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.

Fighter Ace 3.0

The Fighter Ace is already a pretty good template.  It's nicely focused and excels at what it sets out to do, which is to be good at piloting a starfighter. This makes him ideal in handling military-scale problems set in space, giving him an interesting relationship with the commando.  Unfortunately, the Fighter Ace is arguably too focused.  Is he good at anything else? This creates two problems.  First, how often will military-scale issues come up in space?  If everyone is a fighter ace, it can come up all the time, but if your party consists of an assassin, a spy, a bounty hunter and a fighter ace, what does the rest of the party do while the fighter ace if dogfighting the enemy, and what does the fighter ace do when the rest of the crew is doing their thing?

To help with this problem, I've made sure that handling any vehicle, mostly through the rules I've applied to defaults, as well as a few secondary skill options.  Thus, the fighter ace can assist people with any movement needed.  He's not as good as the Smuggler for getting you there, but he can also help you navigate space, and he's better than the smuggler at bypassing military-style blockades.  He can also support the more military characters with close-air support.

I've tried to expand his secondary skillsets in a few useful directions, which have resulted in his power-up packages.  First, the Fighter Ace can easily be very social, with access to good looks, charisma, and a variety of social skills to complement his leadership skills.  This is not a unique power-up package, though, because enough of those skills are fundamental to how a fighter ace needs to work that they make little sense to refactor out.

If a pilot falls behind enemy lines, he'll need to escape, which gives us the Evasion package.  I had already included a variety of skills and advantages meant to assist a pilot in resisting torture, escaping imprisonment and surviving on a deserted planet, and I have since shifted those into the Evasion package.  This gives the pilot a secondary role as infiltrator and chaser.

Finally, knowing how to fix and maintain technology is a useful skill for a fighter ace.  Add to this the possibility of deploying unique technology on his preferred fighter, and he can turn his fighter into a temporary swiss-army knife, using it to solve the situation in unique ways.

Finally, to take advantage of unique "starfighting styles," I've included a few martial art packages to guide players in choosing their perks and techniques.

Starfighter Tactics

Spaceships 4 already includes several maneuvers, which encourages starfighter pilots to hav their own unique approach to combat.  We can expand this out further, including techniques for gunnery and torpedos and tactics to create complete schools for starfighter pilots to follow!

As with military combat tactics, I don't recommend treating these as complete martial arts (though if I were, I'd make them work like gun-based martial arts, in that gaining style familiarity gives you cross-specialization with all appropriate starfighters).  Instead, use this as inspiration for creating standard/simple mook pilots, and to expand the Fighter Ace template.