Since my players taste in ships exceeds their budget, I came up with some rules for buying ships at a discount with some randomly-selected flaws added- that they may (or may not) be able to spot. The idea behind them is that players can save a little money in the short-term by buying a ship with faulty systems, but don't necessarily know how bad the flaws will be. The more flaws you take, the bigger the effective discount (each knocks 10% off the base price) but the higher chance of getting flaws that synergise, and the harder it is to spot them all before purchasing. Plus, odds are it'll cost them more in the long run to fix the ship up than to have bought one new.

I wrote up a table of 20 flaws. I've tried to make a good chunk of them add or modify gameplay in interesting ways- take Rough Ride below, which should have the PCs considering their piloting decisions more carefully. I also produced a deck of Ship Flaws using Khaoldrakul's critical hits card template- rather than rolling on the table you can just deal out cards.

The modified version of Khaoldrakul's template I used is here (thanks Khaol!): Download

The rules & table are here: Download

The cards (for double-sided printing) are here: Download

I'd like to get some feedback on the rules in the PDFs- I've not tried them out on my players yet, and given it could take quite a few sessions before their effects become fully apparent I'd like it if people could catch any oversights.

Balance suggestions are also appreciated- are there too many 'dull' flaws? Flaws like Suspect Transponder and Bad Atmosphere can potentially generate gameplay or make people reassess their choices, but ones like Junker just add black dice (for people's talents to remove). Plus... is the 50% cap necessary? I'm wavering on that, as it seems like letting people buy ships at 90% off might either wind up with them spending all their money on a barely-usable ship, or if it turns out the flaws don't actually synergise that badly, get an amazing ship for ludicrously cheap (it puts the ~$1E6 small cap ships in the starting ship price range...).

In-game money is more of a metagame contrivance than we usually admit to ourselves. (Good) designers certain treat it that way and try to balance monetary choices against other character considerations. Thus in-game price should only be discounted by the listed repair cost.

(Being able to buy a ship ato 10% list price is strong encouragement for your PCs to ignore the ostensible campaign and go into business running a Used Starship Dealership by fixing-up clunkers and flipping them for quick profits.

"A motley crew of scoundrels wanders into your shop and --"

"Hey, look! We're the NPCs of someone else's game! heh...")

Interesting. I'll try and give these a look-over some point in the near future.

Personally, I like the idea of the PC's starting ship being "used" as it fits with the general "lived in" and "used future" feel of the original films. If nothing else, it helps give the ship a little extra character to set it apart from the stock version of whichever ship is chosen.

I like the idea.

Maybe you should also add a mechanism where the flaw is kept hidden from the players till they make a mechanics check to find it or they encounter it while flying.

I doubt many players will start flipping ships to make a quick profit, the GM should head such behavior off unless it adds to the story to prevent it from happening.

At the very least make fixing the problem expensive enough to the point where you don't save a ton of money vs the listed price so flipping a ship would only result in a small amount of money.

I like the idea.

Maybe you should also add a mechanism where the flaw is kept hidden from the players till they make a mechanics check to find it or they encounter it while flying.

I doubt many players will start flipping ships to make a quick profit, the GM should head such behavior off unless it adds to the story to prevent it from happening.

At the very least make fixing the problem expensive enough to the point where you don't save a ton of money vs the listed price so flipping a ship would only result in a small amount of money.

Er, there is in fact such a mechanism- when looking for a ship, you have to make a Mechanics or Perception test to spot its flaws. So if you hunt for ships with a *lot* of flaws, you'll probably miss some. Revealing the flaws whilst flying is a bit difficult given some of them alter the characteristics of the ships, but it is a bit more flavourful.

The average cost to fix a flaw is 12.5% of the ship's base price- and that's including the flaws that have non-%age based costs as 0. You can't really make a profit by flipping them, particularly not as failing a check (likely, if you're repairing multiple flaws) ends up costing you extra.

Given as Lorne says money is a bit of a contrivance, the value's set low enough not to be punitive (you basically pay the same for the ships whichever way you buy it), but high enough to discourage flipping (not that any halfway interesting party would?). Having a mix of cheaper and more expensive flaws ensures that the expensive ones get to hang around for longer- things like Jury-Rigged (upgrade the difficulty of all mechanics checks on the ship) are no-brainers to remove first otherwise.

Looks very interesting, and the presentation is excellent. Will check it out.

LibrariaNPC also has a set of used starship rules in his Frieghter thread if you're looking for more ideas.

I really wish I could do that type of presentation. really nice work

On first brush, this looks pretty solid, so well done.

That said, some of the flaws do seem rather debilitating. I'm almost of a mind to suggest they be scaled back a bit in some cases, but that's likely more of my personal taste and the thought of implementing these as quirks to help personalize a ship beyond it's starting stats.

I like the idea.

Maybe you should also add a mechanism where the flaw is kept hidden from the players till they make a mechanics check to find it or they encounter it while flying.

I doubt many players will start flipping ships to make a quick profit, the GM should head such behavior off unless it adds to the story to prevent it from happening.

At the very least make fixing the problem expensive enough to the point where you don't save a ton of money vs the listed price so flipping a ship would only result in a small amount of money.

Er, there is in fact such a mechanism- when looking for a ship, you have to make a Mechanics or Perception test to spot its flaws. So if you hunt for ships with a *lot* of flaws, you'll probably miss some. Revealing the flaws whilst flying is a bit difficult given some of them alter the characteristics of the ships, but it is a bit more flavourful.

The average cost to fix a flaw is 12.5% of the ship's base price- and that's including the flaws that have non-%age based costs as 0. You can't really make a profit by flipping them, particularly not as failing a check (likely, if you're repairing multiple flaws) ends up costing you extra.

Given as Lorne says money is a bit of a contrivance, the value's set low enough not to be punitive (you basically pay the same for the ships whichever way you buy it), but high enough to discourage flipping (not that any halfway interesting party would?). Having a mix of cheaper and more expensive flaws ensures that the expensive ones get to hang around for longer- things like Jury-Rigged (upgrade the difficulty of all mechanics checks on the ship) are no-brainers to remove first otherwise.

O good.

I couldn't quite make out all the type on your picture, couldn't magnify it enough for my screen, so thats why I missed it.

First off, I absolutely love when people make attractive game aids. It speaks worlds of the amount of effort the are willing to go to to show off their work, rather than just put out a Word doc (not pointing at anyone in particular; just a comment).

Skimming though, here are some initial thoughts and questions.

I do have to wonder how often this would get used. How often do players go ship shopping?

Is there any special significance to hiding the flaws from the players, rather than allowing them to have that information up front?

For developing new flaws, I would maybe have that as a result of Criticals, since we already have those in the game. Perhaps a Despair when repairing a crit causes a new flaw, rather than being double billed with crits and flaws.

I would consider repair costs being tied more closely to the silhouette than strictly the cost of the ship. While there will be a little correlation here, an engine part or piece of hull plating is more likely to cost based on mass, not an arbitrary number contrived from value and desirability. Also, things like navi computers and sensors are going to be less based on the cost of the ship and more of a standardized cost. Of course, this throws some of the concept on its neck, but it will represent more of a rational cost structure (although parts are often more valuable than the whole ).

On first brush, this looks pretty solid, so well done.

That said, some of the flaws do seem rather debilitating. I'm almost of a mind to suggest they be scaled back a bit in some cases, but that's likely more of my personal taste and the thought of implementing these as quirks to help personalize a ship beyond it's starting stats.

Yeah, not sure about the magnitude of all the flaws.

O good.

I couldn't quite make out all the type on your picture, couldn't magnify it enough for my screen, so thats why I missed it.

Well, the intent was for people to read the PDFs? The picture *is* illegible, it's just an illustration of the look.

First off, I absolutely love when people make attractive game aids. It speaks worlds of the amount of effort the are willing to go to to show off their work, rather than just put out a Word doc (not pointing at anyone in particular; just a comment).

Skimming though, here are some initial thoughts and questions.

I do have to wonder how often this would get used. How often do players go ship shopping?

Is there any special significance to hiding the flaws from the players, rather than allowing them to have that information up front?

For developing new flaws, I would maybe have that as a result of Criticals, since we already have those in the game. Perhaps a Despair when repairing a crit causes a new flaw, rather than being double billed with crits and flaws.

I would consider repair costs being tied more closely to the silhouette than strictly the cost of the ship. While there will be a little correlation here, an engine part or piece of hull plating is more likely to cost based on mass, not an arbitrary number contrived from value and desirability. Also, things like navi computers and sensors are going to be less based on the cost of the ship and more of a standardized cost. Of course, this throws some of the concept on its neck, but it will represent more of a rational cost structure (although parts are often more valuable than the whole ).

Ship shopping is definitely going to be irregular, which is why I'd prefer to get as many eyes on the rules as possible before implementing them- trying to monte carlo sim whether my model for buying preowned matches the results I want would take a loooong time.

If anything, discount fighters will be the most common purchase (up to 1-3 per party, say, with semi-frequent upgrades) so the rules ought to cope with them. That's largely why having repair costs based on Silhouette is kind of a non-starter as most fighters will fall into either 'No brainer to buy flawed' or 'Buying flawed is punitively expensive' categories.

Consider the Z-95 Headhunter at 55k and X-Wing at 120k- any replacement part that cost ~10% of the X would cost ~20% of the Z-95. If you balance for the X, then buying a cheap Z-95 at 50% off is pointless because the parts will cost 100% of the retail price, even though you'd expect there to be more beat-up, old, cheap Headhunters. If you balance for the Z-95, there's no reason to buy an X full-price because you can pick one up at 50% off then buy an extra 25% in parts and do it up. You can't have a thematically appropriate ship progression where a player buys a cheap Headhunter, does it up, sells it to upgrade to a cheap X-Wing and does that up.

Even worse, the 38k Cloakshape and 300k TIE/D are both Silhouette 3 starfighters too!

Keeping flaws hidden is partly to evoke the feeling of buying a second-hand car from a dodgy dealership- god knows what you're actually getting. It also attempts to discourage people from just browsing through as many ships as they can find (with their rarity rolls) then picking the one with the best flaws- there's an element of surprise and jeopardy. It also means some of the worse flaws will actually see play; otherwise, nobody will buy a Jury-Rigged ship. But yeah, if they only buy ships with 1-2 flaws they'll almost certainly spot all of them, so...

Despair when repairing is problematic as you'll only get those (normally) when the GM spends a force point, and even then only 1/12 times. Plus you could pick up a flaw repairing a minor 1D crit that just dinged the paint. Equally, getting hulked is something unlikely to happen to the PC's ships, so that rule would mostly be used to make salvaging your kills less profitable (and discouraging kamikaze starfighter attacks I guess?).

Nice job on the rules and table. I think there's some good creative flaws in there. I like the Rough Ride one, since it gives Brace a use.

Now I have to ask - What's the trick to making this look so awesome it could have been pulled right out of an official FFG book?

Nice job on the rules and table. I think there's some good creative flaws in there. I like the Rough Ride one, since it gives Brace a use.

Now I have to ask - What's the trick to making this look so awesome it could have been pulled right out of an official FFG book?

Templates and copying, really. I found the fonts & book backdrops with google, matched the colours for the tables and fonts using GIMP to get the RGB values for them, and generally just tried to copy the styles used- the tools I used were GIMP & LibreOffice (but really I should've used InDesign or something, especially for the cards).

In-game money is more of a metagame contrivance than we usually admit to ourselves. (Good) designers certain treat it that way and try to balance monetary choices against other character considerations. Thus in-game price should only be discounted by the listed repair cost.

(Being able to buy a ship ato 10% list price is strong encouragement for your PCs to ignore the ostensible campaign and go into business running a Used Starship Dealership by fixing-up clunkers and flipping them for quick profits.

"A motley crew of scoundrels wanders into your shop and --"

"Hey, look! We're the NPCs of someone else's game! heh...")

I'm GMing a new EotE game this weekend, and from what I've heard, my party is going to be the most scavengy scavengers to ever scavenge. I joked that I'm going to have to end up running NPC vs. NPC battles and they're going to just swipe loot.

I like what you've made. I think I am going to use it as is.

Genius! I wanted to write up something exactly like this, but now it pops up in the forum. I love it! Thanks a lot! You saved me a bunch of work!

Oh crap. I never posted this here. I loved this write-up, and so made a generator , a long time ago based on it in Javascript. I hope that's alright.

I hope this is useful.

On 03/02/2018 at 6:05 AM, Foolster41 said:

Oh crap. I never posted this here. I loved this write-up, and so made a generator , a long time ago based on it in Javascript. I hope that's alright.

I hope this is useful.

Ah, thanks!

On 6.1.2016 at 8:28 PM, TheDeer said:

I'm GMing a new EotE game this weekend, and from what I've heard, my party is going to be the most scavengy scavengers to ever scavenge. I joked that I'm going to have to end up running NPC vs. NPC battles and they're going to just swipe loot.

Sounds still like a lot of cool stories to be told.

On 2/2/2018 at 11:05 PM, Foolster41 said:

Oh crap. I never posted this here. I loved this write-up, and so made a generator , a long time ago based on it in Javascript. I hope that's alright.

I hope this is useful.

this is great! is there a way to add a 'select ship type' instead of having to randomly generate them?

Does anyone have a working copy of the pdf? I tried downloading it from the original link, but the Adobe is not able to open the file.

6 hours ago, Kabal said:

Does anyone have a working copy of the pdf? I tried downloading it from the original link, but the Adobe is not able to open the file.

Did you use this hyperlink?

On 8/8/2014 at 2:06 PM, Talkie Toaster said:

The rules & table are here: Download

Because I just tried it and it worked for me... for what it's worth, it opened in Google Chrome for me.

So strange. The first two times I downloaded it from the Mediafire link, the download completed, but Adobe wasnt able to open it. I tried it again from the link you quoted (the same link, really), and it opened without any issues. No clue why. Thanks for the confirmation that its working.