Something triggered my mind to wander into Adventures on Dungeon Planet again today. Although I don’t have any plans to run a space game anytime soon, I couldn’t help but draft a pair of dogfight moves to complement Johnstone Metzger ‘s stellar work. This is a first draft, and I welcome any feedback you wish to throw me.
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A dogfight in space follows the engagement concept of the Hack & Slash move in that agreeing to engage the enemy means dealing, receiving or exchange damage.
Maneuvering your ship to break away and flee your enemy is like Defying Danger.
In both cases, you may either use the automated systems and their stats, or grab the manual controls and employ your character’s abilities to push your craft beyond its normal capabilities. The simplest way to resolve this is to cancel out opposing bonuses/penalties before your roll, to keep math to a minimum.
Agile/Fast tags each grant +1 onging to Fight and Flight rolls.
Clumsy/Slow tags each grant -1 ongoing to Fight and Flight rolls.
A Small ship battling a Large ship takes +1 ongoing to Fight rolls and -1 ongoing to Flight rolls.
A Large ship battling a Small ship takes +1 ongoing to Flight rolls and -1 ongoing to Fight rolls.
Automated weapons, targeting systems or a dedicated gunner will add you a maximum of +1 to your Fight roll.
A pilot or autopilot system adds a maximum of +1 to your Flight roll.
Manual control discards these bonuses, instead using DEX+INT. Failing with manual controls is likely to result in a crash which destroys your ship.
Evasive technologies, like a warp drive or cloaking device, take a moment to ready, requiring one successful Flight roll before they may be activated.
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Fight
When you decide to engage an enemy craft during battle, roll+FIGHT, wherein the FIGHT value is the sum of all relevant bonuses and penalties based on either your ship/crew or one hero at the controls. * On a 10+, you deal your damage to the enemy craft based on your ship’s weapon stats, and avoid their attack. If you choose to expose yourself to their attack, double your damage. * On a 7-9, you deal your damage but the enemy makes an attack against you.
Flight
When you decide to evade an enemy craft during battle, roll+FLIGHT, wherein the FLIGHT value is the sum of all relevant bonuses and penalties based on either your ship/crew or one hero at the controls. * On a 10+, you avoid their attack and gain enough distance to attempt to flee or hide as your next move. * On a 7-9, either your skill or luck was found wanting; the GM will give you a worse outcome, hard bargain, or ugly choice.
Shouldn’t the small/large thing be reversed, where the small ship can outmaneuver the large ship and the large ship can just pound the small ship with weapons?
Paul Arezina I considered that, but decided that Agile/Fast would provide that bonus, and that a small ship can [a] easily hit a large target and [b] takes a while to leave the range of engagement by the leviathan.
I guess the large ship bonus/penalty doesn’t counterpoint that thinking very well…
Maybe I should simplify it to Large v Small gets +1 to Fight, Small v Large gets +1 to Flight? Thoughts?
I use volley for gunnery, I only used hack n slash once when the PCs rammed an enemy ship. You can also defend your ship, like the engineer who stays in the engine room to make sure it doesn’t blow, and takes damage from the steam of radiation or whatever.
In Dungeon World, I don’t really like the +1/-1 adjustments from tags, I like them being fictional justifications. Like if your ship is agile you don’t need to defy danger to go through the asteroid belt to escape the imperial cruiser, but if your ship is clumsy, defy danger to do anything remotely agile. I do use something similar in my non-fantasy sci-fi designs, though, so I’m not totally against it.
I’ve been meaning to write a sequel to DnPl that’s all ship combats, ship crews, and exploring planets that are actually like dungeons, but, you know, busy.
Noted! I just wanted to draft something that made more sense to me than a character’s CON or STR when using the ship itself to perform functions, so I tried this.
Yeah, you kind of have to be wrestling with the throttle to use STR, which is pulpy, but not very hard sci-fi. You could use CON for resisting gravity, I guess.
Matt Horam Okay, are Small ships by default doing less harm or damage than Large ships? Because I can see them being “relatively more accurate” to compensate for that.
Paul Arezina No modifiers to damage, as I think it should be based on the weapon stats from the book.