D20 future starship combat, tweeks and improvements

[engrishonly]

If you get down to grids, hex's and rulers you've stopped playing an RPG and started playing a starships battlegame.

This is exactly my issue, and I don't want to create a new thread, so I'm just going to dig this up.

Let's take the new Battlestar Galactica for instance... they don't waste time with fleet maneuvers, firing arcs, pseudo-military mish-mash any more than what enhances the story. I really don't care about the big ships more than to make it dramatic... the camera shakes and everyone dives to one side now and again, a bunch of mooks in Water Closet 34 on Deck 15 get wiped out... but the bridge crew is okay, so things keep working and guns keep firing until you need a scripted dramatic moment OR the players figure out something crazy to do & you run with it.

And the fighter-on-fighter stuff in BSG... it's action, shoot shoot, boom, down, dialogue. There's no piles and piles of dice rolls (fake-ass maneuvers and such) - things are dramatic and immediate, for the most part... even in the "Big Mac" episode, "The Hand of God", things work quickly enough to move the story along.

And yet what we get in the d20 rules are piles of dice rolling, hexes/squares, and silly rules that map crap out to a fraction of a square (which is exactly the problem with the Spiked Chain... if your response to seeing the Lord of All Evil is NOT to stride forward boldly and meet him head-on, but instead to BACK AWAY so you can min/max Attacks of Opportunity, then you're going to give me a G**damn heart attack or I'm going to strangle you on the spot).

When I want to run a game based on a fighter squadron, I want cinematics... I heroes to make dramatic choices, I want things to blow up quickly & well until some Big Bad Problem(tm) shows up and all Hell breaks loose, etc.

I don't want to break out the ruler & graphing calculator to play out a fight against a bunch of mooks in flying buckets even IF I want my heroes to have fun blowing mooks-in-buckets out of the stars.

...

See, the nice thing about the Silhouette system (thinking back to Jovian Chronicles/Heavy Gear) is that the vehicle combat rules were basically an exact mirror of the standard meatbag-on-meatbag combat rules... and that gave the mecha combat an extremely organic feeling. You were basically doing the same types of movements and ideas in your EXO-Armor/Gear that you were doing on foot, making the mecha feel like an extension of you.

I don't get this in d20, and if I end up trying to do a space fighter-based game, I will probably tear everything down and make something similar to the "good ol" combat system of the Red Box D&D or something...

I want organic and visceral dogfighting that puts my players in the cockpit, and that's the bottom line. If I can't do that, then I will never run a game that revolves around space fighter combat.

EDIT: Just want to add that I'm all hopped up on caffeine right now, so if it sounds like I'm pissed off right now, it's just because I've had too much coffee.

 

[Ranger REG]

What do you use?

Go back to the root of d20 Modern vehicle combat rules, which includes facing and using the measurement of vehicle to determine how much it occupies, like in Star Wars.

 

[Chaldfont]

Anyone remember Spacemaster Star Strike (http://www.icewebring.com/ICE_Products/SM2/SM2_9010_Star_Strike.shtml)? It was just like the rest of Spacemaster--really cool on paper but too much bookkeeping in practice. It's the only spaceship battle game I've seen that takes momentum and 3D movement into account.

But, man, its a lot of work.

For an RPG, I want something more abstract like the pre-revision d20 Star Wars rules or the WEG Star Wars rules.

 

[Ranger REG]

Anyone remember Spacemaster Star Strike (http://www.icewebring.com/ICE_Products/SM2/SM2_9010_Star_Strike.shtml)? It was just like the rest of Spacemaster--really cool on paper but too much bookkeeping in practice. It's the only spaceship battle game I've seen that takes momentum and 3D movement into account.

But, man, its a lot of work.

For roleplayers, yeah it's lot of work for them. But if they wanted that much closer to reality, let them ... so I can watch all of them venting and pulling their hair out before they need straitjackets.