Help me love Spaceships

[vierasmarius]

Originally Posted by Rev. Pee Kitty

3. Dogfighting Combat (from GURPS Spaceships 4)

This is a boldly cinematic combat system in which small fighter craft can fly circles around slower ones. Speed and skill are king -- your personal abilities are at least as important as your ship's statistics. This is a great choice for most cinematic and space--opera games, as it makes drama and action more important than physics.

While the rules presented in SS4 are "boldly cinematic", they don't really represent a new combat system, just a slight variation to the Basic combat. That's fine for what it is, but it doesn't in any way change the underlying assumptions of Basic Combat (ie, turn length, damage control, etc).

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by vierasmarius

While the rules presented in SS4 are "boldly cinematic", they don't really represent a new combat system, just a slight variation to the Basic combat. That's fine for what it is, but it doesn't in any way change the underlying assumptions of Basic Combat (ie, turn length, damage control, etc).

Some of the elements can be employed as variant rules in Tactical combat as well.

But I agree that it hardly seems a whole system of its own.

[PK]

It probably would've been clearer for me to say that they "radically change the feel of the combat system, by making individual skill and dramatic choices far more important." While the turns, etc., don't change, it's my experience that a combat run with the dogfighting rules feels so different from one run without them, that you may as well be using a different combat system.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by vierasmarius

While the rules presented in SS4 are "boldly cinematic", they don't really represent a new combat system, just a slight variation to the Basic combat. That's fine for what it is, but it doesn't in any way change the underlying assumptions of Basic Combat (ie, turn length, damage control, etc).

When I first saw the Basic combat system in the playtest I thought it made the most sense as an abstract dogfighting system.