And I can breathe again

[Rob Lang]

Feels like I've been trying to get this one right for an eternity.

[DOC_Agren]

Looks good

But Rob when is Fleet going to ready!!

cause Juan wants to see what neat toys they get, that we Scav's can "get"

[Rob Lang]

Crikey, work has absolutely floored me! Now the rapier is out of the way, I'll be speeding through all the other stuff and should be building the PDFs this November. I will probably get an Alpha out there early so people can have a look.

[DOC_Agren]

Very cool

I am looking forward to seeing Fleet, and will there be "starship combat rules"?

[Rob Lang]

I am in two minds about Starship Combat. One one hand, I have some in the rules. It works great for most space craft. But not for fighters. As soon as I start writing a narrative system, it either turns too woolly. If I make it feel more like space combat, it turns into a bad copy of . There doesn't appear to be anywhere inbetween. I've seen systems go even further - recording velocity and so on. I would recommend picking your own favourite board game (if you feel inclined) for now.

[Onix]

Starship combat is a bear to get right. Ideally I'd like to see something that each player can participate in (I know Rob's said the same). If each player had a way of adding a tactic to the turn it would make things interesting. The engineer can put more power to shields or weapons. Maybe a roll that says how well they amp up the power but pushing it too far can damage the systems. If there's four engineer characters they all can add to this. Pilots can improve a gunner's rolls to hit by putting the ship in a good position, and evasive maneuvers making the ship harder to hit. A captain should have some coordination role, directing the tactics but I can't think of an effective system effect that this would have.

The big challenge would be a system where piling up effort by all the players wouldn't break the system. For an RPG that doesn't use miniatures and maps, I think moving to a map based starship combat is too jarring a change. Keep the starship positioning the same as how you handle character positioning.

[Rob Lang]

I'm completely with you on that one, Onix. Icar's system is inclusive - everyone has a role to play and as humans are the only ones that can shoot guns in Icar, it can work nicely. However it breaks down for fighters.

However, the players will want to fly fighters too. Building that into the system can make things really nasty.

I've spent many hours deliberating over space flight systems. I find them upsetting because I haven't worked out how to make them representative and fun.

[kumakami]

[Onix]

That's a good point Kumi, maybe model space combat on submarine warfare. Fighters have very little value when a laser can hit each and every one of them in a fraction of a second and tear(burn?) them in half.

All the characters are listening/watching the sensor data, tuning the ECMs. Once you find the target, unless it's a very powerful ship, it's going to go down.

[kumakami]

also remember at the distances we're talking about a lazer may still take seconds to minutes before hitting...


I've always thought space combat would end up more like sub combat, evasion and targeting solutions. "launch counter measures on my mark...."