RPGPundit Reviews: In Harm's Way: Aces and Angels

This is a review of In Harm’s Way: Aces and Angels, written by Clash Bowley, Publisher by Flying Mice games. The review is of the print edition.

This review has been too long in coming, as my activities of late have meant it took me much longer than usual to work my way through this book; and now that I have gotten to it, I find that in this review I have relatively little to say about Aces and Angels.  It is an excellent game for what it sets out to do: namely, to emulate WWII aerial combat and to run campaigns where the PCs are members of the air forces of one of the nations that fought in the Second World War.

If this is the sort of thing that you would like to run, then doubtlessly this will be a great purchase for you. I doubt that ever before has there been such a thorough and well-rendered RPG book with this particular theme. On the other hand, obviously, if you have no interest in the subject matter, this game won’t really be good for much for you.

A few brief notes about the book itself: Like most of the books by Flying Mice, Aces And Angels is a softcover book with a full-colour cover and black and white illustrations inside. Most of the illustrations appear to be photomanipulations from photographs of the era, as well as (obviously) many images of planes. The rules and materials in the game are laid out in an orderly and sensible format, but without many thrills. There are lots of reference tables, and more than a few random tables throughout.

Some of you might recall that I have previously reviewed “In Harm’s Way: Aces In Spades”, which is a very similar game of WWI aerial combat roleplaying. This book is basically a sequel to that one; it’s a complete and independent RPG in and of itself, and the former book is in no way required for you to be able to use this one. If you already own Aces in Spades, then you’ll see that systemwise, the game is pretty well identical, but even so the main reason to get this book as well as the former is that this one contains complete and detail statblocks for (all of?) the aircraft used in WWII. This book is bigger and thicker than Aces in Spades, mainly because there were far more varieties of WWII aircraft than WWI aircraft, and Aces and Angels has 74 pages dedicated exclusively to airplane stats (PLUS another 4 pages for stats for the handful of jets that were used in that war). That’s a really remarkable amount of detail and information.

I had complemented Aces in Spades for its dogfighting system, and I will repeat that compliment for Aces and Angels: I usually hate vehicle combat rules of all types, in my experience most RPGs provide vehicle combat rules that are either so simplistic as to be useless, or so complex and Byzantine as to be unusable in actual play.  Beyond that, many of them deprotagonize the PC in weird ways: either a single crappy shot can kill a PC, or the PC and his abilities and stats really have little influence on how the combat turns out.

The “In Harm’s Way” mechanics don’t fall into any of those traps. The rules certainly aren’t too simplistic, but they are easy to understand even for someone as wary as I am of these sorts of mechanics. And because the game is geared toward this kind of dogfighting and the mechanics of character creation support that, it means that PCs are right in the spotlight of the aerial combat action.

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 stats for the dozens of airplanes used in this war, ordered by the year they came into use. 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.

These rules are well-organized and easy to pick up; there are some occasional typos in the plane stats (at least, I have to assume they are; I can’t imagine that a 1939 Hawker Hurricane MK II would have 10500 points of constitution when no other plane from that year has more than 1800 points of constitution); but aside from that there’s not much to complain about in this area.

As for the game itself, the fundamental mechanic 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, Soviet, German, Japanese, or Italian) as either a Pilot or a Gunner/Observer.

Like all the other games in the In Harm's Way series, 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 and Angels 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 Second World War, that means that PCs will only really advance a maximum a dozen times, and that's only if you start at the earliest possible point in the war, in 1939. 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’s appendix also includes stats for rockets and torpedoes, and other WWII era vehicles. The game could theoretically be used to run a full blown WWII game, rather than a specifically aerial campaign, though the latter is the obvious focus of the game.

The author of the game makes it clear in the book that his goal in writing Aces and Angels was actually to emulate the action and adventure of WWII-themed literature and films, rather than a “realistic” game dealing with how the air war was actually fought.  Personally, I think that this game can likely be used to support either style of play.
But to cement the former point of view, the book includes details on the various playstyles that could most easily be used with A&A, and provides a brief bibliography of useful books and movies for helping to guide your campaign design.

There’s also quite a bit of detail on the types of missions you could run with A&A: be it going on patrol, penetration raids deep into enemy territory, bomber escorts, close air support, bomber interception, air strikes against enemy fighters, fighter sweeps, or dealing with anti-aircraft defenses.

Beyond that I would note personally that its pretty obvious to me that the game could be basically run in one of two ways: either mainly as a kind of wargame where you only have roleplay in brief spurts between one cool dogfight mission and the next, or as a roleplay-intensive game focusing on the various imaginable themes of the horrors of war or the struggles of a unit of airmen in wartime, mixed in equal or even inferior parts with dogfighting action.  The Notice rules, which regulate how a PC advances in rank, can be downplayed in such a way that everyone stays more or less at the same level, or they can be used to add a strong competitive streak to the game, as PCs vie to gain Notice and thus end up surpassing the other players in rank and authority.

I’ll conclude this review the same way I started it: If you have a hankering to run a WWII aerial combat RPG, you MUST get this game. If you aren’t interested and wouldn’t be interested in that, there’d probably be no point whatsoever in getting this game. In terms of what its designed for, I would give the game an unqualified positive recommendation.

RPGPundit

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Hopefuly, you'll actually like Sweet Chariot, rather than the "It's good if you like that kind if thing" reaction to the two Aces games.

Great review, Pundit! Very thorough, as always! Reviewing a game where the subject matter doesn't thrill you must be a chore, though!

-clash