Help me love Spaceships

[Dunadin777]

Originally Posted by Gollum

Finally what about a combat with those little ships and huge ones together (like the final battle against the second Black Star in Star Wars VI)?

Black Star? Is that really what it's called in the French version? I'd say that's lame but...no, Death Star is really pretty lame, too. :)



As a veteran wargamer, there's always a cutoff point between large-numbers fighter or small ship combat vs large-scale capital ship combat. Pretty much every system I've looked at tends to fall on the side of favoring capital ships. There may be flimsy 'realism' rationalizations for this, but what it boils down to is that most wargames want you to have to make meaningful decisions for your ships and have a chance at success. If fighters or small ship tactics work too well, swarm tactics dominate and the game (supposedly) becomes boring.

GURPS Spaceships isn't a wargame, but it has a similar issue. You're looking at a system that is meant to be interesting for players. The most common scenario is the entire party crewing a ship--which immediately assumes larger ships--and so you have more rules on secondary tasks to do during combat. Even if players are each piloting a fighter, then you're looking at just a single squadron that isn't going to do much without plot protection or a severely limited enemy in terms of firepower.

I'm a huge fan of the new Battlestar Galactica, and I like the idea of massive battles like those in the Halo universe filling up my RPGs. But those would be nightmarish to try to make work with a consistent, detailed, and generic system.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Well for a start, that's not how you say it. You say, "We'll be in engagement range in 8 minutes." The reason why the turns are ten minutes apart, is because you are so far apart and moving so fast that that you have to wait to see the "whites of their eyes". And the way you can make 5 to 10 minutes tense is by dealing a little interpersonal drama into it. Ever watch Balance of Terror? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH7unYCdv6w 52 minute show representing hours of time in the story. During that 52 minutes, each ship opens fire twice. So what did they do for the rest of the time? They argued about whether this would trigger an all out war and whether they could even hope to win against the new weapons. They accused each other of being spies. They mourned their dead. They did damage control. They dealt with a little matter of a toxic coolant leak.

Actually I rather like that sort of thing. The idea of sitting in a wonderful artificial environment where all your needs are met, you can communicate with your friends, at the push of a button, and the atmosphere is like that of an office or a library has a delightful tension with the knowledge that the place you are living in is threatened, enemies might destroy it, pirates or patrolmen might come stomping aboard, or eldritch horrors curse you with a Fate Worse Than Death. The tension between the normality and almost domestic intimacy; and the danger has a thrill of it's own. For one thing the whole idea allows you to pretend you are doing that when you are just sitting at your computer.

For that sort of thing I rather took to the second episode of Andromeda. Or maybe it was the third, and it depends on how you count two part pilots anyway. Andromeda for one thing has niftier gadgets then TOS.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

I was thinking of fast passes.

In Fast Passes, as the term is used in SS1, everything I wrote holds true. Plus there will only be one turn of combat, which makes dramatic damage control, or I would think having problems with appreciating the so briefly used combat system, somewhat less likely.

[Gollum]

Originally Posted by Dunadin777

Black Star? Is that really what it's called in the French version? I'd say that's lame but...no, Death Star is really pretty lame, too. :)

Death Star, yes! I was trying to remember the English name but didn't succeed to do it. In French, it is named "Etoile noire", which can be translated by "Black Star". Why? It is certainly due to the number of syllables: "Death Star" would be translated by "Etoile de la mort", which doesn't correspond anymore to the actors lips' movement. Translators also have mind that too...

Originally Posted by Dunadin777

I'm a huge fan of the new Battlestar Galactica, and I like the idea of massive battles like those in the Halo universe filling up my RPGs. But those would be nightmarish to try to make work with a consistent, detailed, and generic system.

Certainly! But there are times where the player characters are in several little starships and then, the combat could be as interesting as a man vs man combat, with attacks, all-out attacks, dodges, feints, aimed shots... As long as there are interesting rules to support it... Is there any rules like that somewhere? In GURPS Space for instance?

[Dunadin777]

Originally Posted by Gollum

Certainly! But there are times where the player characters are in several little starships and then, the combat could be as interesting as a man vs man combat, with attacks, all-out attacks, dodges, feints, aimed shots... As long as there are interesting rules to support it... Is there any rules like that somewhere? In GURPS Space for instance?

GURPS Space's combat is definitely geared towards the PCs all crewing a single ship. There's even a plotting mechanic of sorts where you place a ship vector marker each turn after moving.

If I was going to do this in GURPS, I'd probably use the combat from Space and then have it where once fighters were in the same hex as something of interest you'd shift to melee time, with maybe 5-10 second turns. Making all the different maneuvers and such work and make sense would be a pain, and probably have to be setting-specific, too, so I'd really dread working this out as a GM. The only RPG system where I've played something along these lines with success was the Battlestar Galactica RPG, and that was highly cinematic, conceptual, and had enough rules holes to make it quick work for me as a GM.

At this point, I'd almost rather marry GURPS with one of my favored miniatures games and switch to a wargame when such situations came up in play. Of course, I don't have to worry about this with my fantasy campaign. :)

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Dunadin777

GURPS Spaceships isn't a wargame, .

It might not be what you want in a wargame but it is very, very like a wargame in many repects. That's why it has long and abstract "Turns" rather than the real Turn of Gurps which is always just one second long.

If I was doing "Balance of Terror" I wouldn't do it in Spaceships. There's a lot going on but it's all happening in character-time rather than Spaceships wargame-like time.

[Gollum]

Originally Posted by Dunadin777

Of course, I don't have to worry about this with my fantasy campaign. :)

Neither do I with my Cthulhu campaigns... ;-)

Thank you very much for these answers.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Gollum

Certainly! But there are times where the player characters are in several little starships and then, the combat could be as interesting as a man vs man combat, with attacks, all-out attacks, dodges, feints, aimed shots... As long as there are interesting rules to support it... Is there any rules like that somewhere? In GURPS Space for instance?

GURPS Space is pretty irrelevant, it's a setting-crafting thing not a mechanics book.

Spaceships 4 makes an attempt at offering rules for cinematic small craft action.

[The Rampant Gamer]

With regards to Balance of Terror, an excellent TOS episode, there's only so much you can do with that in a game without the superscience of cloaking devices. I suppose there can be tension in the initial sensor battle of trying to find one another to get firing solutions.

In terms of scale problems, you can usually tweak that depending upon your particualr character's situation. I'm less concerned with that than I am with the time scale, and I've gleaned a few ideas from the discussion here on how to handle that better. That said, I still wish for a system more like SFB and their Impulse Chart that would better simulate the simultaneity of combat.

[Dunadin777]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

GURPS Space is pretty irrelevant, it's a setting-crafting thing not a mechanics book.

Bah, I must be thinking of ISW again--I always confuse the two since I never use just the one. Just substitute ISW for Space in my earlier comments.