The Gaming Den

Here's one solution I've used for 3d placement:



Every player gets a helping hands, the kind you use to hold things that you're soldering, and a stick. Tape your mini to one end of the stick, grab the other end of the stick with the helping hands, and position your mini where you want it. You'll probably have to hold the thing down with a book or tape it down so it doesn't fall over, but it works surprisingly well.

There are some problems with this solution. First, you'll probably need to buy a bunch helping hands, unless you know a bunch of electrical engineers or roboticists. They cost about five to ten dollars per, so it's not worth a one-off. Second, you have to be very, very careful when you're moving anything; one wrong move will send the entire setup crashing to the ground. You also have to measure distance using tape measures, though this is old hat for wargamers.

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.

One way would be for flyers to have a minimum distance they must be at the end of their turn from where they started or they stall out. set different values relative to movement speed based on how maneuverable the thing is. You can even have flight methods that require 2 move actions each round in the air to remain aloft, so their useful for travel but of limited utility in combat.

Niles wrote:One way would be for flyers to have a minimum distance they must be at the end of their turn from where they started or they stall out. set different values relative to movement speed based on how maneuverable the thing is. You can even have flight methods that require 2 move actions each round in the air to remain aloft, so their useful for travel but of limited utility in combat.

And that's dropping the 'limited turn angle' part.

I think what should be done is this: Divide airships into categories, and assign appropriate maneuverability rules to each.
* Sky Fortresses (Ponderous): These are the truly gigantic airships; they can't change their vectors in combat time, short of getting blown up. They can hover if they want to, but can't turn at all in combat time.
* Sky Boats (Clumsy--): These airships can all hover, but they can't turn very fast. They also can't ascend or descend in combat time at all. If there are no more maneuverable airships, you can just remember how high these are and use top-down viewing like they were actual boats.
* Sky Fighters (Average): These airships must maintain speed in order to stay up, otherwise they fall. They use side-scroller mode on a battlemat.
* Hoverships: (Good+): These airships can hover and turn quickly.

What precisely I'm doing with maneuverability is up in the air at this point.

The rough direction is keep the original 5 categories, for backwards compatibility but to make them simpler than tracking 12 different variables by imposing limits that are easy to adjudicate and also meaningful in relation to the decisions D&D characters normally make for move actions:


Some potentials I'm considering for such limitations are

• Can / Cannot hover in place
• Can / Cannot maintain flight in the face of various obstacles / entangles and grapples
• Must spend some sort of action (swift, move, standard, full) to maintain flight.
• Must expend some sort of action to change direction mid flight.
• Altitude ceilings (this works best if I stick with the rough beverage-based altitude system posted earlier)
• Limits on altitude level shifts per round (again, works best with the rough beverage-based system)
• Has to make some sort of check / save to change direction or altitude

However, assigning limitations properly to each category first requires going through every monster entry in at least the first MM and listing critters by flight class to make sure nothing gets too weird with redefined flight classes. After all that gets hashed out, I may (or may not) want to add one or two additional categories for large and barely mobile fliers.

Here's a start on the list - skipping Dragons and their variable-per-age-category maneuverability classes - although worth noting that it's not just for dragons that "bigger" often equates to less maneuverable flight class - so maybe any sort of flight roll should just take a size penalty?

edit Added in critters past Ythrak, which importanly includes all animals.

Perfect: Allip, Lantern Archon, Arrowhawk(all subtypes), Belker, Demon (Quasit), Devil (Imp), Eladrin (all subtypes), Air Elemental (all sizes), Genie (all subtypes), Ghost, Invisible Stalker, Mephit (Air, Dust, Ice), Ravid, Spectre, Sprite (Pixie), Will-o'-Wisp,

Good: Angel (Astral Deva, Planetar, Solar) Beholder (Gauth, Beholder), Couatl, Demon (Balor) , Devil (Eryines), Dire Bat, Guardinal (Avoral), Half-Celestial, Homoncolous, Nightmare, Nightshade (Nightwing), Pseudodragon. Rast, Shadow, Spider Eater, Swarm (Bat swarm), Vargouille, Wraith, Yeth Hound, Bat, Giant Bee, Giant Wasp,

Average: Cloaker, Demon (Succubus, Vrock), Devil (Horned Devil, Pit Fiend), Giant Eagle, Gargoyle, Griffon, Half-Dragon (large+), Half-Fiend, Harpy, Hippogriff, Inevitable (Zelekhut), Lammasu, Lillend, Mephit (Earth, Fire, Magma, Ooze, Salt, Steam), Owl: Giant; Pegasus, Roc, Stirge, Ythrak, Eagle, Hawk, Owl, Raven,

Poor: Chimera, Cockatrice, Darkmantle, Demon (Nalfeshne), Dragonne, Sphinx (all sutypes), Sprite (grig), Swarm (locust swarm), Wyvern, Wyvern Zombie as listed in statsblock, Giant Praying Mantis,

Clumsy: Animated Object (Sheetlike), Manticore, Zombies as described in Zombie template instructions

see errata: hellwasp swarm

So: spectres fly better than shadows and wraiths, ice mephits fly better than steam mephits, and aside from whopping great dragons there are only like Two clumsy fliers statblocks and one clumsy flier template in the entire book.

The differences between poor and clumsy:
* Clumsy must travel twice as far between turns
* Clumsy needs to upgrade twice to get to average

I think that, even if we do nothing else, we can make poor and clumsy the same maneuverability category, with the difference being a function of size.

So, here are my suggestions for flight maneuverability for creatures:
(Note that the default is that ascending takes twice as much movement distance and descending half)

Perfect:
* You can move on the side-scroll-view like you were walking on the ground.
* You can ignore the speed reduction while ascending.

Good:
* You are considered to be squeezing if an obstacle is within your normal reach.

Fair:
* You can't ascend at a higher angle than 1:1.
* You are squeezing if an obstacle is within double reach, or reach+1, whichever is bigger.
* You are always considered to be moving predictably.

Clumsy:
* You can't ascend at a higher angle than 1:2.
* You are squeezing if an obstacle is within triple reach, or double reach +1, whichever is greater.
* You are always considered to be moving predictably.
* You can't do stunts.

EDIT: Renamed 'Average' to 'Fair'

After reading this thread, I really want to play in a campaign that has airships as a secret project.

After I discover these ships and make it my dream to find how to make them, I want to distribute the knowledge to everyone. Just to fuck the system. I normally wouldn't do it. But only for airships.

So, early on, you laid out "how big" and "how fast" as crucial questions. Those are crucial, but also haven't been answered yet.

"How big?"
All sizes, from the sky-rowboats that are flying carpets, to floating super-carriers cities, or maybe even floating nations.

"How fast?"
Proportional to altitude, inversely proportional to size. A Sky Fortress should need to ascend to cloud level to outrace a galloping horse, while a smaller airship like this can zip along at a hundred miles an hour even when it's an arm's length from the ground.

Ok, if we're not going to track facing or worry about speeding up / down for single-crewed creatures / vehicles, then I think the following setup might work:

Since the game doesn't support facing at the character level, we're not going to worry about it for flying creatures and tiny flying craft either. As long as it wasn't stalled, a flying creature can start moving in any direction it feels like at the beginning of its turn, regardless of what direction it was moving in last turn. What a creature can do during their movement is dependent on their maneuverability rating.

• Perfect - May hover as a free action. May make any number of turns during a movement action. May gain 1 unit of elevation per 30' of fly movement.
• Good - May hover as a swift* action. May make 1** turn of up to 90 degrees per movement action. May gain 1 unit of elevation per 60' of fly movement; this gain comes with 30' of forward travel.
• Fair - May hover as a move* action. May make 1** turn of up to 90 degrees per 2 movement actions. May gain 1 unit of elevation per 90' of fly movement; this gain comes with 60' of forward movement.
• Poor - May not* hover and must spend a full-round action on flight each round or risk falling. May not* make turns during or between movement actions. May gain 1 unit of elevation per 120' of fly movement; this gain comes with 90' of forward movement.

*Action may be reduced or allowed with a successful "piloting" check.
**Additional actions allowed with a successful "piloting" check.

All creatures, regardless of maneuverability, can descend at a rate equal to twice their fly movement. They can also drop a distance equal to their fly movement while gaining half of their fly movement as forward distance.

If a creature does not spend the required actions on movement or on hovering, they stall and begin falling. Grappled creatures similarly stall if they're unable to spend the required actions on flight, and they might take someone with them.

---

This works best with the elimination of Wingover as a feat, because it's not useful anymore. I don't think it works for most crewed vessels either, largely due to the no-facing approximation, but it might be ok if crewed vessel scale combat took place on a minute scale instead of rounds (which also helps eliminate reloading tracking).

Another possible place for piloting checks: flying through spaces equal to or smaller than your combat space. Failure results in reduced speed or falling.

It looks like any sort of no-facing approximation is unlikely to generate large scale behaviors to model in the ship-on-ship combat approximations. Even the worst flyers just move and attack each round assuming things are within range of their movement; there is no tailing or staying out of reach or anything similar that isn't determined solely by relative movement speeds. If ship-on-ship is different (and it might as well be), then Josh_Kablack's preliminary setup is a fine place to start.

Huh, low maneuverability as virtual size categories?

RadiantPhoenix wrote:Huh, low maneuverability as virtual size categories?

That actually pretty ingenious.

For Perfect fliers, it's just like ground movement, you fit through spaces your own size and can even make it through spaces one size smaller at the squeezing penalties.

Then either we scale both up per every category down:

Scaling each up:

• Good Fliers require a space one size category larger than themselves to fly freely, they are subject to the squeezing rules when flying through a space of their own size and cannot fly through spaces smaller than their own.
• Average Fliers require a space two size categories larger than themselves to fly freely, they are subject to the squeezing rules when flying through a space exactly one size category larger than their own size and cannot fly through spaces their own size or smaller.
• Poor Fliers require a space three size categories larger than themselves to fly freely, they are subject to the squeezing rules when flying through a space exactly two size categories large than their own size and cannot fly through spaces that are smaller than that
• Clumsy (if we keep it) Fliers require a space four size categories larger than their own...etc..etc.

Assume that any virtual size increase past collosal is a doubling of the required airspace, so fliers need x2, x4, x8, or x16 their own size as airspace,

Then let me try to set up some categories which scale predictably to make memorization easier.

the rest of this post is rough and hurried, will polish later if feedback says this is a viable way to go:

D&D is played by people who didn't want to play Car Wars and so the flight system shouldn't care about measuring angles for turning, speed vectors or acceleration per round. D&D players also chose not to play nor Formula De, so the flight rules shouldn't set things up so that a decision a player made 2 turns back means that player cannot avoid a crash by the end of this turn. Those are both great games and I recommend playing them. I just don't recommend using their rulesets for D&D miniatures combats.

Now since D&D characters on a battlemat all have movement speed ratings and a number of actions available, the flight system we want should care about how fast a character can fly somewhere and what kind of actions they have to spend to do that. As D&D has 6-second rounds, tracking turn angles and limiting reversals is not merely overcomplicated, it's actually unrealistic. You can go find videos of prop planes from the RC to Airshow scale doing Immelman Turn reversals in 6-10 seconds on YouTube, and a prop plane is generally less maneuverable than a raven or an owl, yet as per the rules in the SRD it takes an average maneuverability flier 12 seconds minimum to reverse (two rounds with a 90 degree maximum turn per round) and a poor maneuverability flier a minimum of 24 seconds to reverse ( four rounds with 45 degree maximum turn per round).

The existing rules for difficult terrain and hampered movement give us a precedent to make some flight cost squares of movement - I'm gonna use that instead of "up angle" - since counting is easier and (at least at the game scale) quicker than protractors and trigonometry.

For the moment, I'm keeping Hover from the original flight maneuverability classes, since it does simplify fights to be able to leave an aerial combatant in one place -- however I am concerned that hovering might be redundant with using multiple actions to turn in place. I'm also a little worried that the predictable scaling of these makes hovering accessible to rather non-agile fliers - that's probably okay with the caveat that coming out of a hover counts as a change of direction for purposes of making a turn.


So here's the current draft:

Perfect Maneuverability
Hover: May Hover as a Free action
Turn: May turn while flying as a Free action - allowing for flight at full speed while changing directions multiple times.
Ascend: 1:1. Moving one square up costs one square of movement.
Required Airspace: Own Size

Good Maneuverability:
Hover: May Hover as a Swift action
Turn: May turn while flying as a Free action - allowing for flight at full speed while changing directions multiple times
Ascend: 2:1. Moving one square up costs two squares of movement
Required Airspace: One size larger

Average/Fair Maneuverability
Hover: May hover as a Move action
Turn: May turn while flying as a Swift Action - meaning that they may only make one change of direction per round while flying at full speed. Such a flier may use a Move or Standard Action to gain an additional turn during a single move - but using either of those actions to turn means that they cannot take a double move or run
Ascend: 3/1. Moving one square up costs three squares of movement
Required Airspace: Two sizes larger

Poor Maneuverability:
Hover: May hover as a Standard Action
Turn: May turn while flying as a Move action - meaning that they cannot take a double move or run action in any turn which they change direction and that they can normally only make a single change of direction per round.
Ascend 4/1, Moving one square up costs four squares of movement
Required Airspace: Three sizes larger

Clumsy Maneuverability:
Hover: May hover as a Full Round Action
Turn: May turn while flying as a Standard Action - meaning that they cannot take a double move or run action nor make an attack in any turn which they change direction and can normally only make a single change of direction per round.
Ascend: 5:1, Moving one square up costs five squares of movement
Required Airspace: Four sizes larger

Ponderous Maneuverability
Hover: May not hover
Turn: Full round action, may only 5' step while turning
Ascend: Entire Move: 1. Moving one square up costs a move action regardless of flier's movement speed.
Required Airspace: Five sizes larger, with a minimum of collosal


Advantages over core system: Fewer limitations to track, no need to track turn-by-turn angles and speeds, everything scales in a linear fashion from Good maneuverability, with each category worse increasing the action type needed and virtual size category, so that with only one class written down, a player can derive the limits of all other classes thereby eliminating need for chart look up.

Disadvantages over core system: Currently have an additional category, when it seems that Core had one more than was strictly needed. Loss of minimum forward speeds mean that fliers cannot stall and can avoid accidental crashing by just choosing to move at 5' or 0' in a round.

So we may need to collapse categories and abandon linear scaling, and we will need to outline some stall / out of control / crashing rules when we get to piloting rolls and hazard avoidance. Or maybe we define "turn" as any type of acceleration / deceleration.

Are you still tracking facing from the previous round here?

My new thoughts (note that airships are not all fliers):

I think there should be three categories of airship:

Blimps and Zepplins

* Rigging (the sample is somewhat lacking)
* Boarding action, planks
* Crossing the T
* Broadside cannons
* Like a ship of the line with an envelope in place of sails

Giant Helicopters

* No small helicopters; two lifting rotors minimum
* Turrets on extremities
* Bombs from bottom
* Like a fortress

Small VTOLs

* Fast
* Axial weapons
* Chases
* Like a car

Also, what actually happens when you don't have your required airspace available? Piloting checks, stalls, something else?

I ask because it's going to come up all the time. Aside from narrow terrain, this happens any time a non-perfect flyer closes to melee with another creature, or when poor or clumsy creatures have short range distance attacks that don't actually clear their airspace. Whatever the penalty here is, it's being added on top of their normal to-hits and could wind up a pretty substantial, if unintentional, nerf to flight.

TarkisFlux wrote:Also, what actually happens when you don't have your required airspace available? Piloting checks, stalls, something else?

Pilot check VS collision.

Check - DC	Result
6 or more	Keep moving
1 to 5	Consumes some extra movement
0	Stop
-5 to -1	Forced back
-6 or less	Collision

More thoughts:

Blimps are now "Skyships"
Helicopters are now "Sky Fortresses"
VTOLs are now "Skyfighters"

Different stunt DCs for different types of airship:
* doing a barrel roll is 'challenging' in a skyfighter, 'heroic' in a skyship, and 'impossible' in a sky fortress
* flying backwards is 'easy' in a sky fortress, 'challenging' in a skyshp, and 'heroic' in a skyfighter

Are you still tracking facing from the previous round here?

Maybe.

Assuming we keep the system outlined in my prior post, one of three things need to happen:

1. Each flier's direction from the prior turn needs to be remembered. Or
2. At the start of each of their turns, each flier starts from a null state and can freely spend their flying move to go in any direction. Or
3. At the start of each of their turns, each flier starts from a null state and must use the appropriate action type to turn and accelerate in the direction they wish to move

Option 1 has the issue of having to track at least facing round-to-round. It's still simpler than core flight as we don't have to track speed and up/down angles, but it seems a bit more complex than I would like.

Option 2 is probably the simplest way to go, but it effectively gives all flight classes one free change of direction at the start of their turn and makes the action type required to turn limitation somewhat less meaningful.

Option 3 is simpler than option 1, but means that fliers of worse than average maneuverability can never take double move or run actions while flying.

I'm open to persuasion on which is the best option ?
Heck, I'm also open to persuasion on option 4: Don't keep the above system because ____ is better.

I think there should be three categories of airship:

At the game design level there are going to have to be more. The fluff needs some serious examination of real-world naval ship and flying craft terminology and sizes. The crunch is going to have to apply to all pre-existing sizes of fliers, from Fine insects up through Collosal Great Wyrms.

However it's probably best if at the MC / worldbuilding stage, airships are limited to a few broad categories along the lines of the three you suggest.

Also, what actually happens when you don't have your required airspace available? Piloting checks, stalls, something else?

Well we can use the existing rules for most some of that. You can just fly through friendly-occupied spaces, so long as you have enough clearance at the end of your move. So only opponents restrict flying movement by virtual size category, and multiple opponents could actually use formations to blockade a flier in.

The bit about being able to move through spaces occupied by
Creatures +/- 3 or more size categories provides some help, and I totally want to allow for things like a gnome on a flying carpet zigzaging through the rigging of a sky galleon. But as virtual size categories are supposed to be a restriction on maneuverability those probably have to work so that fliers can only trample through opponents three sizes smaller than their actual size, and can only mosquito buzz through opponents three sizes larger than their virtual size.

For melee and other close combats involving fliers, we can just state that the system requires clear space equal to your virtual size category for spaces you move through and end moves in, but it does not assume the actual mini is in the dead center of that.

I'm gonna use some 2D ASCII maps to try to illustrate a 3d battlemat - hopefully they get the points across.

Thus a flier with an actual size of one character (A) and a virtual size of nine characters (represented by consummate v's) can engage a single character enemy (E) with a BBBboard map looking like this:
and only gets into trouble if multiple enemies constrain it so that it cannot not have the required virtual space by figuring it's dimensions any direction as in this ascii mapping:
As for what happens: in the above map, there's still space for A to fit into a four-character square, which means that it is just subject to squeezing restrictions while the enemies have it hemmed in.

The one I don't yet have an answer for is this
Where enemies have the 1-character flier is hemmed in tighter than even the 4-character space it can squeeze through - and in that case some sort of entangle / stall / crash ( or skill or save based chance of such) needs to happen.

Assuming that the 0 line is supposed to be a 50/50 check, that table is terribad. Less than 1/4 of the time do you actually get to use your movement in an unrestricted fashion if you're just trying to close and attack something. If "consumes extra movement" means spaces are treated as difficult, then a wyvern (with it's 60' poor) can't reliably attack anyone it doesn't start within 40' of since it needs 40 feet to clear its 20' of airspace. If it means that you spend an extra action, then they don't attack anyone in the air at all because they spend most of their actions getting to them. That's before we even talk about how a creature was rebuffed by another creature before even entering their threatened area. You'll need to fluff that one up pretty well to make it sit that a wyvern can't approach and attack a wizard with his fly up.

If that table remains at all, it needs to give priority to flyers doing actual flying; any possibility of failure will rear itself eventually due to iterative probability. It should probably be restricted to terrain concerns as well, since making checks to attack people is shitting all over flight. Regular success should let them use movement as normal, -1 to -5 means constricted spaces count as difficult spaces on top of being squeezed, and -6 or greater should be a collision or a stall, with a save for simply stopped.

Other thing I noticed - Josh's current proposal leaves the wyvern unable to fly at all through a space less than huge. Since they only have a reach of 5', this prevents them from ever reaching striking range at all. And since it doesn't have its full airspace, even if it could attack it would be squeezed and suffer a -4 to attack and AC. Which is a pretty big nerf to flight, check or no.

So I don't think those space limits make sense to worry about except in relation to terrain, and maybe in cases where you begin your turn with a creature in your airspace. Calling for a piloting check to avoid stalling or hitting someone in your airspace at the start of your turn, and treating spaces except those in retreat as difficult when your check comes back meh, seems like it could work without being extremely weird. I'd also rather see increasing penalties for trying to fly through smaller spaces for poor maneuverability creatures rather than outright denial as well, so that canyon chases with dragons aren't won by flying through something the dragon could otherwise walk through.

On airships, I'm still not clear if Josh's current proposal has us tracking facing from round to round. If it doesn't there's no "flying backwards" to speak of except during the same move action, and that's probably not needed to write into the checks. Similarly with barrel rolls, since you wouldn't need to pull one to get behind someone or through terrain. An immelman turn might have a place though, in the same way that spring attack does.

Even if we aren't tracking facing from round to round, we probably need to track facing for weapon emplacements on the larger craft. A piloting check to bring weapons to bear or keep out of another ship's port firing arc seems like a thing that could help. Also, most larger craft in fantasy are buoyant, and probably won't need to worry about spending movement to keep from stalling or falling out of the sky. Piloting checks to avoid collisions with nearby terrain or enemies seems pretty reasonable though, just like for everyone else.

Edit - This was posted before I'd read Josh's most recent stuff. Some of it may not be relevant.

Double post time - so answers to josh's simul post aren't lost in an edit.

I'm in favor of not tracking facing round to round, and dropping the turning restrictions except as part of movement (similar to charging turn restrictions). A free re-facing at the start of each round just means that creature with better maneuverability basically keep the high ground in flying combat and can go more places. That seems a reasonable benefit for them while keeping the desired simplicity. It also means that one-on-one flyer fights resolve themselves in a similar fashion to jousts, which seems like a reasonable thing to happen.

The "non-centered flyer" approximation sounds like it might work, but I think that a centered flyer with a check at the beginning of their turn when their airspace is invaded works better (though I did just propose it in the previous post, so might be biased). It gives them free movement as long as they just do fly-by attacks, which is the sort of thing I think we want to encourage. And if those aren't an option they can grapple, which I think is worth encouraging as a backup over ending the turn adjacent to a foe. This is largely based on thematics though, and could be tossed for sufficient gameplay concerns.

The check setup could be supplemented with the limit that it only applied to creatures with a combat space greater than 3 sizes less than the flyers combat space. That lets a gnome on a carpet fly around the rigging of a 40' airship (gargantuan object) without disrupting it's flight plan, but means the ship might disrupt the flight plan of the gnome if his maneuverability isn't perfect and he ends the round too close to it. Which seems like the sort of reciprocity we're looking for. The corollary that any creature that doesn't disrupt your flight plan can be overrun fits here nicely.

My current suggestion for the check is that if you succeed you just fly like normal. Failure by -1 to -5 means that you are squeezed (i.e. spaces are treated as difficult and you suffer penalties to attack and AC) until you regain your full airspace. Failure by -6 and up means that you collide with someone (they get a save or something) and stall out. Penalties to this check get assigned based on how small your airspace is and your maneuverability class, with the lower limit on sustained flight being their combat space.

That setup and your maneuverability classes should be substantially simpler than the current core rules, while still promoting the sorts of hemming in and fly-by attack behavior that we want flyers to actually do.

TarkisFlux wrote:Assuming that the 0 line is supposed to be a 50/50 check, that table is terribad.

It's not "50/50", it's a fixed DC, where the DC is based on the reduction.

Here's some numbers I put together off the top of my head.

Pilot (Int) / Aerobatics (Dex)

DC	Action
15	Fly through space 1 size category below your virtual size
25	Fly through space 2 size categories below your virtual size
35	Fly through space 3 size categories below your virtual size
etc	etc

Note: You are still considered squeezing, and you can't move through space smaller than your actual size category like this.

So, a 2nd level airship pilot, with skill focus: pilot, and a +2 masterwork airship helm, and 13 INT, and a +2 magic item of airship piloting, and 5 ranks of pilot, and a 1st level copilot with a +2 masterwork bonus, 4 skill ranks, and 12 INT, and a +2 magic item.

+15 bonus

He can always make progress through a space one size category smaller, and 75% of the time he can even get through unimpeded.
He can get through a space two sizes smaller on the first try 50% of the time, and 50% of those times he can even go through at full speed.

RadiantPhoenix wrote: I think there should be three categories of airship:

So, here's some things.

In real life, blimps don't lift much. Specifically, helium lifts about 1 ounce per cubic foot (about 16 grams per liter). Too lazy to look it up, but IIRC, hydrogen is about 8/7 of that lift, but also catches on fire. Giant zeppelin castles don't work. That's terrible, because they should, but it's also the way it is. There's a couple ways I can think of around this:

1) Elemental in a bag. Take a colossal (+++++) air elemental (or storm, or whatever), make the fabric of the zeppelin a giant harness, and be done. That has some pretty big implications. E.g. how you damage the skyships, and also that you can boost your cargo space by hanging a belt of strength on your gasbag. Also, you're going to have extremely fast and agile skycastles.

2) "Up gas". Something that magically provides more buoyancy than vacuum. That's cool, because you have a resource to fight over, but it also means PCs are unlikely to get access, and that these giant ships are incredibly fragile. Your weight limit is also still probably fairly strict.

3) Magic! Clearly, but what are the actual effects of that magic?

4) Ignore it and move on! Definitely an option, but it means your airships have no predictable interaction with anything. I hate that idea.


Helicopters are worse. Remember, hovering is all about the amount of air you're accelerating down. That's actually really hard to do, which means that your rotorcraft probably need to be in forward motion, basically all the time. That's cool because you can make them autogyros instead of helicopters, but still needs a huge powerplant.

fectin wrote:1) Elemental in a bag. Take a colossal (+++++) air elemental (or storm, or whatever), make the fabric of the zeppelin a giant harness, and be done. That has some pretty big implications. E.g. how you damage the skyships, and also that you can boost your cargo space by hanging a belt of strength on your gasbag. Also, you're going to have extremely fast and agile skycastles.

Doing that with somewhat smaller elementals seems like a good way to make skyfighters...

2) "Up gas". Something that magically provides more buoyancy than vacuum. That's cool, because you have a resource to fight over, but it also means PCs are unlikely to get access, and that these giant ships are incredibly fragile. Your weight limit is also still probably fairly strict.

Under my system, skyships would be the 'tramp freighters' of the sky, so yeah.

3) Magic! Clearly, but what are the actual effects of that magic?

* Bags of holding
* Even lighter Darkwood
* Feather Fall

Helicopters are worse. Remember, hovering is all about the amount of air you're accelerating down. That's actually really hard to do, which means that your rotorcraft probably need to be in forward motion, basically all the time. That's cool because you can make them autogyros instead of helicopters, but still needs a huge powerplant.

Well, they don't specifically need to actually have spinning rotor blades, they just need to hover ponderously and put most of their force on lifting.

Maybe a levitate spell?

Mithral can partially alleviate the problem; it has a hardness-to-weight ratio three times that of normal steel.

Also, feather fall again.

RadiantPhoenix wrote:It's not "50/50", it's a fixed DC, where the DC is based on the reduction.

Ok, that makes much more sense. I don't know what I was on earlier.

I'd still prefer to collapse the results a bit to simplify. Move normal and move slowly are fine, but pushed back is weird and stop only occupies 1 number so it seems annoying to include it. While I'd prefer to see stop, pushed back, and collision rolled into collision / stall, an option that prohibits you from proceeding like stop could work but should probably occupy the numbers currently handed to pushed back. It's still a soft form of stalling for low maneuverability creatures that can't hover whenever they start adjacent to an area they have to pilot check through, since if they get a stop result they can't spend move actions on flight and begin falling. The specific DC numbers probably need adjusting as well, but will depend on whether it's a skill check or an attack roll or a level check or whatever, on who can contribute to the check, and on what level people should be consistently performing these piloting feats at.

And we need to let creatures fly through spaces they could squeeze through if they were walking, if only over very brief distances. It's thematic and common in canyon dogfights and other scenarios to fly though a very tight space and emerge on the other side, while the less maneuverable / skilled crash into it behind you. Creatures don't use all of their combat spacing, and should be able to tuck their wings in or whatever and hurtle through a gap they couldn't normally fly through. Carrying on flight in such cramped quarters we should disallow of course.

I honestly don't see what the problem is with tracking facing; angle of attack and distance moved are annoying because you have to write those down, but you can track last facing just by dropping an indicator at the edge of the battlemat that your ship points to. For larger ships you can use one mini for the front and one mini for the back; this also helps players eyeball the ship's real size.

fectin wrote:Giant zeppelin castles don't work.

They actually do; they're just unimaginably vast, stupidly resource-intensive, and damn hard to steer. We can deal with the second two with magic, and the first one is actually sort of the goal.

To demonstrate, let's make a blimp out of the largest man-made floating structure ever created: the Seawise Giant. Taller than the Empire State Building and about twice as heavy, and seven times the mass of the USS Nimitz. Getting all 700k tons off the ground would require half a cubic kilometer of helium, roughly the world's annual production of the stuff. Thankfully, since even nonmagical tensile structures are far stronger than comparably heavy compressive structures, the materials engineering isn't all that bad.

Helium can be produced in quantity by magic. The easiest way is to participate in the wish economy. Another easy way is to open a big gate to a cloud of helium in the Elemental Plane of Air. Building magical machinery to simply manufacture it would be feasible, and at the very least a legion of fire elementals or fire mages would make a bitchin' hot air balloon (though it'd have to be about 2000C to get as much lift as helium, at which point your blimp is one part awesome per thousand parts burnination).

Propulsion and stationkeeping are also pretty simple; just hand immovable rods to a rowing team. Alternatively, air elementals.

Vebyast wrote:Propulsion and stationkeeping are also pretty simple; just hand immovable rods to a rowing team.

Now that's just awesome.