Piloting/Driving Combat in RPGs is No Fun!

[MGibster]

Have you ever played a pilot-character?

Oh, yeah. I've played Star Wars (many versions), Rifts, Robotech, Deadlands (pre and post Savaged), and Blue Planet with characters who were pilots or drivers.

Not every character is useful at picking locks, either. It's bad enough that some games -require- all characters to have personal combat skills, but are you suggesting that all characters should have vehicle combat skills as well?

Picking locks doesn't typically take a significant amount of time while the other PCs just kind of stand around. But to answer your question, maybe? I'm currently in a Star Wars campaign where we're all pilots/commandos. As a general rule though I'd probably say no.

Regarding Robotech, I wouldn't call using general rules a "cheat." I'd call it elegant design

I never thought I'd hear someone describe the Palladium rule set as elegant but when you're right you're right.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Social interaction differs from combat in that if you aren't skilled at it, then you are really in the way and actively harming success if you engage in it.

I don't disagree with any of your post. However to take this in a different direction; most games are "optimized" for combat; where as you say, even someone who may not be a combat expert is given mechanical ways to help. But D&D and it's various offshoots (what I guess we might call "traditional games") really doesn't give social interactions or other types of challenges mechanical ways for non-experts to participate.

Example - your face is going to have a social encounter. Someone who isn't that good at social encounters could however be in the background finding out something embarrassing about the target; or threatening their minions/dear ones; etc. But usually there isn't mechanical weight put to that except what the GM decides to do themselves.

I think it's the games we play that are optimized for group on group combat (ie platoon scale war games) that make these other modes of play not as much fun as group on group combat.

(and yes, D&D at its core (and at its roots) is a platoon scale war game, notwithstanding all the "role-play" stuff that is added on top of it)

 

[MGibster]

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.

I agree with this. Hence my criticism of the Alien RPG for having so much focus on piloting and ship-to-ship combat when the fiction it's based off of doesn't really feature a whole lot of that. Star Wars and a game based on 18th century pirates should have a fairly robust ship-to-ship combat system because it's a big part of the fiction that inspires the game.

 

[Celebrim]

Example - your face is going to have a social encounter. Someone who isn't that good at social encounters could however be in the background finding out something embarrassing about the target; or threatening their minions/dear ones; etc. But usually there isn't mechanical weight put to that except what the GM decides to do themselves.

I think that the way RPGs have been played traditionally tends to thwart that as a solution. The problem with your suggestion on its face is that the process of finding out the skeletons in the closet by the snooping expert, or the process of threatening minions and dear ones, each themselves plays out as a solo activity. So while it might be possible for each of those lines of play to be interesting, they involve taking long turns while the rest of the party is not interacting. They may come together at a point at some point, and influence future events, but they don't resolve the problem that the activity you describe doesn't generate joint activity in the way combat does.

There is a potential resolution, but it carries it's own problems, and that's to do something like 'Blades in the Dark' does of treating time non-linearly and allowing non-simultaneous events to be resolved together through flashback to earlier scenes. But that non-linearity at least allows you to have the feeling of joint activity, so that as the face does their thing, you can narrate how you helped through retroactive activity.

I think it's the games we play that are optimized for group on group combat (ie platoon scale war games) that make these other modes of play not as much fun as group on group combat.

And I think it's that it's actually very hard to play out other sorts of challenges in a natural way and have the characteristics of play that make group combat so interesting. Or to put it another way, it's relatively easy to come up with interesting mechanics for platoon scale war games that creates a transcript of play through a natural linear narrative experience in which everyone participates. It's not at all easy to do so for everything else.

 

[Celebrim]

double post

 

[Eyes of Nine]

I think that the way RPGs have been played traditionally tends to thwart that as a solution. The problem with your suggestion on its face is that the process of finding out the skeletons in the closet by the snooping expert, or the process of threatening minions and dear ones, each themselves plays out as a solo activity. So while it might be possible for each of those lines of play to be interesting, they involve taking long turns while the rest of the party is not interacting. They may come together at a point at some point, and influence future events, but they don't resolve the problem that the activity you describe doesn't generate joint activity in the way combat does.

There is a potential resolution, but it carries it's own problems, and that's to do something like 'Blades in the Dark' does of treating time non-linearly and allowing non-simultaneous events to be resolved together through flashback to earlier scenes. But that non-linearity at least allows you to have the feeling of joint activity, so that as the face does their thing, you can narrate how you helped through retroactive activity.



And I think it's that it's actually very hard to play out other sorts of challenges in a natural way and have the characteristics of play that make group combat so interesting. Or to put it another way, it's relatively easy to come up with interesting mechanics for platoon scale war games that creates a transcript of play through a natural linear narrative experience in which everyone participates. It's not at all easy to do so for everything else.

I guess? I don't think I'm going to go down with the ship defending this; but I will say that having a sequence of scenes with each person doing their thing is definitely within the purview of a game. It's just that right now D&D doesn't really support that sort of narrative framing. D&D 5e is more about bunch of folks in the same room with monsters, bashing each other. 4e had much more mechanical support using the Skill Challenge for that type of montage scene.

 

[Fenris-77]

To be fair, the idea that a montage scene is even a possibility owes more to other games than it does anything to the actual D&D rules, although I agree with your point.

Generally though, the only pillar of play that the D&D rules support full party inclusiveness is combat. When it comes to exploration and social interaction it becomes much more spotlightly and single or maybe dual character focused. That can be dealt with, but you need the right party with the right skill mix, the right DM, and the right mix of encounters, not to mention the right general table expectations.

Theres a reason you see so many threads about how to buff the 2nd and 3rd pillars in 5e play. Never mind the cart chase scene with crossbows firing, fireballs cooking, and the artificer in the back telling the fighter he's giving the back axle everything he's got.

 

[dragoner]

I use Classic Traveller Book 2 Starships combat; generally every player has something to do, so much so that they have NPC's to flesh out the crew. The best thing is that it is fast, usually around five turns and the winner or loser is decided. Pilot can be about the most boring because in a dead run chase, there is not much going on. Usually I have them rolling to keep anticipating the enemy's maneuvers. On the gripping hand, damage to a spacecraft is hellishly expensive: "Oh, hull hit? 100% damage? That is milled out of a single block of T6 aluminum, like the nodes on the ISS." Tens of millions or more reasons why people run before fighting, or dump cargo.

 

[Celebrim]

I guess? I don't think I'm going to go down with the ship defending this; but I will say that having a sequence of scenes with each person doing their thing is definitely within the purview of a game.

I agree. But a sequence of scenes with each person doing their thing is definitely not each player working together at the same time.

It's just that right now D&D doesn't really support that sort of narrative framing.

Wait? Why not? I mean I'd be really surprised if D&D actually told the GMs how to narratively frame scenes. How a DM is narratively framing scenes or how a story is constructed is not something D&D has traditionally cared about at all. When you say that D&D is "more about a bunch of folks in the same room with monsters, bashing each other", you are appealing to a stereotype of play. But D&D neither supports nor fails to support splitting the party and everyone doing their own thing. That's a process of play issue that has to do with how a particular table plays the game, and it's not at all an unlikely process of play to hit upon.

What I think is a highly unlikely process of play to hit upon if you only know D&D style fortune in the middle with purist for process leanings is something like Blades in the Dark with its explicitly non-linear story telling and it's explicitly blessing players right to make calls and propositions against things in the past rather than the present.

4e had much more mechanical support using the Skill Challenge for that type of montage scene.

I don't think you need mechanical support for a montage scene. It's just a process of play. Absolutely I can think of examples of doing it in D&D 30 years ago and it's not a huge step up from, "The thief will move silently down the corridor to scout while we wait here."

 

[nomotog]

I have an idea for ship combat that I just keep turning over and over in my head trying to think of how to avoid the big issues with it. The Core idea is to rip off FTL/Battlestations. You do a full map of the ship and have players move around it. Weapons would work by targeting a room on the target ship with a focus on weapons that create zone hazards (Fire, gas, timed explosives.) and that gets you at least partway. Most player powers stay usable, but then you realize some systems are more exciting than others.

Like shields. In FTL shields are very simple. If put a guy stationed at the shields console they heal the shields over time. Translated to group play you have one player sitting still making one skill check over and over. For a long time, I couldn't figure out how to make that fun. My first thought was to make it hard. Like you have to roll high so you have to kind of try and stack buffs to succeed. That didn't really work well. The other idea was to not do shields as a station for players. My current thought, the best I have so far, is to make it so shields are small. If you set up a shield then it only affects one room. It gives the player managing the shields a choice. They have to decide what to protect.

On the other side of shields. Life support systems oddly compelling out of the gate. Simply being able to vent rooms on a ship is cool and you quickly get into fun ideas like what if you could use the vents to move different gas attacks around the ship.