So we've played the beginner version of the game and thoroughly enjoyed it. Today is the first session in preparation I've been trying to figure out more of the ship side (Personally I feel that while most of the game is simple and fast paced, ship combat feels bogged down with maneuvers). I understand a narrative game (BESM, One Ring, etc) but this ship encumbrance thing is really annoying. In fact I find the whole section on ships weird.

Normally through out the book they give a in-depth description(Adversaries is missing explanation of one or two as well, took me a minute to realize M/R defense was melee/ranged.) of every statistic you are about see in the upcoming stat-blocks, not the case for ships. They leave out crew/ships complement, passenger capacity, encumbrance capacity, sensor range, hyperdrive, hull/type class, maximum altitude, manufacturer, and navicomputer. Even the ones they did explain, which were pretty much only dealing with combat, were at the beginning of the section far away from the stat blocks and focused almost solely on combat stats. I did find a few of those missing stats buried within paragraphs of descriptive text (like so many whitewolf games). Sometimes you just need the straight rules, I understand that this is a narrative based game but seriously don't mention things and not explain them (Still looking an explanation of mass shadow). Checked the Age of Rebellion book, which is almost verbatim the same as far as ships go, and no new insight.

Now that the rant is done here are my solutions to the missing things. So far I haven't found any hard rules for these. If you find or know of some RAW for one of these that I'm about to go over please beat me over the head with it.

Crew/ship's complement - I'm going to assume the ship's crew have quarters and do not count against passenger capacity. (I understand that in some cases, like a tie-fighter, there won't be a space for them to sleep and enjoy a night cap.)

Passenger Capacity - Again I'm assuming crew is counted in this number so to me this number represents comfortable passenger capacity. (As in we have living spaces to fit this many beings.) However this number will not be a cap for my game because technically you could just through them in the cargo hold.

Encumbrance Capacity - It is known to me that there are a few posts about this topic this is my homemade way for handling it. With ships 1 armor is the equivalent to 10 soak, one point of damage from a ships weapon to a person is the equivalent of 10 points of damage, and so for my game 1 point of ships endurance will equal 10 points of personal endurance. Meaning if a ship has encumbrance capacity of 4(ship scale) it can carry 40(personal scale) points of encumbrance. I'm also going to assume beings and passengers are already included and when they talk about encumbrance they just mean cargo and additional weaponry beyond what's included. This will seem like a lot in some cases but in others I feel it balances it quite nicely.


Again if you find a RAW version of anything above please share. These are going to be tested a few sessions and we'll see how it goes. Not too worried about crew and passenger just mostly encumbrance. I will post how this goes after a few sessions.

The physical aspects of ships feel the most abstract part of the system. Communication between GM and players help smooth out the rough spots. In my game, we hand wave many of the simulation parts of space travel because:

a. Most of the fun stuff happens outside of space travel.

b. Nobody really wants to be bothered with all the bookkeeping.

As long as folks follow a social contract of not trying to abuse things, like encumbrance, you'll find the narrative will still flow.

Now if your groups wants a more hard-core feel to their space travel than just work out the house rules together, or borrow from other RPG systems with more crunchy ship mechanics.

In my experience, starship rules are pretty rough guidelines (outside of combat). I just go with whatever works best for the story as far as things like carrying capacity go. Have a cargo hold full of freed hutt slaves? Just enough life support to get to the next planet.

I agree. I'm not sure what more delineation the original poster was looking for in the rules, they seem pretty clear to me.

Ship combat is a little clunky but its manageable.

I'd just hand-wave encumbrance and passenger capacity to whatever makes sense. If you're carrying a bunch of refugees in your cargo hold it makes more sense to count them against encumbrance instead of passenger capacity.

The listed passenger capacities are what the ship has bunk space for, not what it can physically carry(at least in the case of freighters and capital ships)

If you're carrying supplies, visualize how large and bulky they are and just guestimate how much of that you can fit in your ship. It helps if you have deck plans to look at. All encumbrance is not created equal. A pound of feathers and a pound of gold weight the same, but only one can fit in my pocket.

IE: I could squeeze far more encumbrance worth of Glitterstim in my hold than I could of heavy blaster rifles. A 5 Encumbrance container of Glitterstim takes up more space than a single heavy blaster rifle even though the rifle has Encumbrance 6.

So we might say that I could squeeze 1000 HBRs into my cargo hold(if they're packed efficiently), but I could only fit 100 cargo containers of Glitterstim.

First off, welcome to the forums!

I think the other (non0combat) stats are good when you think about them relatively and narratively as opposed to crunch-ily. If so you know a YT-1300 has much more cargo space than a Citadel, but much less than a Wayfarer. However, the Citadel can more comfortably accomodate passengers (14) than the YT-1300 (6), with appropriate rooms and such.

A number of people brought up passengers in a cargo hold. If you're way over your passenger limit, then maybe life-support comes into the story as a narrative obstacle, with the crew having to have a stop-over point for additional fresh air and food. Maybe they come across a Wayfarer that was stuffed with refugees or slaves, some of whom may have died/have malnutrition and are in horrid conditions (as has happened IRL).

The earlier suggestions are the key, though. Use the stats narratively, guestimate, and have a good understanding with your players of how things work in your particular game.

A number of people brought up passengers in a cargo hold. If you're way over your passenger limit, then maybe life-support comes into the story as a narrative obstacle,

That's how I've chosen to interpret the "Passenger Capacity" statistic.

A freighter could physically accommodate dozens of people, and the number of "bunks" is a meaningless and arbitrary limitation (Why not just lay out thirty cots in the cargo hold?).

So the only sense in which "Passenger Capacity" means anything is if it refers to "Life Support System Capacity" - i.e. the maximum number of people who can be on board for more than a few hours without everyone suffocating.