Remathilis said:
Sorry, I just found the two quotes at odds with one another. I know you don't speak for each other, but its funny one is justifying a certain game element with "D&D is not cinematic" and another person (arguing a similar point) draws on cinematic structure to prove his point.
It happens in threads all the time. I see it as a sign that people don't really know what they want, or if they know what they want they don't know how to get it or say it.
Which returns me to my original point: D&D should split the difference between cinematic and not, dependent on what is the most fun for the players.
Ok, sure. But it doesn't follow that a rule change will get there. There is a big difference between the goal and intention of the rule and its actual effect. You can't say, 'Because my rule has this as a goal, it will achieve this goal.' The fact is, it doesn't in general achieve the goal of not 'excluding' other players from challenges.
Back in the day to pilot a ship, you needed ranks in pilot AND a feat (Starship Operation: either fighter or transport).
In my opinion, the big problem was the requirement of a feat. I really hate feats that open up options that ought to be available to everyone. At various points in 3.X, feats where introduced like 'Pick up and throw your opponent'. You don't need a feat for that. Children can pick up and throw thier opponents without being combat masters. A feat was simply the wrong mechanic. Instead of a feat, there should have been a manuever available to anyone, and a feat that allowed some improvement in the manuever with a section for what happened normally if you didn't have the feat.
Thus, if you ever wanted to run ship-to-ship space combat (such as a Death Star Trench Run) any PC who invested in it got to have fun, but those who didn't (by character design or player preference) couldn't.
So now the player preference of not investing in pilot is a bad thing?
(later, we found the rules for PCs as crew, which mitigated the pain somewhat by giving everyone a die roll, even if it was a comp use check to restore shields).
Hmmm... wonderful how reading the rules helps.
Now in Saga, everyone slowly becomes a proficient pilot. There is no more feat, so any PC can jump into the cockpit and perform basic stunts. A dedicated pilot (someone trained, focused, and talented) can literally fly circles around them, but the PCs can all contribute something as pilots and thus act in a large, cinematic space combat. Fun levels improved and the former players who would sit bored during Space Combat commented how fun it was.
Great. However, the problem isn't actually 'fixed'. You can't really gaurantee that everyone is going to have thier own ship. Certainly in the source material, there are long stretches were everyone doesn't have thier own ship: alot of the action occurs aboard the Falcon, Chewy pilots the Imperial Shuttle basically by himself. Most of the time the rest of the 'PC party' basically sits around uselessly, because there is only one pilots chair. (This is why ships with multiple crew stations are good design. Man those turrets farmboy.)
So, while in theory maybe people can contribute, in practice you never know what's going to happen.
I should also note that in combat more people adds to rather than subtracts from the chance of success. (Strictly speaking, this isn't true, but to the extent that it isn't true it doesn't make for a better game.) It isn't hard to force a group to contribute in combat. In fact, you have to go out of your way to keep it from happening, so its not a hard problem to fix.
Hopefully, D&D can emulate that same feeling for other daring combat encounters: balancing on ice bridges, chasing foes on horseback, or escaping sinking ships. It will be fun, and everyone will get to be involved in it.
*sigh* I hope it works out. I really do. But hoping something works and it actually working are two different things.
