The Gaming Den

This is Sad

Even at 2/5 completeness we can do better than saying stuff in Eberron costs too much.

So I'm starting right the hell now:


Airships:

Since the writings satirist Johnathan Swift and noted wargamer HG Wells, Airships have had a place in fantasy. They've been used as a way to have naval conflicts on Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, as the ultimate transit mode in the Final Fantasy series of games, as mobile bases of operations in anime like Visions of Escaflowne and comics such as the Shield Helicarrier. The failure of a Hot Air Balloon was a plot point in the Wizard of Oz and an exploitable glitch in Ultima V.

Thus they clearly have a place in D&D. This isn't to say they have a place in all D&D settings or all D&D games - if you don't think they belong in your setting or particular game, you are free to stop reading and go play D&D games without them. We won't think any worse of you. People run D&D games without Beholders, Magic Missile or Sword Axes Dire Flails, and nobody thinks that those aren't worthwhile D&D games.

But if you are the type who wants airships in your D&D, you are faced with the sad reality that the existant Airship rules are either the craptacular and overly complex vehicle system in A&EG or the setting specific and "PC's can't get these" rules from Ebberon. If you like those rules, feel free to keep using them and just stop reading. However, if you're still here, that means that you are unhappy with those rules, so keep reading:

.....leaving it to others more familiar than I to point out flaws in those rules....

Airships in the Setting and in the Game

If you have a game with Airships, the first thing you have to decide is what roles they serve in the setting and what roles they can serve in the game. There are several possibilities here:


Airships are secret projects

In this setup, Airships are rare, if not unique. Like the Shield Helicarrier from marvel comics or the vehicle in Master of the World, adventurers may come across one that serves as a vehicle for a challenging enemy or a midair dungeon in the course of a campaign - but the general populace is completely unfamiliar with them.

In this setup, the most prominent questions the MC must answer is "why aren't there more of these?" and "what happens if the PCs try to build more?". You don't really have to worry about pricing airships and technological progress here. See the Avatar: The Last Airbender series for an example of a fantasy series where PC actions lead to airships going from a single tinkerer's experiment to the development of airship fleet.

Sample adventures in games with airships as secret projects:

• The Evil Wizard Norwesk has bound Djinn to weave him the largest flying carpet ever made. He can render castle walls irrelevant by dropping his clockwork warriors from the sky as he throws fireballs. Should we assemble enough knights and archers to stand against his assault in Warwick, he can pass by unharmed and have seized Oxford before the knights could reach it to render aid. You must find his grand loom, free the Djinn and find a way to unmake the carpet before he unmakes our kingdom.
• The planeswaler Alarance's famed vessel Sheol appeared above the eastern shore yesterday and has been hovering there motionless. Sailing ships nearby have reported sounds of combat and charred debris floating in the sea. You must capture flying mounts, reach the vessel, breach the planesmetal hatches and investigate why the planeswalker is here, whether he yet lives and what secrets may be hidden in his vessel.
• The designs of the heretic Da Vinci were said to contain plans for a machine which could fly faster than dragonback. If you could infiltrate the inquisition, steal his writings from their evidence, and find ways to bypass the explosive runes, glyphs of warding, sepia snake sigil and secret page spells he doubtless guarded them with, then the famed smiths Wilbur and Orville would surely pay dearly for such blueprints

Airships are a common mode of transport

In this setup, everyone knows about airships and they are a part of established commerce and warfare. This is the default assumption in Ebberon and Vision of Escaflowne as well as some of the FF games where every major city has a airship dock.

In this setup, you have to come up with reasons why airships are used sometimes, but not always. There need to be economic or resource or risk reasons why people still use wagons on roads and sailing ships for some journeys. Airships can be expensive, or limited by climate, limited in scale (either minimum or maximum size) or restricted by officials, or subject to limited resources (like Helium), or at risk of attack from airborne monsters, or slower than other means of transit or other possibilities - but there need to be advantages and disadvantages to airship transit in this sort of setting.

Here, the PCs will reasonably expect to book passage on airships even at the lowest levels and may or may not be able to take ownership or command of their own vessel at mid to high levels. So it's important to have some idea of how booking passage works and what sort of cost / quest or rank it takes to get control of various types of airships. It's also important to have consistent reasons why sometimes battles have to be fought with ground forces instead of airship-to-airship.

Sample Adventures in settings with airships as a common mode of transport

• During a remote passage, one of the airships passengers was killed in his sleep. Nobody has boarded or left the ship since the last airdock, so the killer is still aboard. Complicating matters is that the victim turns out to have been an unlikeable elf wizard who had was keeping his service to The Dark Lord at the end of the Last Age secret. A lot of people would have wanted him dead if they knew that - but was that why he was killed or will the killer strike again?
• The Wizengineer Nikolai's final attempt to build an airship that's safe from lightning has failed in spectacular fashion. His experimental ship lasted nearly an hour as it pushed into The Thunderhead. Now the race is on to salvage the wreckage for materials, magics and any survivors. Watch out for the lightning elementals.
• Lord Smith claims to have built a tunnel through the ancient dwarf mines that will let his caravans make the Kessle Run faster than airships can skirt around The Horn. He's declared a race, and he's paying a good wage for caravan guards. Is he just worried about the Airship Lords hiring brigands to sabotage his effort, or is the ancient evil still luring in those mines?

Airships are the backbone of society and warfare

Beyond even common, airships are nearly ubiquitous in this sort of setting. There are nations that depend entirely on airships for trade and every sort of warfare includes major airship action. Barsoom, Last exile and Eureeka Seven are examples of this sort of world.

With a setting like this, the PCs are likely to acquire a small airship of their own very early (or even start out with one) and upgrade it throughout the campaign. Alternately, they might just borrow or commandeer one whenever it's the most handy option for them. So it becomes very important to have different sizes, speeds, and shapes of airship that PCs can upgrade and customize.

It should also go without saying, that if airships are this common, overland trek adventures become nonsensical. The PCs should only have to worry about encounters such as fighting off predatory jungle cats if their has airship crashed and they don't have hope of a quick rescue. This doesn't mean that all adventures will be "we airship to the dungeon" what's the first room look like? The PCs can still be opposed by airborne enemies (Sky Pirates, Pegasus Knights, Chaos Rocs, etc) or enemies already on the airship (Stowaways, Saboteurs,Mutineers, etc) - but it does mean that you're probably not gonna be using the DMG-standard encounter by terrain charts.

An airship based military would have likely have certain similarities to real-world warfare that would be of great interest to adventurers. If air superiority is a nearly insurmountable strategic advantage (as it is is real world warfare) then it becomes very likely that whenever one military achieves air superiority, the opposing will either surrender or fall back on the sort of small-scale guerrilla tactics that D&D PC groups excel at. Furthermore, if air superiority is a big deal and if airships are vastly more expensive than infantry and man-portable arms (as airplanes are in real warfare), then small-unit attacks with very-low success rates of destroying or crippling airships become a net economic win and thus D&D esque missions such as sending three guys, one with a Necklace of Fireballs, to try to blow up the enemy Skydock are actually clever grand strategy.

Adventures in settings where airships are the backbone of society:

• The annual TukNek two-seater open rally approaches. Can the PCs get their airships and piloting skills ready in time to win, place or show? What made the favorite drop out so mysteriously? Are the rumors of sabotage true? Can divination magic forecast this years course through the canyons before race day? Why is there a kid with a pet monkey in our trunk?
• It appears that the Guildor alchemists have developed a way to enclose alchemical fire in an outer container of rock-eating acid. If it comes to war, our existing shelters won't be enough. Go clear the beggars and orcs out of the Millgate Mine so we can begin refurbishing it as an air-raid shelter.
• The Airship carrying the Princess of Florence has been skyjacked by pirates. They're demanding fuel and weapons for her safe release - but they're going to hold the other passengers for insurance. Use your one-man airsurfers to sneak aboard and get the hostages clear so that we can send the troops in

PC Access to Airships

Once you've decided how common airships are in your setting and game, the next issue is just how much access to PCs have to them?



Power and Lift Source
aka Fucking Airships, How do they work?

In the real world, there are three possibilities: Heated Air in some sort of envelope (hot ait baloons, floating lanterns), Lighter than Air Gas in some sort of envelope (zepplins, blimps) and heavier than air with powerful engines and thrust (helicopters). In various fantasy settings, airships have achieved lift due to floating rocks (Escaflowne), additional colors (Barsoom, Eureka Seven), antigravity fuel (Wells's Cavorite, Last Exile's Claudia), binding elementals (Ebberron) or sometimes unspecified technology / magic.

It's vitally important for the players to have some idea about which of these your game and setting uses and how they can interact with it. Any type of airship that includes a gasbag or envelope can be sabotaged by puncturing the envelope. Airships that work by heating air can be forced to ground if hit with cold spells. Airships that work via engines generating thrust are subject to issues with their rotors or turbines, and probably require very volatile fuel. Airships that lift by using floating rocks have a nice thematic similarity to the sorts of floating islands common in fantasy, but may have issues with rock to mud or earth elementals. If airships are propelled by weird colors or lights, then they likely require reflective sails or surfaces, which can be obscured. If airships require a special type of antigravity fuel - where does it come from, what else is it used for, and does it provide forward motion or just negate weight? If airships work by binding elementals - what's necessary to bind them? what happens to the ship if one dies or becomes unbound? If airships work by unspecified magic - then what happens if it's hit by dispel magic or disjunction, are there jaggds or dead-magic zones where they can't reach?


Existing Rules Issues

If you have lighter-than air craft, then spells which affect objects limited by weight, such as Invisibility, Obscure Object, Levitation, Mage Hand and Mending can potentially be used upon them. Or you can rule that such limitations are supposed to be by mass and not by weight and therefore such tricks don't work.

If you have craft that fly by means of "it's magic" you need to answer how such craft respond when hit by Dispel Magic - is it an immediate rapid descent, or is it a slow safe fall, like the flight spell description.

sadly, that's all I have time for and it's more questions and fluff than answers and rules - but hopefully it's a decent starting point and sets some seeds for expansion into a worthy sourcebook

I don't even remember what that project got hung up on (likely other projects), but it could certainly use a shot of life. Permission to idea mine / post under the CC-BY-SA 3 with attribution captain?

Note that lift and thrust are different: helicopters actually fly differently when they are moving forward than when they are hovering, and you can take off with a heavier load in a helicopter by doing an airplane-style takeoff.

Easiest way I know to make DnD airships is zombify flying critters, then haunt shift them. Best base creature I know is a wyrmling Gold dragon. you definitely want to slap the shadow template on there to bump base fly speed to 300 ft (and swim 90!), but if you're playing with the jokebook, paragon will triple that.

You also want to pimp it out with templates. Animate dead checks hit dice (and is capped), but haunt shift checks CR (more is more better). The dark template gives an extra 10 feet of speed, but I remember having a hard time getting it on there before the shadow template. Also, having your invisible engines be spellstitched is always pimp.

edit: I said that, but it basically doesn't work. you need to grow the thing by 2 HD after haunt shifting it. that's not impossible, but not trivial.

Things still needed:

Choice of airship scale as relates to both real-world analogs and D&D critters. This needs to include some discussion of real world ships and navies for comparison.

Airship speeds as related to other D&D transit modes and methods of flight and the possible advantages and disadvantages of each. Stuff like knights on pegasi, ebony fly, magic carpets, zombie wyverns, and overland flight goes here.

A bit about what airship transport gets used for settings which have gate and portals and lantern archons in addition to airships and sailing ships and wagon caravans.

Discussion of how having airships changes the combat paradigm and suggestions for keeping melee relvant, and/or using enemies that present meaningful ranged threats in PC-scale airship combat.

Discussion of real world physics lift and thrust and discussion of the outright impossibility of using extant manueverability classes for 3-d combat on a battlemap. Potential suggestion of alternate system(s) for such. (Such as beverage-container-based altitude selection)

Some harder suggestions about slecting specific airship commonality, pricing, speed, size and function for a couple different campaign styles - probably presented as or with a couple example campaigns.

I don't mind if anyone else contributes or takes over this project at this point. To be honest, I'm not sure I'm the right guy for the job anyway - I have enough to do as it is.

Other flying stuff in D&D

In the 3.5 PHB and DMG, PCs may gain access to a number of flight spells and items. Here's a short list of the more common ones (with the speeds in parenthesis): Carpet of Flying (40'), Alter Self (120'), Fly (60') Overland Flight (40'), Broom of Flying (40), Winged Boots (60'), Wings of Flying (60'), Phantom Steed cast by 14th level caster (240'), wildshaping into birds, using Figurines of Wonderous Power. If PCs can expect to use the Monster Manual entries, then Spider Eaters (60'), Giant Owls (70'), Giant Eagles (80'), Griffons (80'), Hippogriffs (100') and Pegasi (120') are all listed as potential aerial mounts with egg costs and animal handling DCs right in the book. Furthermore, creative PCs will likely find additional rules-supported methods to fly: a gnome illusionist may use reduce person to become light enough for his hawk familiar to carry him aloft; a bard may charm monster a manticore into serving as a beast of burden and close air support, someone might play a nonstandard race with flight, a cleric of the death gods may animate the corpses of fallen flying foes to soar again as zombies, or maybe you want knights riding around on dragons Weis and Hickman style.

The more astute of you will notice that in Core 3.5 there is absolutely no fucking correlation whatsoever between the actual utility of a flight effect (speed, maneuverability, carrying capacity etc) and the level of the spell or cost of the item. If you have a wide bestiary to choose from, or are playing a Tiefling or something, you can get 60'+ (perfect) out of a 2nd level spell slot with a duration of 10min/level - which makes spending a 3rd level spell slot to fly at 60' (good) for one minute per level utter foolishness. A 14th level wizard can cast Overland Flight to fly at (40', average) for 14 hours as a 3rd level spell slot - or he can jolly well use that exact same spell slot to summon a Phantom Steed that flies at (280', average) for the same 14 hours. Seriously, fewer than half of the flight effects in core are things that PCs would ever choose to use if they didn't show up as unsaleable random treasure results. Winged Boots cost 16,000 GP and let their wearer fly (60', good) for 15 whole minutes a day contrast that with the 17,000 GP Broom of Flying - which is a sluggish (40', average), but provides 9 hours of flight and can run errands independently - contrast both of those with the Figurine of Wonderous Power: Ebony Fly, which flies at (100, average) for an oddly weekly duration that averages out to 4 hours and 40 minutes a day for only 10,000 GP. Wings of Flying cost 54,000 GP and let the wearer fly as much as they want at (60', good) with no weight restriction - while a 10x10 Carpet of Flying costs 60,000 GP to flies at (40' average) with a strict weight limit. Contrast all of that to the listed cost of 4060 for a trained young pegasus with exotic military saddlle and its (120', average) flight speed.

Now that's crappy design and woeful inconsistency. But in this case it's actually good news. Since the designers of Core 3.5 had no bloody idea how much flight should cost nor what level it should come online at - it becomes easy to setup airship costs and availability by deciding that either

1. "Hey a trained pegasus is within wealth-by-level guidelines for a 4th level character, and quite affordable for a 6th level character and alter self provides wings to 3rd level spellcasters, who then get multiple additional flight options at 5th and 7th levels. Thus the cheaper airships should be available to PCs around 3rd to 5th level, and it should be expected that just about everyone is on an airship or flying mount by 6th-8th level."
   or
2. "Hey, reliable flight-at-will items are upwards of 50,000 GP and wizards aren't flying all day until they can blow multiple 5th level spell slots, so nobody really gets to own even clunker airships until at least 10th level.

Approach 1 just requires you to ignore the existence of all the overcosted flight effects and assume PCs and NPCs will use the cheaper, more effective methods. Maybe the other stuff is around as obsolete magics or highly specialized items, maybe it's not - because nobody really wants it, it shouldn't matter.

Approach 2 requires you to apply at least some banhammer or nerfbat to some of the cheaper stuff. You could raise the costs to be on par with the costlier effects, you could say that the cheaper effects don't exist (pegasi are untrainable, zombies can't really fly, etc). Or you can come up with in-setting counters that explain why the cheaper methods are so much cheaper.. It's possible that aerial navies have developed weapons, items and spells that's capable of spooking flying mounts so they become unreliable and techniques for forcing shapeshifters back into their natural forms - making flight via mount or wildshape a risky affair.


Now back to that list of flight effects - those are base values. PCs are gonna wanna pimip their ride, whatever it is. They are going to find a way to keep their pegasus hasteed and get it that sweet *1.5 movement speed from the Shadow Creature template in MoTP. Then the druid is gonna get the bright idea to awaken a cheetah and cast air walk on it so that it can Sprint though the air. This isn't a bad thing. Players embracing their roles and optimizing in novel ways is a key part of the enjoyment for many people. However it does mean that you need to be aware what such speeds can do to any battlemat you may care to set up and in the context of Airships, you need to include similar tricks that characters can use to trick out their air vessels.

TarkisFlux wrote:. Permission to idea mine / post under the CC-BY-SA 3 with attribution captain?

I refuse to read that legalese, but do what thou wilt with it.

Consent noted. I'll note any changes I make when porting to the wiki, and post any additions I write here as well.

Also, legalese? Fuck that. Have a human readable version (their term) on the off chance you're interested.

Towards Human-Playable 3D Movement In D&D3

Now, before I even get to the specifics of D&D, aerial combat in any miniature game has issues of its own:

If you are using a battlemat, you have a pretty good 2-d model where players can either count grid squares or just use tape measures to check move distances and attack ranges. However unless you have a massive bunch of stackable blocks or flightcounter bases, you're going to end up representing altitude in a more abstract manner and people aren't going to get accurate ranges with tape measures. If you are using stackable flight counter bases, then you have added transport, setup and cleanup issues for your gametable; higher altitude means a greater chance the mini will get knocked over when somebody bumps something; you have a flight ceiling imposed by the number of block available; rapid in-game ascents take a large chunk of out-of-game time to represent as the player has to find and stack a lot of blocks; and you can't really represent two fliers directly above each other. So with all of those, you are likely going to end up using abstractions such as letting a one-inch flight counter elevation represent 10 game scale inches or just tracking altitude as a dry erase number on the mat next to the mini. These simplifications will mean that the tactical situation is less obvious to the game's players.

Alternately, if you are not using a battlemat, there are two possibilities: The first is that characters are resolving their moves and ranges in terms of distance from one specific other character at a time and playing mother-may-I with an MC who has only the vaguest of notions where things are. The second is that the MC is tracking the precise position of everything on a sheet of graph paper, module map page or IPhone app - each which is inherently a 2-d model and thus the MC must perform trigonometry to break out the z-vector of characters moving in the 3d dimension. The first option doesn't provide a whole lot of tactical depth, but it can work pretty well if MC is willing to tell players "yes" most of the time to their "mother may I?" More relevantly, this approach doesn't actually have to change to accommodate aerial combat, players can declare "we steer our airship to ram the enemy flagship" just as easily as they declare "I charge the ogre", and so long as the MC doesn't veto the action, or get bogged down arguing minutiae which the players couldn't have known - it happens like that. The second option has all the issues of battlemat based 3-d combat, compounded because the MC alone is tracking it - the person whose job it is to be keeping the players entertained, telling a compelling story, enforcing the other rules, is now occupying their brain with 3-d vectors - and that's bad for the game.

Due to legacy issues, D&D in specific has not only the wide range of flight speeds discussed previously, but also 5 maneuverability classes for flight modes. That doesn't seem so bad on the surface, but a closer read reveals that those classes comprise Twelve Different Factors. Before you click on that, I double-rabid-dog dare you to name which of them change when flight improves from Clumsy to Poor without looking. Unless you and everyone at your table has such things memorized, then you are going to need to use a chart lookup every single time an aerial combatant takes a move action during a fight. That's a major problem, especially if you're already having to abstract and de-abstract altitudes on a map or handle vectors in your hear. If that's not confusing enough, there are a pair of Monster Feats that let critter ignore parts of their maneuverability ratings. Even worse, the "realistic" rules for a flier stalling and coming out of a stall require tracking what it moved on the prior turn - and most MCs cannot realistically remember that Griffon Knight #3 (green base) failed to take a single move 20 minutes of realtime ago and fell 150' 10 minutes ago, so falls 300 feet this round while tracking everything else.

So all of this has to go in favor of something simpler.

I'm gonna start by proposing a more formalized abstraction for altitudes, based on objects commonly found at game tables. In this, there are only 7 altitudes and some rough approximations of exact position are used in the interest of simplifying things and not having to do trig mid-combat. Now this is an abstraction, much like how facing is not constant during the parts of a 6-second round where a D&D character is not actively taking a turn, fliers are assumed to be at varying heights within their altitude categories during the course of a 6-second round.

Having 5' of reach (a medium character with a longsword) lets you make melee attacks, threaten and take AoOs against anyone within one one altitude category of you. The combatant in the higher altitude category counts as having higher ground against the combatant in the lower altitude category. Having 10' or more of reach lets you make melee attacks against anyone within 2 altitude categories of you, but in this case you only threaten and get AoOs against targets which are below you. To attack targets more than 2 altitude categories away you need spells or ranged weapons (or to be a roper or something with 50'+ of reach)

Sadly, most things in D&D still have ranges in squares, so we need a fast and easy way to compute those on a battlemap. I'm gonna use some multiple-of-5 approximations that should be easy to add, but which probably favor fliers heavily and would damn sure make Pythagoras cry.

• No Altitude: Figure is on the battle map. This character is on the ground and follows all the usual rules.
• Altitude I: On a d6 Figure is on a coin or die: This character is flying no more than 5' off the ground. They do not trigger pit trips, pressure plates, caltrops or similar traps. They can fight in melee and be attacked in melee by enemies on the ground, but they count as having higher ground against such enemies. As the elevation is minimal, ranges and movement to and from this figure may be figured by counting squares or using a tape measure.
• Altitude II: On a shot glass Figure is on a coffee cup or shot glass or dice box: This character is flying between 10 and 25 feet above the ground. The character is in range of short range spells, missile and thrown weapons from ground-based enemies. Ranges and movement to and from this figure may be figured and elevation accounted for by using a tape measure to measure to the base of the glass or box and then adding 2 squares (10') for additional elevation.
• Altitude III: On a beer can Figure is on soda or beer can. This character is flying between 30 and 100 feet above the ground, and is out of range of short range spells from the ground, but still in range of medium range spells, missile weapons and some thrown weapons. Ranges and movement may should be calculated by measuring or counting to the base of the can, and then adding 10 squares (50') for elevation.
• Altitude IV: On a bottle Figure is atop a 12 or 16 oz (350 or 475 ml) beer or soda or iced tea bottle. Character is flying between 100 and 250 feet above the ground, and is out of range of most medium range spells and thrown weapons from the ground, but is still in range of long range spells and missile weapons. Ranges are movement should be calculated by counting or measuring to the base of the bottle and then adding 25 (125') squares for elevation
• Altitude V: On a big bottle Figure is atop a 2-liter soda bottle or a fifth of Old Crow (750 ml) or double fifth (1.5 l) of cheap vodka or similar tall beverage container. Even though such a figure may only be an inch or two higher than a figure on a smaller bottle, this represents a much higher altitude Character is flying between 250-750 ft above the ground. Character is in range of most long range spells and can still be hit by the better missile weapons, albeit at severe range modifiers. Calculate ranges and movement by counting or measuring to the base of the bottle and then adding 100 squares (500') for elevation
• Altitude VI: Far, Far Above Figure is off to the side of the map. Character is serving as offboard artillery and can only target with or be targeted by extreme range attacks from the ground. Things like longbows of distance or long-range spells with metamagic used to increase their ranges. If precise range is still relevant then, note a point on the battlemat and add some number greater than 150 squares to the point as the range to the figure.

time's up for now, will edit in some thoughts about making maneuverability classes workable (by using easier and more commonly relevant things like launch and landing action types, flight ceilings, and reaction to airborne entangles to differentiate) and maybe a totally abstract non-map dogfight system

Josh, you are the amazingest.

Thought: With a table surface, you have a 2d surface, but it doesn't need to represent two horizontal dimensions. If height is an important position variable, you can switch to side-scrolling mode.

While those sound like useful simplifications for air / ground encounters, I don't know that they do much to purely aerial encounters. Aerial combat in my experience normally devolves into the following scenario: a few rounds of maneuvering (that is inversely proportional to the worst maneuverability + best speed present), followed by a melee fly-by attack / ranged barrage / grapple. Ship-to-ship isn't going to be much different, it just has boarding instead of melee flyby and ramming instead of grapple. Setting up a system where your movement rate and maneuverability gave you bonuses to setting up one of those attacks and determined how long you waited between those attack "turns" might simplify and speed the whole process. And at the end of the fight, you could just roll a couple of die like a grenade miss to see where the victor wound up.

Admittedly it completely fails to work when you add in any land based participants, for whom your position is a bit more important. I'm not sure if that makes it not worth developing or not though, and wanted to suggest it before I forgot about it.

Abstract dogfighting / Aerial Maneuvering system outline take one:

In an abstract aerial combat system, there are only three or four things that combatants really care about:

• The Relative distance (gap) between combatants. This determines what sort of ranges attacks need to have, and it determines if parties can leap from one ship to another - either for boarding or escaping.
• Relative altitude (who is higher or lower). This determines who gets a height advantage, who can reach a ground target first and what sightlines are available over obstacles on the ground.
• The absolute distance to some stationary point. This determines who's in range of the catapults or who's closer to the finish line.
• And the optional category of facings - which doesn't normally matter in 3.5 D&D, but might matter if you have airships with broadside volleys or otherwise have weapons with limited firing arcs or individuals for whom parts of the ship might block LOS.

So any sort of opposed or random dogfight roll should be used to contest those factors.

I'm gonna propose that the skill roll should be Ride (for characters on aerial mounts) Tumble (for characters flying themselves) and er um we need to pick something for piloting airships. It could plausibly be a profession or Use Magic Device roll. Even handle animal for some of the weirder conceptions of airships.

Next I propose that the combatants roll off first and then they take turns picking which of the remaining factors they want to "win" at.

Example: a Barsoomian patrol cloudskimmer is chasing a smuggler airskiff, and the patrolboat wins the dogfighting roll, they can choose which factor is in their favor - since presumably they want to apprehend the smuggler they choose win at relative distance and choose to narrow the gap and get closer. next the smugglers can choose to either adjust their altitude or to close in on a stationary point. Since the smugglers want to get away and have no allies terrain at handy distances, they choose to "win" at altitude and gain a higher position to hopefully help them next round. That means that the patrol boat "wins" at absolute distance and maneuvers to force the smuggler craft back away from the border and closer to patrol's HQ city.

This is extremely rough and needs some rules groundwork I haven't done yet before it can be formalized, like how fast ships can close or widen a gap and what abstract distances correspond to - but hopefully the general idea is clear and will be workable. I'm open to suggestions.


Circumstantial Modifiers:

Of course, it's not just about piloting skill, other factors can modify the roll:

Faster craft: +N for being faster, plus an additional N for each multiple of slower craft's speed. So if you're twice as fast, add 2N, thrice add 3N and so on)

More maneuverable craft: +N per each maneuverability category advantage

Terrain advantage: +N if the conditions notably favor one craft over the other. For example a: smaller craft has this advantage against a larger craft if maneuvering though narrow canyons, while a larger craft has this advantage against smaller craft in areas of shifting winds.

Positional altitude advantage: +N to the craft that was at the higher altitude when the roll was made.

If you want the skill roll to matter a lot and higher level and skill characters to be able to overcome faster and more agile craft, then N should only be +1 or +2. If you want the type of craft to matter a lot, then N should be +4 or greater.

RadiantPhoenix wrote:Thought: With a table surface, you have a 2d surface, but it doesn't need to represent two horizontal dimensions. If height is an important position variable, you can switch to side-scrolling mode.

That's actually pretty handy, and I'm surprised I've never seen it.

On the subject of scrolling, I do need to at least briefly discuss combats between ships with both relative and absolute velocities and the logistical problems that can present to a battlemat.

TarkisFlux wrote: Aerial combat in my experience normally devolves into the following scenario: a few rounds of maneuvering (that is inversely proportional to the worst maneuverability + best speed present), followed by a melee fly-by attack / ranged barrage / grapple. Ship-to-ship isn't going to be much different, it just has boarding instead of melee flyby and ramming instead of grapple. Setting up a system where your movement rate and maneuverability gave you bonuses to setting up one of those attacks and determined how long you waited between those attack "turns" might simplify and speed the whole process. And at the end of the fight, you could just roll a couple of die like a grenade miss to see where the victor wound up.

Flying combat at scales that can work on a battlemat should be handleable just as easily as other combat at the same scale.

Admittedly, when dealing with airships that can be hundreds of feet long and dragons that can fly through 80' of the mat as single-round charge action, a lot of aerial combat is going to be resolved at a different scale than the usual D&D 1inch= 5 ft tactical scale.

Any discussion of airships in D&D needs to touch on both the options of scaling out the battlemat to fit such things on a grid and the option of just resolving such things in an abstract fashion with dice rolls that determine what the battlemat looks like when the action gets to the small tactical scale.

So with that in mind, I was always planning on including the sort of abstract system you suggest and have now posted a rough first draft version of what I think it could look like in the post I made prior to this. Your insight about what you've seen in aerial combats is actually quite useful in thinking about how to abstract the pre-battlemat maneuvering.

Josh_Kablack wrote:Circumstantial Modifiers:

Of course, it's not just about piloting skill, other factors can modify the roll:

Faster craft: +N for being faster, plus an additional N for each multiple of slower craft's speed. So if you're twice as fast, add 2N, thrice add 3N and so on)

I would make this logarithmic, so a 10ft and 100ft speed have the same relative modifier as a 100ft and a 1000ft.

N=4 for every power of 10, like carrying capacity.

More maneuverable craft: +N per each maneuverability category advantage

Since maneuverability requires you to track facing anyway, the advantage of higher maneuverability is the ability to better bring your firing arcs to bear on the enemy.

Also, handling can be a Max Dex bonus.

Terrain advantage: +N if the conditions notably favor one craft over the other. For example a: smaller craft has this advantage against a larger craft if maneuvering though narrow canyons, while a larger craft has this advantage against smaller craft in areas of shifting winds.

N=4, like the modifier for squeezing in normal combat.

Positional altitude advantage: +N to the craft that was at the higher altitude when the roll was made.

N=1, just like in normal combat, but with the added effect of potentially not having a firing arc on the enemy with, say, bombs, or axial weapons.

JoshKablack wrote:System sketch stuff

I think you're getting ahead of yourself actually. Any abstract system for resolving these sorts of combats should come organically from the more precise system so it doesn't give odd or contradictory results when you swap between them. And without seeing your hinted at maneuverability revision I don't know what that system even looks like so it's difficult to judge how well this one performs in that respect.

While I'm on that subject, a few thoughts on maneuverability. There are probably going to need to be a few more classes of it, or the turning stuff should scale in some way with size. I don't think it's particularly desirable to have huge cruisers turn on a dime (relatively speaking), which they could do with even a clumsy rating. Turning those boats around should probably take a few rounds, if only to make smaller and more maneuverable craft/creatures valuable in a fight. But making them take longer to turn about also opens up the possibility of units "getting on their 6" and staying there, which they do pretty deterministically once there without something to help randomize things.

Which brings me to your check mechanics. They should be built into maneuverability in some way, so that you can break free of those sorts of kiting and the results you're looking for in your abstraction fall out. Ride is a fair call for mounted stuff. Tumble is reasonable for personal flight (as is balance), though I'm rather partial to BAB in order to make flight a bit more combat centric rather than skill centric. I'm not really happy with the listed suggestions for larger, ran by crew craft though. UMD seems needlessly limiting character wise, and profession should die in a fire. I'd personally go with a straight level check, possibly modified by an attribute, or command rating to indicate the larger crew involvement in the affair, but I understand I'm a bit cavalier with knowledge and profession style things. Some character cost might also be justified for that sort of thing (feat, background, training, whatever).

And in case that's not at all what you feel like looking at, there's some weirdness with your "winner chooses first" setup. If you're trying to flee, you get to pick either distance from your pursuer or distance from a place. It's possible that you could get miles ahead of your pursuer without actually leaving the airspace of their base of operations and still under fire. You can't trade off with distance from them and distance to a point either, because then you never gain on either one. If winning by a particular margin allowed you to pick multiple times before trading off, that might work, or it might just be an issue with the options.

Alternately, you could set it up more like Tome grapple. You make a check to tail them, break a tail, engage, flee, that sort of thing. Winner makes headway, or gets a bonus in the case of compatible selections (both want to engage). This probably makes more or less sense depending on the maneuverability setup.

Dragonmech had rules for turning mechs which amounted to stuff like

"It can only change its facing by 45 degrees per round." so it literally takes you 4 rounds to turn around. I recall something about 30 degree facing changes at the really low end.

A big airship with a lot of momentum would be even worse and it'd likely be moving while it did so. So, yeah. Probably looking at junk like "45 degrees a minute" and, in extreme cases for stuff on a scale with Castle Wulfenbach, an hour.

"Macro-Clumsy"

RadiantPhoenix wrote:"Macro-Clumsy"

I prefer Ponderamcfuckenginormous.

But yeah. Better set what your maneuverability levels are and typical vehicles which would have them. So a little 10-man crew airship could have the "manage to turn 180 degrees in 30 seconds" thing.

But you're going to have big floating bases/siege platforms which bristle with guns and defenses so it really just don't matter which way its facing because it will, in fact, have at least a dozen guns pointed at you from any approach. It just happens to be moving X amount of speed every turn, in the same direction. For practical purpose, it doesn't care about maneuvering in combat situations, because its approach was planned out a day or more ahead of time.

This thread got me thinking about all those mentions of the Githyanki and their planar airships, among other things...however, would it be problematic to try and fly airships across planes after you're done with the material plane in a campaign, since gravity starts to turn funny in some of them? Aside from that, I sadly can't find anything else to speak of that would be on-topic.

On the Astral and other SDG (Subjective Directional Gravity) planes, you don't need to worry about up and down; they're whatever you want them to be, and you just need to move your airship to the right heading.

ODG has weird topology, but that's just a matter of drawing out a map so you can know which way is down.

0G is part of space combat, but you floated anyway, so see SDG, with the exception that bombs don't work.

light G and high G aren't a problem, it's just a manipulation of falling speed and required lift.

Any system which both requires fliers to maintain forward momentum each round and also limits turn degrees per round is just fundamentally more complex than D&D combat can support on a battlemat. That's one of the glaring issues with the extent maneuverability category rules, and regardless of "realism" I'm not going to repeat it.

Giant craft with ponderous maneuverability get to be terrain that other stuff flies relative to and such craft just cannot alter course at the small-unit-tactical 5' square, 6 second round scale.

At the overland movement level, such craft get there in several hours or days, (potentially punctuated by encounters) just like other movement modes.

I'm not sure that we even want a concrete system for any in-between strategic level scale. Someone want to make a case for the usefulness of such a system over just abstracting it to something mapless like piloting rolls?


And, yes Gith with the floating rocks of limbo, and the 'Yankee red dragon lancers and 'Sox reverse gravity monks were already on the drawing board for being one of the examples of "how to use these rules in campaign building" once I get the rules down.

You probably want to look at spelljammer, and how it works there. Not because it's well done (though it actually is), but because it's the setting where people have already given a lot of thought to how flying ships interact with the rest of DnD.

The WizKids Pirates game is a cheap way to get surprisingly good ship minis. If you use them, you can use the same one inch square battlemat everyone knows and loves, just by saying 1 inch is 50 feet. It works pretty well.

Josh_Kablack wrote:Any system which both requires fliers to maintain forward momentum each round and also limits turn degrees per round is just fundamentally more complex than D&D combat can support on a battlemat. That's one of the glaring issues with the extent maneuverability category rules, and regardless of "realism" I'm not going to repeat it.

Parts of that could be resolved by just requiring lower maneuverability ratings to spend a move action or fall, but the larger point stands. It's a fair position to take, and not one I really feel like arguing against.

It leaves me wondering what maneuverability even means outside of air battles though. If you're standing on the ground, what do you propose the difference between fighting a foe with <worst> maneuverability and a foe with <best> maneuverability wind up being?

The answer could be "nothing", in which case maneuverability can just be a piloting bonus check that they don't make against ground based things. It could be the Pathfinder answer, where the difference is that a worse flyer is less likely to pull off a turn or hover, but they're all potentially the same given sufficient ranks. Or the answer could be "this stuff that's sort of a simplified version of the SRD chart we have", in which case there's differences that will generate scenarios in an air battle that could be built into / offer direction for the abstracted piloting check stuff. It could also be something I'm not thinking about at all.

Any answer is fine at this stage, but an answer would be useful before moving forward with an additional abstraction layer. Well, useful for me since I don't want the two layers to give different results, and the small scale one seems easier to build from.

Josh_Kablack wrote:Any system which both requires fliers to maintain forward momentum each round and also limits turn degrees per round is just fundamentally more complex than D&D combat can support on a battlemat. That's one of the glaring issues with the extent maneuverability category rules, and regardless of "realism" I'm not going to repeat it.

Giant craft with ponderous maneuverability get to be terrain that other stuff flies relative to and such craft just cannot alter course at the small-unit-tactical 5' square, 6 second round scale.

So, are we keeping Average, Poor, and Clumsy maneuverabilities and just adding Ponderous as, "can't turn in combat time," onto that, or are we replacing those all?

I mean, if we're doing side-scroller mode, 'required forward momentum' can just be on the z-axis, which we're not paying too much attention to.

The main bits of maneuverability I would like to keep are what angles you're allowed to fly at, and ascent/descent rate adjustments.
* Perfect can just move around the battlemat like it's walking, all others have reduced ascent rates
* Good can bring any firing arc to bear in any direction, (all lessers must fire based on which way they're moving?)
* Average can put its front arc any direction, but can't put its bottom up or top down
* Poor and Clumsy can't change their firing arc angles, and can't spend more than half its movement on going up.
* Ponderous moves along a predetermined path which it cannot vary from