I Believe I Can Fly With Average Maneuverability

[HeavenShallBurn]

I was being tongue in cheek, but I wasn't kidding. Way back in time, D&D used to embrace what were essentially mini-games as an aspect of gameplay. Instead of working out a battle between armies using D&D rules, for example, it was suggested you go use a separate system, or better yet, play a wargame.

Dogfighting is an odd thing to try to run using D&D movement and initiative, and the rules you'd want for a full dogfight are just going to be a headache when the party gets divebombed by some harpies. Seriously, go find a dogfighting game and replace the airplane miniatures with dragons.

I essentially do this for certain things. Naval combat, certain kinds of aerial combat, or "space combat" on Astral ships.

 

[GlassJaw]

Matching them up on eHarmony?

ROFL! You almost made me lose my dinner Wulf!

 

[GnomeWorks]

Yeah, those rules are crazy, and I just don't believe anyone ever uses them.

I do, and they're really not that bad.

In the game I'm currently running, I have two characters in mechs capable of flight. It comes up in every combat, and after awhile, you learn the table. It's really not that complex, and it provides granularity that I find appealing. For the most part, the players have a vague idea of what their mechs are capable of, and they only look things up on the table when they want to try something awkward (just like we look up bullrush, trip, and grappling).

It would be nice if other aspects of aerial combat (for instance, you can AoO squares around you - what about the ones above you? Below you?) were cleaned up and actually written somewhere, rather than needing to be ad-hoc'd into existence, but it's not that much of a mental drain to do so. Not only that, but we have rules for movement along two axis, but none for three - again, I ad-hoc'd something that works, but it would be nice to have some written rules to rely on. The system is only lacking due to its unfinished nature, and that it's not integrate well into the rules - and those gaps are easily filled by extrapolation or ad-hoc judgments. It's not a perfect system, but it works.

Aerial combat only really becomes a pain when distances need to be figured out on the fly. I just wing it, but it's still frustrating.

 

[Ahglock]

The Fly spell could then grant the caster Basic Flight, while a higher-level spell could grant Perfect Flight. Further spell differentiation could come from duration, speed, etc.

Sure I can always say "its magic" so that is why it works that way. But somewhere in the back of my head I can't accept a magic flight spell that doesn't let you hover. Is a giant rocket flame exploding from your butt or something why can't you hover? If you grew wings or something and then flew I'd be ok with it, but when its just hey I can fly I'm superman, not being to hover just seems off.

 

[Hella_Tellah]

Sure I can always say "its magic" so that is why it works that way. But somewhere in the back of my head I can't accept a magic flight spell that doesn't let you hover. Is a giant rocket flame exploding from your butt or something why can't you hover? If you grew wings or something and then flew I'd be ok with it, but when its just hey I can fly I'm superman, not being to hover just seems off.

I usually describe the standard fly spell by saying the caster grows wings. Since the PHB doesn't have much in the way of flavor text, I extrapolated from the mechanical effect. The 3.5 version doesn't let you hover, either; it gives you "good" maneuverability, requiring you to reference the DMG to find the table I posted in the OP.

 

[Stalker0]

3E flight is messy. I hope 4E does something like that:
Poor flight: All movement in a single turn must be in the same direction. Must make at least one normal move or falls down.
Average flight: Movement from the a single move action must be into a single direction (but if you make a full move, i.e. make two move actions, you can change in between).
Good flight: Move as want to move.

Cheers, LT.

I like it!!

 

[Skaven_13]

As an aside, once we had an encounter with a goblin on a worg, and me on my horse. The goblin fled and shot at me, but my horse was faster, so I chased after it and reached it (shooting an arrow as I went). Then on the goblin's turn it ran away again, and I had to chase after it again. It was a really odd initiative sort of thing to have him go a long distance, then have me be far enough away that I could get fireballed and he wouldn't be hurt, and then to have me get up to him again.

If nothing else, there should be some concept of momentum in the game. If you're double-moving in one direction, the next round you should not be able to move backward or sideways without some sort of Dex check or something.

Chases tend to be a problem not because of momentum, but because there is no real chase mechanic to the game, and everything falls into the traditional initative-style encounter. It's one of the things I like about spycraft. The target starts with a lead over the persuer, both play some sort of manuever to reduce or increase the lead, and then combat takes place. Rinse and repeat until you catch your target or the target manages to get away.

If 4e could include something like that, which you could use on foot, mounted, or aerial chases, you could abstract a lot of the combat until you break down into traditional melee.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I was thinking about this a month or so ago, and thought of a system which might work (although some other people at the time didn't think much of it, I soldier on regardless )

Background: Runequest2 used to distinguish between 'in combat' and 'out of combat' speeds - basically different creatures had a different multipliers for their 'out of combat speed' Something like x2 for bipeds, x5 for quadropeds, x10 for flying creatures.

The key idea is that manouverability would affect how much movement you get in melee. In a no-facing system, the only real aspect of manouverability that reflects your ability to make choices is how far you get to go.

So something with poor manouverability might have combat movement of 4 squares, something with average manouverability might have combat movement of 8 squares and something with perfect manouverabilty might have combat movement of 12 squares
They might all have out of combat movement rate of 20 squares, or there might be differences. (completely made up figures).

An approach like this would mean that all you need to know about the flying creature is its movement rate for melee as against its movement rate outside of melee, and then move it how you want.

Sure, it's simplistic... but I think there are times when simplistic is good

Cheers

 

[Klaus]

The square root of 40^2 + 100^2. Sqrt(11600). 107.7ish.

If I wanted to square root anything, I'd have taken Architecture as a major, not Advertising!

The DLCS offers a less-accurate but faster-and-accurate-enough system for that.

Me? I'd make aerial maneuvers into Balance checks (substitute with Ride checks for mounted creatures) modified by maneuverability. And I'd state that all flying creatures take their actions in two separate initiative counts: Movement Phase and Standard Phase.