in terms of doing the earbud comm's, i can try to sort that out. Engineering

and as for encryption, i wasnt sure about it, so i left it out. but, it can easily be gotten right?

No problem. I'm afraid my experience in these matters is relegated to a year in Army Cadets and a load of historical reenacting, so I shall bow to your superior judgement (and, I imagine, inventive tactics that will leave my Minions running in circles getting shot)

in terms of doing the earbud comm's, i can try to sort that out. Engineering

and as for encryption, i wasnt sure about it, so i left it out. but, it can easily be gotten right?

Star Wars was never big on encrypting crap. Nor on actually protecting sites that were worth a ****.

Encryption would probably be a combination of Computers, Skulduggery or Deception, and maybe a Knowledge Skill. Hard to say, though.

No problem. I'm afraid my experience in these matters is relegated to a year in Army Cadets and a load of historical reenacting, so I shall bow to your superior judgement (and, I imagine, inventive tactics that will leave my Minions running in circles getting shot)

Oh, believe me, if I go the quartermaster route and throw my lot in with the Alliance, I'm going to trick out the "minions" to a level that would make them rivals before too long.

Seval looks with confusion at Rax. "I thought you knew? You've been assigned as the new transport driver," he looks with confusion at the blank faces of the team. "I've got your assignment orders here: Rax Zetrac, replacement supply driver; Issan Bal'Po, assigned as the new human resources officer; R2-CT-55, the new utility repair unit; Ract Toco - is that right? - you're the new designated marksman; Oro Logray is your personal protection. And Dr Hanson is here as an expert in viral pathology, correct?" he smiles. "But of course with Captain Zavvel in charge of 3 Platoon you'll all see plenty of action."

Ok, with this statement, I must admit I am more than a little concerned in character. Out of character I am very interested in seeing what is happening.

Also, I am calling for a Charm Action against Lieutenant Seval. I believe we all want to know more about what is going on, especially if there's a big operation about to go on.

That's a relief! Don't worry, this is going somewhere

Seems the mobile version of the forums don't give the fancy text editor, so please excuse lack of coloring and bolding for posts I make from my phone (which will be like 8am-7pm EDT most days). Is there an alternative formatting you'd like mobile users to use?

Seems the mobile version of the forums don't give the fancy text editor, so please excuse lack of coloring and bolding for posts I make from my phone (which will be like 8am-7pm EDT most days). Is there an alternative formatting you'd like mobile users to use?

From my perspective, using parenthesis followed by "Action" should suffice.

Example: (Action: Would like to assist.)

As for unskilled assistance, that is GM call.

However, because I am appealing to the Lieutenant's better nature, as well as the time crunch in addition to wasting time at the brief. The more people who join in, the better off the skill check should be. Possibly.

It's an Average check, with one boost from the assistance and one because the Lt wants to help

It's an Average check, with one boost from the assistance and one because the Lt wants to help

So, two Difficulty Dice, two boost dice, and my Charm+Presence of two Ability Dice and one Proficiency Dice.

Charm check: 2eA+1eP+2eB+2eD 1 success, 4 advantage

Now, that's a beautiful roll. Sucks if I just blew a really good roll for later.

in terms of doing the earbud comm's, i can try to sort that out. Engineering

and as for encryption, i wasnt sure about it, so i left it out. but, it can easily be gotten right?

Star Wars was never big on encrypting crap. Nor on actually protecting sites that were worth a ****.

Encryption would probably be a combination of Computers, Skulduggery or Deception, and maybe a Knowledge Skill. Hard to say, though.

but thats what we saw of star was Canonnically.

what im reading at the moment, the Thrawn Duology, and even in the Thrawn Trilogy, many hacks were made and failed and also many systems are in the way.

but any how. lets see where things go for the time being

Quick question: I haven't been playing/GMing FFG Star Wars for very long, so I'm still getting used to the system. One thing I've heard recently is that starfighter combat is extremely deadly (the term used was "rocket tag") was curious to hear your guys' own experience with this before I came to any conclusions, though.

Quick question: I haven't been playing/GMing FFG Star Wars for very long, so I'm still getting used to the system. One thing I've heard recently is that starfighter combat is extremely deadly (the term used was "rocket tag") was curious to hear your guys' own experience with this before I came to any conclusions, though.

Most of the space combat I've done has been larger ships (usually the PCs freighter) either against a bunch of smaller starfighter minion ships or another freighter. So I can't comment too much from direct experience with "dogfight" type space combat. But the smaller ships don't tend to have a whole lot of health, so using tactics effectively to get the upper hand in the dice pools is more important.

I have to admit to never having run space combat, so if I'm doing it wrong when the time comes please don't hesitate to tell me

I'm a proper space battle soon. ask me on sunday next week (20th Sept)

I have one question - if Evasive Maneuvers is the only way to make it harder for you to be hit, how does Piloting skill affect anything? How is a Rebel ace better than an incompetent TIE pilot?

The Narrative Dice system makes a few assumptions about combat resolution. Notice Hand to Hand is always difficulty 2. Ranged shooting is always the range of the target from the shooter. Vehicles are more concerned wit the relative size of the combatants. All these thing set the base difficulty of the roll.

What changes the to-hit mechanic difficulty is usually talents. Some critical effects, Destiny points or select maneuvers (like the Evasive Maneuvers (er) maneuver or Defensive stance) can effect the roll. But it is usually Talents that have the greater impact. (Boost and Set Back Dice often represent side influences such as sun in your eyes, ECM jamming or poor equipment)

Character skills represent one facet of competence. Talents are another key part to fleshing out that whole person. Perhaps they know what to do (high skill rating) but have no real world experience (lack a talent). A Rebel Ace doesn't just have a good Agility Attribute and Pilot (Space) Skill; they also have a smattering of talents that make the odds of being hit much less.

In this case, Piloting is mostly focused about making the ship do what it needs to do to avoid obstacles and navigate terrain to win a chase. Two pilots riding speeders, the more skilled one can dodge traffic and evade capture from CorSec. Or fly in such a ways as to Gain The Advantage over their target to have a better chance of taking them out.

The flip side of this multi faceted specialization is that everyone can try to do things in Star Wars. I couldn't fly a plane IRL without a ton of training. But in Star Wars, Ewoks can operate a ATST (badly) the first time they sit in the seat. When Chewbacca takes over, the walker begins operating well enough to fool other Imperials and even sneak up and kill one.

That's a good point. Thanks for clarifying. I had experimented with making the check Gunnery vs. Piloting, but given that explanation I think I'll stick to RAW

Character skills represent one facet of competence. Talents are another key part to fleshing out that whole person. Perhaps they know what to do (high skill rating) but have no real world experience (lack a talent). A Rebel Ace doesn't just have a good Agility Attribute and Pilot (Space) Skill; they also have a smattering of talents that make the odds of being hit much less.

There's a couple of reasons why that doesn't really seems to work out that well, though, at least in the mock battles I've run through to get an idea of how starfighter combat plays out:

1. Those talents are DEEP in the tree. In other words, the only way a pilot will get the experience to survive a starfighter battle is...if they never fly starfighter battles. Or if they only fly starfighter battles where there's enough ablative redshirts to die in place of the PC. Looking at the pilot tree, the first defensive talents you can get are 4 levels down (taking 45 XP to reach) and cost 20 XP each. Not cheap.

2. The defensive bonus they grant is negligible. Defensive Driving gives you one extra defense (so the enemy gains a single setback die to their attack roll) and Tricky Target lets you count your silhouette as being 1 lower for the purpose of being attacked, which doesn't effect starfighter combat because it's a Average Difficulty roll as long as you're 1 sil higher or lower than your target, and starfighters start at the same silhouette size. So, of the two defensive talents that required 45 XP to reach and 20 XP each to gain, one has a small effect and the other has NO effect in starfighter vs. starfighter combat.

3. The only defensive talent that grants you any real assurance of surviving starfighter combat is the 25X "ultimate" talent, Brilliant Evasion, which lets you pick one opponent and make them unable to attack you for (Agility) rounds if you win an opposed Piloting test. But even that doesn't help you against multiple opponents (which you will be facing, it's the Empire after all) and it literally only works by making you untargetable in the first place!

4. Finally, all of those meager defensive talents? ONLY show up in the pilot tree. All the other Aces are dead in space.

RE: relation to ground combat, it's worth noting that in ground combat you can take cover. You're rarely forced to fight in the middle of an open grassy field, and by taking cover you can control the amount of vulnerability you have. That option doesn't exist for starfighter vs. Starfighter combat. Even if there IS terrain like an asteroid field, you can't hide from another starfighter on one side of an asteroid like you could against a capital ship. The best you can do is indirectly let piloting come into play by forcing them to make Navigation piloting checks, but then every starfighter combat has to take place in or near an asteroid field, which make things like fighting in low orbit tricky.

IRE: Ewoks, my own personal quibble isn't that an Ewok can fly an X-wing, it's that an Ewok can fly an X-wing and perform evasive Maneuvers as well as Luke or Wedge.

While there may not be explicit mechanics for taking cover in space, there are certainly ways to narratively use advantages and threats to the same effect.

The most exciting space combat I've run was when the PCS hopped in their freighter and had to escape a trap of TIE fighters waiting for them. The chase happened within the atmosphere, so they were detailing with trees and mountains and terrain. The PC pilot rolled 3 advantages? He just made a slick barrel roll move into a narrow Valley making him harder to hit. (Add setbacks to the NPCs.) The TIE pilot just rolled a Despair? Oops a strong breeze blew him off course just enough to clip a tall tree.

Now this is a bit harder to do in open space, but there are still ways to use the dice results to adjust the situation. That's what the narrative dice system is all about.

The nature of Star Wars space combat is very deadly. Almost all talents are oriented at doing more damage. You are correct that most of the defenses are deeper in the tree. But the features are design choices.

The game isn't meant to be a defensive one. Look at the movies. TIEs are destroyed by the dozen. The vast majority of Rebel Pilots do not come home. There were what 2 flights of X-Wings and a flight of Y-Wings that left Yavin IV against the Death Star? Luke, Wedge and a stray Y-Wing make it home (IRC). That is it. So the game reflects that. Starfighters are very fragile.

In game terms, the more defensive you make combat, the longer combat takes. By emphasizing the offense, you also speed up the attrition nature of battle. Many RPGs suffer from the hour plus combat resolution for the 30 second fight scene. By moving things to a faster resolution, more of the game gets to unfold at the table.

The game does also have rules for using minion allies as protection for PC and Nemesis NPCs in th GM's screen rules packet. These help the game play out more like the movies.

The Space game can be deadly. Being in a fighter can be even more so. The game has mechanisms to make it playable, but there is no promises of safety.

That's true. I mean IRL air combat is deadly. So perhaps I just need to come up with incentive uses for Setback. By the way, for IC actions could you describe how you want to use advantage and triumph in the post?

While there may not be explicit mechanics for taking cover in space, there are certainly ways to narratively use advantages and threats to the same effect.

The most exciting space combat I've run was when the PCS hopped in their freighter and had to escape a trap of TIE fighters waiting for them. The chase happened within the atmosphere, so they were detailing with trees and mountains and terrain. The PC pilot rolled 3 advantages? He just made a slick barrel roll move into a narrow Valley making him harder to hit. (Add setbacks to the NPCs.) The TIE pilot just rolled a Despair? Oops a strong breeze blew him off course just enough to clip a tall tree.

Now this is a bit harder to do in open space, but there are still ways to use the dice results to adjust the situation. That's what the narrative dice system is all about.

The problem is that you can't use Advantage from die rolls when there is no roll, and currently there isn't one for Evasive Maneuvers. If there's terrain, you can enter a Piloting check into the mix, but only if there's terrain. My thought on this was just to make Evasive Maneuvers an Average Piloting check, and for every 2 net successes you got on your roll you add 1 difficulty die to your rolls to attack and be attacked.

The nature of Star Wars space combat is very deadly. Almost all talents are oriented at doing more damage. You are correct that most of the defenses are deeper in the tree. But the features are design choices.

The game isn't meant to be a defensive one. Look at the movies. TIEs are destroyed by the dozen. The vast majority of Rebel Pilots do not come home. There were what 2 flights of X-Wings and a flight of Y-Wings that left Yavin IV against the Death Star? Luke, Wedge and a stray Y-Wing make it home (IRC). That is it. So the game reflects that. Starfighters are very fragile.

In game terms, the more defensive you make combat, the longer combat takes. By emphasizing the offense, you also speed up the attrition nature of battle. Many RPGs suffer from the hour plus combat resolution for the 30 second fight scene. By moving things to a faster resolution, more of the game gets to unfold at the table.

The game does also have rules for using minion allies as protection for PC and Nemesis NPCs in th GM's screen rules packet. These help the game play out more like the movies.

The Space game can be deadly. Being in a fighter can be even more so. The game has mechanisms to make it playable, but there is no promises of safety.

The piloting tree, honestly, seems to assume that you'll be flying the Falcon or a Patrol boat more than a starfighter. The only time lowering your silhouette by 1 is going to make a difference in starfighter combat , when you're in a craft with sil 5 and drop to 4, putting you even with starfighters. And as I said, it's not just that the defenses are deep in the tree, but also that they're vastly underwhelming for keeping your character alive.

When it comes to combat resolution time, I guess I'd rather have an hour of tense combat than a fifteen minute combat that guarantees I'll need to roll a new character at the end ;P

I mentioned using "ablative redshirts" before, and it's one way of putting a band-aid on the problem. But then you have to explain why the Rebellion, who's always supposed to be outnumbered, conveniently always has redshirts to act as hitpoints for the PCs. And facing Minion NPC was my original assumption, the problem didn't come from enemy skill being too high, it came from not having any of the options for mitigating damage a ground combatant has.

I agree that Space Combat should be deadly, but it shouldn't be a death sentence. Otherwise, why would there be an entire career dedicated to it?

I think the main problem is that the game in EotE assumed you were Han in the Falcon, and balanced things according from there. That never really changed in AoR, even though the player now has to make use of the very fragile starfighters that were meant to splatter on light freighter turrets. I don't want the base defenses of starfighters to increase, I think that they should be delicate in keeping with the movies. I just think that highly skilled pilots should have a higher survivability rate than minions, the same way that skilled PCs on the ground have a higher survivability rate than minions.

TL;DR: Why can I use my piloting skill to dodge an incoming asteroid shower but not a shower of plasma bolts?

Under the description of the piloting skill in the CRB (at least under Space, not sure about Planetary), there is an optional rule planted that says, before you can shoot, the pilot needs to roll a competitive piloting check against the target (with terrain modifers) to see if you can get in position to shoot (showing how the other pilot is trying to get out of your line of fire). This doesn't consume the PC's action (I don't know if it even counts as a manuever...).

I've seen it used once in practice and it seemed to really reward those that invest in the skill and even more so if they got talents.

EDIT: Also, it has been pointed out by the developers that a ship doesn't have to blow up when the HT reaches the threshold. It's just out of the fight. Like personal combat, death is only really death when the 150+ crit is rolled.

Oh that I like. We're doing that

Oh, and then there's the squad rules in the AoR GM kit. However, that gives more to the conclusion of survival through redshirt sacrifice than the pilot winning through skill.