The ship styles need another look
given the action vehicular combat update.
-Christopher
Almquist
In previous iterations of Psi-Wars, I had used the default GURPS
Spaceships system. When it came to differentiating fighter aces,
officers and smugglers more finely with techniques, I had only to to
use the techniques defined in GURPS Spaceships 4, and perhaps add a
couple of my own. With the switch to the Chase rules, this became
more complicated, as I had to define my own techniques, as Patron
Christoper Almquist has tirelessly pointed out.
But do I even need techniques? I asked myself that question every
time Chris pointed out its absence. On the one hand, I strongly
believe that a group should all be able to operate as the same
template and “feel different,” or the template is too narrow. A
classic way to do that with, for example, Fighter Aces is to add
techniques, in the same way that adding techniques to Space Knights
helps differentiate their force sword abilities.
On the other hand, space
doesn’t come up that much.
How much it comes up will depend on the campaign: one might make it
the center of their campaign, but that’s far from a sure thing. On
a more planet-focused campaign, a fighter ace will twiddle their
thumbs most of the time, while a smuggler usually at least
has their underworld connections and their natural deception going
for them. The more I encourage players to invest in space, the more
likely they are to feel sidelined if space doesn’t come up. They
can get around this by not playing space-based characters, but
Psi-Wars, like most Space Opera, tends to zig and zag through
settings, so I expect most campaigns will have fighter-based
characters that get a chance to fly and fight sometimes.
(Incidentally, I’m not the only
one to have this concern about fighter aces. SalsatheGeek played a
fighter ace in Tinker Titan Rebel Spy intentionally, not just to see
how they handled in space, but also planetside, and Patron Nemoricus
has routinely recommended Wraith Squadron to me, precisely because
it’s a series about fighter aces who double as commandos and
spies).
So I left the question to my
Patrons in a snap poll, to get a feeling for what they want. They
voted, 2 to 1, for elaborate and detailed techniques, with the other
third voting for simpler techniques. Nobody voted against
techniques, or even shrugged at the question. So clearly
the people who invest in Psi-Wars want techniques,
and they don’t mind them being highly detailed.
I find myself balking at Space Combat Styles, though. I’ve had
them before, more as a guide for myself, a way of thinking about
fighters, and I think, broadly speaking, there’s still room in my
design space for
thinking
about how fighters approach space combat in terms of styles.
Imperial Fighters tend to operate differently than Alliance fighters,
who operate differently from pirates, and strike pilots tend to
operate differently from dogfighters. That said, I hesitate to
formalize them in the form of styles. Once
a game has a style and numerous power-ups, certain players will be
tempted to invest heavily. This is the intent
behind styles. If Kung Fu exists in a game, then this sort of player
will want to master it, and perhaps a few additional side-styles, and
then compare and contrast their style with others. This fits into
force swordsmanship wonderfully, but if we add it to fighter aces,
then, once again, we have characters who want to dump all of their
points in space, when we want to encourage fighter aces and smugglers
to at least think
about generalization a little.
We can also handle “space
combat styles” by building them into specific templates. Quick,
what do you call a corvette pilot that emphasizes evasion, deception
and speed over aggression and attack? That’s right, a smuggler.
And the opposite? A pirate. This follows how GURPS Action 3: Furious
Fists handles “styles,” by breaking up your martial artists into
“Fast, Strong, Weapons and Ninja.” We still run into a problem
with the Fighter Ace and the Officer, in that they legitimately have
some unique approaches (the heroic, leadership-oriented Officer
should feel different from the brutal, “nuke them all and let God
sort it out” Officer) that can be broken up along sub-divisions,
but this might be better handled by discussing lenses, rather than
introducing complete styles.
Avoiding a deeper work into space
combat styles also works well for a first revision. I need to come
up with techniques for the new rules, and so twenty or so should be a
good start (and I already have ideas for a few more). Given the
appreciation my patrons have shown for more complex techniques, we
can proliferate a bit past the five or so in the original Spaceships
rules, and see how things go. This is not a “final decision,”
nothing ever is when you take an iterative approach to game design,
but I’ll definitely be watching this space to see if it can
tolerate more complexity.
