Interesting space dogfights

[contracycle]

So this has inspired an idea, although this is something that has really arisen out of considering battles systems rather than duelling systems, rather than fighter combat per se.  But at first glance... well you tell me.  

A big part of this idea is the thought that initiative is often the decider; that is an initiative system can often be a resolution system.  This was an insight that occurred during a counter strike game when someone correctly observed that CS was almost entirely about who walked up behind whom.  Also, the computerised version of the Renegade Legion space fighter game used strictly alternating sequencing of movement order to great effect.

So, I have made the initiative system the central mechanic, and also, basically random.    The point (another lesson from CS) is that half the battle is *not missing the opportunity*.  Opportunities arise because of the chaos, the trick is capitalising on them before the enemy does.

So, here I have a sort of tabletop mechanic for a dogfight based on these principles.  I believe it can be used to incorporate other crew and cap ships with any luck.

We have three props.  

Firstly, the table space is not "the board" it is "the radar".  It is not meant to be primarily descriptive, only loosely.  On the table go "blips", like poker chips, strongly coloured and identical for each team.  One blip per ship for fighters.

Secondly, we have a set of cards.  In the most basic conception, we have one card per pilot.  These are what makes initiative the fundamental mechanic.  

Thirdly, we have dice for resolution purposes.  The dice will resolve two things: the success or failure of a manoeuvre and the success or failure of a fire attempt.  The latter should be a much smaller range than the former, a ratio of something 1-20 and 1-6.  These will be Test A and Test B.

Basic concepts
A manoeuvre.  When a player/pilot acts, they manoeuvre, and almost always describes positioning for an attack run.  Importantly though, a successful attack/manoeuvre is also a defensive measure, in that your manoeuvre difficulty acts as your defence against being hit too.  However the real intent is to describe the action with all the funky manoeuvres and flashing lights.  It is resolved as a Test A.

An attack: After a manoeuvre for position has completed, the difference between the attackers manoeuvre difficulty and the targets defence determines the range of Test B.  If successful, the attack hits and does damage.  Insert extra mechanism here.

Order of  Play
For a round of play, all cards are gathered into a deck and shuffled.  Then they are placed face down to one side of the blips.  The top card is turned over and the player who owns that pilot takes their action.  When they do, they describe their manoeuvring and move the blips accordingly on the radar.  The moving player can manoeuvre to attack against any enemy blip.  Once the manoeuvre and its difficulty are determined, the player rolls a Test A against it to get a fire opportunity.  If they fail, their difficulty is recorded as their new passive defence.  If they succeed, they may make a test B later in the turn to fire.  Once the payer has moved, their fire test difficulty has been noted, and their card set down, the next card is turned and the controlling player of that pilot takes their move.  Once all moves have been completed in one phase, all fire attempts are resolved in a second phase.  That's a whole turn.

Moving
An attacker can manoeuvre (Test A) for a shot (Test B).  They do so by citing "manoeuvres" that have difficulty ratings attached – the attacker must pass a test against this difficulty to get the opportunity to shoot.  The moving player describes the closing run and what sort of weapons are being used etc. The probability of the shot itself will be determined by the extent to which the accumulated difficulty of the attack run exceeds the defence of the target, in the range of Test B.  A moving player can attack any blip they like, whether or not they have already moved.  The Test A to see if the move is successful, and the pilot keeps control of the vessel at the end of the manoeuvre to shoot, is made here and now.  A blip that successfully manoeuvres to fire is marked with a fire marker joining its blip to the target blip.  Blips that fail to fire are just moved according to their described course and its manoeuvre TN is noted in case they are attacked.

Chains
A moving blip may manoeuvre to attack a blip that has already moved.  Under these circumstances, the target blips own manoeuvre TN replaces the passive defence of the target blip.  This generally makes attacking blips that have already moved much harder, but there may be good reason for doing so.  The target blip may already have achieved a fire opportunity on a friendly blip, and so the moving blip may hope to destroy it before it can do so and thus rescue their ally.  In this scenario we have a Blip A, the friendly, under fire from blip B, the target, blip, which blip C, the moving blip, is manoeuvring to attack, a chain is said to exist between them.  Blip A is the first link, blip B the second etc.  Furthermore, there is nothing to prevent a Blip D from joining the end of the chain and attempting to rescue Blip B from Blip C.  The only consequence is that the TN to attack the end of the chain steadily climbs to unachievable numbers.  Chains are thus self limiting, and only the best pilots will be able to join the end of a long chain.  It is not possible to join a chain anywhere but the end.

Firing
The main concern is order of fire.  There is no particular need to resolve the order of fire for un-chained blips, and they can be rolled at the discretion of the players.  In a chained fire attempt, however, the order of fire is from the last link in the chain to the first.  Thus, in the sample chain above, Blip D, if it successfully joined the chain, would fire on Blip C first.  Obviously, if destroyed, Blip C will never get its opportunity to fire on Blip B.  This process is cascaded down to the first link in the chain.

Loops
What happens if the first blip in the chain, Blip A, has NOT yet moved?  In this case, Blip A may well choose to turn and fire on the blip at the end of its own chain, blip D, or any other hostile blip.  That's fine; when moving blips on the board, the chain follows blip A.  Blip A can attack as any other blip; that is, it has all the freedom any other moving blip would have.  The only and entirely natural constraint is that by definition, if Blip D is a member of a chain it must have a manoeuvre difficulty which blip A will have to overcome to fire.  On the other hand, blip A is also a member of the chain in its own right, and takes its fire opportunity in appropriate order. In effect, Blip A loops the chain.  If this occurred in the sample chain, the order of fire would be Blip A on Blip D, blip D on C, C on B, B on A.  The only benefit to joining a hcin that blip A does not get is modifying their defensive TN; the success of blip B's manoeuvre has already been established.

Consequences
These systems are intended to create the following tension:

It is hard to get on the end of a chain, and the longer the chain the harder it is.  But it's good to BE on the end of a long chain for exactly that reason.  Therefore, I expect play to breakdown into several chains, a couple of independent furballs going on.  When an established chain becomes un-joinable, I expect a new chain to form.  Some blips will be disconnected, by virtue of the plot having failed a fire manoeuvre roll.  But each turn, the whole thing will readjust and the blips will twist into new and different chains.  Hopefully, the effect will be one of roiling, fast action as the blips are shuffled about.  The only break in this flow is the round structure and the strictly ordered resolution of fire all in one phase.  But the manoeuvre phase should have invested the fire phase with danger and opportunity, and so tension should be maintained.

Also, its important that the concept "the radar" replaces "the map".  The radar is not definitive, only representative.  Players must feel liberated to move extravagantly on the radar.


Development and Complications
The looping business is a little broken – I have contradictory statements about whether a chain starts with a target that has moved or not.  Also, I say that a chain can be joined only at the end, but I don't think this is actually necessary.  Loops and chains will get more complicated and harder to describe without diagrams, though.

Not chains but bars.  If blip A is attacked by blip B, and blip C is allied with Blip B and ALSO attacks Blip A, do the fire attempts of B + C get resolved together, or amplified, or what?

Tests A and B are not strongly specified.  They can be monkeyed with or folded out to any degree of complexity.  The only thing that is significant is the fact that they accumulate and their proportional ranges.

Cards 1:  The deck constitutes on card per pilot.  Maybe, more skilled pilots can have more than one card so that they get more than one action.  That's quite a bennie to have. Also, we can put more crew in the deck than there are blips and play games with sequencing. Maybe, a backseater has to come out first and be heal in readiness before a pilot can make a certain kind of fire action.  Stuff like that.  Also, cap blips can be represented by multiple cards for crew or departments or what have you.

Cards 2: some cards could be dedicated to technologies or other benefits or hindrances.  Having the right to add a card to the deck would be quite a significant character development action.  Maybe, for SW type situations where a flight of one ship type fights another homogenous flight, each ships type can have cards added as opportunities to the players by default.

Cards 3: this all works with normal playing cards with suits corresponding to flights.   A normal deck could handle a four-faction fight of 12 blips to a faction, plus extra cards for special effects.

[Jake Norwood]

Digesting that is going to take a while. I think that there's elements here that I'd like to see in what I'm doing, though as a whole it's not what I'm looking for.

OTOH it does look like fun. I'd love to see this in another project.

Jake

[LordSmerf]

I do like the randomized Initiative, though i'm not sure if that interests Jake for this or not...

Thomas

[Jake Norwood]

Actually the idea of a randomized environment--represented, frex, by initiative, is a good thing here. The manevuering around is really an attempt to seize initiative or positional advantage. Randomness can add a lot of tension to all of that.

In some ways it's a race to get the initiative first, and only then to steal it or protect it. Can we do this without (a) unbridled randomness or (b) loads of charts?

Jake

[Valamir]

I suggest looking at Mongrel's system for regulating turn order (from Ron's Sim essay) which I've shameless stolen for Robots & Rapiers.

Its decidedly non random, but it wouldn't be hard to incorporate a random element as the base and then use the action points to represent pilot quality and the ability to steal initiative etc.

[contracycle]

OK.  randomised environement rather than initiative.

Still using normal cards, 'cos I have a thing for them at the moment, we change the random element to the type of task that must be accomplished.

Pilots/ships have ratings organised by card suit.  These categories need some sort of action of behaviour or bonus source rationalised for each.

To act, each player draws a card.  If they call an action that is of the same suit, they get to add their rating to the face value of the card and like roll below it or something.  If they don't, they don't get the card bonus which will be really significant, ranging ass it does from 1 to 10 or 13.

This should mean that the environment appears external to the players: they are compelled to perform tasks in a category they may not be strong in.  Furthermore, they may have to think on their feet to manipulate the kind of task they must complete to have some bearing on the conflict as a whole.  This will hopefiully lend the experience a frisson of real tension and surprise.

[Darcy Burgess]

I'm a late arrival to the discussion, I know.

However, GODLIKE has a kick-butt dogfighting mechanic that would be a good model to base your space opera shennanigans off of.  Especially considering it's already "pre-loaded with WWII charm and plenty of vitamin violence".

Rules are available free online:

http://www.arcdream.com/pdf/airplanes.pdf

or, just buy Will to Power and support a cool RPG.

[Harlequin]

Yet more late arrivals...

An element getting dropped out of the discussion here, some, is the idea of the dogtail.  If you're on someone's tail, you can try to line up shots on them.  If you're not, you're trying to get (a) out from under their tail on you, and then (b) onto their tail.

Everything else is special cases.

I had a Star Wars (WEG d6) GM who used this to extremely good effect in our game at one point.  House rules, obviously, but very simple.

Every round, every pilot announces who he's trying to get on the tail of (or escape).  You're always trying to obtain or break the basic condition of being on your opponent's tail.  They then all made a piloting roll and compared that to their immediate opponent's result; if their opponent was paying attention to someone else, then you automatically win the roll.

If you beat your opponent's roll, you went from disengaged to dogtail, or from tailed to disengaged, or preserved your tail and could fire.  If you didn't, you didn't.  The one exception was that when starting from disengaged (neither one on the tail of the other, standard start for the battle), if the two rolls were within X points of one another, then you were incoming head-to-head, and (a) could both try to fire, but (b) might want to save your energies for the piloting roll to avoid colliding with your foe.

That was about it.  A couple of tricks like redirecting your shields forward, back, or neutral again, but basically everything else came down to the interplay above.  Because you essentially couldn't risk ignoring an opponent, it automatically came down to one-on-one dogfights, plus X extra TIE fighers over the PCs' total which the GM would sometimes assign in as surplus attackers and sometimes keep out of the action until we'd dispatched one of his fellows, as best served the tension of the battle.

Worked like a charm.

I suspect, from this lesson, that any maneuvering that is not one of those two alterations - from being tailed to disengaged, from disengaged to tailing your guy - is probably waste overhead, if you want abstract positioning.  Think back to the movies, with "coming in to save your buddy" being parsed as the free tail you acquire because the TIE is busy tailing Wedge and not you.

In those terms, also, it might be interesting to drive this with a variant on Dance of Steel.  Make this mapping:
- Hearts (Advances in DoS) -> Entering a firing pass.  This will generate a tail in your favor if your opponent is disengaged, but do nothing if he's tailing you already. [Optionally, under some condition - Hearts of value within two points of each other? - we end up head-to-head.  I'd say at the end of next round we collide if this is still true.]
- Diamonds (Retreats in DoS) -> Pulling away.  This will shake a tail off your back [or break out of a head-to-head collision course!], or else represent just some swooping around in space if you're already disengaged.
- Clubs (Parries in DoS) -> Evasive maneuvering.  Will negate a Spades (Firing) card of equal or lower value, and mitigate the harm done by (or accuracy of, if this is supplemented with dice) a Spade of higher value.
- Spades (Attacks in DoS) -> Firing on your foe.  If, and only if, you're in a tail position, then you hit (or roll to hit) and inflict damage.  Otherwise you had planned to fire but have no shot.

It lacks a little bit of the interplay DoS possesses, in that you can't rely on your opponent's Advance to close the range, you need your own.  But I think it is still worthwhile to consider as an engine, if you want something pretty abstract.

IMO the major problem you'll have with any TROS conversion has to do with the initiative... unless you choose to have initiative represent the tail position, in which case it needs to key to something a little more complex than "winner of last exchange" since having this position shift back and forth too frequently is visualization-breaking for a dogfight situation.

Just some .02 (Canadian, so worth about one-and-a-half Yankee cents).

- Eric

[Daniel Solis]

I've got nothing particularly new to add, but I want to mention how much I like the more duel-like attitude of Harlequin's rules than even my own suggestions. The dogtail maneuvering is fairly simple and seems like a lot of good ol' fun.

[Loki]

I also liked Harlequin's dogtail idea, but here's another anyway.

A post above abstracted maneuvering to the following limited options: A behind B, B behind A, head-on and A and B to the "side" (there was also A and B disengaging, but that doesn't seem like combat so I'm omitting it). So maneuvering from one position to another is a matter of opposed skill checks by the pilots, with +/- depending on which position one starts in (in other words, it's easier to move from "side" position to behind position than head-on to behind, etc).

Ships are made up of vital systems: engineering, weapons, command, etc. Each of these correspond to a hit location a la TROS. So hitting a ship in the command center (ie head) might be more crippling than hitting a ship in engineering (ie left leg). The rub is that ships are designed to protect their vitals, so the difficulty of hitting the "head" vs the "left leg" depends primarily on your position.

So combats proceed with the better pilot slowly climbing toward the optimal firing position (ie on the enemy's tail), with both ships exchanging fire at the vital systems exposed by their current position. For instance, while pilot A moves from head-on to side to behind pilot B, he can fire at increasingly more vital systems. Pilot B finds his potential targets decreasing as A gets into position.

Once position is determined, the exchange takes place. The attack is the power of the weapon being used, plus any skill by the operator, versus any "armor". The damage that gets through is applied to the vital system and the ship's effectiveness (ie stats) are decreased. So a hit to life support might reduce the effectiveness of the pilot, which might allow his opponent to get behind him, which allows a shot at the bridge, which if it penetrates armor disables the ship/kills the crew, etc.

For more variety, ship weapons could have effectiveness based on position: a guided missile can be fired at a target in any position except head-on, but a turret can be fired at only targets to the side (top, down, etc). So the combat is not only about trying to get and keep dominant position through pilot skill, but also moving into positions that allow you to use your best weapons. Or if you take damage to your ship, positions that allow you to use functional weapons.

The above probably works best if there are more than 4 positions... if being behind the bad guy is optimal, several levels of behind are probably best, as you lock in and really line him up. But the combats become pilot duels where both ships take superficial damage to non-essential systems until one pilot gets an advantage or enough damage accumulates to weaken a ship. Then the loser goes up in a ball of photons.

[LordSmerf]

A good point on dogtailing.  However, i'm not sure if we have addressed whether we're working with a Newtonian physics model or somethine more like Star Wars.  If we're going Newtonian then you could simply pivot around, while traveling the same direction, and shoot back.  Less cinematic that way...

Thomas

[Harlequin]

Oh, as stated above in this thread, space opera only.  Newtonian physics will only be invented in a galaxy far, far away, a long, long time from now.

Of course Newtonian physics skews things.  Free plug for an indie board/war game of space duels using true and absolute Newtonian physics (but no hard math!), on which I've consulted/co-authored - Attack Vector: Tactics goes to print soon.  It's a totally different game as soon as you include all that, but it's not what Jake is looking for.

- Eric

[contracycle]

Allright, something DoS-like.

Our suits are now Evade, Boost, Chase and Attack.  Players get cards in their hand by sundry mechanism.  Each round they get top play a trick out of their hand that corresponds to a manoeuvre which exists as its own prop - a big book of attack pattern diagrams as were used for pilot training.

Hmm, Google is with me, check out this barrel roll attack:
http://www.faip.favg.org/acm/barrelroll_attack.asp

If that does not work go here: http://www.faip.favg.org/
and click Air Combat Maneuvers on the left.  Theres some text stufff in the musketeers lectures.

Back to the cards and the barrel roll.  Say we represent the barrel roll as a Boost - Boost -Chase - Attack, then a player would have to play cards of those suits at whatever rating they have to attempt that manoeuvre.

This idea was camne from thinking about space sims I have played that are this sort of fuzzy part SF part WW2 mixture.  There is a big difference in the feel of these depending on whether you have a booster or throttle.  For a throttle model, the suits would need to be tuned to accelerations and decelarations.  In the barrel roll attack, the attacking plane is ditching momentum at the end to make the turn, and so the cards could be accelerate, accelerate, brake, attack.

The pips on the cards could be used to test whether or not a player succeeds in carrying off that component of the proposed manoeuvre, or accumulated to a value used at the end.  Obviously, face cards allow the opportunity for Specials.  I'd expect a player to have a fair sized hand per round, so probably each player should have their own deck.

Some external mechanism would have to govern who can attack whom when and where.  The main point of the exercise is to concretize the manoeuvre into something imaginable and intentional, and to place limits on this imagination to create tension.  This is imposed through the requirement to play a pre-constructed trick, to match a set, from an external and random resource.  This requires the player adapt to their situation.  I grant though that players could easily depart from pre-constructed tricks and extemporise once they have a grip on the principles.  Nevertheless, they will be held to the cards actually in their hand, not those they would wish to have.

[AdAstraGames]

And I'm on the other end of the spectrum.  I've got an interesting setting built to provide Attack Vector: Tactical (which Eric is a co-author on), and just stumbled across Riddle of Steel as a game engine, which I've praised a few times elsewhere on this board.  

I'm looking for a good RPG engine that can be adapted to a fairly physically plausible SF RPG setting...

And to throw some kindling on the fire:

First, if you want really cool space combat dogfighting, I can recommend Hard Vacuum and Science Gone Mad, from Fat Messiah Games.  (I have copies of them in inventory if you want to buy them, even).  It's definitely got the feel you're looking for (WW 2 air combat in space, weapons that go ZAP! and POW!) and would be a better engine to recreate the Star Wars combats than AV:T is.

Do you want your space combat dogfighting game to be airplanes in space, or do you want some of the aspects of space combat to filter in?

(In other words, do you want banking X wings or gymballing Starfuries?)

Do you want 3-D to be important, and if so, how?  (This isn't a trick question -- I know a good way to make 3-D work for a wargame)

An easy way to eliminate seeking weapons is to say that lasers cycle quickly enough and produce enough energy that, well, unless it's shielded like a fighter, the computerized targetins system makes them evaporate at Really Long Ranges.

On the other hand, seeking weapons give a reason to maneuver, which is why they're in SFB.  There are ways to handle seeking weapons without counters on the map -- one of Eric's major breakthrough contributions to my game was a solution that makes seekers work for in 3-D.

Here's the line of reasoning that makes space combat favor capital ships rather than dogfights with pom pom guns.  Note that I'm not dissing your design concept or saying my way is better...but these are things that need to be addressed in the handwavium department.

1) Detection in space is (if using real physics) very easy.  Any drive that will give you interplanetary travel in RPG-scale time frames will be VERY easy to detect.  (By "very easy", I mean "is the brightest star in the night sky, and has visible proper motion" when the ship is a month or so away.)  This means that stealth is hard to accomplish.  It's something you'll either ignore or address with handwavium alloys. :)

2) Lasers (rather than blasters) never miss.  There may be some jitter in the firing platform.   Even really really skimpy lasers (like the ones in AV:T) have point blank ranges in the realm of 200 km.  That's not exactly dogfight distance...though we get a lot of interesting 3-D vector dogfighting in AV:T.  (Eric can tell you what it's like tring to hit James in a maneuverable ship with seekers)

3) Ships need to be able to handle long duration voyages.  (Ever wonder how the hell Luke went to the bathroom when flying from Hoth to Dagobah?  Or SHAVED?).  They also need mass to protect the crews from the radiation environment in space (or from the drive being used...)

4) Unlike an air environment, a fighter doesn't inherently get to go faster than its carrier.  It may (and almost certainly does) have higher thrust, but its top speed isn't any higher.  Thrust is useful for juking out of the way of seekers (if you have them).  It doesn't do you any good at avoiding speed of light weapons.

All four of these factors favor ships with mass to them -- mass to let them do long voyages.  Since you can't dodge a laser, your only alternative is to armor up so you don't get fried by it.  As you armor mass increases, your thrust drops, and your fuel requirements go up...and eventually, your space fighter turns into a PT boat.

The way to get around this (and to make fighters in space work again) is to go the other way:

Lasers never delivered on their promise as battlefield weapons.  They were big, bulky, fragile, expensive, and took too much energy.  Everyone just fires guided rockets at each other.

Now, if you have a fuel source that's energy dense enough (we call them Highly Concentrated Black Magic drives in my neck of the woods), you make self propelled rockets that have high thrust and are capable of Unthinkable Delta V(tm).

As a handy rule of thumb, an object hitting at 3 km/sec delivers KE equal to its mass in TNT.  Divide rate of closure in km/sec by 3, square the result, and look at TNT equivilants.  In short, you probably don't need nukes.  Flechetting crowbars closing at 10 km/sec will do quite nicely.

This gives you small ships carrying sledgehammers, and it gives you an air-to-air combat feel -- you're juking around trying to evade the engagement cones of the missiles, and hoping you have one left when the other guy runs out of go juice or missiles to throw at you.

Suddenly, you have your dogfighting back with some semblance of real physics underneath it.  Ships send fighter screens to engage other fighter screens (or other ships if they get past), and it only takes 2-3 fighters with full loads of missiles getting by to kill an enemy carrier.  Your carrier has a constant thrust fusion drive of some sort, which is low thrust, but high delta V.  The carriers match velocities and send fighter strikes off (and try to do a pass a deux to get to where the fighers will need to be after their fuel runs out).

If you want a not-quite physically impossible form of Highly Concentrated Black Magic, use metallic metastable hydrogen or metallic metastable helium.  Having a fleet train that scoops hydrogen and processes it into either reactor fuel (deuterium and tritium) or fighter fuel (metallic metastable hydrogen) gives a reason for Bespin, or having specialized ships the carrier has to defend that refuel it.

Ken Burnside

[contracycle]

Hmm, not sure I agree with the conclusion although I agree with much/all of the argument.  The reason is simple: why engage at only 3km/sec relative when you had to achieve at least 5km/sec delta V to get to Earth from Mars, or vice versa?  In fact, why not keep the pedal to the metal and arrive at 10 or 15 km/sec and fire your flechette crowbars from there?  If your target accelerates toward you, closing vectors might be in the order of 20 or 30 km/sec.

And of course, if you acquired 10 or 15 or so km/sec leaving mars orbit and entering a transfer to earth, you would not need to keep your engines burning; thus the problem with detection is somewhat obviated by simply coasting in on very high relative velocities and using the drives only to manoeuvre once you arrive, or to enter an attack run only a few hundred or thousand klicks out.

But all of this works against a dogfighting dynamic; these are firing platforms sliding past each other at huge velocities and likely to enter and exit each others sensor envelopes very quickly.  Even a sensor radius of 1000km would be entirely crossed in a little over a minute and a half at 20km/sec relative.  OTOH, this brings back the gattling gun, because this sort of battle will prompt design toward maximum output in the shortest possible time.  Furthermore, accelerating the platform also accelerates the ordnance, which is nice and easy and you have to do it anyway (OK, so you still have to pay for pushing the mass as you always do).  And, you don't even need to keep your missile ordnance in a bay while you coast in, you can launch it beforehand and have them coasting alongside you as you close so they can all be locked and fired at once.

Dogfighting this aint, but I think it has its own dramatic appeal of riding in on a torch at ridiculous speeds.