Interesting space dogfights

[Darcy Burgess]

In response to contracycle's point re: motivating a feudal system.

You don't have to look too far before you can find a simple reason such a political system might arise.

Megatrav explained it all away simply (and believably) by making jump travel not fast enough to allow centralized government.  This gave rise to a "systemic governor" set-up.  Although most of these lords were nominally loyal to the throne, they all had their own separate agendas, etc.

Where Megatrav differs from the (apparent) intent of this project is that the throne (emperor, king, whatever) has a standing fleet (Imperial Navy) with which to enforce its will.  This of course is always stretched too thin, dealing with foes from outside, etc.

Long and the short of it: the King can't be everywhere at once, and has to rely on his lords to govern his kingdom for him.  They micro-manage, he attempts to macro-manage.

[Harlequin]

Back on the mechanics side, we've done a tiny bit of actual play - an inconclusive X-Wing versus TIE Fighter duel - using a slight tweak on my TROSesque mechanic above. (Or insert equivalent "all around solid ship" versus "cheap unshielded maneuverable ship" for setting of choice... Destrier-Class Knightship versus Blackguard-Class Mercenary Fighter?)

The results can be found in this thread so that we can stay on the setting issue here.

And contracycle (is it Jason, or am I misremembering?), I think we'll just have to agree to disagree.  In SF, I totally 165% agree with you - I'm the staff physicist for Attack Vector, I know how impossible noncomputational space flight should be.  But something about seeing spacecraft "bank and turn" in space opera makes me quite open to accepting mostly-manual flight in the same environment - I mean, it really is awfully similar to WWII aircraft.  So that aspect fails to break suspension of disbelief for me, and in fact enhances it slightly.  If the "Knights" analogy continues, I think it's also a useful way to think.  Whether it's that they don't have computer support, or they have it but it is unable to remove the enormous element of reflex and skill that makes the Pilot Caste important, doesn't matter to me.  Maybe the "swoosh" actually makes things vastly harder, and their SOTA computation is part of what controls maneuverability in this situation?  Whatever.

- Eric

[contracycle]

What I was getting at more, was making infotech invisible through ubiquity, rather than conspicuous by its absence.  I very much agree that this has to be strongly pilot driven (flown?).

I'd like to ask for more from Jake on the Arthurian theme.  Is this Pendragon ins space?  Does this game have a metaplot that follows the arthurian pattern?  How extravagantly powerful do you want the stations weapons systems to be, or do they not have offensive capacity?  Are you thinking multiple systems with FTL travel?  Do you have any thoughts on what kind of FTL?  Am I correct in thinking the allusion to gates earlier means gates INSIDE the stations for the fighters to use? What about aliens?  What about megascale engineering like ringworlds or Dyson spheres and the like?  Beanstalks?

How baseline human do you want the viewpoint characters to be?  In ballpark terms, are we talking about a handful of stations or hundreds or thousands?  How about numbers of fighters and "knights"?  Obviously I donlt want to pin you down to serius numbers, just some indication of the total scale of this society and the proportion that is this military elite.

[Jake Norwood]

The "Pendragon in Space" is hard to resist, since I'm a massive Pendragon fan. However, I'm going to. I think that Arthur is the model in which we will build the game, and that we can take/learn a lot from Pendragon, but I'm not seeing this as a multi-generational game, nor one that's neccessarily based around the kinds of traits/passions that KAP is. Therefore, I say no metaplot but rather a directive to follow the Arthurian spirit (including an eventual downfall) is the way to go on this.

As for the rest...I'm as open to ideas as anyone. I really see this as a group project, not "my" project.

Jake

[Mike Holmes]

Jake, it's your project in that if we don't have a leader on the project with whom the buck stops, nothing will ever get decided. Instead you'll get a mishmash of ideas that don't gel into anything playable. So, you're not a dictator, you're just the guy who says "Yeah, that sounds good." Do it for the good of the project.

If people want to go in a different direction from what you decide, they can and will start their own threads. So there's no problem with having a leader.

Mike

[Furious D]

Therefore, I say no metaplot but rather a directive to follow the Arthurian spirit (including an eventual downfall) is the way to go on this.

Heh, you say that now, after I've already had thoughts of the ancient dreadnaught "Excalibur" sleeping, hidden, in the sol asteroid belt.  Waiting for a boy with certain genetic keys to wake it, and with it the authority (and the firepower) to unite the disparate colonies of human space under a single ruler :P.

Still, you've just about inspired me to dig up and retype the rules I once wrote for the Riddle of the Force (luckily I did print them for when I playtested it, last year, so the hard-drive failure I had since then wasn't a total disaster on that point).

[Jake Norwood]

Heh, you say that now, after I've already had thoughts of the ancient dreadnaught "Excalibur" sleeping, hidden, in the sol asteroid belt.  Waiting for a boy with certain genetic keys to wake it, and with it the authority (and the firepower) to unite the disparate colonies of human space under a single ruler :P.

Still, you've just about inspired me to dig up and retype the rules I once wrote for the Riddle of the Force (luckily I did print them for when I playtested it, last year, so the hard-drive failure I had since then wasn't a total disaster on that point).

Ah, but what if instead of Metaplot there's a Metahook (new word, yay me)? In other words, you start out that way, but the way it runs is different every time. The future is unwritten, and the PCs are the protagonists. Make one of them Arthur? You could. I want the Arthurian thing to hold tight, but Pendragon in Space is too...pendragon.

And I do want to see that RotF stuff.

[quote"Mike the Tyke"]Jake, it's your project in that if we don't have a leader on the project with whom the buck stops, nothing will ever get decided. Instead you'll get a mishmash of ideas that don't gel into anything playable. So, you're not a dictator, you're just the guy who says "Yeah, that sounds good." Do it for the good of the project.

If people want to go in a different direction from what you decide, they can and will start their own threads. So there's no problem with having a leader. [/quote]

Good point. The deal is that I'm crunched for time, working on 4 games at once right now. I can't do it, but I can give thumbs-up and thumbs-down. I need a lead writer--someone that will actually put all of the okay-ed ideas into game-text. Volunteers? I can be line editor, though, sure.

Jake

[Harlequin]

In terms of setting models, actually, I was thinking that we could do worse than to use Arthurian mores and structures, but a Prince John / Richard the Lionheart social setup.  Or an "after the disappearance of Arthur" timepoint, though I prefer the (comparatively) more immediate possibility of return a la Lionheart.

Something like:  True king unites the squabbling systems and sentient species of the galaxy; there is a period of prosperity.  There is an enemy, and a reason to go far, far away to strike at his heart... perhaps an AI/berzerker incursion from a second galaxy (and our FTL sucks for intergalaxy travel).  Three incursions are beaten back and the true king takes a force of heroes to rid us of the menace forever.  He appoints a regent, no, make that the Regent.  The Regent is not your friend.  He is a tyrant, who keeps his power by spending the great wealth of our period of prosperity on (gasp) mercenaries.  The Pilot caste is naturally offended by the presumption that just by paying for a ship and paying a nobody to fly it, you can assert force; even more so when that force is directed at them and their estates.

A rebellion therefore exists.  It's mishmash and motley-race, moral in tone, and exists overlaid upon the classic baronial structure.  Most barons are more or less loyal to the Regent, some are secretly disloyal, and some become openly rebellious.  It's not an easy choice; the code of honour of the "default" (the Logres to this game's Britain) homeland is pretty serious about loyalty to your liege, even in the face of horror and tyranny.

The King's army is long gone; nobody knows (a) how long it'll take them to get to their destination, (b) how long it'll take them to finish their task, (c) whether they're still alive, or (d) when they'll be back.  He's almost forgotten in day-to-day life.  And he took most of the eldest sons, and family's best starfighters, with him - the younger son with the family's/planet's second-best fighter is an archetype here.  These second sons, either on behalf of a family which wishes to remain apparently loyal, or on their own account (and to their family's possible dishonour!), tend to form small squadrons (roughly the size needed to deal with a flight of mercs) with which to range about righting wrongs and dealing with tyranny.

In terms of the mercenaries, craftsmanship and quality is less important to the Regent (both with respect to their ships, and their persons) than quantity.  Tyranny requires many hands, and (as in TROS) numbers really do make a huge difference in a given fight.  So we get our TIE Fighter analogue, cheap and poorly defended ships appearing in greater numbers than the players, as another archetype.

Either because the True King's reach never extended that far (the Pictish lands), or because treaties made with the True King are being broken (the Saxons if Arthur were to disappear), or simply because the galaxy is a wild, strange, and sometimes only thinly inhabited place (the Foret Sauvage), there are other enemies than just the Regent and his men.  Whatever enemy the True King went off to fight may still be an influence, either active (incursions continue - what does this mean about our King?) or remnant (pockets of AI drones, waiting on orders never triggered).  I'm all for monsters, though as a note the dogfight engine is very tailored toward ships of roughly comparable size and mobility, moving at pretty comparable speeds.  So it'll take some careful handling to manage anything "dragonlike"... hm.

Perhaps the AI drones tend to be very specialized, such that you build a "dragon" opponent by having a big flame-blaster drone, a command drone, a long-range sensor drone, two winglike Gate drones, two smaller offensive drones, and three armour-creaking shield drones.  That would actually be a neat match against 3-4 PCs, if we put very careful attention into the many-on-one rules... I love TROS's rules for this, but they do break down sometimes (A rolls to only have to face B and not C, C rolls to only have to face A and not D) without careful GM management.  However, there are only three in the list above who can actually hurt the PCs, so there are three opponents trying to chase/tail/shoot them, while the others mostly just want to avoid fighting, and the shield drones want to use a version of the many-on-one to get themselves between the PCs and the crucial bits.  Fighting a dragon would then be as it should be - maneuvering to stay out of the way of the claws and flame, and trying to scrape together enough effort above what you're using for survival to get past the defenses and strike the heart.  By making the attackers and the defenses and the heart all separate foes, but not giving them the capabilities of truly separate attackers, we bring out those elements directly.  That could really work.

Anyway.  Just brainstorming at this point - the core idea is the Regent giving us an excuse to have an, ahem, Rebel Alliance of noble houses and noble sons, and the absent king to give us Arthur or the Lionheart and some loyalty to the throne.

- Eric

Edit: Crossposted with Jake.  Just wanted to add that I love the idea of the Metahook and having one of them be Arthur every time.  IMO that makes early-Arthurian quite as compelling as the scenario above.  Or we can of course combine them.  Hmm - I'm thinking that "who is the heir?" might overlap with MLwM-style "trigger conditions" somehow.  Just a germ of a seed of a thought.

[LordSmerf]

Jake,

I hereby volunteer my services as lead writer with the following precondition: I will not do this alone.  As long as there is active discussion and support, people making suggestions and you ok-ing them i will continue work.  I've got some preliminary stuff down already.  It's time to start making some decisions.

Metahook? Yes, no?

Thomas

[contracycle]

While reflecting on the experience of asteroids in computer games for the mechanics thread I got to thinking of the way Homeworld and Freelancer use clouds of gas to beautiful effect, creating stunning sort of "sunsets" and colour shadings in the various systems.  So one colour thought is "it should be full of stars", and we can set this when the Big Bang was young, and the universe was dense, and all of it was like a stellar nursery, like this: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap021102.html  This lends a mythic resonance, ostentatiously abandons any pretensions to being a prediction of the present human future, and gives us clouds of gas to manoeuvre ships around in sneakily, plus some misty 'forests' and fog-shrouded badlands.

[Harlequin]

Ooh - that's pretty.  Possible name: Stardust?

A brief desciption of the setting (protosetting?) to a friend yielded a couple more gems:

- If there exists a weapon which kills the pilot but not the ship, then Raubritten or the classic "black knight at the ford" image is feasible; bandit-knights who build their strength by conquest until they're finally rooted out (primarily due to their poor skill - usually - compared to true Pilot caste) could be a serious threat to impoverished systems.

- Looking for the equivalent of Saxon Raiders, we talked about the hyperdrive... how the normal ship is independently hyperdrive-capable, but maybe the mercenaries or other cheap ships might need some kind of carrier (not to steal too much from Star Wars or anything).  And this prompted his suggestion: raiders who arrive in a hypercarrier which doesn't have the fuel to get home again; conquer or die.  Between tourneys with friendly pilots, enmity between rivals and/or loyalists/rebels, possible mercenary scum, Lions and Tigers and Bears of AI dronecraft, I'm not sure we need more nasties... but it's all Pendragon in spirit, and might help create the feel of the "embattled realm" in their variety and strength.

- Eric

[contracycle]

A few Homeworld screenies for those ont familiar with the look:

http://www.strategyplanet.com/hwshots/hw2/shots/HW2_07_corvettes01.jpg

http://www.strategyplanet.com/hwshots/hw2/shots/HW2_15_strafing02.jpg

http://www.strategyplanet.com/hwshots/hw2/shots/HW2_05_asteroid%20sunset.jpg

http://www.strategyplanet.com/hwshots/hw2/shots/HW2_02_Cruiser_Under_Fire_2.jpg

http://www.strategyplanet.com/hwshots/shots/shota188.jpg

http://www.strategyplanet.com/hwshots/shots/shota497.jpg

http://www.strategyplanet.com/hwshots/shots/shota505.jpg

http://www.strategyplanet.com/hwshots/shots/shota837.jpg

Some freelancer screenies, well wortha look as they show more fighters and better space environemnts: http://www.gamershell.com/hellzone_Space_Sim_Freelancer.shtml


All of which, incidentally, suggests that graphics might be relatively easy to come by.

[LordSmerf]

This does become interesting.  I like the idea on setting and color, and it does provide some easy art.  It will also be different since most RPG books use a lot of hand-drawn art and we're discussing the use of Hubble photos.  I also think it would be nice to do ships and stuff with CG.

Over in the mechanics thread the idea of monsters as clusters of AI controlled ships has been brought up.  I think it's a pretty cool idea, from a setting standpoint is this something that we want to do?

Also, considering the Metahook idea, are we thinking of Excalibur being a fighter that only works for the "Chosen" or whatever?

From the mechanics thread: the idea of capital ships has been tossed around a few times, what if any role do we want them to have.  We've already established that we want knights in starfighters, does this mean that capital ships are either not FTL-capable or unarmed?  Maybe they don't even exist...

Thomas

[Harlequin]

I'd like capital ships or armed starbases to exist, simply because we have such excellent mechanics to handle their presence in a fight.  And heck, we need castles to besiege. (Grin.)  CG ships would also be a really nice effect, artwise (though how much colour art can we honestly price-point?).

- Eric

[LordSmerf]

Ok, captital ships that are unable to make it into FTL?  Or perhaps the idea that a capital ship has enough power to propel it's mass through FTL or power weapons and targetting clusters?

Art: As stated Hubbles stuff is (i believe) public domain.  So that stuff is good.  I'm really not sure how much CG art would cost, but i would figure that it would be pretty close to traditional art...

Thomas