I run Age of Aether, a steampunk fantasy RPG. Obviously, airships are a common sight in my campaigns. I personally love running missions where the airship itself is a significant obstacle - mechanical failures, hydrogen leaks, de-icing the envelope, and so on. My players have had fun doing things like heating the lift gas to gain some extra lift (at the risk of catastrophic fire) and trying to gain extra ballast so they can descend without venting lift gas.
Before now, I’ve always run the games with my own knowledge and ad-hoc rules devised on the fly, but now that the game is out, I’ve been thinking about codifying airship rules, possibly for a future expansion book. However, I don’t know exactly how much detail people will enjoy playing with. I like having lots of options, giving many methods to solve problems and representing the depth and complexity of real LTA airship operations, but if things are too complex, then no one will want to use the rules.
I’d like to get the pulse of the gaming community before I spend a while writing rules. What does everyone think? How much is too much, and how simple is too simple, for airship operations in a pen-and-paper RPG?
Honestly, I think it’s entirely a matter of what your players would enjoy. If they like resource management and problem-solving in their RPGs, they may like a complex set of rules. So, it’s an answer that, really, only they can answer for you.
Personally, I might have enjoyed that when I first started playing RPGs in the '80s. These days, I much prefer rules-light systems that facilitate, even encourage, roleplaying and storytelling, and I don’t care much anymore for complex rule systems and subsystems. (It’s the same reason why I don’t like some of the complex, fiddly board games that some of my gaming friends adore.)
Should I include something like a description of how airships work? Things like static vs dynamic lift, parasitic ballast, blaugas vs gasoline vs diesel as fuel? Different lift gasses? I know I love when an RPG gives me ways to design a ship, and I’d like to offer that opportunity to players and GMs without things getting too byzantine.
I’m hoping to get an idea of what the gaming community as a whole would enjoy.
OK, it wasn’t clear to me from your first post that you’re looking to write for an audience beyond your personal gaming group – sorry about that!
For me, personally, that sort of thing is fun for “fluff” or campaign background, but it sounds like you’re more interested in it being “crunch” (i.e., lots of statistical options for ship design and operation, and encouraging players to spend game time on optimizing their airships), which isn’t my cup of tea.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t an audience for it, of course, but that audience isn’t me, and that all feels, to me, more like what I’d expect to see in a steampunk board game than in an RPG.
Likewise. I had an airship in a D&D 5E campaign I ran a while back (technically, it was an interplanar airship, so some of the action took place on the Astral Plane). The players had fun repelling boarders from a massive hobgoblin-crewed warship, running a blockade, and firing at wyverns with their lightning cannon, but besides that, we all basically treated it as a way to get from point A to point B. I doubt they would have enjoyed getting more involved in its operation than “roll Air Vehicles check to fix”; I certainly wouldn’t. All that crunch, IMHO, would have gotten in the way of the story flow.
All I know is that you can take off from a desert, but you can’t ever land in one, and you can’t land anywhere within a hundred miles of the city where it was built, even though there’s a nice flat open space within the town walls.
But seriously, I don’t think that fantasy airships bear much relation to real ones. Your typical fantasyairship has a hull that’s nearly as big as the envelope, as opposed to the tiny control car hanging under a huge envelope of a real airship. The rules for a fantasy airship can’t be based on real physics, because by real physics, they couldn’t fly.
Ideally, you’d include some dials to let people using the book decide how much crunch they want. Of course, that’s a lot easier said than done, and I wouldn’t spend much design and development time on trying to implement this, but if a clever idea for implementing crunch dials occurs to you, try to include it.
I’m not familiar with the “Age of Aether”, but if you’re aiming at a supplement specifically for that game, that pretty much sets your level of crunch for you. Vehicle design rules are usually just about the crunchiest section of an RPG that includes them, so look at “Age of Aether”, look at the crunchiest part of the rules, and aim for that level. A number of RPGs have also gotten a lot of mileage (heh) out of treating a lot of different game elements, including vehicles, as characters. Character building is also usually the most detailed and elaborate section of an RPG. You may want to take a look at using the “Age of Aether” character creation rules as a baseline for your airship design rules.
If you’re aiming at a more system-neutral book, in general the trend in the RPG market over the last couple of decades has been away from crunch and towards narrative. That’s not to say, though, that there’s no place for a crunchy, detailed vehicle creation guide. But most players that would be interested in that probably already have “GURPS Vehicles”. I’d advise getting a copy and looking at it. For one thing, any GURPS product is pretty much going to be the outer bounds of what’s crunchy but still usable at the table. For another, you probably want to figure out what your system will do that GURPS doesn’t already do for crunchy vehicle design. Finally, it will probably give you a lot of good ideas about what to include in your own rules, even if you’re aiming it at a specific, non-GURPS rule set.
I was in a short-lived Victorian Steampunk-ish RPG on another message board a few years back, and we spent some time in an airship. The game wasn’t especially detailed as to the operations of the ship, but I didn’t mind, as I wasn’t really looking for that. I agree with those posters who’ve suggested you poll those who’ll be playing in your campaign. Some (like me) won’t be really into the details of flying and maintaining the ship. If you have someone playing an engineer or gadget gal, though, you might want to add more detail just for that player to enjoy.
Sounds to un-informed me like the details or “crunchiness” (great term BTW) are well-suited for a computerized game where the user sets the dials and the software delivers the behavior.
That crunchiness sounds hugely distracting from the game play for a tabletop game.
If the entire point of the game was an airship race through difficult terrain and weather maybe. But if the game is about a lot more and the airship is simply a vehicle / weapon platform, that sounds like vastly too much manual effort on minutiae.
Some ultra-Aspergery sorts might love playing crunchy airship ops with pencil and paper. But ISTM they’d likely be playing by themselves, not as part of a group of competitors.
You’re absolutely right. I tend to hew far closer to realism than usual for fantasy. The general rule that I use is what I call the “rule of thirds.” The gondola can be no more than one third the length, width, and height of the envelope (based on the M-Class Blimps used by the US Navy following WWII), and that’s a max.
Maybe a setting/tech level explanation would help?
Age of Aether is set in a steampunk fantasy 18th century, so without magic, the tech level would be somewhere around the 1790s. Magic does exist, but permanent enchantments are super hard (you can throw a lightning bolt or briefly levitate a carriage, but enchanting a carriage to fly forever is nigh-impossible). However, magic is often used to create non-magical items far beyond the capabilities of a mundane craftsman (superior alloys, strong but light steam engines, etc). This is called magitech, and it’s how I get things like functioning airships in the 1790s.
While my airships are made of wood with gondolas that looks somewhat like sailing ships, they are small, made of doped canvas and lightweight wood like balsa, and are slung under gasbags filled with hydrogen. Airships are nonrigid or semi-rigid, with up to four engines and a max envelope size of 1.5M ft^3 (the larger N-class blimps reached this size. Let me know if there are bigger nonrigids out there. I know Hindenburg was 7M ft^3, but it was a rigid).
Disclaimer, since I don’t think I made it clear: I am the designer of Age of Aether, so I know the system and the setting inside and out. The base game does not have large vehicle rules (ships/zeppelins/etc) in order to keep the core rulebook manageable, but I’d like to design them anyways, possibly for a future expansion. However, I want to design rules that the player base will find fun and not an onerous chore. Thus, I’m trying to ping the community now before I get writing.
The cruchiest parts of Age of Aether are character creation and advanced weapon creation, both of which allow the players to build complex characters or weapons with exactly the features they want. The gameplay to use those weapons, however, is quite simple. Airship creation will probably be similarly complex, but like with advanced weapons and characters, there will be plenty of samples that a player can use whole cloth if they don’t want to build their own from scratch.
Unlike a lot of what is done with a weapon, though, the more I study airship operations, the more complex it looks.
It seems like most people use airships simply as transport. Has anyone had airship combat? Two airships fighting one another, or dragons attacking a zeppelin or some such? Were there rules for things like what happens if an engine got hit or if the envelope was damaged and leaking gas? Or was it just exchanging gunfire until one airship went up in flames?
If you’re not already familiar with it, you might be interested in reading The Flying Cloud, a web serial (illustrated, but it’s mostly text, so it’s not a webcomic) set in an alternate timeline where the Great War ended early and airship technology became mainstream. They have a lot about airship operations, including combat (ground to air, air to ground, and air to air), which might be useful for inspiration.
Not with airship combat, but I’ve been running the Skull & Shackles Pathfinder Adventure Path, on and off, for a group for the past few years (scheduling issues keep us from playing regularly).
In that campaign, the PCs are a group of pirates. The adventure path books feature a separate set of rules for running combat between sailing ships. We tried it once, decided that it was clunky and far too complex for our group’s tastes, and it turned those scenes into miniatures wargaming. So, we chose to ignore those rules, and we now do ship combat more abstractly.
It’s not an RPG, but Crimson Skies is a good dieselpunk portrayal of airship combat. In the game each Zeppelin functions as an aircraft carrier with fighter bays, etc.
I have very much enjoyed Guns of Icarus, fleet airship combat, where you balance between pilots, mechanics, and gunners, who have to run around fixing damage while also inflicting attacks on the enemy. There’s choice in ammo which has different effects (flechettes deal more damage to balloons, shatter deals more damage to equipment like engines, armor piercing destroys armor but not hull, etc), and when different parts are damaged, they have different effects (damaged engines slow the airship or reduce maneuverability, damaged balloons make you sink, etc).
I guess I was hoping people would enjoy some of that in an RPG, running around fixing engines under fire, repairing the gas envelope before too much hydrogen leaks out, and trying to damage enemy airships in such a way as to facilitate escapes, especially if the enemy airship outguns the players’.
I am late to this thread and have just about nothing to add to its main questions. However, I thought I would mention a feature that I have tried to use in a few RPGs.
I think it would be interesting and would create narrative opportunities and adventure seeds if you expanded your underlying airship technology into technologies, plural. Meaning, have more than one way to power (or give lift to) airships. This is akin to having more than one way for FTL travel in a space opera game. (hyperspace, warp drive, wormholes, Glen Cook’s The Dragon Never Sleeps alien communications network, true teleport, etc.)
I hated Star Trek TNG’s technobabble, but differing technologies allows lots of different kinds of techno-issues to come up (in a technobabble sense.) Not just different fuel, but different engine parts, control mechanisms, explosive issues, vulnerabilities.
None of it has to get too crunchy, just say ‘this airship is lifted by hydrogen gas bags but that airship is lifted by airstones from the Windward Mountains. They dissolve as time goes by.’ The different ships will offer different RP possibilities.
I’ve read serious papers about jet-powered zeppelins. However, this is an advenced q8gh century game, so…
Lift gas options I’ve considered hydrogen, coal gas, hot air, and bound air elementals. Fuel includes coal, coal gass, and fire elementals.
This gets more into airship design, which I’m more comfortable with and feel more people want to be crunchier. Age of Aether in general is crunchy at creation, but is simple in terms of gameplay.
There’s also the option of having different styles. Hot air balloon style vs. traditional airships. Engine powered vs. sail, etc. If magic exists in this world, maybe introducing spells that control wind speed and direction, etc. Things like that could add variety without having to delve into micro details.