Action Vehicular Rules 1.1

Currently on my Patreon, if you're a Patron, you get a one week preview of the Action Vehicular Rules, the Space Opera update for the Action Chase rules into a full dog-fighting and space combat system.

If you're a patron, you can check it out here.  If you're not, come back next week, and it'll be available to you!  As always, I want to make a shout out to my patrons, and give them a big thank you.  I know it's been a quiet few months.

Why Capital Ships? New Rules for Dreadnoughts in GURPS Action Chase rules (Part 1 of 2)

My apologies for my absence.  Between illness and family, I've been busy, but also, the topic I had selected to tackle turned out to be exceptionally large, so large that I've had to break it down into several smaller posts.

The core issue I want to tackle are Capital Ships and how they fit into our new combat paradigm.  I had intended for this to be a single post, but it turned out to be nearly 4500 words, so I'm going to break it down into a two parter.  Today, we start with some theory, and then dive into a greatly expanded set of rules on Passenger Actions.

Why Capital Ships?

Most space-based combat games find that they naturally center around a “sweet spot” of design. For games like Wing Commander, this is the fighter; for settings like Star Trek, this is the capital ship. For settings like Star Wars (and thus Psi-Wars) we need to justify multiple sweet spots to make our visions of our desired form of space combat come to life.

Psi-Wars focuses mostly on the model of “one character, one ship,” and this works best with starfighters, and thus starfighters are probably the prime form for participating in space combat. Thus the other models, the corvette and capital ship, need their justification. I’ll put off justifying the corvette, except to note that it offers an opportunity for multiple characters to lend their skill on a ship that is competitive with starfighters.

The Dreadnought offers a far greater concern when it comes to justification. They represent enormous resource investments that lack the speed and agility of a fighter, and sport similar firepower, and are vulnerable to starfighters. Why, then, would someone field capital ships at all, instead of fielding fleets and fleets of starfighters? Moreover, how does the capital ship fit into the model of “one character, one ship?” How can our GURPS Action Vehicular Combat model all of this, making the dreadnought useful while still keeping it focused on a single character? To make dreadnoughts function, we need to answer these questions.

The justification of the dreadnought is perhaps the easiest question to answer. The word “capital ship” arose to describe the sort of “dreadnought ironclads” that arose during the heady naval years before WW1 (and thus, in a sense, “Dreadnought” and “Capital Ship” are synonymous, at least if we use the former term to describe a class of ships). I don’t know the logic of justification behind the term “Capital Ship,” but capital is a term used to describe the great industrial machines in which a nation would invest, suggesting that a capital ship is a great industrial machine of war, a giant mobile fortress from which the rest of your operation can be staged.

This is certainly an apt description for a carrier. A starfighter lacks long-term accommodations and the capacity of long hyperspace journeys, and people and tanks certainly lack the ability to travel through space. The carrier offers room, accommodations and transport capacity for starfighters and soldiers, ferrying them across the galaxy. In a game, they often serve as a “mobile base.” In Tinker Titan Rebel Spy, a playtest I ran to test whether a dreadnought was “too much ship for players to handle,” I found they mostly used their dreadnought this way: they slept in its cabins, flirted in its cantina, planned in its briefing room, and launched their starfighters from its hangars.

We should also consider the capital role of flagship. The great size of a capital ship allows it to carry far more electronics and expert crew members than the average starfighter or corvette. With access to megacomputers, FTL communication and huge sensor arrays, the capital ship has unparalleled ability to see and command a battlefield. They can coordinate fighter squadrons or ground troops, and they can put expert strategists and spies to answering any questions the members of the arrayed force might have.

Finally, the capital role of the battleship remains valid because a blaster shot is much cheaper than an expensive isomeric nuclear torpedo! While a starfighter can defeat a capital ship, so can another capital ship, and it can do so over and over again without needing to refuel or reload, and can do so from a fairly extreme distance. This is less important for swift “first strikes” against other capital ships, but it’s vital to be able to pour on firepower against hardened ground targets, ideally from orbit where you are far away from anti-air defenses.

What the Fighter Ace is to the starfighter, the Officer is to the Dreadnought. Naturally, a fighter ace can directly control his vehicle, while the officer must command his crew to carry out his orders and must coordinate that crew effectively and efficiently. But where a corvette, with a crew numbering typically no more than ten, can afford to allow a handful of heroic characters to shine (one top notch pilot with a couple of highly skilled gunners and a single, desperate scavenger trying to keep the ship flying), a capital ship can have crews in the literally thousands, making it nearly impossible for the singular actions of a character to make a difference. Thus, we must treat out crew as natural organic extensions of heroic characters.

The rest of this post naturally arises from my attempt to adjust the action chase rules to fit these changes. GURPS Action assumes small vehicles with a single driver and a passenger or three: a car chase with perhaps motorcycles and a helicopter or a tank; they do not envision “chase scenes” with battleships and carriers. We need them because they impact battle, but they should do so on a larger, more strategic scale.

Solo: The Best New Star Wars Film You Haven't Seen

So, Solo: A Star Wars story is finally out for rent, and I finally took the time to sit down and watch it.  I didn't have the chance to do so when it came out in movie theaters (more on why, and what it means, later) but I wanted to see it, and having seen it, I want to give my thoughts on it and, I hope, clear up some of the air around it, in case you haven't seen it, heard it was bad, and were avoiding it for some reason.

The TL; DR is that it's good, definitely worth your money to rent, but it isn't flawless, and I suspect you already know what the flaws are and, if you haven't seen it, it's because of those flaws.

Generic Fleet Followup: The Battleship Slugfest (and more!)

After yesterday's post, Discord has been buzzing with questions.  I wanted to answer a few as best as I could, especially since it lets me dive a little into how I came to yesterday's conclusions.

• How do various ships match-up against one another?
• Destroyer vs Corvettes, which is better?
• My assumptions

The Generic Fleet: A Psi-Wars Tactical Context

It's easier to know what you're doing when you can see what's going on.  One of the reasons I recommend the iterative approach to design is that once you've constructed one piece of your puzzle, or given yourself an overview of what your final product will look like, putting the rest of the pieces in gets that much easier, and flaws jump out at you.

A lack of this overview has proved a problem for my spaceship designs in Psi-Wars.  In iteration 3, it didn't matter because I just borrowed existing ships and used the assumptions there.  Why is an Empire-Class dreadnought SM +14? It doesn't matter, it just is. But if I'm going to rebuild it, I need to know why it's that size, and what it's facing, so I can know how much firepower is enough, how much DR is too much, etc.  More than that, if I'm going to run playtests, I often need more pieces than just "Dreadnough, Typhoon, Starhawk."  How does a battleship fare against a dreadnought? To know that, I need a battleship!

Thus I realized I needed a "generic fleet," worked exemplars of of typical space warship designs.  By seeing how those ships worked and how they interacted with one another, I could see both whether my new rules worked, and what sort of ship designs I should built.  It also offered a shortcut for my work: if I have to "run Psi-Wars now" I can use the ships in the generic fleet.  They're not great, but they're enough.

These designs are not meant to be  the perfect design, nor are they particularly customized.  The final versions of various navies will include much more particular ships: an Imperial Dreadnought, for example, might combine the designs of the battleship and the carrier below, while a pirate fleet might have several variations of corvettes.  I also didn't dive deeply on details that didn't matter for the purposes of this test.  So I didn't put much thought into crew complements or diplomatic accommodations, etc.  These are basic designs meant to be sufficient to provide examples and to get a good overview on how the tactics of Psi-Wars work.

Dreadnoughts don't Dogfight: Thoughts on Spaceship Accuracy in GURPS Action

The playtest between the Typhoon and the Starhawk raised some oddities regarding accuracy that I want to revisit, but far more importantly, the addition of Dreadnoughts into the game are really going to play havoc with some assumptions of the Action chase system in that we’re adding a vehicle that really operates by very different assumptions than a fighter does. This motivated me to stop and rethink how we should handle accuracy so we don’t get surprised by some emergent gameplay at the table.

Eggshells with Hammers in Psi-Wars: Contemplating Capital-Scale Damage

"I'm interested in seeing how you handle the eggshells with hammers problem" - Patron Jose
"That's not how I would see dreadnoughts fighting one another." - Patron Brett Tamahori

So, the drop of the dreadnought and my Eggshells with Hammers article sparked quite some discussion with made me stop and think and revisit a lot of ideas I had, which proved fruitful. It also proved time-consuming, and I’m still walking through the results. Balancing damage in Psi-Wars has proved difficult for precisely the reasons I outlined in my article, and it’s a problem a lot of people face. Thus, I thought by posting these musings, proposed rule changes and synthesis of various house-rules might serve as a useful worked example for others.

This is going to be a long walk through some GURPS "insider baseball."  The idea is to highlight the problems with how GURPS handles damage at large scales for the specific problem of dealing with fighters vs dreadnoughts as we tend to see in Star Wars and other forms of space opera, so read a long if that interests you!  This will be the first of, ah, a few posts.