Psi-Wars Space Battles Lite

 I've had a lot of complaints recently that my Action Vehicular Combat is "too complicated."  It "involves unfamiliar maneuvers" (that are right there, in GURPS Action) and "really big numbers."  I don't know what to say.  If you can handle applying a -10 Deceptive Attack Penalty to the Vitals (-3) in the dim torchlight (-2) while making an All-Out Attack (+4) and then apply 1.5x damage on a hit, I'm pretty sure you can handle rolling against  Piloting with a +20 bonus and determining the margin of victory.  This is GURPS, we deal with big numbers all of the time.  This isn't White Wolf, where you can count on your fingers.

"I can do the math; I'm an engineer. I just don't want to.  I'm here to play, not to work." 

--Nele van den Ende, PHD

Alright! Alright. I get it.  I see these complaints a lot, and they mean something.  The criticism of my action vehicular system is not that it's wrong, or that it's inaccurate, or that it doesn't scale.  It hits all of those notes just fine.  The complaint is that it's too much work to implement.  Yes, it's simpler than standard GURPS combat.  Yes, it's simpler and more cinematic than GURPS Spaceships combat, itself a simplification of standard GURPS combat. But it still involves quite some work and some experience to learn. Can it get any simpler than that? Sure! Of course. I mean, we're a long way off from GURPS Ultra-Lite, so I'm pretty sure there's plenty room in which we can put something that's simpler, but still tactically interesting.

But what do we mean by "simpler."  We probably don't want "whooshing sounds with crayons." I mean, if you want really simple, just have people roll Pilot and then make up what happens.  What's wrong with that idea? Well, it makes the Fighter Ace effectively pointless ("Did we defeat the Empire and save the carrier?" "Well, I rolled well, so yes.").  So we still want some complexity here, but then, how much complexity is too complex? Well, we have some fairly specific criticisms we can parse through, and my own gut feelings.

I think what people who are complaining about this want are:

• Familiar maneuvers: GURPS Action's Chase rules are fine, but you have to, you know, learn them.
• Finger-Counting: It sounds condescending, but it's true: humans are very intuitive with values ~5, which is why we often see modifiers that tend to be in the plus or minus 1 to 5 range.  Even if we have to do a lot of adding, it's easier to add 5 + 5 + 5 than it is to workout the margin of success from a roll of 13 vs a total of skill 17 with +19 in modifiers.
• Roll and Shout: While "Just roll Piloting and narrate the results" is probably too simple for what we're looking for, most people do just want to roll their skill with some "finger-counting" modifiers and then get a result out of it.  As much as possible, we should be rolling against familiar skills and familiar values. That is, we shouldn't be rolling against a -1 or a 50, if possible, but somewhere between 3 and 18.

Emergency Power Allocation

While working on Trader Tech for my Patrons, I began to ponder the nature of "Cobbletech" and what possible bonuses I could use to represent it.  While researching and poking around, I came across the old idea of "Energy Reserve for Vehicles to allow Extra Effort."  It's an intriguing idea, but how do you handle extra-effort for a vehicle?

Then it hit me: we already had such a system in place in GURPS Spaceships.  I always liked the Engineering actions that GURPS Spaceships allows, especially since it gave Psi-Wars tech-bots a reason to hang out in your Starhawk.  With the shift to Vehicles though, and discarding of Power Points, this no longer served a purpose.  But what if we could bring it back in the form of Extra Effort?  Not all vehicles would have spare energy reserves, so for most vehicles it would be moot, but for some, it might be an option.  I propose the following rules:

Emergency Power Allocation

Some vehicles have Emergency Power Reserves, which can act as Energy Reserves for the purposes of "Vehicular Extra Effort." These represent more robust power-transfer systems, distributed energy capacitors and spare energy banks. Vehicles without Emergency Power Reserves can still "redline" and reduce their HT by one to gain the benefits of "Vehicular Extra Effort" (see "Machines and Fatigue," page B16); this represents overcharging certain systems, blowing out energy transfer systems, etc.  Allocating Emergency Power Reserves requires a Passenger Action, a roll against an appropriate skill and a single point of the  vehicle's Emergency Power Reserve (or one level of HT).

• All Power to the Engines:  Skills:  Electrician or Mechanic (Appropriate vehicular specialization). For a single Action Vehicular Combat turn, double the Move of the vehicle; as a simplified calculation, apply a +2 to its chase rolls.  This doubles fuel consumption for the turn (if that matters), and apply a cumulative -4 to the skill roll for this form of vehicular extra effort for each additional attempt to double your Move.  Critical failure on this roll disables your engines.
•  Emergency Evasive Maneuvers: Skills: Electrician or Mechanic (Appropriate vehicular specialization). Success grants a the vehicle a +2 to a single vehicular dodge; this //always// counts as a High-G dodge.
• Emergency Firepower: Skills: Electrician or Armoury (Vehicular Weapons). Success grants a single weapon +1 damage per die or +2 damage per die by the weapons Malf is reduced to 14.  A critical failure on your skill roll for this form of vehicular extra effort disables your weapons.
• Emergency Screen Recharge: Skills: Electrician or Armoury (Force Screen). Rather than wait until your next turn to restore your force screen to full DR, do so immediately.  This usually works best when a force screen is under a particularly intense barrage of lighter attacks.
•  Emergency System Purge: Skills: Electrician or Mechanic (Appropriate vehicular specialization). This allows a vehicle to ignore the effects of a failed HT roll due to a Surge attack, a roll to see if the vehicle remains operational, or a roll to see if a system was disabled, for the duration of one turn.  The GM may choose to limit the effects of this an emergency systems purge to temporarily restore the functions of the energy system or systems that draw power, such as weapons, force screens and some engines. This has no effect on Destroyed systems, nor can it prevent a ship's destruction.
•  Emergency Weapon Recharge: Skills: Electrician or Armoury (Vehicular Weapons). Success restores half of all shots to a single weapon.

Vehicular Updates

Redjack Fighters would gain the option of an emergency power reserve as an option slot

Valiants would simply gain 3 energy reserve points.

Valkyries would gain a psychotronic power module which allows the user to supply the energy directly from his own fatigue (likely with an exchange rate, probably 5 fatigue for 1 vehicular energy reserve), and replaces the roll with a Will roll.

Playtest: The Tall Tales of the Orochi Belt

I've wanted to explore the Action Vehicular combat rules for awhile, and there's no better way to do that than to use the actual rules that we've built up and run a game with them.  Furthermore, actually running a game helps me focus on what I actually need, and what actually matters.  A great deal of material comes from run games.  Finally, I've not put enough time into running games of late, as my family and work have been eating into what time I have, but with luck, I'll manage to schedule enough time to do this.

The Tall Tales of the Orochi Belt will be a (roughly) episodic mini-campaign.  I have three to five arcs planned, all episodic.  They follow in an obvious sequence, more or less, but it should be relatively easy to have players drop in and out as necessary.  The premise will be the liberation of a star system, the Orochi Belt, that features no planets to speak of, and thus all "space" action, ideal for testing out space combat rules.

The first session will be January 4th, and we already have 5 players.  As I get more details (such as who the characters are, other than one Kainian Space Knight and one Asrathi Witch-Cat Pirate), I'll tell more.  In the meantime, enjoy this introductory snippet:

Wiki Showcase: the Fighter Ace

If you're a Disciple or better on Patreon, you already know that I've announced the coming playtest for the Action Vehicular Rules: Tall Tales of the Orochi Belt. I'll detail more as we come closer to the first session. Naturally, to run this playtest, I need to work out the sorts of characters that would use all these fighters we've been builing, and that means working out the Fighter Ace and putting it on the Wiki.

This was actually the first of the new templates I revised for Iteration 7. I started working on it after I finished the Action Vehicular Rules, because it changed a lot of how they functioned, and I wanted to capture that.  That said, it's probably changed the least of the new templates; mostly, I just migrated the advantage/disadvantage choices based on who they worked for to lenses, and updated their techniques to use the new techniques.  I've removed the "Maverick, Wingman, Bomber" distinctions of their techniques as I expect everyone to be adult enough to understand what to do with that, and I've discussed that in their customization notes (this could be expanded, though).  I've integrated their "Power-ups" into the template rather than leave them as distinct, "Fighter Ace only" upgrades (this means they lose their "fighter gizmos," but we can bring that back if people really miss them).  I do intend to create a "cross-class" fighter ace specialization, so people who want to play as space knights who can also fly fighters can do so.

The Ridiculously Huge Action Vehicular Playtest Part III - The Aftermath

This is the finale of the Three Part playtest of the Action Vehicular Combat series.  See yesterday's post for the bulk of the actual "battle," and the day prior for additional context.  This mostly consists of a retrospective on what worked, what I had to change, and what I missed out on playtesting.

The Ridiculously Huge Action Vehicular Playtest Part II - The Battle

This is part two of an epic playtest for my GURPS Action Vehicular System for Psi-Wars (though you can borrow it for anything Action-inspired).  See yesterday's post for additional context!

The Ridiculously Huge Action Vehicular Playtest Part I - Setting Up

It was about three quarters of a year ago that I posted an updated ruleset for GURPS Action chase rules.  The intent was to marry the Dogfighting rules with the Space combat rules to create something that would work for Psi-Wars.  I did a few playtests, but stopped short of a complete one.  I lacked the proper resources at the time (namely, the ships) to run the sort of playtest that I envisioned, which would be the sort of scenario that I would imagine playing out in an actual Psi-Wars game, especially an epic-scale battle, which tend to be fan-favorites and also the most taxing on a system.

However, now that I've completed the vehicles for the Alliance (at least the Maradonian nobles) and the Empire, I have enough material to run the scenario, and thus, we can have the playtest.  For reference, this playtest will use:

(For the Alliance)

• the Allegiance-Pattern Carrier (the Blind Justice)
• The Lancer-Pattern Heavy Assault Frigate
• The Raptor-Pattern Strikecraft
• The Valkyrie-Pattern Light Psychotronic Fighter
• The Valiant-Pattern Multi-Role Fighter

(For the Empire)

• The Executioner-Class Artillery Cruiser (the Final Judgment)
• The Imperator-Class Dreadnought (The Valorian Edict and the Reign of Fire)
• The Peltast-Class Light Strike Fighter
• The Tempest-Class Orbital Supremacy Fighter
• And last (and least), the Javelin-Class Interceptor

I had a lot of fun with the playtest, so I hope you don't mind the lurid descriptions (I always thought GURPS and excellent narrative went hand in hand, since GURPS plays a lot like a film, if the film was in slow motion), but this is as large and sprawling as its epic ambitions might suggest.  We'll be at this for a couple of days, and today, we start with the introduction.

Note that the rules I link to above are already outdated as of this playtest, as I did what you should do with a playtest, and made notes and updated them to reflect what "felt right" while I played.  I'll discuss those changes more at the end of the whole playtest series.