Liminal Void rambling: ships, ship combat, and ship “combat“.

March 2, 2023

Thinking out loud about Liminal Void ship stuff because that's on my docket alongside Valiant Horizon and VH is mostly in the "the thing's constructed, just gotta tweak it around the edges" stage. (If you're not familiar from previous posts, basically it's a space game with an Expanse-ish level of hard-sci-fi-ness, give or take a bit, but more centered on survival in shit space capitalism than interplanetary politics as such. I have a free quickstart here! for ground-level, Level 0 rules if that sounds like your thing!)

Ships

As part of the core concept of the game, past that Level 0 conceit (which is defined as "the time before you have a ship and become capital-P Protagonists") I'm assuming you have a ship at all times. (My toxic trait as a designer is I think I can be the one designer make vehicle and not-vehicle interactions that actually work and make both parts of the game good/interesting/not worth skipping.) In general ship stuff is supposed to be one of the major sources of advancement, but that's a later problem.¹ Right now I'm thinking about ship combat.

My general concept for ship-on-ship combat is that it's not some cool dogfight even at the Expanse level (where fighting ship-to-ship is insanely dangerous) so much as "two sets of assholes in tin cans desperately trying to poke holes in each other before the other one does, escape, and/or board the other one". My concept for this was to use my Clashes and Dueling rules - you can see a sample ship there, even. In this system each combatant picks an action and both are revealed at once, a priority is determined based on classification of the ability picked (Aggressive < Defensive < Indirect < Aggressive), and effects resolve based on that priority. I think it seems like it'll be cool in the abstract. I have two problems to solve at the high level though which intersect.

Combat

My first problem is that I definitely designed this dueling system first with a different game (Machinations of Court and Frame, which you can see referenced in that page, and which is only in pre-pre-production, and not tested in the slightest) in mind. Machinations is conceptually a troupe-based game where players have a few characters working for various noble houses on all sides of a war, so odds are any duel is going to be between two PC characters and players who aren't directly involved get drafted and split up out of character to give advice to players who are for a usually-1v1 fight between two noble house-representing pilots, while the GM/fifth wheel/etc acts as a referee (online this feels like a "both parties send a secret message to the ref who reveals both at once" situation, at a table this is "both people scribble actions on cards or have action cards and flip at once"). I think it works best in that case: each character in the fiction is a mech pilot who can mostly focus on taking one action at a time, and you don't have as many players sitting around bored because you're splitting the PCs into two camps or running two parallel duels or whatever once that starts.

Liminal Void is...not that kind of game. You're playing one character, or possibly one of several characters in a crew, but either way everyone involved is on that ship having probably one of the worst days of their lives so far. Splitting the party up in that way feels weird given that - designating half the party to be in charge of Random Dipshit Corporate Police Cruiser kinda sucks, and saying the party can only do one kind of thing at once feels weirdly limiting and feels like it will mostly lead to one person quarterbacking and everyone else just along for the ride. But also I don't want the traditional "battle stations" idea where everyone just Does Their Thing every round because that sucks and I don't think anybody really likes that!

I'll give it a think. Given that the actions are typically a lot simpler and each shot is intended to matter way more than in Machinations (after armor is stripped away, each hit has the potential to deal systems damage, which I suppose gives characters who aren't the pilot something to do but more importantly has lasting implications until they can get legit-repaired) maybe it's tense enough to be fine.

"Combat"

The thing about Liminal Void is that it's a game where I wanted to emphasize not-just-combat as being interesting and worthwhile. You can mostly take jobs that involve salvage/repair/exploration if you're into that, and even in the quickstart scenario you can "win" without ever getting a proper weapon or firing a shot. That way, when combat happens, it's not "casual" in that sense: it's quick, visceral, tactical, intense, and someone you like is very likely to walk up kind of messed up if not dead. So given that, how do we represent ship encounters where it's not like a fight to the death? Or even an encounter with another ship?

If you think about spaceship stuff, off the top of my head there's a lot of cool scenarios that aren't dogfights: navigating asteroid/debris fields, trying to take another ship intact, trying to get away from a ship trying to board you without shooting at it, chases, flying through highly populated areas like local station traffic, flying close to an emplacement that's shooting at you. In a lot of cases it's a safe assumption your ship doesn't even have a weapon: like it's very possible you have a luxury cruiser and your main strategy for getting attacked is to speed up and either get out of acquisition range so they can't find you. Or maybe you have a space big rig and your main strategy is to ram them and board them because you're twice their size.

I think this is mostly doable by designating scenario events as "actions" in that Aggressive/Defensive/Indirect enemy attack sense: like for an asteroid field, they could come in the form of rocks in the way of the ship (Aggressive), rocks with enough minerals in them that they deflect sensors (Defensive), and rocks that are coming towards the side because they were deflected off something else (Indirect). Instead of aiming to deal enough Harm to take down some kind of Health/Integrity so the opponent dies/explodes/is destroyed, we could re-use the idea of Rolling for Progress and define various actions in a scenario as adding X Die Progress (like moving towards a goal, or lasting long enough in a chase that you get to a part where your pursuer has to turn around, or finding the proverbial needle in a haystack in a ship graveyard where the black box signal is coming from).

Conclusions

I have none, honestly, I just gotta make some stuff and see how it feels.

Anyway, thanks for reading this far!

1. My general thought is as you make more money you can install more storage, add workbenches and armories to maintain increasingly expensive sets of equipment for various tasks, etc. Personal advancement as opposed to ship advancement is probably going to be a mess because right now most Total//Effect advancement I've written is "get more powers per level"² and that doesn't work as well here because those kinds of abilities are equipment-locked but that's a problem for future me and I have some ideas already.

2. Also I need to figure out the best way to make Reactions exist fluidly. Again, a problem for future me.

(Read the original on cohost here!)

Comments