There is no such thing as safe rounds. With things like Linked and Breach, I'd take on a battalion of stormtroopers before I got into the cockpit of a fighter. I'll take that flight of minion Ties over a basic freighter everyday.

Breach isn't that common among weapons able to target fighters, just warheads really. And Linked isn't an involuntary thing. If your GM is shooting missiles and activating linked on you often.. you may want to ask him what you've done to offend him.

Hahah I am the GM, and while I'm not out to kill the players, I am here to make things at least difficult for them. One of the good quotes I've heard is "The GM isn't trying to kill you, he's trying to make you a hero" (paraphrased from Critical Role). If you're flying against Z-95's expect concussion missiles, if you're fighting a Star Destroyer, expect turbolasers.

As long as you factor in the use of those weapons into the encounter design you're fine.

My analytic and math ability is near zero XD

Can you put a clear sample to understand it. I love the general concept but I need a clearer sample please.

Sure! and by the way, I was just suggesting something you could theoretically do to modify shields in a way that lets you generate more crits whenever someone gets hit; however, this may or may not improve the game or work the way you would hope it to work so you would have to playtest this:

Basically, shields would become the new soak (you may need to increase or decrease shields by a certain amount to make it work) and then armor would work as a damage threshold before crits kick in. Essentially first you reduce shields from the attacks damage, and then compare the leftover damage against the armor (which you would also have to modify); if the leftover damage is lower than armor you just apply the damage to hp, but if its higher, you apply the damage and also trigger a crit roll. Basically what armor would represent is the amount of damage (after reducing it by soak) that your ship can take before it generates a crit.

Here are 3 examples using completely random numbers for illustration purposes only:

5 damage against a ship with 5 shield and 2 armor - no damage dealt to the defending ship and no crits rolled

5 damage against a ship with 4 shields and 2 armor - 1 point of hull damage dealt to the defending ship, and no crits rolled since the leftover damage was not higher than the armor (you would roll crits if you roll enough advantages, however)

5 damage against a ship with 2 shields and 2 armor - 3 points of hull damage dealt to the defending ship and 1 crit generated as well since the leftover damage was higher than armor (if you also roll enough advantages to generate another crit you would use the current rules for dealing with situations that generate multiple crits).

Again, to use this you would more or less have to respec every ship as the game was 100% not designed to work this way, but you could use this if you wanted to. I personally wouldn't use this mod as I feel its a lot of work and it doesn't make the game more to my liking, but if you feel it would make your game better and you don't mind trying to come up with the optimal new shields and armor for every ship you and your players use, then by all means go for it! I am a big fan of tweaking the system to make the game work for you and your players.

I've run numerous space combats, the system isn't broken, it's just a little different and starfighters in Star Wars have been put on a pedestal thanks to video games and novels. Go back and watch EP IV again, the Death Star attack is pretty fast and horrific.

Never said it was broken, just making it more to my liking and sharing ideas with others as well in case they want to do the same. Luckily, all of the rules in the RPG are more or less suggestions for the GM to use and modify to his heart's content, so we can all make new rules or tweak existing ones to make the game suit our tastes a bit more. This , in my opinion, is one of the best part of playing RPGs as it allows us to patch or mod the areas that we don't like and keep the ones we do.

What about shields being extra soak that decrease by one every time you are hit. You could also double the values and then say that it also decreases by two when exceeded. Then you can use the lower of a pilots piloting or ship handling minus the same for the target. Positive numbers are boosts to attack, negative are setback. Pilots can take 2 system strain to boost their number by one to a maximum of their piloting.

This allows highly maneuverable fighters to have an advantage on slower ones as long as they're good enough pilots. It also allows fighters to last a little longer but still be overwhelmed by firepower.

This sounds pretty good, especially the shields part which would make any ship be unable to hide behind their shields for too long.

The one problem I see with the handling/piloting skill comparison is that it doesn't take agility into consideration when normally agility would be considered for all other things that involve piloting checks, and that you would have to calculate it every time a different ship tries to shoot you. The game already makes you do that with opposed checks, when calculating silhouette/speed differences, etc., but I still feel that ideally any custom rule that affects the way difficulty is calculated should be simple enough that you calculate it once and then its pretty much the same for the rest of the fight so that you don't have to calculate 3 different things every time someone shoots.

That being said, if you don't mind the extra complexity, it would make pilots with more piloting training (ranks in piloting) in more maneuverable ships be able to make themselves harder to hit, which is certainly a good thing in my book!

We're actually in agreement in avoiding the This + That - Other vs. Something x Attribute formula. It's why I haven't posted a fix myself yet. I know what I want to achieve but I'm struggling to find a way to keep it consistent with FFG's approach and similar to normal combat. I like the kernel of the idea suggested but think there are too many exceptions and special cases built in. I would be in favour of sliming it down significantly back to the core idea of just an Advanced Evasive Manoeuvres. My essential problem is that anything you roll would normally be an Action, and if you make it an Action, you don't have an Action left for attacking.

I hear you and Ghost. I think this RPG makes it specially hard to modify because of the fact that there are multiple dice and you want o figure out how to use them, and on top of that some stuff does require math (like the way damage is calculated, etc. (its not like in D&D where its already pretty math heavy so doing a bit of additional math doesn't hurt the system too much).

Still, I am curious of what you guys think of what I proposed earlier (the stuff in the spoiler). Yes it is a bit this or that + this minus the other, etc., but I don't think its too disimilar of what FFG already makes you do (I mean the way upgrades work is pretty fiddly as it is... grab the higher of either your characteristic or your ranks in the skill in green die, then grab the other in yellow die, then replace the greens with the yellows, add boosts, do the same with the difficulty, etc.), and the best part is that you calculate it once when the pilot gets on the ship and it stays the same for the rest of the encounter / you don't have to roll anything to calculate it so it would still be a maneuver (essentially, you add setbacks to people shooting at you when you are doing the improved/advance evasive maneuvers equal to your yellow dice in the piloting skill up to the ship's handling, and you can improve it beyond that if you have yellow dice left over by paying a penalty). It would also work for planetary vehicles as those also have handling values so there shouldn't be any issues there either.

I would love to get some feedback, negative or positive, about the rule that I came up with so that I can improve it, especially if you guys have specific ways in which you think it would not be ideal or would make certain talents useless to begin with (e.g. if you see off the top of your head that it would make x talent useless or something like that).

Next time I get together with my players I am going to try it out with them to see what they think... Maybe I will do 2 combat scenarios with the exact same setups ship/pilot wise, one with vanilla rules and one with my rule added to see what my players thinks and I will post the results (I may also throw in another set with the players fighting a rival or nemesis using these rules to see if they make those combat scenarios much harder).

We're actually in agreement in avoiding the This + That - Other vs. Something x Attribute formula. It's why I haven't posted a fix myself yet. I know what I want to achieve but I'm struggling to find a way to keep it consistent with FFG's approach and similar to normal combat. I like the kernel of the idea suggested but think there are too many exceptions and special cases built in. I would be in favour of sliming it down significantly back to the core idea of just an Advanced Evasive Manoeuvres. My essential problem is that anything you roll would normally be an Action, and if you make it an Action, you don't have an Action left for attacking.

I hear you and Ghost. I think this RPG makes it specially hard to modify because of the fact that there are multiple dice and you want o figure out how to use them, and on top of that some stuff does require math (like the way damage is calculated, etc. (its not like in D&D where its already pretty math heavy so doing a bit of additional math doesn't hurt the system too much).

Actually, I work with maths all day long. I don't find your rule complicated in absolute terms, and I don't find it unbalanced, just I think more complicated than it needs to be. But I say this fully aware that I have not been able to come up with something I find satisfactory myself - so please don't take this is major criticism or anything, it's just feedback as you asked.

So anyway...

Pilot Only: Yes


Silhouette: 1-3

Speed: 3+

Improved Evasive Maneuvers reflects a pilot's efforts to avoid incoming fire, collision, or other calamity when piloting small and nimble starship and vehicles. Executing Improved Evasive Maneuvers upgrades the difficulty of the dice pool once for all attacks made against the ship. They pilot also increases the ship's Defense by an amount equal to the lesser of the pilot’s agility or ranks in the appropriate Piloting skill up to the ships handling if it is positive, or grants any attacker targeting the ship [boost] equal to the handling of the target’s ship if negative. The pilot performing the Improved Evasive Maneuver may increase Handling by 1 when calculating the effects of Improved Evasive Maneuvers by incurring 3 system strain, but only if the lesser of the pilot’s agility or ranks in the appropriate Piloting skill is higher than the ship's handling; the pilot may do this multiple times as long as the ships handling is not greater than the lesser of either the pilot's agility or ranks in Piloting, but it incurs system strain each time handling is increased in this way. The pilot may not increase Defense past 4 by performing this maneuver, and the ships Defense would become 4 if performing Improved Evasive Maneuvers were to do so. Improved Evasive Maneuvers can only be performed once per round, and its effects lasts until the end of the pilot's next turn.

I like that it applies only to Sil 3 or less very much. This addresses something I find a problem - that no PC would rather climb into a star fighter for a combat than the Star Wars equivalent of a van. I want Luke to think that flying an X-Wing or A-Wing is a good thing, not wish they were having their dogfight in a Wayfarer.

I like that you have kept it generally consistent with ordinary Evasive Manoeuvres in principle. My own idea was to simply upgrade the difficulty further whereas you are effectively adding Setback dice. I think your idea is better because it lets people make use of all those talents that ignore Setback dice, so I like that.

I don't like the parts about increasing effective Handling with System Strain or where its situational on the pilot's skill vs. the handling rating of the craft. Neither is necessarily unbalancing, but I don't find either of them necessary and I think they add unwanted complication as well as some odd niche cases which are a little counter-intuitive. I would simplify and get rid of them.

As this is a manoeuvre, there's nothing to stop someone using this and ordinary Evasive Manoeuvres together. I'm not sure if that's intentional.

Anyway, I hope this is useful feedback and clarifies what I meant (can't speak for GhostofMan). I think it's along the right lines, but I would find ways to slim it down slightly.

A house rule that I have used, in an effort to keep it simple but add a little more survivability, is using shields to convert a portion of any incoming damage into system strain.

The wording I use is as follows:

Shield Damage Conversion

Any time a ship with active shields suffers damage that goes through Armor, convert one point of hull trauma to one point of system strain for each point of defense from shields in the fire arc that was hit. This rule assumes that any hit that does less than Armor rating is absorbed or deflected by the shields without added system strain.

It adds a small amount of complication, in that you have to keep track of two different types of damage (hull and system strain). It can't keep an X-wing alive under heavy fire for much longer than an additional round or two, and (arguably fittingly) does nothing against ion damage (I convert system strain to... system strain!).

Any thoughts or helpful criticisms from the other GMs?

I like that it applies only to Sil 3 or less very much. This addresses something I find a problem - that no PC would rather climb into a star fighter for a combat than the Star Wars equivalent of a van. I want Luke to think that flying an X-Wing or A-Wing is a good thing, not wish they were having their dogfight in a Wayfarer.

I like that you have kept it generally consistent with ordinary Evasive Manoeuvres in principle. My own idea was to simply upgrade the difficulty further whereas you are effectively adding Setback dice. I think your idea is better because it lets people make use of all those talents that ignore Setback dice, so I like that.

I don't like the parts about increasing effective Handling with System Strain or where its situational on the pilot's skill vs. the handling rating of the craft. Neither is necessarily unbalancing, but I don't find either of them necessary and I think they add unwanted complication as well as some odd niche cases which are a little counter-intuitive. I would simplify and get rid of them.

As this is a manoeuvre, there's nothing to stop someone using this and ordinary Evasive Manoeuvres together. I'm not sure if that's intentional.

Anyway, I hope this is useful feedback and clarifies what I meant (can't speak for GhostofMan). I think it's along the right lines, but I would find ways to slim it down slightly.

Thanks for the feedback! Its good to hear that my rule isnt super broken, and to be honest I tried taking a lot of the points brought up in the forum before into consideration when making it so if its any good its probably thanks to that!

Yeah the part about the strain to increase handling (esentially to add more setback die for one round of Improved E.M. only, at a penalty, but it does nothing else) is the part that I am a bit iffy on. The only reason why I added it is so that someone with 3 agi / 3 piloting (very rare but possible) doesn't always want to get on a high maneuverability ship, and to allow for people to get rid of the negative handling effect that my rule applies (which I could get rid of to fix that particular issue). The other thing is that I tried to avoid is create a "sweet spot" when modifying rules so that people avoid putting points beyond a certain ammount; for example, because there is no ship with Maneuverability 5, people might only put points until they have 3 yellow piloting dice and then skip the skill. Still, I am not sure that the bit about increasing handling addresses that very well, and I am not sure if people would want to pay the cost of getting agi 2 / piloting 2 (or I guess Agi 2 / piloting 4 should work too... but not as my rule is written; need to fix that!) just to get an extra setback on an x-wing by paying strain to do so, but I guess they could do it to get the advantage that having better piloting offers in other areas, such as gain the advantage. I guess what I intended to do was allow an exceptionally good pilot to have the ability of making itself harder to hit for a cost, but it might add more complications than needed.

As for allowing for the regular one plus the advanced one, the reason I made it once per round is so that you dont use the new evasive maneuvers twice to get double the setback dice (thus helping low maneuverability ships more than high maneuverability ones), but you could do improved once and then regular once also. I read somewhere that the designer of the game said you could do evasive maneuvers twice if you wanted to so I wanted to keep that feature, but keep it in a way that doesnt add too many extra setback dice.

Here is my rewritten rule, I tried to write it a bit simpler and made the strain thing optional:

A house rule that I have used, in an effort to keep it simple but add a little more survivability, is using shields to convert a portion of any incoming damage into system strain.

The wording I use is as follows:

Shield Damage Conversion

Any time a ship with active shields suffers damage that goes through Armor, convert one point of hull trauma to one point of system strain for each point of defense from shields in the fire arc that was hit. This rule assumes that any hit that does less than Armor rating is absorbed or deflected by the shields without added system strain.

It adds a small amount of complication, in that you have to keep track of two different types of damage (hull and system strain). It can't keep an X-wing alive under heavy fire for much longer than an additional round or two, and (arguably fittingly) does nothing against ion damage (I convert system strain to... system strain!).

Any thoughts or helpful criticisms from the other GMs?

Hey, nice rule! I never thought of doing something like that. I like that it is simple and you probably shouldnt have to respec every ship to use it. It would certainly make every ship more survivable, but I think it would benefit high strain ones more than anything, is that what you intended?

A house rule that I have used, in an effort to keep it simple but add a little more survivability, is using shields to convert a portion of any incoming damage into system strain.

The wording I use is as follows:

Shield Damage Conversion

Any time a ship with active shields suffers damage that goes through Armor, convert one point of hull trauma to one point of system strain for each point of defense from shields in the fire arc that was hit. This rule assumes that any hit that does less than Armor rating is absorbed or deflected by the shields without added system strain.

It adds a small amount of complication, in that you have to keep track of two different types of damage (hull and system strain). It can't keep an X-wing alive under heavy fire for much longer than an additional round or two, and (arguably fittingly) does nothing against ion damage (I convert system strain to... system strain!).

Any thoughts or helpful criticisms from the other GMs?

Hey, nice rule! I never thought of doing something like that. I like that it is simple and you probably shouldnt have to respec every ship to use it. It would certainly make every ship more survivable, but I think it would benefit high strain ones more than anything, is that what you intended?

Thank you!

If the rule favors any particular subgroup of snubfighters, I would think that it would be those fighters that have shields as well as an astromech droid to help remove a point of system strain each round. Exceeding five damage in snubfighter or larger scale combat is very easy to do; TIE fighters do a minimum of seven damage on a successful hit (before armor, of course). In the gameplay I've used with it, it tends to barely push half of most snubfighters' strain thresholds before the fighter takes enough hull trauma to knock it out of the fight.

For a quick example (from something that showed up in a playtest I ran with a couple of my players):

An X-wing pilot in the middle of a dogfight loses track of one of the TIEs he's engaged with until it delivers a solid hit on him from behind. (2 successes, 2 advantage). The X-wing diverts all of his shield power to the rear and disengages. The TIE on his 6 has less success with its second shot (1 success), thanks to the diverted shields and some fancy flying on the X-wing pilot's part. Thanks to a lucky roll on the astromech's part, the x-wing disengages by jumping to hyperspace and safety.

Let's break down what would happen with and without the shield house rule.

With: The TIE's first shot deals two successful hits at 8 damage (base 6, two successes, two advantage activating Linked 1). Armor removes the first 3 damage from each hit; since there is still 5 damage per hit incoming, the shield rule applies, converting 1 damage from each hit into system strain. After the first attack, the X-wing has taken 8 hull trauma and 2 system strain. After doubling the rear shields to defense 2, the TIEs second hit deals one successful hit at 7 damage. Armor removes 3, and the rear shields now convert 2, leaving the X-wing at it's hull trauma threshold of 10, as well as 4 system strain (system strain threshold is also 10 on an X-wing). It is heavily damaged, but not disabled, after two attacks on it.

Without: The TIEs first attack deals two successful hits at 8 damage. Armor removes 3 from each hit, leaving the X-wing at its hull trauma threshold of 10 with no system strain after the first attack. The second attack deals one successul hit at 7 damage, bringing the X-wing to 14 hull trauma, disabled from exceeding hull trauma threshold, a critical hit (from exceeding hull trauma threshold), and zero system strain. The astromech has one chance to repair the 4 hull trauma it needs to make the x-wing flyable again.

It *is* possible that circumstances would allow the rule to favor those fighters with a high system strain threshold; the two cicrumstances that come to mind are a series of attacks by low-powered weapons such as autoblasters, or a snubfighter with a PC astromech that is both boosting shield power in one arc as well as directing shields as needed (possibly boosting an X-wing's defense in one arc to 3, for example). In that way, I suppose the rule favors fighters with a higher system strain threshold. Do you think that would be a big concern for GMs looking to implement it?

Nice to see it in an example, thanks for that! I dont think it would be a big concern, other than making ships with high strain or astromechs better than the ones without, and still making light freighters better than fighters; but again that could be a feature instead of a bug. Either way, it makes ships more survivable which is a good thing if you want to accomplish that (and its also logical; when shields get hit its putting pressure on the systems keeping the shields on).

Quick question, can minion ships suffer system strain? I know they cant suffer regular strain, but i am not sure about system strain. If they can then this makes enemies just as survivable as pcs so you would have to consider that, but if they cant then youre good to go!

Alltheraz, one thing that chafes at my verisimilitude from your example is that shields should be taken into account before armor.

Alltheraz, one thing that chafes at my verisimilitude from your example is that shields should be taken into account before armor.

Ha! You are correct; that's a fine point my players and I debated when we were trying it out. Let me show you the line of thinking that led to the second sentence of the house rule, and let me know if it makes sense or not.

The sentence I'm referring to is:

"This rule assumes that any hit that does less than Armor rating is absorbed or deflected by the shields without added system strain."

Having the shields convert damage first, no matter what, creates the awkward situation where a low-powered weapon, that wouldn't break through the ship's armor anyway, still does system strain. It creates the incongruous need to drop shields in a particular zone to keep from taking damage. For example, it's fairly easy for a transport to get an armor upgrade to armor 5. A minion group of starfighters firing autoblasters at that transport is unlikely to get more than two successes on a regular basis, doing 4-5 damage. If shields converted first, the ship would be taking it's current shield rating on the zone being fired at in system strain, when if the shields were dropped (or the house rule not be in effect), it wouldn't take any damage at all, hull trauma or system strain.

I liked the idea of having more powerful shields from larger ships be able to shrug off damage more easily without taking system strain, but coming up with a system to determine relative shield strength by silhouette got complicated quickly, and the benefit wasn't really worth the effort. Instead, I decided to just use the ship's pre-existing damage absorption stat (armor) as a quick test to determine if the ship would actually benefit from the house rule or not.

One thing I absolutely didn't want to do was to turn shields into a complicated system of damage absorption, or supplant the armor stat in any way.

For the sake of verisimilitude, I could add the following sentences to the example: "This damage exceeds the x-wing's shield's absorption level, so its shields convert one point of incoming damage to system strain for each point of defense in the rear arc generated by shields. After the hit/hits go through the shields, armor is then applied, and the remaining damage is applied to hull trauma."

[edit: removed unnecessary line. One of these days I will sleep, and it will be glorious!]

I'm not saying it doesn't work, just when I read it there's that little voice in the back of my head jumping up and down saying no! no! no!.

That could be a valid tactic though, using small weapons like autoblasters to wear away shields before hitting with the big guns.

What if you simply made the rule adjustment that for every 2 ranks of piloting(space) increases the ships armor by 1, as long as the ship is silhouette 3 or less. It gives a little bit more soak which should help give a few more shots to kill and can be easily stated narratively by saying you angle your ship to change concrete hits into glancing blows.

I would need to do some math and ensure this helps the pcs more than hurts them ( which is what will happen if you take into account handling, as most imperial ships are faster by design ) Remember, on minion groups soak is only counted once per attack, (not once per minion) so even if you did this to a tie fighter minion group of 4, it will still benefit the players more. At first I thought about 1 armor per rank, but then end game pilots could get 6 more soak, making it almost impossible to kill them without missiles.

This sort of thing drives me crazy. The fighter (or other ship) is a physical object with the properties that it has. Putting a different pilot in the seat doesn't make the armor thicker or change any of the other physical characteristics. It has limits to how well it can perform, and while a better pilot can get more of that performance out of it, it doesn't magically turn into a ship with higher limits just because you drop a named character into the cockpit as opposed to "random callsign bob".