Cheat!

I've been having trouble coming up with anything much to say. However, here's a thought or two regarding hordes of NPCs, fighter wings in Star Wars, and the game last Saturday.

On Saturday, I faced my PCs with a huge number of enemies. Unfortunately, I botched slightly, in that the enemy were about two steps too powerful for them, and for the story I was planning on running. Still, adopt, adapt and improve. No-one died, so there's no huge problem. And, they think they know how to get out of this mess...

That's an aside - I was wanting to get to the point that I was bouncing some ideas I've had about how to handle fighter wings in Star Wars and similar games. Broadly speaking, I think a fighter wing should move and fight as a single unit, with what amounts to a single attack roll and damage tally from the whole wing in the round. My current thinking is that each fighter beyond the first should provide a +1 bonus to attack rolls and AC to the main fighter in the wing, with each successful hit on the wing as a whole either being assigned to a random member of the wing or shifted to a member of the wing at his choice, if a Pilot roll is made (I don't know a likely DC). The basic idea there is that damage is generally assigned randomly, but individuals could choose to "drop back far enough to cover you", as in Star Wars, effectively taking the hits for their buddy.

Anyway, as a first step to this, I decided to have to 'secondary' members of the wing instead make use of the "Aid Another" action in combat, with each member thus providing what amounted to a +2 bonus to attack rolls (only) to the main pilot. I did this because I didn't want to drop in some new house rules without telling my players, especially when they're untested rules.

This worked fine. The effect was that the wing hardly ever missed, but the energy resistance of my PCs' mechs negated most hits - as expected. I've commented on my thinking that mechs should provide an AC bonus OR hardness, but not both, before.

The only problem I had with it occurred half-way through the battle, when I chanced to look up the "id Another" action in the rule-book. At this point, I discovered that it only applied to melee attacks. Whoops.

Of course, people make mistakes all the time, and it wasn't as though the mistake had cost anyone their life, so no problem. That I then didn't confess my error, and continued using the ruling even after I knew it was wrong was another matter, though...

One of the problems I sometimes feel when running D&D (and similar d20 games) is that PCs gradually become so powerful that they become immune to all attacks from low-level NPCs. So, we can have a lone Barbarian facing off against a horde of orcs and win. I have no problem with this. However, they also tend to come out of the combat totally unscathed, since the NPCs all too often require a natural 20 to hit, which doesn't happen often. Henceforth, I think I'll counter this by having my orcs make extensive use of the aid another action. Just a thought.

I'll try to think of something a bit more interesting to post nearer the end of the week.