Piloting/Driving Combat in RPGs is No Fun!

[Fenris-77]

I'd probably use a PbtA style clock. You have a pilot, a gunner, a trouble shooter and everyone else is either cheerleading or helping. Any combination of, say, five successes before 3 failures and the ship gets away (assuming it's a chase). Done that way the input from every participating character is counted equal and overall the thing shouldn't take too long. Plus, no matter what happens (damage, success, failure etc) the narrative moves forward. It could be five great shots from the ships cannon, or two shots, a great pilot move, and a couple of successful repair rolls, or whatever.

 

[Celebrim]

I'd probably use a PbtA style clock. You have a pilot, a gunner, a trouble shooter and everyone else is either cheerleading or helping. Any combination of, say, five successes before 3 failures and the ship gets away (assuming it's a chase). Done that way the input from every participating character is counted equal and overall the thing shouldn't take too long. Plus, no matter what happens (damage, success, failure etc) the narrative moves forward. It could be five great shots from the ships cannon, or two shots, a great pilot move, and a couple of successful repair rolls, or whatever.

Which is fine but it mostly has the advantage of having a fast resolution. No choices are actually made in the above scenario. It doesn't really matter if you use 1 dice roll (James Bond style) or 5 (4e D&D style), all the choices here are illusionary and it doesn't matter what you choose the dice are really what's playing the game.

 

[Umbran]

But it's a very hard problem to solve in a PnP game where none of that visceral experience is present in any form - no sounds, no sights, no pulse pounding action - and control of the battery is usually just in the hands of dice and your sole role is to roll them and report what they did.

I don't see how this is different from the small group tactical wargame combat stuff we use. A fighter doesn't have a the sights, sounds, or the feel of steel hitting steel or the like, but we manage to make it work. The same could be done for ship-combat.

There's a major question, though of whether a designer wants to or should spend the time and effort building out ship combat with anywhere near the depth of personal combat. That question will typically be answered with answering hte question - How much play time do you want/expect to be spent on ship combat?

 

[prabe]

There's a major question, though of whether a designer wants to or should spend the time and effort building out ship combat with anywhere near the depth of personal combat. That question will typically be answered with answering hte question - How much play time do you want/expect to be spent on ship combat?

Seems to me as though this is a question that should more or less answer itself during the design process. Is the vehicle combat the point of the game, is it purely a narrative tool, or is it something in between (or something that might vary table-to-table or session-to-session)? Possibly similar to "is the vehicle the setting?"

I think it can be made to work, but I agree with posts upthread (@Fenris-77 and @Celebrim I think) that it seems to have a lot of the same problems as computer hacking (in games that have that).

 

[Celebrim]

I don't see how this is different from the small group tactical wargame combat stuff we use. A fighter doesn't have a the sights, sounds, or the feel of steel hitting steel or the like, but we manage to make it work.

Critically though, only because each player regularly makes some decision - where to move, what to attack, what spell to cast, what combat maneuver to use, what stance to fight in, etc. So even if the visceral action is missing, the player is still mentally engaged in the challenge.

Compare what happens when you have a theater of the mind combat using a system where everyone makes basically the same move each round, say rolling a D20 to determine to hit, and reporting damage. When that happens, no one is really making a decision and combat tends to become really "grindy" and not that enjoyable past age 12 or so (not long after card games like 'war' with its similar lack of decision making have ceased to intrigue).

The same could be done for ship-combat.

It's not at all clear how. A lot of systems have tried, but other than the obvious solution of making vehicular combat work like tactical combat with each player in their own vehicle to control, it's easy to figure out how you'd do that.

There's a major question, though of whether a designer wants to or should spend the time and effort building out ship combat with anywhere near the depth of personal combat. That question will typically be answered with answering hte question - How much play time do you want/expect to be spent on ship combat?

I think that's entirely tangential, and really even misses the point.

The system shouldn't be telling you how much time to spend on ship combat or any other sort of challenge. The process of play adopted by a particular group should decide what aspects of the story are worth focusing on. If the designer decides, "Groups shouldn't focus on ship to ship combat, that's not what my game is about", in a setting where ship to ship combat is a meaningful part of the reality, then the designer is headed for trouble because invariably groups will eventually want to engage with such a scenario or find themselves in such a scenario where they feel it matters and deserves some sort of resolution at some degree of granularity. And if the game's answer is, "That's not the way you should be playing!", it won't be long before the players look for a different game.

It's reasonable to assume that if vehicles exist as part of the fiction, the players will want to engage with them in some fashion. The OP wouldn't be asking the question if he didn't find himself regularly engaging with that part of the fiction and finding the game designers answers to his needs lacking.

Fiction ought to have the priority. That's why we play RPGs. The fiction doesn't exist to support the mechanics. The mechanics exist to support the fiction. If a fictional reality asserts itself, then the mechanics are there to resolve it. If the mechanics come up empty of answers, you've had a catastrophic failure of design.

 

[Fenris-77]

Which is fine but it mostly has the advantage of having a fast resolution. No choices are actually made in the above scenario. It doesn't really matter if you use 1 dice roll (James Bond style) or 5 (4e D&D style), all the choices here are illusionary and it doesn't matter what you choose the dice are really what's playing the game.

Sure choices are made. Flee or fight to start, plus a bunch of stuff that relies on the rules. Do you man the shield controls or put out the fire in the hallway? Do you keep manning the guns or go to help the other gunner that just took shrapnel through the gut? The resolution matters a lot - the player choices and the resolution from the GM are what combine to make things happen. Mind you, the system either needs to provide those consequences or the GM needs to layer them on. A lot of vehicle system I'm familiar with don't extend to consequences for the crew of the vehicle at every step during the fight or chase, and that often gets boring. If the focus is on crew actions and consequences for the crew, rather than specifically for the vehicle, you stand a better chance of having an interesting scene.

 

[Blue]

We had a recent Design Masterclass column about the 007 game. It was luaded for a literally decades for excellent car chase mechanics. Now, the idea may seem obvious or quint today, but that's because it introduced them and others took inspiration.

But one thing I don't see very often is a bidding war for maneuvering, including the fact that your vehicle has a redline and if you bid worse than it and you fail the check, things go way bad. But if you succeed on the check, no harm. Really bringing character skill to the forefront more than gear.

We've gotten so used to tactical combat that I think we overlook vehicle combat is often better left for theater of the mind, where daring maneuvers and such can described based on the results of the characters checks, instead of mathed out. There's definitely a place for that wargame style, but as a subsystem in an RPG it's not the only way.

In RPG systems over the years, I've had the most luck with:

• Each player having their own vehicle. e.g. mechs or speederbikes.
• Each player having a distinct role on one or more vehicles. Crew of a starship, multiple cars with drivers and gunners, etc.
• The vehicle having it's own crew that the players can order around, and can either assist them or use their own abilities, such as how navel combat in D&D is often done.

As others have mentioned, if it's the same pool of character building currency, those who do not chose to specialize in a particular subsystem (vehicles, hacking, social, personal combat, exploration, etc.) will find themselves will less they can contribute. With how much wall time vehicle combat can take, that's not a good thing. If an RPG expects vehicle combat often (such as SF ship combat), it should ensure all characters have an array of useful abilities for that just as they do for other common aspects of the game, like personal combat.

 

[Umbran]

The system shouldn't be telling you how much time to spend on ship combat or any other sort of challenge.

Of course it should. It is an aspect of genre choice, and much as folks want it to be otherwise, rules help enforce/create genre. Using an extreme case to demonstrate the point - D&D 5e tells me to spend exactly zero time on starship combat... having no starships in the game because they aren't a significant element in Ye Basic Fantasie Genre.

 

[billd91]

b) Tactical man to man combat has a nearly unique property in that it is a cooperative task were everyone can contribute toward success and everyone can regularly make real decisions in the task. There is a myth that games are combat focused because the rules mostly provide for combat. [The truth is that most games are combat focused because that's one of the few things a whole party can regularly do together. There are all sorts of other challenges, but the problem with the tends to be that you really only need one person to solve them, or that only one person is actually making the decisions. Cooperating to fly a starship is one good example. You might have rolls that each member of the party can make, and the outcome of those rolls might be important, but really only the one person actually steering the vehicle is making any real decision. Everyone else is just rolling a dice and reporting the outcome, which quickly becomes tedious. Now, if you have only one player, this isn't much of a problem. But it's not a fun group activity.

I think you've got an interesting way to look at it. I'm not sure I agree 100% with it because I don't think it applies to all RPGs, but it is certain fits well with D&D's development over the years. Maybe even to a T.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Totally with you on this. One of the reasons I stopped playing Starfinder was because I found starship combat to be dreadfully dull. And don't get me started on starship combat in Megatraveller. Back in the day we just didn't have starship combat because it was such a boondoggle. In Shadowrun, until they started adding drones, riggers were stuck being near-useless away from their vehicles, and everyone else was stuck being useless when they were.

I definitely think adding subsystem on subsystem for vehicle combat contributes to slowing things down, when it should feel fast and exciting.