Larger teams, more ships?
Possible. 5 vs 5 crew, one on one ship will probably be the standard, however once everything is worked out I'll probably create the templates for larger ships that will hold larger crews, as well as multi-ship battles. Also possible are battles with only 5 people on each side but with NPC ships to fill out the ranks. I'm Cautious of including too many active players, just so I don't get overwhelmed by having to track 30 people over the maps.
In fact, it might be a good time to tell you guys what I'm thinking of for the finished product here.
A rough Idea of the finished game
I don't know if any of you have heard of the game "Hammerfight"; it's a game about helicopters fighting with swords and maces. It's as awesome as it sounds and I suggest you look into it if you haven't; but the reason I'm bringing it up is that it had an arena mode. You would fight opponents in various locales, earn money, buy new weapons and rise amongst the ranks until you're a glorious champion draped in flowing banners, heralds and the skulls of your opponents.
Thats pretty much what I want to do here.
It basically works out like this: When players create a character they're placed into the world with a set amount of money (the exact number is determined randomly, but there are upper and lower limits). From there they can do pretty much whatever they want. They can gamble on the airships, set up a surfa-scav shop and sell to other players, work for npc's or players, run an assassin's guild, etc. The big draw, however, would probably be to crew an airship.
To do this, players will form teams. These teams are like professional sports teams. They're more then just the five man crew of the ship; they're little corporations that can include the crew, backup crews, maintenance men, non-fighting financial backers, etc. Player created teams can, with time, rise from a 5 man crew cobbling together a junker in one of the underhang slum hangers to a professional organization with several ships, living the good life in the cloudline estates.
What I'm trying to do is create a world and then allow the players to live in it and to try to advance and make their living however they like. Mechanically, this means that a good deal of the game will actually be without rolls, or with few rolls. The actual arena combat will be the most mechanically intensive part of the game, while a seperate thread will deal with life outside the arena. This way I can have, theoretically, pretty much as many players as want to join, but still not overwhelm myself with mechanical minutiae.
Speaking of Mechanical Minutiae, I've been thinking about the way we're gonna handle melee in this game. The idea goes like this.
There are three types of weapons, Strength based, Speed based, and Dex based. They have a sort of rock paper scissors relationship, where strength beats dex, dex beats speed and speed beats strength. Actually, beats is a bad word, "has an advantage over" is more accurate; a man with a dex weapon can still beat a str weapon if he's skilled, it's just harder.
When you actually get in a fight, it's handled like this; you chose a stance and then you take your dice pool and divide it into two, an attack pool and a defense pool. These pools can be divided in any way you want (pool of 9, 5 in attack, 4 in defense, 3 in attack, 6 in defense, etc) and simulate how you want to fight, the level of aggressiveness you want to bring. How it works is that both players roll their attack dice, and whoever gets the most successes gains an opportunity to strike. The number of successes that won that opportunity then becomes the target number for the attacked player's defense roll. In this way, it becomes a tactical decision; more attack dice means a better chance to hit, but if they beat you, it leaves you with less to defend yourself. And if you're taking on two people at a time, you have to split your dice
between them, so fighting any more then one on one is very tricky; just like in real life.
I'm taking today off -as I do every sunday- to continue working on the game; so if you have any questions or ideas, feel free to throw them out. Best time to bring things up is when I'm actively working on the system, after all.
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Topic: Airship Combat: Rocket man. (Read 73587 times)