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The Alternative Collision Chart takes away a player’s ability to control the direction of his own aircraft, and instead puts his fate in the hands of rules makers and random dice.
A few seconds to choose a card is a small price to pay for a player to have some control over his pilot’s fate. We’re not talking about slowing the game down every turn of every mission. We’re talking about a 10-second card choice that might occur once in every two, three or five games.
The chart does have a good use – once the traditional card choice determines that a collision has occurred, it can be used in condensed form to determine only the severity of the collision.
But taking away a player’s rightful ability to control the direction of his aircraft is entirely unnecessary, reduces the fate of your 5 or 10 or 50 mission pilot to blind luck, and purports to solve a problem that never existed.
Why should a pilot be under cards for his entire turn, and thus subject to more restrictions than other pilots, based on something that will be resolved in the first second or two of a 20 second turn? If you want to choose directions somehow, that’s fine, but picking from the existing 16 cards doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Plus, what if a player decides he deliberately wants to ram an enemy plane? No actual, sensible pilot would want to do that, but a player with a rookie pilot might! There’s a lot of opportunity for abuse with cards. A group could even have an “understanding” that people go right (just as an example) and thus avoid collisions. If people are choosing cards without some bias or alternative agenda, there will still be an enormous amount of luck involved.
I’m fine with the luck of the dice vs the luck of whether I happen to pick a direction that contradicts what my opponent picked.
All that said, it’s just a game and I really don’t care all that much.
Graham
I agree that there’s no reason for card restrictions to apply to planes in possible collisions who are otherwise not involved in tailing. Then again, I’ve never heard of that being done. The only purpose of the card is to determine a collision. Card restrictions do no apply.
I’m quoting from the 7th edition rules….
“If the planes do not collide, the altitude restrictions on the maneuvers do apply for the rest of the move.”
Graham
Most of your other comments refer to luck in some form or another, so I’ll address that separately.
To my mind, this is not about eliminating luck. This is about preserving player decisions.
Ultimately, this game is a collection of decisions made by individual players culminating in an unknown outcome. Contemplate this for a moment… the essence of the game is the player’s choices. The more actions we dictate by legislation, the fewer choices are left to the player. The fewer choices left to the player, the less relevant the player becomes to the process.
The Fly By Legislation rules have multiple unintended consequences. For instance, the Fly By Legislation rule that forces observers to commit in advance to 1) firing their Lewis or 2) artillery spotting, eliminates the possibility of an enemy plane deliberately taking a close range shot (thereby offering a tempting, close range head-on to the observer) in an effort to distract him from his artillery spotting duties.
Historically, this is a very realistic scenario. It encourages bravery by both parties. It gives some dramatic moments to the game. It allows the defenders to actually have a realistic chance at stopping the artillery spotting. It allows them to try to alter the observer’s actions. But none of this will ever happen because rules lawyers simply cannot abide the thought that a player might be able to make his own decision.
(As an aside – the justification of this rule is that the observer couldn’t possibly move the Scarff ring on his Lewis in time to respond. This is untrue. I myself, with no training or gunnery background, sat in the front cockpit of the world’s only flying Vickers Vimy at Oshkosh in 2000, while flying full throttle at 2,000 feet altitude while wearing goggles and leather helmet, and easily manipulated the Scarff ring in less than five seconds. How much faster could a trained gunner have done the same thing?)
I oppose almost all rules that take decisions out of the hands of the player and place them in the hands of rules lawyers. Without player decisions, we are simply going through meaningless motions and watching the results of random dice as third parties. It’s more like watching TV than playing a game.
I prefer that the result of a possible collision – whatever that may be – come not from rules lawyers, but from the decisions of the players at the table.
Brisfit Ace wrote:I’m quoting from the 7th edition rules….“If the planes do not collide, the altitude restrictions on the maneuvers do apply for the rest of the move.”
Graham
Didn’t know that and agree with you that it should be changed.
I’m only arguing because I like to argue. I don’t really care how we determine collisions as long as we all know by which rules we’re playing.
The card you pick doesn’t determine if you collide. The card you pick AND the card your opponent picks determine if you collide. Unless you’re colluding, that will be based largely on luck. So if the card choice is luck and the dice roll is luck, who cares which you use? And not picking cards gives you more freedom to make more choices, since you’re not bound by the card chosen before the turn began.
While we’re at it, many games involve a lot more choices and a lot less luck than Dawn Patrol. Anything with plotted movement, for example, instead of an initiative roll. That doesn’t make them better games, or more fun. But it does reduce the impact of luck.
Any one Dawn Patrol game is very heavily luck-based. But Dawn Patrol is a marathon not a sprint. The fun is building pilots over the long term, for me, and that’s where skill shows through. I could beat Doyle Brunson in any one poker game if I got lucky, but if I played him all the time he’d have all my money!
The impact of the collision rule is tiny, at best. I’ve been in three collisions in 1,068 games, or 0.3%. Not something I’m going to worry about either way, really. So I think the only time it’s worth arguing about is if you like to argue…
Graham
I don’t disagree, but again, I’m looking from a broad view at the choices being taken away from players by rules makers and this is one of them.
And remember, if it really doesn’t matter and it’s no big deal, then we might as well return to card choices for collisions. After all, it’s only 0.3%
That would have been fine with me. I didn’t consider what I wanted when I chose the house rules, I selected based on what everyone else posted. No one at all objected to the d10 for collisions when I first asked for feedback from those who had played online.
Certainly luck still plays into the card choice, but you can impact your odds to some extent. Not all cards have the same odds of a collision. You can make educated guesses about what your opponent might do. You have choices. You can’t impact anything with a die roll. You’re not really even necessary to the process.
I don’t have a problem with the dice roll for collision. It is very quick and simple and the rules are easily understood. (Note that the original (card) system is easily understood as well) To me the choice of maneuvers is similar to rock paper scissors: you have a choice, but it ends up essentially random. The dice roll is faster and allows for unrestricted movement, and subsequent greater options, assuming no collision of course. It may be a philosophical question whether there should really be much calculation involved picking a maneuver with planes approaching at these speeds? I think we’re talking about less than a second here.
If there was a way to pick maneuvers so that you could significantly decrease the chance of a collision, perhaps at the cost of some movement flexibility, I think that would present a more game-worthy decision point. One option might be a 17th card that requires you to choose the opposite (however defined) of the opposing plane’s choice.
Under your card system, what is the roll you guys use when there actually is a collision?
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