Artillery and Air Support

[Killer Cyborg]

I recently watched "We Were Soldiers" and it impressed upon me exactly how important artillery and air support are.
Unfortunatly, there seem to be no rules for that sort of thing in Rifts.

Anybody got any good house rules or home-made weapons and equipment?

[grandmaster z0b]

Artillery has had many threads, if you do a search I'm sure there would be many recent refrences. How would this effect the game? Would characters have to dodge mortar rounds etc.? What exactly do you mean by air support?

[Killer Cyborg]

I'm thinking like the movie.
You call for air support, they fly in, bombs drop, fit hits the shan.
Not in the "I drop a bomb at that guy...(roll to strike)" sense that Rifts seems to love, more like
"Everybody in x area needs to dodge/save/whatever or take massive damage."

I don't like the idea of dodging it.
I don't think there's an appropriate save.
I don't like the idea of everybody automatically getting hit either, though...

Probably a dodge would work best, but maybe "Dodge for half damage" or something...

[Ice Dragon]

I recently watched "We Were Soldiers" and it impressed upon me exactly how important artillery and air support are.
Unfortunatly, there seem to be no rules for that sort of thing in Rifts.

Anybody got any good house rules or home-made weapons and equipment?

Classic Artillery is replaced by missile artillery like MLRS, MARS, etc.

If a missile battery is place near by (30 - 40 km or for LRMs 200 - 300km), characters could call in a missile strike. But it takes time and they would need a TAG or the skill artillery observer.

CAS is always good - a flight of helicopters or jets can falter an enemy advance.

Remember Murphies Law on Combat:

8. If at first you don’t succeed, call in an air strike.
9. If you are forward of your position, your artillery will fall short.
77. Air strikes always overshoot the target, artillery always falls short.
84. When you have sufficient supplies & ammo, the enemy takes two weeks to attack. When you are low on supplies & ammo the enemy decides to attack that night.
91. All-weather close air support doesn’t work in bad weather.

[PigLickJF]

I'm thinking like the movie.
You call for air support, they fly in, bombs drop, fit hits the shan.
Not in the "I drop a bomb at that guy...(roll to strike)" sense that Rifts seems to love, more like
"Everybody in x area needs to dodge/save/whatever or take massive damage."

I don't like the idea of dodging it.
I don't think there's an appropriate save.
I don't like the idea of everybody automatically getting hit either, though...

Probably a dodge would work best, but maybe "Dodge for half damage" or something...

How about rolling with the blast? That's how you take half damage from missiles and other explosions any other time.

Rifts doesn't really deal with this stuff because it was meant more as a high-adventure personal combat game, not as a war simulator. It would still have made a lot of sense to include stuff like this somewhere along the way, especially as they themselves delved more and more into large-scale combats/wars, but at it's heart it's still meant to be a "one-on-one" kind of affair between a small group pf players and NPCs.

I wonder, does Recon have any rules for this type of stuff? I don't know anything about the game, but it seems like they might deal with it, as it's supposed to be more of a modern-day combat warfare scenario. Might at least give you some ideas how Palladium would go about handling such things.

PigLick

[Athos]

I recently watched "We Were Soldiers" and it impressed upon me exactly how important artillery and air support are.
Unfortunatly, there seem to be no rules for that sort of thing in Rifts.

Anybody got any good house rules or home-made weapons and equipment?

I served in the army for 7+ years and artillery is still called the "king of battle" for a reason. Yah, it makes a huge difference to a battle's outcome, doesn't matter whether it comes from traditional artillery pieces or from planes or gunships.

You would need someone with a forward observer skill to direct the fire if the target were not on radar.

My guess on why they left it out is two reasons, first it is not very exciting from an adventuring standpoint. What fun is calling in an arty strike on a monster? Boom, monster dead. Second, they are probably implying that because of technology, hand held weapons are now more powerful than old style artillery. Why no one has invented new tech arty, who knows? But it probably has more to do with game balance than anything else.

[Killer Cyborg]

Two reasons why there isn't any.

One: Game related, how fun is it when YOU the player takes automatic damage from an attack YOU can't dodge and simply die. No roll to save, no dodge. BOOM! You die! No second chance, the guy you've been nursiong through 17 game sessions becomes a brickette because you had the bad luck of being in the area.

No thanks.

Two: Most modern Long Range Artillery require a either a GPS system, and seeing as which Rifts Earth's space is off limits, no can do. Or a Spotter to get in and paint the target, and as smart as that would be, see reason number one.

As for Aircraft, there aren't enough in Rifts Earth.

1. Any time an NPC performs a Simo Attack, you can "takes automatic damage from an attack YOU can't dodge and simply die".
Death is part of the game.

2. Use a spotter. Good excuse to make a new OCC and a couple new skills. Also gives the PCs a chance to prevent an airstrike by enemies... sneak up and find/kill their spotter before they get a call off.

3. There aren't enough aircraft in Rifts because Palladium didn't want to get into airstrikes and all the stuff that comes with it.
Not because nobody could make them, and not because nobody would want or need them.

[Killer Cyborg]

What fun is calling in an arty strike on a monster? Boom, monster dead.

I think that it could be very fun. And not all monsters die that easily.
Could lead to some dramatic moments... calling in an artillery strike on a swarm of advancing troops, there are big explosions all around... the enemy gets back up and regroups. No casualties...
(Vampires, for example.)

[Athos]

I think that it could be very fun. And not all monsters die that easily.
Could lead to some dramatic moments... calling in an artillery strike on a swarm of advancing troops, there are big explosions all around... the enemy gets back up and regroups. No casualties...
(Vampires, for example.)

I suppose you could use the missiles on pg 46 of the main book as artillery. It would be expensive but effective and a small city would probably have some kind of arsenal like that for a last ditch defense. Don't see many adventuring groups carting these babies around, so probably wouldn't change things too much.

And you get to test the nukes vs. vampires theory first hand.

[Zer0 Kay]

Probably a dodge would work best, but maybe "Dodge for half damage" or something...

How bout that funny ability Roll with blast/impact?

[The Galactus Kid]

The Taurus Glitter Boy is an artillery piece. I never really understood how to useit in game play, especially if the Taurus has no visual on the target. The idea of having a forward observer calling in strikes is good, but even the blast radius on the Taurus shells are no match for regular artillery pieces. A clarification of this rule would be very helpful for me.

[Scyber]

As for air superiority, the ability to achieve air superiority (or sumpremacy) is greatly reduced with the high number of highly accurate surface to air missiles in Rifts.

[Killer Cyborg]

Death is part of the game.

Fairness and fun is also part of any good game.

By calling in artillery on PCs you are pretty much relegating them to dying. You are essentially pulling a wrath of God on them. If you decide the artillery hits, it does. If you decide that it did enough damage to kill all the PCs, they die. Where is the fun in that for the player? How is it fair to them?

You're oversimplifying things.
You could just as easily say that Glitterboys take all the fun and fairness out of the game because they can easily kill their enemies.

In order to call in artillery on a party of PCs, the following things need to happen:
-A spotter has to find the party.
-The Spotter has to call in an air strike (possible Radio: Scramblers skill check, definite "Forward Observer" skill check) and make an accurate description of where to strike
-The artillery operators or airplane pilots need to make some sort of strike/skill check
-The PCs, as I have said, should get some sort of save/dodge skill (or Roll with impact, as others have pointed out) to reduce the damage.

I don't know what other steps should be in the process, but the amount of damage should be interesting to determine... there may be overlapping explosions or gaps between explosions...

A PC going up against a demonic force to save the townspeople but failing at least grants them a hero's death. They go out with a bang. By launching artillery at them you are just killing them and they die for no purpose, they go out in a wimper. Rifts is not a horror game like Cthulu where you inevitably die, the characters are supposed to be larger than life heroes that can change the world.

Rifts can be anything.
That's its appeal.

I try to run my games by the words KS placed in SB1: "A good, fair, game master never kills a character. It's the character, acting in anger or foolishness [or heroism], that kills himself."

What, angerly charging into artillery fire doesn't qualify as the character killing himself?
I wouldn't run an adventure where the adventurers are having a pic-nic and are suddenly killed by artillery fire any more than I would have an adventure where the characters are having a pic-nic and are suddenly killed by a a Glitterboy squad.
In Rifts, The GM shoudn't abuse his power and slaughter the PCs, but people can die at any time and the players have to be careful.
I could just as easily have a vagabond ambush the party when they're out of their armor and hose them down with his Wilk's 320.

[Jefffar]

As a GM I do believe that Fire Support has a notworthy role.

But I tend to use it like a supremely powerful spell. It has to be invoked. Depending on the situation, the players could be invoking it, or trying to stop it from being invoked.

Incidently, in one RT game session, my Veritech pilot was in full afterburner going vertical trying to shoot down an ICBM in its boost phase.

10 MIRV each with a 100 kT warhead. There's firesupport for you.

[grandmaster z0b]

I've run cool adventures where the PCs had to go SAS style, infiltrate a base then "paint" several non-moving targets with a laser and get the f*** outta there before the shelling begins. It cool coz the first part of the mission was stealth and bypassing surveillance systems and the second part was shooting and running before hell rained down from above.

[Mack]

Not to mention that we're currently developing artillery shells that can adjust their course and hit specific targets. Would be real easy in Rifts to have shells that home-in on vehicles or individuals.

[Rallan]

Just as an aside, I'd imagine that in a high-tech setting where increasingly sophisticated defensive measures have become available (eg the pre-rifts golden age that most Rifts Earth tech is based on), there probably would've been a swing back towards tradiitonal artillery rather than relying mainly on rocket and missile attacks. An artillery shell has no guidance system or thrusters that can be knocked out in flight, it's lack of thrust also instantly kills several fairly easy methods high-tech sensors could've used to pick up a missile in flight, and the fact that it doesn't need to be so perfectly aerodynamic and maneuverable means that you can make the thing a lot sturdier and harder to destroy than a rocket. Basically your end result is something that's hard to detect and target, almost impossible to stop from hitting it's destination without destroying it altogether, and harder to destroy anyway.

Plus of course if you start mucking about with orbital weaponry (tragically no longer an option for the nations of Rifts Earth), you'd be able to field artillery projectiles that are virtually indestructible. I mean seriously, how do you stop a hundred-ton chunk of heat-shielded rock from smashing into a city short of reducing it to gravel?

[Mack]

And in related news:

Army Laser Zaps Artillery Shell in Test

[Vrykolas2k]

I ran a mercs campaign where we used the Wilderness Scouts as spotters, and they had 12 Howitzers from pre-GPS days {IMAGINE!!! LOL!}, with "modernized" rounds... 1D6X10 MD to a 40' area. Roll for half damage, just to make it... "fair". I forget the ranges off-hand, but it was effective.

[Vrykolas2k]

Then again, I was happy as hell when Rifts: Mercenaries brought back helicopters, to be continued in World Book 11. Choppers are great for troop deployment and close air support. Then again, for some reason hight-tech Rifts helicopters need more crew than modern ones for some strange reason... I have yet to figure that one out.

[Killer Cyborg]

But unless you a complete poke you shouldn't have a couple artillery pieces being fired from who knows where actually kill your group. It would simply not be fun. It would be the same as having your group ambushed by a dozen GBs. 4 people in your group and you say haha and a mile and a half away you see 12 GBs firing at you. which would actually be better than having them wiped out by artillery... at least they could see what wiped them out if it was big shiny GBs.

I don't throw anything at the players that will completely wipe out the party without giving them advance warning and a chance to avoid their death.
But players are often stupid and shortsighted, and they tend to get into large amounts of trouble at times.
And when they do, I have no problem with killing them off.
I wouldn't spring an artillery ambush directly at the party, but if the PCs knew there was arillery in the enemy base they were attacking and they took no precautions then that's their problem.