[Basic] Advantage of the Week: Flight and Walk on Air

[johndallman]

Flight [40] is an exotic physical advantage, which lets you fly. It has a large collection of special modifiers for different kinds of atmospheric and space flight. It probably first appeared in GURPS Supers for 3e.

Walk on Air [20] is likewise is an exotic physical advantage, which does just what it sounds like: the ability to selectively treat gasses as solid ground. I don’t know where it first appeared.

The default Flight doesn’t involve wings, works at any altitude within an atmosphere, and allows hovering. It is classic “superhero” flying, at a top speed of twice Basic Move. You can adjust that fairly cheaply, or take Enhanced Move to go significantly faster. To do aerobatics, buy Acrobatics skill, and to improve endurance, buy Flight skill. You can also “fly” underwater, if you don’t have any of the special limitations for this trait.

The special enhancements for Flight give you the ability to fly in space (although Flight doesn’t confer the ability to survive in space, at high altitude or underwater), either superhero style, or with a limited delta-V budget.

Flight has many more special limitations. Wings can be large, supporting you, or small, used for control rather than lift. You can be limited to descent-only gliding, or gliding with the ability to gain altitude in updrafts. If you aren’t limited to gliding, you can be unable to hover, and if you have the ability to fly in space, you can be limited to only doing that. You can be lighter than air (or gaseous, using the same rules) which means that the wind has major effects on your movement. Finally, you can have a limited ceiling. Powers adds two more special limitations, requiring a planet, or a surface, to “push off” in some way.

Walk on Air uses ground Move, and has special rules for falling. If you are knocked down or otherwise lose your footing, you fall. You can make a DX roll once per turn to catch yourself. If you reach the ground first, you take normal falling damage. Given the extent and variety of the special limitations of Flight, I’m puzzled that Walk on Air isn’t one of them.

Flight appears on all templates and creature descriptions for flying creatures in GURPS 4e. The No Legs (Aerial) disadvantage requires you to buy Flight, and Bio-Tech has rules for designing flying humans (for low-gravity environments). Disasters: Hurricane extends the wind rule for lighter-than-air Flight to other forms in extreme weather, and Power-Ups 8: Limitations has rules for Flight that requires low gravity. Powers explains how to implement various kinds of real-world and fictional flight, as well as “surfing” forms of travel, and Psionic Powers has a limitation for slow Flight. Reign of Steel: Will to Live has a limitation for engine-driven Flight that requires refuelling, while Space considers aliens that fly without machinery. Template Toolkit 2: Races has body plans and hit location tables for flying forms that aren’t in the Basic Set, plus a Flight special limitation for balloons without propulsion.

Walk on Air occurs less often, although the spell of the same name confuses the issue. Disasters: Hurricane has rules for using it in very strong winds, and Powers has an “Only While Moving” limitation for it, and similar abilities (the ability sometimes known as “Walk on Earth” is Clinging in GURPS, likely with the Attraction enhancement from Powers p. 45), while Psi-Tech has a very odd device that gives this ability to anyone who believes in it.

When I started this article, I thought Flight was missing several forms and details, but they all exist, in various supplements. How has Flight been important in your games?

[Not another shrubbery]

I used Flight for most of my super characters, just because it's such a handy way to get around. I hardly ever used Walk on Air, especially after 4E came out, when it became easier to tweak Flight with modifiers to get it just so. My players weren't as enamored with Flight as I was, often being fine with vehicle transportation to get wherever they needed to go.

[Pursuivant]

I can see a case for Walk on Air being treated as a limited version of Flight, but if so it's potentially underpriced.

It is, effectively:

Flight (Enhancement: Reflexive, +40%, Limitations: Always On, -10%; Nuisance Effect (Will begin to fall if you trip. DX roll required to recover.), -10%; Temporary Disadvantage (No Enhanced Move (Air), No Enhanced Move (Underwater)), -30%.)

The Reflexive enhancement is added because you can presumably roll vs. DX every turn to stop falling even if you didn't walk on air to get to the point where you fell. Additionally, there's nothing in the rules that prevents you from sleeping or resting in air. It is also possible that you can use your ability unconsciously allowing your to save yourself from falling even if you're knocked out.

Nuisance Effect value is doubled to -10% because potentially falling from a height is a very dangerous nuisance to have!

Temporary Disadvantage negates the doubling of Basic Move in air and the ability to move in liquid at your Basic Speed (essentially Enhanced Move 0.5) which is inherent to the Flight advantage.
I believe that Walk on Air also appeared in GURPS 3E Supers 1E along with Flight.

Flight is one of the ubiquitous exotic advantages in GURPS. It's great for NPCs and players alike and well worth the 40 points it costs. Various limitations to Flight limit its utility based on character concept.

The Newtonian Space Flight and Space Flight enhancements might be a bit overpriced, especially since you have to buy ridiculous levels of Enhanced Move if you want to get to other planets or star systems in a hurry. Realistically, you also need hefty levels of DR, Doesn't Breathe, Doesn't Eat or Drink, Radiation Tolerance, Temperature Tolerance, and Vacuum Support if you want to move at relativistic speeds in deep space for long periods of time.

[transmetahuman]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

I can see a case for Walk on Air being treated as a limited version of Flight, but if so it's potentially underpriced.

It is, effectively:

Flight (Enhancement: Reflexive, +40%, Limitations: Always On, -10%;

(my bolding)

I can't see Always On being justified for this. Firstly, there's no evidence that the advantage is always on by default at all. If you rule that it is, then Reflexive makes no sense.

Regardless, since you can still walk on the ground and even swim with the advantage, if it somehow was always on (and given you don't need to spend a turn activating it, maybe in some abstract sense it is), it wouldn't cause any difficulties and therefore wouldn't be worth points.

I've never seen a character take Newtonian Space Flight, it's only ever used on vehicles.

[RogerBW]

Walk on Air certainly existed as a power in 3e, as it's in Compendium I. Alas, that book doesn't give its original sources. It does appear in my copy of Supers for 3e, so that's at least one possible origin. I think that in the early days of GURPS 4th the rolling in of powers to "core power plus advantages/limitations" wasn't as thorough as it became later; certainly given the other things Flight covers it now seems sensible to combine WoA too.

A thing I came to realise while writing Will to Live is that the movement rate you get from buying Flight is essentially your Acc in vehicular terms, while Enhanced Move gets you Top Speed. (Which is why most of those flying robots have lots of Enhanced Move and not much boosting to their actual Flight.)

The reason for that special limitation was for surveillance drones: a basic RNU-01 Spybot, if driven by something with a bit of smarts, ought to be able to fly into a warehouse, land on a high beam, and spend many hours recording what goes on, even though it can only actually fly for a short period.

When GURPS 4e first came out one of the big ideas was "you can build a sentient starship as a playable character", and naturally this power would be pretty key to that.

[AlexanderHowl]

The utility of Walk of Air is that it allows for 3D movement without the expense of Flight or Insubstantiality. It also benefits from Enhanced Move (Ground), which can be important for speedsters. For example, you could have a speedster that could perfectly maneuver at 640 yards per second in three dimensions (though not underwater).

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

The Newtonian Space Flight and Space Flight enhancements might be a bit overpriced, especially since you have to buy ridiculous levels of Enhanced Move if you want to get to other planets or star systems in a hurry. Realistically, you also need hefty levels of DR, Doesn't Breathe, Doesn't Eat or Drink, Radiation Tolerance, Temperature Tolerance, and Vacuum Support if you want to move at relativistic speeds in deep space for long periods of time.

Its less that that they cost too much and more that they have weird limitations that cripple them without high levels of enhanced move. I'm guessing they're mostly concerned with not turning you character into a relativistic kill missile. But most space settings have to deal with that anyways, and space is HUGE. We talk about the difficulty of getting things into orbit, or breaking the speed of light, but we forget that if we could drive to the moon at 80 mph on an interstate it would take 100 days. And Mars would take 55 years.

[Fred Brackin]

The major appearance of Flight among various PCs was in my World of D'y'r't game. The story begins with character creation and the setting's iconic mage Aldehar the Incendiary (though it may take us a while to get to full flight).

Whilst he was looking around for more cp to buy Fire spells he said "You know, Aldehar doesn't really _need_ legs." and so it was that Aldehar gained the No Legs disad. We don't really know how he lost his legs. He never told the same story twice.

Alderhar could maintain the Levitation spell without FP expenditure so that is what he did at frst. This did limit him to Move 3 but whenever the part had to really run he grabbed onto the belt of Nyx the Barabrian and "hoverboarded" behind her.

Things went on like this for a while with the group steadily bashing theri way through old D&D modules (various editions, including Hackmaster) all converted to Gurps on the fly. Until in one module they found "Anklets of Levitation" among the loot. These were an actual thing in 2e. You can check in the old Encyclopedia Magica.

So after I had ruled that magical anklets could be used by a character who had no ankles as long as there were some parts of his legs left, Aldehar used those and saved himself a "Spells on" penalty.

We get to the Flight Advantage when Aldehar started getting ambitious or at least discovered how abusable the Ally rules in 4e had become. The Ally took the form of a Flying Carpet whith the Flight Advantage. Whiekl a amge with the flight spell or even jsut Levitation can bypass many dungeon difficulties a Flying Carpet of any sort can let the whole party just cruise past them. I reccomend agaisnt letting your party find a flying carpet in a dungeon-based game if you care about this sort of thing.

One area where the carpet served with particular utility was in hauling loot. The party once found a Mirror of opposition and declared "We ought to be able to sell this to _somebody_!". So without letting themselves be reflected in the mirror they got it off the wall and laid it face down. Then the pulled the carpet over it and strapped it in place. Then they flew back to town. At their cruising altitude most living beings below then did not produce enough of an image in the mirror to activate it but occaisionally a Chaotic Evil cow did fall ot of the sky.

The next place Flight showed up was when Aldehar the Incendiary discovered how abusable the Golem rules from Magc for 4e were. His "golem" took the form of a Spelljammer as we had made it to that part of D&D 2e by then. It rather outperfored all existing spelljammers and after the party conquered an Evil empire with it soem Beings of Pure Thought from the Multiversal Omnipotent Power Examination Division or M.O.P.E.D. showed up and turned Aldehar's ship back into a large pile of gold pieces.

So the moral of all this is to beware of Flight in many genres.

[Not another shrubbery]

Originally Posted by transmetahuman

I can't see Always On being justified for this. Firstly, there's no evidence that the advantage is always on by default at all. If you rule that it is, then Reflexive makes no sense.

Yeah, I don't believe that Reflexive is called for if deriving WoA from Flight. The latter should give falling characters the same chance to stop themselves. The derivation (to me) looks it would be (Slow, Basic Speed, -25% (from Psionic Powers); Not Underwater, -20% (at a guess); and a Nuisance Effect, Must run or walk, -5% [20]).

Originally Posted by RogerBW

Walk on Air certainly existed as a power in 3e, as it's in Compendium I. Alas, that book doesn't give its original sources. It does appear in my copy of Supers for 3e, so that's at least one possible origin.

That jibed with my memory, and digging a little I found the old krommlist for 3E that gives the source as Supers.

Originally Posted by ericthered

We talk about the difficulty of getting things into orbit, or breaking the speed of light, but we forget that if we could drive to the moon at 80 mph on an interstate it would take 100 days. And Mars would take 55 years.

And boy, are those bathroom break stops hard to find! ;)

[Rindis]

While working up a spells-as-powers project, flight has come up a couple of times, and I've ended up creating two extra modifiers for it:

Controlled Fall: You do not ‘fly’ as you have no means of locomotion in the air; Air Move remains 0 with this option. However, your rate of descent is a constant one yard/second. Strong winds and the like can blow you around, but otherwise you just fall straight down until you hit the ground or come in reach of something you can grab for support (or vice versa). This is incompatible with every other modifier for Flight. -60%

(That was used to emulate Featherfall. It could also be used for some form of gadeteer parachute.)

And in response to a question, Kelly Pedersen came up with the following general modifier:

Externally Sourced -10%

This modifier can be applied to any advantage that provides a form of movement (Aquatic, Flight, Walk on Air, etc.) or one that increases your Basic Ground Move (Enhanced Move (Ground), for example). Your mobility comes not from your own muscles or personal power source, but some other force that moves you. This means you don't have to expend your own FP to move quickly, and can even rest while you move, regaining FP as if you were moving at no more than a slow walk.

However, your Move when using the advantage cannot ever exceed the Basic (/Enhanced) Move granted by the ability—you can't sprint, use Extra Effort to extend your movement, and so forth. Instead, it uses a separate energy reserve, which is either equivalent to your normal FP, or a ‘fuel supply’ that will last eight hours (akin to the Machine meta-trait). This can be modified with extra energy reserve, or Does Not Eat, and similar traits.

Lastly, the advantage now only covers your own body, and will shut down if you carry anything more than light clothing. To be able to carry more, take the Can Carry Objects (or Can Carry Others) enhancement.