We aren't speaking of minions and minor NPCs, but the PCs themselves. The later shouldn't be killed in droves even if the former can be.

The problem I have with the above is that it's applying to Minion groups. If there are five Tie-fighters instead of one, it is now massively harder to wear down their numbers. Scoring that first hit will be immensely difficult. Is that a bug or a feature. I'm not sure.

Have trained minions be considered Skill level 1 (always, regardless of numbers) for Evasive Maneuvers. Untrained minions of course Skill level 0.

At first I thought that making Ev Man add more upgrades was the answer to starfighter vulnerability, but then I did some number crunching and realised upgrading does not really make a check harder. It mostly just adds a chance of rolling a despair. And I don't think that shooting at an evading target should do that. It should just make it more difficult to succeed.

So here is the current house rule to starship combat I'm using:

Evasive maneuvers adds to the difficulty of attacks targeting your ship (and made by you) by:

one if your speed is 3-4

two if your speed is 5+

So a TIE figher (speed 5) shooting at an evading X-Wing (speed 5) is facing a difficulty of 4P. Or 6P if it is also using evasive maneuvers. This makes GtA quite useful, which in turn makes having a high piloting skill useful. Tying it to speed also makes those A-wings harder to hit than your average starfighter.

It's why I like the houserules made by playtesting on /tg/. It makes ships tougher, so won't die in 1-2 shots, and also makes smaller ships (I'd suggest applying the 'for starfighters' rule to ships Sil 4 and less) more resilient due to increased skill of the pilot, which it should be.

Most people don't think personal combat needs to be fixed, but a lot of times the think Vehicle combat should be. Mainly because I think people don't "Get" vehicle combat and how it works.

Brilliant Evasion is the Key talent that makes vehicle combat survivable, the trick is not to ever get shot at to begin with.

We aren't speaking of minions and minor NPCs, but the PCs themselves. The later shouldn't be killed in droves even if the former can be.

Narratively speaking? I agree. But this isn't about narrative, its about mechanics that can be avoided, using narrative. Which is how we do in this game...

I would tie this more into Evasive Maneuvers rather than make it base difficulty – maybe 1 upgrade per rank in Pilot. Doing it that way:

1. Weeds out larger and/or slower ships that shouldn't be doing it (like having an incredibly well-piloted Star Destroyer that is impossible to hit)

2. Adds serious value to Gain the Advantage

I like this, but I think that 1 upgrade per rank in skill is a bit much. Either 1 upgrade per 2 ranks, so basically max 2 extra upgrades from skill. (unless there's a way to get a 6th rank in the piloting skills that I'm not aware of/have forgotten, or if you round up you can end up on 3 upgrades, but then 1 rank = 2 upgrades; 1 for Evasive Man + 1 from 1st rank... it definitely gives having the skill an advantage from the get-go).

The main point is to tie it to Evasive Man, as this interacts with other important bits of the system.

I saw someone suggesting increasing the difficulty instead of piling on upgrades, and that might work well too, but I'd still follow the same 1 increase per 2 ranks (rounding up or down depends on the power-buff you want to dish out to players and gain for your own NPCs), and still tie it to Evasive Manoeuvres, so both the standard upgrade and potential increases are void if your opponent GtA.

Arguably you could also go silly and do something of a mix: When performing Evasive Manoeuvres upgrade difficulty one (1) additional time if the character has 2+ ranks in Piloting (relevant), and increase difficulty by one (1) at ranks 4+ (or 3+ if you want the buff to come early or let Corellian human variants to start the game with a beardy Evasive Manoeuvre).

As for the damage reduction idea presented in the first post, GMPhil/DarthGM has his suggest Snapp-roll incidental presented here and here, which may or may not be to your liking.

I also made some extra manoeuvres and actions a while back, which can be found on page 51 here and in a less refined state here.

Yay! A brainstorming thread! I like the analytical thoughts on this thread.

I like the idea of buffing the Evasive Maneuvers maneuver but would also be concerned about large minion groups becoming impossible to hit. What about the idea of using the Skilled Jockey talent instead of ranks in the piloting skill.

How many ranks of Skilled Jockey are out there? I know there are two in the Pilot Tree and two in the Driver tree and a few others in other trees as well.

Depending on how you limit the EM buffing, it may not matter much whether minions get the buff or not.

Now if you go for a 1-for-1 buff between ranks (skill or talent) and upgrades (or increases) that's going to get beardy pretty quickly, and using skill ranks will easily improve minions too much to some people's liking. Me included, a 6 group minion with 5 upgrades (or increases) is a terrible idea... too many potential Despairs for my taste (sacrilege!!! .ph34r: ).

Now, if you have it reduced, as per my suggestion that could alleviate that problem at least a bit, it wouldn't get out of hand, but would still buff players significantly I think. I'll have to test it. But a cap of 3 upgrades or increases if based on skill rank isn't too bad, even for minions... or one upgrade and one increase if going with the mixed approach.

@Royden: I would think Hotshot has some, but I can't recall for sure.

I would tie this more into Evasive Maneuvers rather than make it base difficulty – maybe 1 upgrade per rank in Pilot. Doing it that way:

1. Weeds out larger and/or slower ships that shouldn't be doing it (like having an incredibly well-piloted Star Destroyer that is impossible to hit)

2. Adds serious value to Gain the Advantage

I like this, but I think that 1 upgrade per rank in skill is a bit much. Either 1 upgrade per 2 ranks, so basically max 2 extra upgrades from skill. (unless there's a way to get a 6th rank in the piloting skills that I'm not aware of/have forgotten, or if you round up you can end up on 3 upgrades, but then 1 rank = 2 upgrades; 1 for Evasive Man + 1 from 1st rank... it definitely gives having the skill an advantage from the get-go).

Rather than frame it as an equation based on skill, I would just make it a separate Maneuver that requires 3 or 4 Piloting skill. Advanced Evasive Maneuver or some such. Easier to deal with in my experience.

Experience varies, but fair point.

I'd go for 4 ranks then.

I still can't decide upon upgrades or increases, which is why I suggested the combo, one of each - or let's say two upgrades to be superior to EM and one increase...?

Meh, I'm not even sure I'll use this

I'd actually like to return to "Why does ground combat work" as opposed to just looking at space combat. Why don't our PCs, even out non-combat heavy PCs, not die in droves when confronted with four Stormtroopers?

Well, as minions, the four stormtroopers are limited in their skills (although good if their are 3+ of them), and die with one good shot (5 wound). Now, our PCs have fixed skills, but unless you're an experienced combat heavy, you don't have much better defensive talents, skill or soak. All PCs, however, do have at least twice the wound threshold, and a reserve of strain. That's basically the only difference between a low level PC (or non-combat PC) and a squad of storm troopers.

What if we applied the same thing to starships? Double the hull of any ship with a Rival, Nemesis or PC in it. Remove system strain from minion & Rival starships, tracking it with Hull instead.

This is just a thought, but if you're thinking of house-ruling vehicle combat, maybe go in reverse a bit and see how the same logic could be applied to personal combat as well. Then make it consistant with both forms of combat.

I've considered using Melee/Brawl comparisons to determine base difficulty in melee with 2D being typical. You have much less skill then your opponent, your attack difficulty goes up. It doesn't involve a Competitve roll at all and shouldn't slow things down. I've also considered a simple chart that assigns a difficulty to a melee target based solely on its skill (not skill comparisons).

Without quoting the rest of your post, remember the comparison should be about the Actions/Maneuvers, not just the skills. We are talking about a Maneuver (Evasive Man.) adjusting difficulty to attack a target. The comparison would be using a Guarded Stance that provides more or less Setback to defense based on skill. I also wouldn't equate the movement skills of personal combat to having the same affect of the movement skills of vehicle combat. In a dogfight, movement ability hugely affects your ability to attack especially when you can't immediately "turn around" as you can in personal combat. It's apples and oranges and shouldn't be the same. Melee/Brawl includes the skill of moving around while fighting (footwork, tumbling, etc) imho while Gunnery doesn't, for a reason.

Gain the Advantage already involves an action roll. A change making it a Competitive roll so skills are included isn't adding much time to the process. Instead of comparing speeds of the two craft you are now comparing the skills of the two pilots.

Edit: I'm not sure if all of this made sense I've been peering over too many messages and rulebooks today and I think I need to take a break for a bit.

No, no, you made perfect sense . This was, in fact, the exact kind of dialog I was hoping to spur with my post. The only thing I would add is that it's not really apples and oranges here. FFG obviously wanted to make the two type of combat as symmetrical as possible so you wouldn't have to learn two completely different systems, all the while tweaking each type of combat in various ways to give each the appropriate cinematic flavor.

As for movement being treated differently in the two systems, I understand what FFG was trying to do by not having you roll Piloting checks for everything, since there's no real comparison to that in personal combat. With that said, they may have gone too far to sync the two systems up in this way. As a purely anecdotal observation, I remember when I first briefly read over the vehicle combat rules, I kind of scratched my head as to why Piloting seemed to be relegated to just being used for "rough terrain" or "environmental hazards", rather than for doing cool maneuvers in space. After "getting" what they were trying to do (at least, what I thought they were trying to do ), it made more sense, but I still feel that Piloting should come into play more in vehicle combat.

And yes, your comparison with Evasive Maneuvers and Guarded Stance is valid, except that Evasive Maneuvers is beefier and upgrades difficulty, rather than adding setback dice. This "tweak" is similar to how silhouettes are taken into consideration in both types of combat, but are applied differently (increasing/decreasing difficulty, rather than setting the difficulty).

As for Evasive Maneuvers, it's pretty powerful as it is, at least if you have a small ship. But depending on how it's applied, I could see changing it in some fashion to include the skill of the pilot. Either that or making it more like Guarded Stance (setbacks instead of upgrades) to help keep the two systems synced, and then adding a different mechanic that uses piloting. My only bugaboo about that, other than my general skepticism of house rules is that any such maneuver or action shouldn't have the same power as a talent. This also goes for changing Evasive Maneuvers to take piloting into consideration.

Also, the lack of vehicle-scale talents that are analogous to personal-scale talents has been bandied about (although, talents such as Tricky Target, Defensive Driving, and Brilliant Evasion are all good defensive talents for vehicles). If we were to keep both personal and vehicle combat the same as they are now, perhaps some existing vehicle talents could be modified to be used in vehicle combat. For instance, what would be the downside of expanding Skilled Jockey to be able to remove setback from Gunnery checks when the weapon-using character is also the pilot?

If there really is a problem, maybe it's just that there is no Dodge equivalent talent for Vehicle/Starship combat.

The easiest fix, in that case, would be to convert an existing talent into that (Defensive Driving may be a candidate). The question then would be would the strain suffered be applied to the pilot, the ship or both?

I am starting to dislike the idea of modifying talents or adding skill rolls.

The big difference I see between personal combat and star-fighter combat is that in the personal range your wound threshold is capable of taking twice as many hits as the equivalent star-fighter's hull threshold. What about an idea that increases the Hull threshold of the ship.

Maybe the ship's HT is increased by the pilots ranks of the appropriate skill.

I personally was glad that Pilot wasn't rolled as often in this combat system like it was back in Saga. There the only thing that really mattered was your Pilot score. That was the only thing that made a good pilot, combat or otherwise. It also leads to the peculiar point that everyone who learns how to fly instantly becomes a combat ace.

Compare it to driving. Someone who races might be really good driver, and expert of putting the car where they want it, how to accelerate and decelerate without loosing control, etc. Now assume that someone is shooting at the car, or they're trying to do a vehicular takedown during a chase. They're not going to do a whole lot better than a standard driver because they don't necessarily know what they need to do in those situations. Where as a policeman who's done defensive and offensive driving courses might not be as good at handling their car as a race driver, but knows what to do when being shot, or when taking down another car.

I agree with increasing HT, I just don't think it should be based on pilot skill. I should be because there is a "Named Character" on board.

I personally was glad that Pilot wasn't rolled as often in this combat system like it was back in Saga. There the only thing that really mattered was your Pilot score. That was the only thing that made a good pilot, combat or otherwise. It also leads to the peculiar point that everyone who learns how to fly instantly becomes a combat ace.

Compare it to driving. Someone who races might be really good driver, and expert of putting the car where they want it, how to accelerate and decelerate without loosing control, etc. Now assume that someone is shooting at the car, or they're trying to do a vehicular takedown during a chase. They're not going to do a whole lot better than a standard driver because they don't necessarily know what they need to do in those situations. Where as a policeman who's done defensive and offensive driving courses might not be as good at handling their car as a race driver, but knows what to do when being shot, or when taking down another car.

I agree with increasing HT, I just don't think it should be based on pilot skill. I should be because there is a "Named Character" on board.

Yeah that all makes sense. If you look at it in reverse, a minion or a rival has about half the number of WT that a PC or a Nemisis has. So you could say that rather than 10 as an average they get what 2-3 so about a third? The role of the character has a huge factor on how much WT it has. That is not really true of starship combat.

Here's a thought... most everyone's issues seems to focus around starfighters. They're just too easy to destroy because of their minion-level hull trauma. Plus, a pilot's skill would, I think, come into play more in a small craft, rather than in, say, a freighter or a capital ship. In WWII movies, for instance, you're always seeing dogfights between fighter aircraft with "ace" pilots, but when it comes to bombers, they pretty much go in a straight line and rely on their turrets and their fighter escorts to survive.

So, maybe what's missing is small craft-only maneuvers. We have maneuvers that are for silhouette 4 or under only, but what about special maneuvers for silhouette 3 and under (or maybe silhouette 2 for ground vehicles)? These maneuvers would, somehow, take the pilot's skill more into consideration.

Now, in general, skill checks are normally only performed for actions. So maybe for starfighter (or other small craft) maneuvers, skill is used in some other way (some of which have already been suggested, such as upgrades or downgrades based on pilot skill, etc.). There could also be small craft-only actions that could include piloting checks. These special silhouette 3 and under actions and maneuvers would be centered around the survivability of the craft, and secondarily aid in actual combat and single-pilot weapon use.

This also has the benefit of keeping vehicle combat the way it already is. You'd just be adding on some special activities for the more maneuverable (and single-pilot) craft.

Just a thought

Here's a thought... most everyone's issues seems to focus around starfighters. They're just too easy to destroy because of their minion-level hull trauma. Plus, a pilot's skill would, I think, come into play more in a small craft, rather than in, say, a freighter or a capital ship. In WWII movies, for instance, you're always seeing dogfights between fighter aircraft with "ace" pilots, but when it comes to bombers, they pretty much go in a straight line and rely on their turrets and their fighter escorts to survive.

So, maybe what's missing is small craft-only maneuvers. We have maneuvers that are for silhouette 4 or under only, but what about special maneuvers for silhouette 3 and under (or maybe silhouette 2 for ground vehicles)? These maneuvers would, somehow, take the pilot's skill more into consideration.

Now, in general, skill checks are normally only performed for actions. So maybe for starfighter (or other small craft) maneuvers, skill is used in some other way (some of which have already been suggested, such as upgrades or downgrades based on pilot skill, etc.). There could also be small craft-only actions that could include piloting checks. These special silhouette 3 and under actions and maneuvers would be centered around the survivability of the craft, and secondarily aid in actual combat and single-pilot weapon use.

This also has the benefit of keeping vehicle combat the way it already is. You'd just be adding on some special activities for the more maneuverable (and single-pilot) craft.

Just a thought

This is a very good idea, imo. Someone earlier suggested an "Advanced Evasive Manoeuvres.". Perhaps this is something only available to Sil. 3 and under. So that it ties into Pilot skill it must have a higher difficulty than the standard Evasive Manoeuvres action. And obviously a greater reward for achieving it. I also like the gambling aspect that it adds where a player would have to decide whether to simply go for Evasive Manoeuvres with a greater chance of success, or pull an Anakin Skywalker and try some crazy stunt that Obi-Wan would hate but risk failing. To me this adds one more exciting aspect to it without any cost in increased complexity.

It also has the advantages of not needing any alterations of existing talents or breaking the similarities to ground combat. I don't know if this is a perfect approach, but it's good and unlike some of the more substantial reworkings I can't see any downside. And your average Tie pilot and similar isn't likely to attempt it because it takes high piloting skill to reliably pull off. At a stroke, you have given the elite pilots a way to be more survivable and distinguish themselves without having to do anything that boosts all pilots (e.g. doubling the Hull points of all fighters). Which I think is what we really want.

The more I think about this, the more it appeals. The current system isn't bad, imo. It just doesn't allow really good pilots to distinguish themselves enough due to having little greater survivability than the poor pilots. So what we need, again imo, is not a huge reworking and rebalancing, but some trick to achieve that. I really like this.

So question: anyone fancy writing up an "Advanced Evasive Manoeuvres" rule? Difficulty? Benefit?

I'm posting this as a second post rather than an Edit because the forum software butchers my formatting when I do that. But all I wanted to say is that I recall that episode in TCW Season 1 where Anakin is leading a squadron of fighters against the Malevolence trying to surgically bring down the bridge with Grevious on it. Anakin says "We can make it through" as they zip amongst the bigger ship's weapons. To which Ahsoka replies "No - YOU an make it through. Everyone else is being shot to pieces", drawing his attention to the fact that his squad were being hammered.

That is what I think we need to be able to do - not a major reworking for everyone: Han should still be able to shoot down Ties and Vader shouldn't have trouble hounding those X-Wings. Rather Luke or Vader or Anakin should be able to wheel around and dodge fire when it's them in the ship. Because they are great pilots.

Short version - I REALLY like the idea of an Advanced version of Evasive Manoeuvres that is harder to pull off but provides more reward and can only be used by Sil. 3 or smaller.

So question: anyone fancy writing up an "Advanced Evasive Manoeuvres" rule? Difficulty? Benefit?

What about negative handling?

What about negative handling?

I'd say it adds nothing. It doesn't make much sense that it would add a positive die to the mix (bringing the potential max for successes higher than if the pilot did nothing).

Does it not also require Handling of +1 or better? If you have Handling of +0 or less, you don't gain anything over a normal EM. For example, a Pilot in a Y-Wing couldn't benefit from AEM at all.

I love the idea of simply adding a new EM without having to house rule current RAW. Thanks for the idea I think I will tweak my own fledgling house rules.

What about an EM1 (RAW), EM2, and even an EM3? Would that be too much? As in add another one that gives 2 upgrades but requires Speed 4 and more Pilot skill?

EM1 (RAW): Pilot 0, Silh 1-4, Speed 3+. 1 Upgrade.

EM2: Pilot 2, Silh 1-3, Speed 3+. 1 Upgrade plus Setback equal to positive Handling.

EM3: Pilot 4, Silh 1-3, Speed 4+. 2 Upgrades plus Setback equal to positive Handling.