[Spaceships] Interesting Piloting Techniques?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by weevis

I really appreciate all replies and I'm not trying to be argumentative or difficult. But in game terms I think a negative modifier to handling is not implementing a rule that some ships "just can't do" some things. Indeed a negative modifier to handling is implementing a rule where you are welcome to try but you are less likely to succeed. (Seems like a good use for a technique.) Whether this is realistic for large spaceships is another question.

Perhaps not the best choice of words, but I think it's a legitimate description for what handling represents. Not on the level of large-scale maneuvers, that's a distantly derived quality. But a vehicle has hard limits on various maneuvering characteristics (for a spaceship, that would be acceleration in various directions, angular acceleration in various axes, and limits on survivable centrifugal forces).

It is true that in GURPS, there's nothing actually stopping a sufficiently good pilot in a vehicle with Hnd -5 from achieving any possible handling task. This isn't the only place that GURPS' desire to make things skill rolls combined with open-ended skill levels can have impossible results. See Tactical Shooting's weapon-based cap on effective shooting skill...

Originally Posted by weevis

Maybe I'm misreading the rules, but the fact that something is or is not negative also doesn't seem to matter. It looks like I can even make techniques with positive modifiers to the original skills (that is, easy ones) within the existing techniques rules. A technique is just "a specific application of a skill."

You specifically described it as buying off a penalty. While it isn't required that a Technique be buying off a penalty, it is very common.

And from the description given, if it were not restricted to buying off negative Hnd, it would be the same as increasing your piloting skill but for less points.

[weevis]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

It is true that in GURPS, there's nothing actually stopping a sufficiently good pilot in a vehicle with Hnd -5 from achieving any possible handling task.

Well... In my games that would be me--the GM who forbids impossible rolls. You just have to stand up to them when they try to jump the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine over the entire Florida Peninsula. I "forbid such attempts altogether" (Success Rolls -- p. B346). Hard to see that as a flaw in the vehicle system's Hnd stat.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

You specifically described it as buying off a penalty. While it isn't required that a Technique be buying off a penalty, it is very common.

And from the description given, if it were not restricted to buying off negative Hnd, it would be the same as increasing your piloting skill but for less points.

You lost me there. I'm not trying to make any claims about it. I'm just reading the Techniques rules. I don't think being negative should have anything to do with whether something can be a technique or not. The five Spaceships techniques Mailanka found are all based on +0 tasks that use piloting, for example. No negatives there.

And it seems to me the whole idea of Techniques is to increase your skill but for less points -- by focusing on a specific task within the skill. I'm not sure of your objection. It could be overpowered, but I don't quite see what the overpowered part has to do with negative handling.

Indeed I was thinking an SM-based technique must be overpowered as it costs the same as a vehicle bond (Power-Ups 2 p. 9) and does the same thing (+skill) but applies to an entire class of vehicles (e.g., SM+9 spaceships). And it can be raised higher too. This is sad because I was so proud of the name "Whale Jockey." However maybe I can still use a handling-based technique if I scope it a little tighter.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Perhaps not the best choice of words, but I think it's a legitimate description for what handling represents. Not on the level of large-scale maneuvers, that's a distantly derived quality. But a vehicle has hard limits on various maneuvering characteristics (for a spaceship, that would be acceleration in various directions, angular acceleration in various axes, and limits on survivable centrifugal forces).

It is true that in GURPS, there's nothing actually stopping a sufficiently good pilot in a vehicle with Hnd -5 from achieving any possible handling task. This isn't the only place that GURPS' desire to make things skill rolls combined with open-ended skill levels can have impossible results. See Tactical Shooting's weapon-based cap on effective shooting skill...

Nitpick: acceleration is acceleration, and is only loosely connected with Handling. It takes a tenfold change in acceleration relative to the previous acceleration to provide a ±1 Hnd change. And turning rate depends on ship size, not Hnd. So Hnd is Hnd, and we have other characteristics to denote various possible-or-impossible things (ability to turn in time to face the required direction, ability to take off etc.).

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by weevis

Hmmm... These are all just specific maneuvers from the space combat system in Spaceships 1. This is the kind of rule I was looking for, but I find these techniques lack panache.

My particular player is much more interested in having cool-sounding things on his character sheet (and in getting to say them out loud) than he is interested in actually winning a fight with the Spaceships 1 combat rules. Or actually ever learning the Spaceships 1 combat rules. Or actually ever reading Spaceships 1. That may be why I find these techniques less than exciting. He'd prefer a Pylon Turn any day. Or a Nap of Earth: Death Star. Thanks for the heads-up though.

They're techniques, man. GURPS Martial Arts isn't full of techniques like "Eagle Claw Strike!" or "Moon-behind-clouds FIST!" It's full of "Exotic Hand Strike" and "Feint."

The purpose of a technique is to emphasize certain aspects and approaches, not to put a hard definition on how you fight. For example, a pilot with Aggressive Maneuvering will excel at making Closing maneuvers, but he still needs to decide if he wants to be Dedicated or not, or which ship to attack, or when to make those closing maneuvers, and so on.

When you get into hard details or "cool names," you get into Secret Styles or Trademark moves. "Moon-hides-behind-Cloud Fist" might be a trademark move of an All-Out Feint followed by a deceptive -1 strike to the face. It's a risky move, but potentially high reward, and he gets a +1 to hit if he shouts out the name.

You might have similar trademark moves for spaceships, which has been something I've been thinking about for awhile. You need to carefully define what that move is, though I think it might be up to the GM how specific you are. For example, Wolf Pack Tactics might be an Ambush maneuver while in Formation with other ships, provided you're attacking the weakest enemy ship available. The Omega Maneuver might be a dedicated Closing maneuver when you have no shields available and all available power is in engines and guns.

Your cool-but-very-specific maneuvers will be trademark moves.

You can still use techniques, of course, and even a variety of skills to define your pilots. You might even have styles of piloting. The Zorabian pilots are known for the cunning tricks (Evasive and Reversal), are well trained in the use of Electronic Warfare technology, always have access to the Cockpit Multitasking rule, and can learn the trademark maneuvers Horizon Ghosts, Star Pattern Alpha, and the Shatter-Shock Missile-Attack Pattern. Skills, techniques, perks, just like a martial art style.

[weevis]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

When you get into hard details or "cool names," you get into Secret Styles or Trademark moves.

Ah yes you're completely right. I think I went over the line there.

Originally Posted by Mailanka

You might have similar trademark moves for spaceships, which has been something I've been thinking about for awhile.

I like it. I like it a lot. In a wrinkle to your comments, it seems like spaceship techniques might involve multiple people and the ship itself. In fact the "Crazy Ivan" in Serenity definitely seems like a trademark move more than a technique. On a signal from the pilot, the engineer forcefully disconnects some important-looking hydraulics to allow the rotating engines to turn faster than they are supposed to. The pilot maneuvers the ship--IIRC flying backwards--to cause a 180 degree change in direction without turning. This makes a pursuer overshoot them. It involves the ship, the pilot, and the engineer. It is specific to one particular class of ship (the Firefly-class) or maybe even just one ship. It looks like it required prior experimentation and practice.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by weevis

Ah yes you're completely right. I think I went over the line there.

It's just important to know what tools to use for the job. I've tinkered a great deal with martial arts and I started where you are now ("I want totally cool moves!") and started with techniques, only over time to realize that GURPS tends to encourage less of a card-game/powers system like you might find in Legends of the Wulin or D&D and World of Darkness and more of a sort of complete view of a martial art. They still have cool moves and cool concepts, but they tend to be layered beneath skills and techniques and ideas. It becomes complex (or "rich" if you prefer), but if you can deal with the complexities, it becomes very satisfying.

I like it. I like it a lot. In a wrinkle to your comments, it seems like spaceship techniques might involve multiple people and the ship itself. In fact the "Crazy Ivan" in Serenity definitely seems like a trademark move more than a technique. On a signal from the pilot, the engineer forcefully disconnects some important-looking hydraulics to allow the rotating engines to turn faster than they are supposed to. The pilot maneuvers the ship--IIRC flying backwards--to cause a 180 degree change in direction without turning. This makes a pursuer overshoot them. It involves the ship, the pilot, and the engineer. It is specific to one particular class of ship (the Firefly-class) or maybe even just one ship. It looks like it required prior experimentation and practice.

You're quite right about how Starships works, which is fortunate for me, as I'm looking at running a captain-and-crew game. You get into situations like the Artemis Bridge Simulator, where the group, as a whole, is working together to create a tactical advantage, and each character has a great deal of choice: Will the captain focus on leadership, tactics, or encouragement? Will the science officer focus on combat navigation or analyzing the enemy ship for weakness? What maneuver will the pilot take? Does the engineer want to risk boosting the system? As a group, you work it out, and there are plenty of choices there.

But I've been thinking about the context of your specific thread, about your comment that the techniques are "bland" and your search for "fighter maneuvers." I've been pondering the role of a pilot for awhile, and I eventually decided to remove him from my captain-and-crew game, as the genre rarely features dedicated pilots, and given that most characters need to have a reason to go to a planet, I find a pilot too specialized. Moreover, what he's specialized in isn't that interesting: He's useful in space fights, where he's exceptionally useful, but he doesn't have many choices. Most ships I've seen will just close over and over again, or they'll evade over and over again. In my explorations, I haven't really seen the need to make the sort of complicated choices that you find in GURPS Combat. That's probably by design, because of the team-oriented nature of GURPS Spaceships, but what about for fighter pilots? Perhaps I underestimate the complexity of managing all of those systems on your own, but it seems to me that a mecha-pilot or whatever would be less interesting to play than a martial artist.

Can we expand their options?

Well, there's a Dogfight Action! in the Action! issue of Pyramid, which involves expanding the Chase rules from Action 2 to include high-octane aerial combat. I suspect you could get quite some mileage out of adapting the concept to a starfighter sort of game. You'd have to fiddle and expand a great deal, of course, but the fodder for your material is there.

[Mailanka]

It's a shame you removed your previous post, I thought it raised some good questions.

It seems clear to me now that I'm speaking more from personal experience with Martial Arts than actually from the book. So I'll see if I can condense that experience down to show you what I think you need to do to make this work.

On page 126 of Martial Arts, in the "Faster Combat" section, it discusses the concept of "Trademark moves" as a way of speeding combat up. "Encouraging trademark moves" was later codified with the addition of "Trademark Move" in Power-Ups 2: Perks, on page 8. As for the distinction between them, techniques are much broader than trademark moves. A flying jump kick can be Deceptive or Telegraphic, it can target the face, or the leg, etc. While the Trademark move Flying Dragon Face Kick will always be Telegraphic and to the Face.

But if you flip through the martial arts and read the style descriptions, you'll often see that the description discusses how that martial art tends to fight. The book is further encouraging a focus on trademark moves and a sort of "philosophy of combat" unique to each style.

Why? Why not focus on techniques instead of trademark moves?

The economy of points.

The problem with GURPS Skills is that they're very specific and very cheap. We don't have a 10 point-per-level unarmed fighting skill. Instead, we have like 6 unarmed fighting skills that are 4 points-per-level. This doesn't give us a lot of wiggle room. So let's look at two karate styles: Te and Shotokan. Te has a greater focus on precise attacks, counter attacks and destroying your opponents foundation (leg grapples and sweeps), while Shotokan has feints, jump kicks and flashy moves like spinning kicks. We can see that they are different styles... but what happens if we use techniques to express how our Te fighter fights? Perhaps we'll take Exotic Hand Strike, Hammer Strike, Leg Sweep, Counter Attack, TA (Punch/Neck) and Aggressive Parry. Pretty cool! But also impractical, because you don't need to buy a technique to use it, and most techniques are Hard, which means you need to start by investing two points in them. So our character might spend 24 points buying all of these techniques to +4. For the same price, a guy with "just Karate" could improve his skill +6, which means he can do all of these things at +6, and has better parry and other skills besides.

In practice, you can only take 1-3 techniques before it becomes impractical to buy more, and when it comes to exceedingly specific techniques, unless your style really revolves around them, it's often not worth it to buy them at all. Not because you'll never use them, but because you'll never use them exclusively.

There are a couple of solutions to this problem. My solution is the Trademark move. The character with Te might like to focus on sweeps and exotic hand strikes and attacks to the neck and aggressive parries, but I need to look at where the points are best spent. Counter Attack and Aggressive Parry might be worth the points, but for a deceptive exotic hand strike to the neck might be better off as a trademark move, taken with a perk. That expresses the uniqueness of my style and focuses on a strategy without really sacrificing the expedience of my point expenditures.

Another solution is a house rule that some people use: Every point spent on a skill grants an equal number of points you can spend on techniques (or less points, but with an exchange rate: Perhaps every 4 grants 1 free technique point). This allows your characters to quickly expand their variety as well as versatility. It makes certain skills "more valuable," but depending on the focus of your campaign, that might not be a bad thing.

GURPS has a rather generic focus. For an action hero who sports karate as well as guns and explosives, the fact that he can punch and kick is a foot note, an ammendum to his other, more lethal skills, and there needs to be no more additional detail than that. Likewise, in most games, "Pilot" is just a skill that says we get from point a to point b without too much trouble, and perhaps we'll do well in a chase scene. It's just one moment in a larger campaign.

But some games have a more specific focus. A kung fu game demands additional detail! "I know Karate" is not enough. Which form of karate? What is your focus? What makes you a better karate guy than the next guy? "I put more points in my skill" is boring and creates an arms race. There should be variety of approach, not "Who has the highest skill?"

The same should apply to a game where piloting is vital, an Ace-of-Aces game. We want to know why one pilot is better than another, and it needs to be for a better reason than "I have more Pilot skill." So we have to find a solution. My reason for opposing your exceedingly specific techniques is not that they violate some rule or are "wrong" but that they'll be ineffectual in the current point-economy. There's no reason to invest in three different highly specific combat maneuvers when I can just buy a single extra level of Pilot. Investing in one or two broad maneuvers and then taking a few trademark moves makes sense, though. On the other hand, if I get free technique points, then a variety of highly specific techniques makes a lot of sense... in fact, the broad, bland techniques might be too powerful in such a scheme.

But this is where I'm coming from and why I recommended what I did. I solved my problem in a specific way and, naturally, suggest that you do as well. But, in retrospect, there are other solutions that might work as well for you.

[weevis]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

It's a shame you removed your previous post, I thought it raised some good questions.

Crap, after I deleted it thought I posted a revised version but it has disappeared. :(

[David Johnston2]

The problem of course is that space is the classic featureless plain that allows few opportunities for unconventionality unless you're moving absurdly fast.

[Krinberry]

Originally Posted by weevis

I don't quite see what the overpowered part has to do with negative handling.

I think the problem is, you're basically saying you want a technique that buys off the actual physical problems that come with larger vehicles. The handling modifier goes lower and lower as ship size increases because that simply follows from physics - a larger ship has more inertia than a smaller one, which means it's going to require more complicated maneuvering controls to get it to do what you want.

I'd say it's definitely a Cinematic technique if you're going to allow it, and I'd say that it would only really make sense at all if you specify a specific ship, or at the very least a specific model to represent that you were particularly familiar with the quirks of that line; Large Vessel Piloting (Drudge Class Cargo Hauler) or similar.

Anyways, in the end though it's your game and if everyone else is happy with it, it's all good. :)