[DiTV] Jedi in the Vineyard
Gareth_Lazelle:
Quote from: Salar on July 31, 2009, 09:58:46 AM
1.4.2 At least one of the group should have a starship, just name it for now until I can think how to do starship combat.
How about something like this as a basis (might also work for any vehicular combat):
All vehicles have a bunch of traits with a single numerical score (or dice?), whenever you try to perform the noted action your first die is gained from the vehicle and is of the value noted, as well as a "crew rating" reflecting the support provided by having a crew (added in the same way the mob-rules work perhaps),
So perhaps a X-wing might have the following:
X-Wing
Evade Anti-fighter fire: 6 (or 1D8?)
Attack Fighter: 6 (or 1D8?)
Attack Starship: 2 (or 1D4?)
And a Nebulon-B frigate:
Shields 6
Attack Fighter: 2
Attack Starship: 6
Crew: +4d
Imperial Star Destroyer
Shields: 8
Attack Fighter: 4
Attack Starship: 8
Crew: +6d
So your X-wing pilot performing a raise might raise by declaring an attack on the frigate, pushing forwards one dice and using the fighters "Attack Fighter: 6" trait as the second dice with a score of six (or rolling 1D8, or whatever).
The frigates captain (who rolled four extra D6 at the start of the combat reflecting the frigates crew) pushes forwards a dice as well as using the frigates shield rating of 6 to withstand the attack.
I'm in two minds as to whether the "bonus dice" should require you to also discard a dice or not - discarding a dice might help with figuring out turned blows?
Groups of fighters could use some variation on the mob rules to improve their stats?
henebry:
Here's what I've been thinking in regard to starships:
1) you need a new system for the "Arena", to replace "Talking, Physical, Fighting, Guns." My choice at the moment is "Posturing, Racing, Ramming, Dogfighting."
2) you need a system to replace some, if not all character stats with starship stats. In the interest of keeping my system simple (at least to start off with), I've decided that when starship fighting you get all your normal stats except your Strength, which comes from the ship. If you have several people crewing the ship, they can each contribute a different stat, so the guy with the best acuity contribute that stat, while the gal with the best heart contributes that stat. Some ships have a min or max crew (or both), and that functions as a limit on the # of chars that contribute stats in a starship conflict. NPC crewmembers give 2d6 standard.
3) Traits: Characters serving as crew can roll in Traits only if the trait is relevant to their role in the crew. The ship’s trait can be rolled in at any point, as can one Astromech droid.
Thus, each ship comes with Strength dice in addition to the standard dice from a Thing, but otherwise are like other gear in the game. Yes, I've upped the dice a bit (one very large ship comes with 3d8 Thing dice), but this is the exception, not the rule.
Note that this isn't a system for running fights between X wings and Imperial Star Destroyers. I think it's a mistake to stat out a Star Destroyer or anything 1000x larger than a player character's ship. But perhaps it would work, so long as you set clear limits on the possible when negotiating Stakes: in Episode V, Han and Leia and Chewie avoid capture by a Star Destroyer. That's possible, whereas it wouldn't be possible to fight one head-to-head.
When possible, though, I'd try to make space combat into a conflict carried out between characters, with stakes set as appropriate to the scenario. At the end of Episode IV, for instance, the Rebels have plans that make it just possible for an X-wing to take out the Death Star. I'd play it out as a conflict, though, between Luke and Darth Vader, not Luke and Death Star:
Luke starts the conflict at Racing, rolling in his own Heart and his ship's Strength. Later, when he escalates to Dogfighting, he rolls in the rest of his stat dice. He also has several NPC allies (Wedge, etc) who contribute Stat dice.
He rolls his relationship to the Empire at the start of conflict as well.
In the course of the battle, he would roll in dice for R2D2 (astromech droids provide special dice for space combat in my game), for the Force, for the ghost of Obi-Wan, etc.
Meanwhile he's facing Darth Vader (who's trying to stop the destruction of the Death Star). Vader gets his relationship with the Empire at the start of the conflict, and he rolls in the Stats for Racing as he tries to catch up to Luke's X-Wing, plus stat dice from NPC helpers. He also escalates to Dogfighting. And he gets more dice from the Death Star's defenses (a thing) and probably a die to reflect the difficulty of the target Luke's trying to hit.
At the climax of the conflict, Han and Chewie come in from out of nowhere (since they weren't present at the start of the conflict, these PCs roll in as an improvised Thing—in this case I'd give them the "Thing" dice for the Millenium Falcon, even if doing so might not be quite according to core rules). This happens at just the moment when Luke needed dice to avoid taking the blow from one of Vader's shots. I'd like to think that their entry allows Luke to Reverse the Blow and then raise Vader prohibatively.
In the aftermath, Vader's left spinning out into deep space (some d6 and some d10 fallout, probably) and the heroes return in triumph.
Gareth_Lazelle:
Some very neat ideas - I like the suggested arena system, and it's much more streamlined than my suggestions above,
I am slightly concerned that (other than the single strength stat) all ships are functionally identical? Would it be better to give the ships all four stats and then allow characters to bring in traits applicable to their position (i.e.: piloting if they are the pilot, gunnery if they are the gunner, repairs if they are on damage control, etc)?
henebry:
You could give ships their own stats, and then allow players to complement those stats with their own stats. I tend to be leery of making big changes to a working game system, so I only made the single change (Ship Strength in place of Body) because using a character's Body stat in a ship-to-ship dogfight seemed too blatantly laughable.
My guess is that this doesn't throw off game balance too much because in the core game Body is actually better than the other stats (it keeps you alive when you have a 12+ Fallout roll). So long as ship-to-ship combat is an occasionial event, replacing characters' Body with the ship's Str functions to rebalance the value of the various stats.
The fundamental problem here is that Vincent's game takes the spotlight off of Things and puts it on people. Another game designer working up a Western might give far more prominence to guns and horsebreeding. Vincent allows players to pump flavor in (if they want) with narrativist descriptions of their guns and horses, but gives such detail no mechanical value. It's just Thing or Big Thing or Really Nice Thing or Crap Thing.
The Star Wars movies put a spotlight on people too, but fanboy culture tends to fetishize the stuff that people carry: Dooku's lightsaber, or Han's blaster, or (even more) Luke's X-Wing and the Millenium Falcon.
My solution to this "problem" is severalfold:
I've created little cards for Things, providing a picture as well as some descriptive text and the Thing's dice. This provides an outlet for the fetishist in all of us. We get a card with a picture! (I'd be willing to share these, if there's a file upload feature on this forum) I've increased the range of dice for things, so that some things (especially ships) get 3d6 or even 3d8 Thing dice. I've given some things special powers, using the rules that Vincent posted here for magic some time back (and referenced just above by watergoesred). For instance, the Alpha-3 V-Wing fighter has 2d8 Thing dice, but can also take a Strafing Run, rolling in +1d10 on that See or Raise (this functions like a helper die) at the cost of 1d8 Fallout.
If you want further differentiation, you can have different ships get different Ship Strength stats. You take it a step further and give ships 4 different Stats, allowing characters to augment those stats with their stats. The danger is that you're creating an elaborate add-on system, changing the balance and the flavor of the game system in ways that are hard to predict. So I decided to treat ships as Vincent treated horses, as a Thing that gives a character a slight advantage.
One last thing: the more important that gear gets, the more important that gear acquisition be balanced in some way. Gear is left unbalanced in Dogs. You get a pool of dice to assign to Stats, Traits and Relationships, but you get exactly as much or as little gear as you want, with the caveat that everyone agrees its reasonable that your character is lugging all that gear around. That's a powerful gesture on Vincent's part, but it seemed to me insufficient to counter the allure of the shiny, high-tech gear of the SW universe, especially since I was adding dice and special powers to certain gear.
My solution was to create a rudimentary economy. Jedi start with 6 credits worth of gear, non-Jedi with 8, and Senators with 9. (Jedi get less to balance the fact that Jedi can get access to their Passion stat a second time by playing footsie with the Dark Side.) Each credit buys roughly one "die," so a big high quality blaster (2d8) costs 2 credits, and so does an Alpha-3 V-Wing. Special powers like the V-Wing's Strafing Run don't cost extra because (I figure) the cost is borne in the form of fallout when you use the power. Yes, I realize that a 2d8 big blaster is a better deal than a 2d6 pistol-sized blaster (they both cost just 2 credits), but I didn't want to get into an elaborate purchasing system. I would have preferred to leave it simple, as it was left in the original game.
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