RPGPundit Reviews: In Harms Way: Aces In Spades

The game is "In Harm's Way: Aces In Spades", by Clash Bowley, from Flying Mice Games.  The original "In Harm's Way" was Clash Bowley's RPG about naval adventuring in 19th century wooden ships.  Aces In Spades is not a sourcebook for the original game; it is instead a complete RPG in its own right, using the same rules to emulate WWI flying aces adventures.

The game itself is an odd sort; the central element of the game involves dogfighting on WWI fighter planes, and there's a very complete set of mechanics for this aerial dueling.  As such, a considerable part of the game plays like a kind of wargame; though certainly the game has everything needed to allow for full-bore roleplaying; and theoretically you could use the game to run a campaign that was utterly earthbound if you so chose; set in the "Great War" or thereabouts.

The game itself is a 128 page softbound book, with a very nice full-colour cover, a collage of images of fighter planes and flying aces. Inside there are a number of black and white images mostly done in a photographic style, all quite topical and very nice.  The layout of the book is good, still fairly "old school" in its format (one of my gaming group buddies has suggested that Bowley's books are reminiscent of the 80s in their structure), but I for one have found it better structured than his previous games; Clash is definitely improving in what has usually been one of his weakest characteristics as an author/publisher.

I've already talked a lot about Flying Mice's house system in previous reviews, but I'll dip briefly into it again for this one, since it's been a while.  The game is based on percentile rolls, which are derived from stats and skills.  There seems to be an unusual degree of complexity to how this comes up, since you end up with skills that are listed as bonuses (ie. +2, +3, etc) that you then convert into percentages (ie. +10%, +15% etc) to roll the skill with.  Once you get used to that, its not a big deal, but I've always felt its kind of an unnecessary step.

Characters are created by dividing points into stats, the selecting skills based on background.  The character creation process allows you to choose your general background (pre war background if you will) from "skill sets" like "urban", "rural", "social", "sport", "maritime", "artistic" etc; as well as from social class (which is also determined based on the points you invest into your social class).  This game also provides templates allowing you to quickly assign yourself a set of skills based on a standard "archetype" of who you were prior to the war (stuff like "soldier"; "cowboy" (presumably for American or Canadian PCs), "adventurer"; "musician", "button pusher", "crook", "playboy", etc). The templates would allow you to really speed up character creation at the cost of having much less diversity of characters.
After this you would choose your career in your nation's Air Force (be it British, American, French, or German) as either a Pilot or a Gunner/Observer.

Like In Harm's Way, this game takes stock of the reality that the PCs might get stuck with a lot of downtime when their character isn't in the spotlight, and recommends "troupe style" play, suggesting that players be allowed to have a number of "secondary PCs" to run while their main character is not in the action.  Secondary characters include such choices as doctors, chaplains, supply officers, carpenters, blacksmiths, mechanics, clerks, drivers, or cooks.

There are also some very useful rules for the quick generation of NPCs, as well as a good list of stock NPCs for when you really have to have a set of stats in a pinch.

Like Flying Mice's other games, Aces in Spades doesn't really have any sort of "experience point" system. Instead, PCs evolve over time alone, gaining new skill selections every 6 months of campaign time.  Since the default assumes that the PCs are only going to be played through the Great War, that means that PCs will only really advance a maximum of 7 or 8 times, and that's only if you start at the earliest possible point in the war, in 1915.  As such, the emphasis of the game isn't really on improving your character's stats. Instead, the "goal" of the game is to gain Notice, which leads to promotion of your rank in the air force. Notice is gained by competence and heroism, and of course people who begin in a higher social class will have an advantage for Notice purposes (at the expense of having less points to put into their character build otherwise).
The game also has an interesting mechanic, the "Practicality/Honor" mechanic.  Your character's actions will raise or lower these, as choices are made between what is practical and what is honorable. Honor will give you a bonus to checks involving interaction with superiors, the upper classes, diplomatic activities, or leadership.  Practicality, on the other hand, will give you bonuses to dealing with criminals, the underclass, intimidation, and dealing with corrupt officials. Neither is thus a penalty, your choices just give you different kinds of bonuses.

The game includes a lot of great historical details; listings of the different kinds of medals that the various nations fighting WWI assigned (and the conditions in which they were awarded), equipment lists for typical items of the time, and even random tables to determine the overall quality a given air base will have for the housing of its men, the condition of its landing fields, and the quality of its machine shops.

The dogfighting rules are based on keeping track of your plane's fuel while burning up said fuel in different kinds of maneuvers, which will give you different sorts of bonuses and penalties to hit your opponents.
The rules are explained quite clearly, with lots of good little diagrams of plane outlines showing you what each maneuver  looks like,  and each position for firing.  There are rules for "Lucky shots" (when you get your exact number on a gunnery roll; basically a Crit Table with some very good results), crash landings, etc.  There are a couple of pages where each maneuver is detailed in little boxes, presumably you could photocopy these pages and make the boxes into chits for ease of play.

There are stats for a couple of dozen different kinds of planes, divided into the year they came into availability; all of which ends up making this aspect of the game very easy to run.  There are even a couple of pages with mock-ups (like paper cut-outs) of the Albatros DV and the Sopwith Camel, which you could presumably photocopy, paste onto cardboard, and use as models.

The game's appendix also includes stats for WWI tanks and other vehicles, for use in the land-bound part of the game.

In all, the game is remarkably complete, and would give you everything you need to run not only a "flying ace" game, but all kinds of other options for WWI-era historical play. Plus it has one of the smoothest aerial combat systems I've ever seen, without being either too simplistic or stupidly complex.

The Good: The game is excellent emulation of genre. And the dogfighting rules look like they'd run really fine.

The Bad: Nothing much, even the production, though still relatively mediocre in comparison to big-time RPG publishers, has imrpoved to the point where there's nothing wrong with it anymore.

The Ugly: nothing at all.

I'd recommend this game for sure to anyone who's enjoyed any of Flying Mice's games before, and to anyone who has ever wanted to play the WWI flying ace hunting the skies for the Red Baron.

RPGPundit

Currently Smoking: Meerschaum bent billiard + Argento Black
 

Thanks, Pundit! As always, an excellent, thorough review. As to organizing and laying out the game, I'm learning all the time, and getting better at it. It's just not something I'm naturally good at...

-clash

A second comment:

"There seems to be an unusual degree of complexity to how this comes up, since you end up with skills that are listed as bonuses (ie. +2, +3, etc) that you then convert into percentages (ie. +10%, +15% etc) to roll the skill with. Once you get used to that, its not a big deal, but I've always felt its kind of an unnecessary step."

This is a feature, not a bug, Pundit. I put in that step to abstract the chargen system from the task resolution system. With that step in there, I am able to drop in a wide variety of t-r sub-systems with virtually no change in the character. I've been working on diceless, d20 dice pool, d20 roll under, and 4d6-4/d20 roll over systems, to be published in the StarCluster System Toolbox along with a bunch of other goodies.

I've already used the d20 dicepool - AKA StarPool - in Blood Games II, just published, which will be on its way to you as soon as I finish the print layout. I used it instead of the percentile system because BG is more cinematic, which StarPool does well. The diceless sytem - AKA StarKarma - is currwnt ly being playtested. The others are finished, and await playtesting, except Star20, the d20 roll under system, which is just the percentile system in 5% steps and thus needs no playtesting. If you don't like the percentile, you can just drop in any other system and use it.

I have been working on this since I wrote the first StarCluster, many years ago, and it's all coming together right now.

-clash

Ok, well, I remain to be convinced about that; but if you're really telling me that you've figured  out a way that setting up your current system as it is will make it easy-peasey to convert to other systems, I'm looking forward to seeing evidence of that!

RPGPundit

The only thing I had to change was adding INT as a derived stat from IQ. INT is in the same range as the physical stats now, so all modifiers can work the same in all versions of the game. This can be done retroactively to any of the older games. It makes all characters totally portable between all the systems, percentile, dice pool, diceless, or whatever.

You'll see the result in action in Blood Games II, at least for the dice pool.  

-clash

As a fan of the original In Harms' Way book and as one of the playtesters of IHW:Aces In Spades I think Pundit's review is pretty much spot on. I'd like to point out that the dogfighting system is really nifty in that it feels authentic yet plays very easily unlike some other cumbersome systems that are too wargamey and lacking the right 'feel' for player characters. Having only just recently viewed some WWI aerial movies, I'm feeling inclined to run another game of Aces In Spades.

Yeah - I feel the dogfighting system was a blast! The stunts my players pulled in the air were awesome!

-clash