Warbirds Play Through

Let's move on in my experiments with air combat rules. Last is Warbirds.

THE GAME

Warbirds is a roleplaying game of dueling fighter pilots in a fictional, diesel-era world.

Important Stats

Like typical RPGs, Warbirds allows you to stat out your character. 

• Player characters have rating for three attributes: Body, Mind, and Spirit. 
• 0 represents an average person.
• There is a derived attribute called Situational Awareness that plays a role in air combat. It is the sum of Body, Mind, and Spirit. PCs generally start at a +1.
• Characters also have ratings for Piloting. Gunnery, Ordnance, and Strafing skills. These typically start at 1 or 2.

The planes also have stats.

• They are rated for Performance, Armour, and Structure.
• Players outfit their planes with weapons, which have unique stats.
• Players can also buy special traits for their planes.

If you don't want to build your own warbird, the publisher offers a sourcebook for World War 2 planes.

I'll reference these stats throughout my play through.

MY PLAY THROUGH

My Pilot

Since this is a test, I'm not going to create a full character. I'll just generate the stats I'll need.

Our hero is Frank. He has

• Situational Awareness (SA) = 1
• Piloting = 2
• Gunnery = 1

He flies a Spitfire. which has

• Performance = 3
• Armor = 2
• Structure = 3
• Light machine guns (+1 damage)
• The reduced turn trait which gives +1 for Dogfight rolls.

Warbirds does not have tables to generate scenarios. Being an RPG, it is up to the GM. For today, I'll keep it simple. Frank meets an Me109, with Performance/Armor/Structure of 3/2/3. I randomly generate the pilot stats. Frank's opponent has SA = 0, Piloting and Gunnery = 1.

The Dogfight

Our combatants meet in the skies. Let's walk through their dogfight.

Round 1

• Dogfight roll - this is an opposed D6 + Performance + Piloting + SA
• Frank has the advantage over the German, Fritz, with a +7 vs. +4 modifier
• Frank wins the roll. He now has a shot at Fritz.

On Fritz's tail

• Firing - the winner rolls D6 + Weapon Accuracy + Gunnery + SA
• Frank rolls a 4 + 1 + 1 = 6
• Defense - the loser can choose a Defense. Fritz chooses a basic Break
• The Defense score for a Break is Performance + Piloting + SA.
• Fritz has a Defense of 4
• Damage - the shooter does damage = difference in rolls + Weapon Damage - Armor
• Frank scores (6 - 4) + 1 - 2 damage = 1 point
• Fritz has a Structure of 3. 
• He can take 3 points of damage before suffering effects.
• It takes 2 x Structure damage to shoot a plane down

Round 2

• Fritz wins the Dogfight roll.
• He fires with his cannons, which have an Accuracy of -1. He offsets this with his SA of 1
• Frank's Defense = 6
• Fritz cannot beat Frank's defense. Does that mean he cannot hit him?
• I had to check the rules. Fortunately for Fritz, a tie counts as a hit
• Nevertheless, Fritz misses

Final Round

The combatants spent a few rounds circling other and trading ineffective shots. Then:

• Dogfight - Frank wins
• Firing - Franks rolls a 6. Add 2 for mods = 8.
• Defense = 4
• Damage = 4 (difference) + 1 (weapon) - 2 (armor) = 3

Fritz takes a hit!

Fritz now has 4 total damage, which means he is crippled. He takes a -1 penalty to rolls and cannot dogfight. His only option is to Disengage.

• Frank make a Dogfight roll. He scores 1 + 7 (mods) = 8
• Fritz rolls to disengage. He gets +2 for using the Escape defense. 
• Fritz rolls 4 + 3 (mods) + 2 (Escape) = 9

Fritz gets away!

Dogfight 2

With his superior pilot skills, Frank did not give Fritz much of a chance. I decided to try another dogfight with a pilot of equal ability. Here comes Franz

After a few rounds, Franz gets on Frank's tail.

• Firing = 6 (roll) + 2 (Gunnery + SA) - 1 (weapon accuracy) = 7
• Defense = 6
• Damage = 1 (difference) + 3 (weapon damage) - 0 (armor)
• Cannons have 2 points of armor piercing, which means that Frank cannot deduct his Armor from damage
• Final result = 4 points = crippled.

Now it's Frank's turn!
By the way, 1 vs. 1 dogfights make for boring pictures

Fortunately, Frank was able to escape!

ANALYSIS

What do I think?

What I Like

• Defense options - when defending, you can choose from multiple options. This gives some player choice.
• For my play through, I only used Break and Escape. There is also a Stunt defense, which gives you a die roll. It's risky; roll low and you do worse than a standard break but roll high and you are better off.
• There are also a number of advanced Stunts, like Stall, Scissors, Yo-Yo, etc. Each has different effects.
• Intuitive rules - they make sense and should be easy to remember given experience.
• Scaleable - I just did a 1 on 1, but you can have a plethora of planes in combat. Warbirds offers a tracker to help you handle multiple planes.

• Not just dogfighting - I'm just scratching the surface here. Warbirds has rules for all sorts of missions, including strafing and bombing. I plan to mine it thoroughly for ideas.
• Aircraft creation - being an RPG set in a fictional world, you aren't confined to historical planes. You can design your own warbird, fitting it out as you like. This may give me some ideas when I run imagi-nation aerial combat.
• Rounds to ground - the rules assume that planes slowly lose altitude as they engage. After a number of turns (set by the GM), they must break off or crash into the ground. This means that dogfights won't drag on forever. What a great mechanic.

What I Don't Like

• Lots of modifiers - characters have 5 different stats that apply to aerial combat. This makes sense for an RPG, but is too much for my quick-play skirmishes.
• RPG setting - some people like it but I think their setting is silly. Of course, I'm not using their setting so I can ignore this section of the rules. The problem is that it pads the number of pages. As a result, the PDF is quite large. I wish they would publish a stand-alone set of aerial combat rules.
• Hard to hit - I found it difficult to score hits, especially with an inferior pilot. Partially this is because I roll poorly, but even with Fritz, I needed to roll a 6 to hit. This probably works pretty well for an RPG, but could make combat drag.

Final Analysis

Warbirds has a lot of great ideas. As an RPG, it probably has more chrome than I need. Therefore, I doubt I will play it as is. Nevertheless, I plan to borrow from it liberally.