Abstract Combat for Everything

I've been wanting to play a sci-fi space ship game lately. However most of the people I'd play with either have no experience with, or interest in, dog-fighting. I also hate having to break out maps and minis in the middle of a role-playing game, which is why I love old school D&D and so much: combat is normally very abstract. I was starting to wonder, why couldn't we take this approach with ship to ship combat? Heck even actual aircraft dog fighting even. In fact, we could even use this for mech combat.

Of course my preferred venue for mech combat is BattleTech, but there are clearly mech-like creatures in D&D, so why couldn't we make mech combat rules for D&D? Really we wouldn't need to. You could just D&D, and include monsters that are essentially mechs. Most of this revelation came to me as I was looking through Booty and Beasts I believe. There's a ton of sci-fi gonzo stuff in there, and it really got me thinking how great it would be to start including that stuff in D&D.

I've also been watching a lot of Flash Gordon lately, I just watched John Carter of Mars, and I've always loved Star Wars, so this all just seems like a natural extensions of geekdom to me.

Some actual thoughts on the matter though. Namely, for games where Fire and Maneuver is such a big deal, you'd probably want to incorporate the Dexterity modifier to Armor Class. Even if you didn't use that rule per say, because I'm actually against giving monsters ability scores, you'd want to factor speed into the armor class of those "monsters". Obviously faster, more agile ships/mechs would be harder to hit. This is already done with some monsters (at least in AD&D as far as I know), mostly with flying creatures.

Since I have a war gaming background, I'm always sure to include terrain and environment, even if I don't map it, so this would definitely be necessary. Even if you don't map it, you want to give your players the options of specifying their tactics and decisions. Even if it's not extremely tactical to simply say "I take cover behind the rubble", it's fun, and dramatically appropriate for these genres.

That's all for now. I'm not sure if I'm just going to stat up some stuff for D&D, or if I'm going to make a D&D inspired system for this stuff, but I'm probably going to work on something soon. On one hand more material for D&D is great, on the other hand I'm not a one-system for everything kind of guy. I definitely feel systems designed specifically for their genre, are normally more fun.