The Culture: When You Can Make Them Save Or Die From Miles Away

Reading Jeffro's RIFTS threads got me thinking about something else.

The reality of armored combat is that most encounters are Beyond Visual Range. Your Mark I Eyeball won't detect who is shooting at you, or with what, and neither will those ears until it's too late.

Rarely in fiction is this even addressed outside of some nameless mooks being mowed down by People That Matter, but fantastic adventure wargames are games and not fiction; narrative logic does not apply.

Therefore, it is not surprising that most people playing out armored combat do so as if it were still the World Wars and most combat (save for artillery) is Line Of Sight- even with ordinance like rockets, missiles, etc.

With the advent of Flight Simulators, that changed. Originally a proprietary technology used by the military, they came along into the civilian sector when PC technology reached the desktop in the 1980s. Now people who would otherwise never experience this phenomenon could do so, and it still fucks people up until they either quit or adapt and overcome.

You can count the number of tabletop products that (a) attempt to address this matter, (b) do so competently, and (c) actually make it fun and playable on one hand and you'll have digits left over.

Most mecha games (the sort most in need of an answer to this question) don't even attempt it.

• BattleTech, as noted previously, doesn't even try as they use a different model entirely for its combat rules and procedures.
• Palladium just treats the matter as weird costumes for its Silver Age Comics combat scheme, despite it providing just enough information to make it viable to play.
• Dream Pod 9 tries, but given what they're adapting (VOTOMS/Gundam) it's considered a niche issue, and Gear Krieg is a Weird World War game so it doesn't bother.
• Mekton Zeta broaches the question, but doesn't present the answer (instead leaving it to be drawn by inference by the reader) because it's not a complete product- it's a Product Developer Kit masquerading as a complete game. The same applies to HERO, GURPS, and every other such product.

Furthermore, consider the massive influence that Dungeons & Dragons has had on the hobby. Most people are going to think Line Of Sight, and a lifetime of entertainment media where every last dogfight, tank brawl, major battle is either in the World Wars or conveniently works its way through all that BVR stuff to devolve into World War style combat Because Drama (not even Tom Cruise is immune, as Maverick showed).

You'll also see this come up in Space Opera games, as most of them are either influenced by Uncle George's Space Opera or are said Space Opera, which (in these terms) is World Wars In Space.

What this comes down to is a Failure Of Imagination all around. Designers fail to comprehend what this is, so they don't even try to design a fun way to play it (or try and make ones that doesn't scale up or account for three or more combatants), not realizing that for the player the fun is in attempted to outplay--to outturn, outthink, outflank, etc.--the opponent and get that kill. (See the DCS video above; that's thrilling stuff.)

Even when talking about armored combat on the ground, BVR combat applies- especially as your man's ability to detect and communicate extend past his Mark I senses. If you can radio in a Fire Mission, you have a reason to figure out how to do this on the table that's fun- and no one has, yet, but I have every reason to believe that this will change and soon. Once someone figures out how to do it that's fun, and he starts stacking wins doing so then you'll see the entire scene shift radically overnight.

Players that don't adapt to this are going to get smeared into paste by those that do, like what Iran did to Iraq's airforce in the 1980s when they went to war and Iran's F-14s scored one BVR kill after the next upon the Iraqi's MIGs.

I can't wait to see it, and a game like RIFTS (as with Gamma World, After The Bomb, and several others) is a perfect stage to pull off such a stunt.