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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7931840" data-attributes="member: 4937">I personally feel this is the essential problem and a problem that is not limited to vehicle combat, although vehicle combat does showcase the problem.The problem has two forms:a) The game has multiple subsystems and in order to succeed in that subsystem, you need to specialize. This isn't limited to just piloting a vehicle, but includes things like being a netrunner in cyberspace, or investigating a murder, or what have you. What you end up with is a team of solo adventurers who each can contribute to the party success, but never at the same time. This is one of the reasons I typically don't run science fiction games. They invariably have longer and longer lists of skills that encourage more and more extreme specialization. It's not possible to be reasonably competent at everything.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.It is very hard to solve both problems in a pen and paper game, but... ...that is how you do it.   Put everyone in a separate vehicle and make sure that the vehicle piloting subsystem leverages skills that are used in other situations.   If you do that, then you are just in a straight up combat situation with slightly different rules.But again, this doesn't apply to vehicle combat.  It's a general issue that has to be overcome in any system or for any particular process of play.</blockquote>

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