Fighting During Flight, air-mounted combatants

[LokRobster]

My holiday gifting of DFRPG hath seen its rewards: the 18 year-old that received it has been running quite a few games now. He texted me this morning and asked how to run a combat with flying folks. I was pretty sure hadn’t seen that in DFRPG and checked just now in the Exploits index and didn’t see anything along those lines.
My answer was “maybe abstract it a bit and have the fighters roll against DX before they can hit each other”, then he mentioned he was thinking of riders on flying dragons (ok now i want to be playing in that campaign). So i said i was pretty sure that was outside the scope of DF, but yeah , go ahead and do it, just make melee very improbable. Allow ranged combat at some penalty and maybe make a Rider skill roll (or -DX default since who has trained with flying dragons!? ) to line up a good shot first. I tried to highlight for him to focus on the cool idea of the combat and that making it fun is more important that the exact mechanics.

Has anyone else run a Flighty-ish combat?
What advice would you pass on to a new DFRPG GM for this situation?
Did i miss something in the books that covers crazy anctics of dragon-riders?
So far he has only the DF Box.
(I keep encouraging him to join up on the forums and ask stuff here but he hasn’t yet)

[Colarmel]

Some quick and dirty mounted combat rules are in Adventurers under the riding skill. That's a good place to start.

[Kromm]

You'll want to read Air Superiority (Monsters, p. 27). That has pointers to all the relevant rules, and adds a small number of clarifications. There are no rules for genuine aerial dogfights, though. If you want to do that, the simplest way is to handle the battle as if projected downward onto a 2D map but to keep track of who has the elevation advantage and treat the higher fighter as having "air superiority."

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Colarmel

Some quick and dirty mounted combat rules are in Adventurers under the riding skill. That's a good place to start.

For those in a rush: Adventurers, p. 87. If your flying combatants are mounted, then falling is a big deal. Here are some more quick-and-dirty rules for that:

If the mount must roll vs. DX or skill to negotiate a difficult obstacle, is wounded, or fails a Fright Check and is spooked, the rider must make a Riding roll; apply the mount's shock penalty (-1 to -4) if the roll is due to injury. If the rider suffers stun, knockdown, or knockback, the rider must make a Riding roll at -4. If any of these Riding rolls fail, the rider falls off! Falling off is automatic in the case of rider unconsciousness or death. Use the mount's altitude as the falling distance; the minimum fall is two yards.

[mlangsdorf]

I collected all the rules from GURPS 4e for flying, high speed, and mounted combat into one document here:

https://empireofnightnewdawn.fandom....Mounted_Combat

There are some house rules in there (the Dragon rule, the distinction between wiping out and losing control, treating dives as turns, and some others) but it's a good place to start. Though the Dragon Rule is just expanding the ability that Griffons already have in DFRPG to all flyers.

My group used these rules for a massive aerial dogfight (6 PCs on pegasi and giant eagles, 6 NPC fighter-wizards on pegasi and dragonback) which was a little complicated but pretty amazing.

[LokRobster]

excellent! thanks for the input, that's exactly what i was looking for.