bases for Maps
• VB Map Library
• Magic Effects and Token Templates
• Maxen Token Library

Want to create tokens? See these guides to help!

📄️ Getting Started with Tokens

This guide walks through creating vehicle tokens. We use these tokens for Discord-based battles in Warcraft Conquest. Typically there are a few types: squads of character models, beasts, and vehicles.

📄️ Capture Assets

With an idea for your build, begin capturing assets and by cleaning up the images you collected, start removing backgrounds, cutting up bits, and setting up layers.

📄️ Create an Easy Token

The easiest way to create a token is using one that already exists. You have a ton of options:

📄️ Create a Vehicle Token

With an idea for your build, and assets collected, it's time to create a ship! The best way to explain how to edit together a new vehicle. Check to make sure you have the major assets you need. As you build, you may need additional assets, requiring more captures and clean up.

📄️ Create a Squad Token

Squads are small groups of units using character models, such as flamethrower engineers, magisters, riflemen, and more. You can create these easily with cool transmog and the WoWHead Dressing Room or the WoW Model Viewer.

War Machine Rules

Vehicle Battles use the War Machine system created and maintained by the Warcraft Conquest community.

• Conquest War Machine System 3.3
• Unit Templates

Sonceri House Rules

Fast Repair/Brink of Death

If an attack would send your unit to 0 or negative XP, you normally would leave the field or destroy your unit. This house rule allows for healing and repairs to get you back into the battle! Players hit by an attack and reaching at or below 0 can receive "healing" through a rolled amount or Fortify ability. If you used Self Destruct, that's it. That ability is meant to take you out of the battle while attempting to deliver a strong blow to everyone around your unit. When at 0, you have a choice of calling out for help, or writing posts of your dire situation, helping to alert others of your endangered state.

OOC Repairs/Heals

You have a choice if your unit would be repaired or healed before the next VB. You are not locked to one token, one unit, per campaign. You can always bring another vehicle, unit, etc. Options for Hard Core, in-game or discord repair events, etc may be added depending on length of campaign etc.

Hero units

You can build your character as a squad, including your character with minions, devices, magics, etc as a HERO unit. They can be just as effective as a tank.

Mission Battles

Some Vehicle Battles (VBs) will have a specific mission or objective with restrictions on the types of units brought to the field. These could include stealth and scouting, magical rituals, investigations, defending a location, building fortifications, delving a dungeon/raid/boss location, etc. So many options! These are story driven, objective events with custom options in each.

Custom Ability

As with in-game Expertise options, VBs may eventually support a similar option for a 1 custom ability per unit. This would be employed like Empower, preparing to use a custom ability in one round, using it the next round. This could be abilities like teleport, aoe heal, etc. Still in the works, but could make for inventive play!

Planning a VB

1. Decide on a location for the battle and the objectives. You can cobble together a map from various screenshots from in game, models from WoWHead and WoWTools, etc.

2. Balance the number of players with enemies. I strongly recommend fewer enemies with higher health pools over large numbers of easier enemies. Each enemy will require a roll, RP post, and edits in the map. 15-20 players may require 15-20 enemies. For boss battles, consider variations and changing aspects to the boss model(s).

3. Add tokens to the map using grouping of layers, color coding groupds, to easier handle finding and editing unit locations, HP, and effects.

4. Ask for the Unit Info in the following format: Discord Tag Without the @ - Vehicle Name - Traits/Type - HP ### - Atk ### (Antitrait) - Initiative ###

   For example: loriolio - MECHADON - Armored Artillery - 200 HP - 125 Atk (AntiArmor) - Init 0

5. A VB will have a lead DM running the PSD files and tokens. Get others to help DM the VB with you, having them create stats and roleplay info for units, dividing them between the DMs.

6. Ask players to post their unit name, target unit name, and how they attack in the roleplay post. Also have them end the description with: (@discordtargetname, Unit hit, damage amount, anything special, any movement locations).

7. Remember stories! You can tell a tale and explore events through VBs, not just big explosions.

8. Consider alternative options for interactions: capturing units, saving units, destroying or rebuilding the area, syncing actions between a Discord VB and in-game event, have actions in one event affect the next.

9. Plan your events using Google Docs shared with DMs. Here's an example of three vehicle battles to help!