Air Combat and Driving Mechanics

[kaikatsu]

Hey all.

Does anyone know where some good mechanics are for air/air or vehicle combat?  I have a fairly fleshed out system.  I can post details if people want, but for the most part, it's fairly a fairly unsurprising, level based, classless d20+something system with optional metagame mechanics.  Person to person combat is pretty well figured out at this point.  I'd call it an improvement over OGL d20 on many fronts, but I'm biased.

That being said, when it comes to vehicles, I find things are lacking.  In particular, I don't have a good way to simulate a car chase.  I've been doing it, so far, by throwing skill checks at both drivers and seeing who screws up first.  That works, but it seems to be lacking something, and there's no way for the chased to get away other than for the one persuing to screw up.  Not so keen on that.

Even worse are the air to air combat mechanics.  As in, I don't really have any good ones.  Sooner or later some air to air dogfighting is going to come up and I'd like some system support.  (The world certainly supports it.)  I could use a tactical map for air combat if I had to, but if I could get away without one, that would be cool too.

Does anyone have any suggestions or existing mechanics to raid for ideas?  I'm not so much looking to publish this as just have fun running it with friends, so I am quite willing to copy good ideas wholesale.  (But not the words, I know what copyrights are...)

I'm aiming for something on the gamist side of things.  Realism is good, but I don't want to slow the mechanics down too far.  Quick and dirty and fun is best -- but at the same time -- if I could emulate the effects of a scissor fight as the aircraft turned on one another, that would be very, very cool.

[Shreyas Sampat]

Hm.

Have you seen the Extended Conflict mechanic in HeroQuest? It might work for you. (Unfortunately, I don't have a good enough handle on it to explain it in a useful way, but I'm sure that poking around in the HQ forum will be useful.)

[Saxon Douglass]

A quick thought on your car chase mechanic:

A good way to try it is to have the first person to beat the other by 10 win. To make this a fast process, you can give bonuses when the distance between results is less than this. Every time their is no "winner", give the player who had the better result a +5 bonus. You then roll again - if someone wins by 10 then they succeed as usual. If neither wins then you see who did better. If the player who had the +5 bonus did better, give them +10 this time. If the other player did better, they gain +5 (and the other players loses the +5). Here is an example of this.

Abe and Zac are each in seperate cars, and are racing eachother through the streets of New York, say. Abe has +13 driving while Zac only has +8. They both roll to start and Abe rolls 14 (13+14=27) while Zac rolls a nice 17 (17+8=25). Although their is definitley no "winner" yet, Abe rolled higher and so gets +5. You would narrate what happened through this "sgement" of the race.

They'd go again. Abe rolls a decent 12 (12+13+5=30) while Zac rolls 10 (10+8=18). Abe wins this segment of the race, narrates, and is declared the victor.

The same basic premise can be applied to the air combat (although you probably want something a bit more detailed). The idea is to have people leading towards the over 10 mark, like one would in a real chase. If you wanted it to be more unpredicatble up the amount to over 20, or make the leading player lose all bonuses if they fail only once.

Hope that helps a bit!

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

What's the game about? That will deeply influence how car chases work.

If it's a James Bondy game, where car chases end in getting away through increasingly brash maneuvers or crash and capture, that's a different thing from the Blues Brothers, where they're accumulating crimes that determine the nature of their eventual incarceration. Also, if it's a COPS type of car chase, you know how that ends.

It sounds like your intent is for car chases and arial combat to be strategic points, different from dramatic points, of the story. Is your game about strategy? Or is it about heroic action? Are you talking about Biggles/Luke Skywalker/Top Gun arial combat, or Iraq/Israel/Berlin aerial combat?

[kaikatsu]

It is, without a doubt, aimed for the lighter side of things.  I don't want to say "Bond" for driving mechanics, because in Bond things get very crazy... very crazy indeed.  COPS would probably be a better feel for what I would want.  Perhaps with a bit more chance for a heroic get away -- but definitely closer to COPS than say Dukes of Hazard.

As a general rule, I prefer tactics to actually show up in games, instead of being purely dramatic.  The "Dramatic" system is intended to be a metagame mechanic which is built on top of something with "good enough" realism.  I can't define how much realism is "good enough" but I can provide examples.  If the principles of air combat (stay with a wingman while attacking, dogfighting becomes battle to maintain energy and outturn target) are maintained in some general form, I would be a very happy man.  However I'd be willing to ignore a number of things like flight characteristics changing depending on fuel mass and missile loads.

Saxon, your mechanics are an improvement over what I had.  Any idea on how to then incorperate mechanics for different cars?

*goes to find HQ mechanics and take a look*

[David "Czar Fnord" Artman]

Since you are already in d20, why not look at Star Wars d20's way of handling dogfighting? It would also work well enough for chases (which are, basically, dogfights without weapons). I can't recall all the nuances of the system, but I do remember that it doesn't need/care about a tactical map: ships are only "tracked" in as much as their distance and facing relative to a primary target is concerned.

HTH;
David

[MatrixGamer]

I have a car chase mechanic in Engle Matrix Games.

Important note: Things happen in EMGs when players make an argument about what they want to have happen next. The referee decides what the success roll is and the player rolls. The chase mechanism flows from this basic mechanic.

Example: Bob's character - Sneaky Pete - is placed on the map by "The Bank" the player controlling the police places a car behind his. It has already been established that they know his car and thus can follow him anywhere...unless he argues to get away.

BOB: "Pete's car is THE fastest car on the strip. He blows out of the parking lot and loses the cops in a cloud of dust."

REFEREE: Really strong, roll anything but a one and it happens.

BOB rolls a two. Pete runs away.

POLICE: Hey! I want to follow him!

REFEREE: Okay Bob's argument started a car chase. I will decide who has the advantage and that person will get first crack at resolving the conflict. Bob says he has the fastest car on the strip but this is the first I've heard that so I think the police have the advantage. Tell us what happens.

POLICE: Lights, sirens, blow through a few stop lights and he stops.

REFEREE: I think Bob's serious so he won't stop that easily. Really weak, roll a six or it fails.

POLICE roll a five and fail.

REFEREE: Bob, tell us what really happened.

BOB: Lights, sirens, blow through a few stop lights, BANG! They are broadsided by a truck. I get way."

REFEREE: Average, roll four or better.

BOB rolls a four. He gets away.

REFEREE: This caused a mess. I want Bob to make a trouble argument explaining why he is not immediately spotted again. I want the Police to make a trouble argument about why the officers in the car are not injured.

BOB: Everyone is focused on the accident so I am able to slip into my ex wife's garage.

REFEREE: That sounds okay, roll a four or better.

BOB rolls a five. His character is now "hidden".

POLICE: The car flips and slides along the road a way. Then the officers are seen crawling out, just like on TV.

REFEREE: Pretty strong, roll three or better.

POLICE roll a two. Oops! The officers are "injured".

There are a few other variations on this approach. If you are interested I can describe them for you. I have used it in a WWI air grand tactical game but am not certain that works as well.

Chris Engle

[kaikatsu]

Hello all, sorry for not responding sooner.  Final exams and all that.

I'm not using d20 per se, but something close enough.  However the SWd20 mechanics assume, for the most part, space combat.  Combat in space, even the funny Star Wars kind of space comabt dogfighting, fundamentally assumes no air and gravity.  That's very different from what I'm dealing with, where the twists and turns of movement can cause aircraft to lose velocity.

In space, there's no real difference between a break turn and a split-S.

Matrix, what you have is interesting, but I don't know for sure if it will fit with what I have in mind.  The basic assumptions you seem to be working from are different.  While I like the idea, I can't afford to change some of my basic assumptions at this point in time.

That being said, some of the ideas might be useful for a metagame mechanic.  You got my brain going in an unrelated direction.

[MatrixGamer]

Matrix, what you have is interesting, but I don't know for sure if it will fit with what I have in mind.  The basic assumptions you seem to be working from are different.  While I like the idea, I can't afford to change some of my basic assumptions at this point in time.

That being said, some of the ideas might be useful for a metagame mechanic.  You got my brain going in an unrelated direction.

I think it is important to be true to your initial vision. I know that I start projects by asking a basic question (often a design one - like "Can you make a game in which players can roll as many dice as they wish knowing that if they roll too much they could lose?")

Glad you are thinking about Matrix Games for the future though!

Chris Engle
Hamster Press = Engle Matrix Games

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

Dammit! Lost post!

Uh, a quick summary, with bullet points:

• I build airplanes (little ones), particularly sailplanes and I design games.
• I've found it curiously difficult to explain how energy works in an airplane to someone who doesn't fly them or study physics.
• If you want this to be the Biggles RPG, this might be a good idea. I think that otherwise, it's unnecessary detail.
• A mechanic you might want to use if you actually want dogfightng to have to do with energy retention:

You have:

- N dice. These represent your current energy.
- A target number you have to roll, T. It's determined mechanically by your opponent's position; the tighter the maneuver, the higher the number.
- You can take extra dice (the number determined by your pilot skill) to pull a particularly hard maneuver, but every one that comes up (say) 1 means that you lose a die. When you have zero dice left, you stall. You maneuver to dive normally, which makes it supereasy for you to get Bogie back on your six.
- A table of maneuvers and countermaneuvers and how hard they are against each other. You should probably pull this from some early dogfighting manuals. I can't frickin' remember the guy's name... He was German... Crap. This is the best I could get from Google. It wasn't Richthofen.

Hey, if you don't write this game, I will.