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.

Dogfighting 3 - A multi-party dogfight

So far, I’ve handled dogfights “as the rules are” between two fighters, go get a feel for the rules; between a fighter and a tank; to see how the rules handle a fighter vs a relatively static target; finally, I want to tackle how the Chase rules handle multi-party chases. This is where I crashed and burned before. This time around, I chose to approach it more slowly and methodically, to understand everything else around the system before I approach this. It’s critical that this works, because Psi-Wars is never going to be static one-on-one fights; instead, it’s going to be swooping, gnarled, fiery furballs of fighters with fellow pilots crying out “I can’t shake him!” and heroic fighter aces tackling whole squadrons of enemy fighters. If the Chase rules can’t handle that, then we have no business using them.

We’re also going to do something else a little different: We’re going to use biplanes this time around. Some people have suggested that biplanes are a better model for Psi-Wars than modern fighters. Maybe that’s true. What’s certainly true is that the Chase rules should be able to handle biplanes, and that biplanes are different from what we’ve messed with before. By trying them out, we can check their suitability, and learn some things about how the chase rules are constructed and how they work.

Meditations on Biplanes Part II - The Actual Biplanes

Based on the feedback discussed in the previous post, I thought it might be fun to turn the third dogfighting post, the one where I tackle complex scenarios that aren't one-on-one, into a biplane dogfight.  In principle, I think it should work, as I believe the Action chase system is robust enough to handle biplanes, and I think it'll give us an idea of some of the inner logic of that system.

To do that, I need biplanes, and we actually have four in GURPS.  GURPS Campaigns offers us a "barnstormer," but its stats are a bit dubious, and its unarmed in any case.  The next option are the biplane fighter-bombers from GURPS High-Tech, and I thought I would use those, until a little investigation showed me that they were really bombers, not the sort of fighters that an "ace" pilot would fly.  So, I did a little hunting, and uncovered two iconic fighters from the era: the Sopwith Camel (duh), and the Albatross D.II.

Naturally, one can simply convert real-world stats to GURPS stats with relative ease, but I also wanted to dive into GURPS Vehicles a little, to see how well everything holds up.  These definitely weren't built with GURPS Vehicles, but I'll include some commentary and how I might port some concepts into Psi-Wars.

Meditations on the Biplane Part I -- Feedback

My discussion of dogfights have stirred up quite some commentary, not all of which I've had a chance to really address, and some I cannot (yet) address.  I take that sort of enthusiasm as a good sign, and I wanted to tackle a specific post here, by the esteemed Salsathegeek.  His commentary is especially important to me, as he's played a fighter ace, and his experience is one I seek to improve by updating these rules.  If he likes them, then it's a sign of a job well done, and if he doesn't, it hints that there are further problems, so I take his feedback seriously.

I should point out that he's not exactly criticizing me so much as expounding on what I'm talking about.  I don't really feel I need to "defend" myself (I think creators should avoid defending their work anyway; it should stand on its own two feet), so much as expand on some concepts and address why I'm doing certain things, and what it might look like if I didn't.  That is, I want to explore, rather than refute, his feedback.  I want to see what I can take from it and what you could for your own settings.

Dogfighting Revisited

I looked at David Pulver’s Dogfighting article, from Pyramid#3/53, way back in Iteration 3 and dismissed it as inappropriate for what I was trying to do, and in some sense that’s probably still true. Dogfighting won’t cover everything and misses a lot of elements key to space combat, especially how capital ships interact, or things like power management. Even so, Dogfighting is close to “chases,” and I find it easiest to handle gameplay when all the rules match. Broadly speaking, the space combat scenes from Star Wars do not differ dramatically from the chase scenes from Star Wars, and in at least one case, the space combat scene was a chase scene!

Furthermore, as I step away from GURPS Spaceships as the driving mechanics behind my vehicles, I find that I need to look elsewhere for rules governing how they fight. I do still believe that GURPS Spaceships includes lots of interesting concepts for space combat, but it’s also clear to me that Psi-Wars space combat more closely resembles naval and aerial combat than it does space combat, which means we need more aerial and naval forms of combat.

I have no doubt that the final version of these rules will likely integrate elements from GURPS Action, GURPS Spaceships and GURPS Vehicles (especially as the first two are generally simplifications of the third). But if I have to choose a base, it looks like Dogfighting might be the ideal foundation from which the rest of my system will flow.