As the thread name says. I'm looking into homebrew-ing up a system involving aerial combat. 3-dimensional combat hasn't been done properly, in anything that I've found at least. How would someone go about doing it right? Any ideas?
Pic semi-related, didn't have anything better.
Bump.
Which would be better- abstracted height levels, or an exact number? Abstracted = less math, exact numbers = less gamey range system.
There's some WWII ship fighting games that have rules for aircraft where they add an extension to the aircraft's peg base to physically elevate it.
After that, you might as well do away with the models because you're just "flying on instruments" so to say because abstracting it to that degree makes physical representation impossible to pointless.
Until hologram technology is readily available to the average consumer at a good enough quality, 3D game rules like realistic aerial combat are pretty much impossible on the tabletop or mathematically confusing on the page.
>>43531018
>>43529984
I just had a thought:
Could you use the height of dice in an ORE system to handle... well... height? Then just use tokens to represent whether a unit is one the 1,2,3, etc... z level of the combat zone?
>>43531993
I considered something like that (regarding tokens), though I'm admittedly not familiar with ORE. The absolute cheapest idea is "get a bag of poker chips, each color is a height" and slide them under miniatures, or a border around digital tokens.
>>43529984
What's the simplest space combat system I could use? This is going to be used for an online game where I can expect two players to be playing from their phones due to timezone/work issues.
Have you looked at Warbirds? That's an RPG dedicated to aerial dogfighting.
>>43533032
Not quite released yet, as far as I know. And I'm trying to tailor this to our specific group. I'm watching for Warbirds' release, though.
>>43533237
>>43533032
Also, having looked at it, I probably should've clarified better. Rather than what Warbirds seems to be doing, with independent fighters, what I'm looking at/working on is based more around airships, with the possibility of a fighter or two for mid-size ships (and carriers, natch). So a little less on the "fast and everywhere" front. That said, I don't know how well it'll work in practice.
Wrong-era bump post.
Looking at Warbirds' dogfight table (they published it since the last time I looked at their page), I do like their system. That said, 20 altitude values might be a bit high, and I wouldn't want to rip it off wholesale. Once it's released, I'll have to see how good/bad it is, I suppose.
>>43533237
>>43533405
>>43534785
Pretty sure it's been out for two years: http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/115960/Warbirds-Role-Playing-Game
>>43535012
...This is what happens when I look at their site and it has no dates on its posts. Their site's last update said it was "out in 9 days"... Well, I'll go ahead and pick up a copy at some point, then.
For game sake, we use four abstracted altitudes:
0-Ground
1-Tree high
2-Mountain high
3-Cloud high
No close-ish range combat outside your altitude, no long range combat beyond one altitude shift. Airships don't move fast enough to warrant much more than that.
I like Mercenary Air Squadron. The system is really simple. Planes start encounters at a certain distance. Using man oeuvres they can close the distance to fire missiles or lock the enemy in dogfight where they can use canons and missiles. Planes, weapons and pilots have stats for detection, maneuvering and shooting. There are also three altitude bands (high/medium/low). They influence the maneuvers you can do and what surface to air weapons can hit you.
MAS has two settings. A modern one and WWII.
