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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7931924" data-attributes="member: 4937">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).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.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.</blockquote>

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