Here in the near-ish future, I will be running a game of what is essentially Dungeons and Dragons IN SPACE! I need a decent ship-to-ship combat system, and I thought about Armada. My question is: Is it possible to modify the armada combat system so that it fits into D&D?

What exactly do you want to Achieve?

Do you want each member of the party to be doing certain things? Do you want them each in command of a ship? Do you want them all in one ship but doing certain things?

The games are not immediately transfer-compatible, but there would be ways, but its up to what you want them to be doing...

I want the feel of the party being the crew of a ship, and want to try to make them feel like their actions mean something. I am running Spelljammer, so they have to deal with not only ship's weapons but enemy spellcasters.

Its probably not the easiest of things to transfer across. You could link Skill Checks to getting the correct dice at range for each Firing Arc and such, but the scale of the game is somewhat that it'd take a lot of work to work out.

Armada is definitely not the best system to use if you're just manning one ship; it is intended as a small fleet action game. In the case of a multi crewed single ship, I think you're better off using an Epic sized X-Wing Miniatures ship with generous house rules.

If you're not married to using a miniatures game, I would instead recommend:

Space Cadets Board Game: http://amzn.com/B009VIE3E6

Space Cadets Dice Duel: http://amzn.com/B00FL3FEG6

Lasers and Feelings: http://www.onesevendesign.com/laserfeelings/

I agree that Armada isn't the best fit for an RPG, but if that is what you want to do, some random thoughts.

In RPGs, the Player Characters are supposed to have abilities/be able to perform far beyond the mundane NPCs. With that in mind,

Allow ships to gain and use multiple command tokens per round, tied to player skill rolls. If one(or more) PC is manning the guns give the ship concentrate fire token tokens for each successful combat roll. Any PCs working to fix damage get repair tokens to spend, and so on. If one PC is dedicated to captaining, allow leadership rolls to shorten the command stack, or change upcoming commands or some such.

You might also allow skill rolls to provide one-round uses of various upgrades.

How big is the PC's ship? If they are commanding a big ship with 100 crew or more, I would say Armada might work, but if they are more like the crew of Firefly and the 4-6 PCs and their henchmen are the only crew, then X-Wing would probably be a better fit.

These are all great suggestions, and I certainly appreciate the advice. Thinking about it now, there would be issues converting Armada straight over since they are operating a smaller ship. But Midnight Dreary, I like your ideas, and will definitely use those when I frankenstein together a ship combat system.

I would heartily recommend FFG's Age of Rebellion, said the biased fan.

I agree with Snickett, X-wing probably is more suited for this scenario. I say this as a former X-wing fan (though I never had any epic ships).

I recommend an X-wing Gozanti, as then they can be in the ship together or go off for fighter combat in the Gozanti's 4 attached fighters.

There is also a wealth of other ships available for creating scenarios, a combat system that works well, and you can also modify the game with new ability cards to represent them being force users.

However, I would most highly recommend making them into dark jedi space pirates, then having them hunt down and kill the crew of the Ghost. Those pesky kids are irritating. Too much hope.

Also, look at the Imperial Assault game for RPG models. The game itself is an absolute cracker, and the models easily double up for Star Wars RPG play, as do the cardboard environments.

Maybe take a look at this game:

https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/12350/battlestations

Guys, His game isn't set in the Star Wars universe, note the comment about enemy spell casters, he's just looking for a rules set he can adapt to the spell jammer setting. Given that, the FFG SW RPGs and imperial assault minis are pretty worthless to the matter at hand.

Guys, His game isn't set in the Star Wars universe, note the comment about enemy spell casters, he's just looking for a rules set he can adapt to the spell jammer setting. Given that, the FFG SW RPGs and imperial assault minis are pretty worthless to the matter at hand.

This guy gets it.

Seriously guys, I love the suggestions and the enthusiasm, but as I stated, the game is set in the D&D setting of Spelljammer, I just needed a better space combat system, because while the usage of science in space was intuitive, ship-to-ship combat...wasn't.

I run a system where the folk each have a role on the ship. Pilot, shields, engineering, weapons (can have multiple) and navigation (psionics). Each have actions they can perform related to their and a ship has a turn similar to armada where everyone gets a chance to do their thing, each player rolling for their role. Pilot rolls to perform a manoeuvre, weapons officer rolls to fire and target, etc. Captain can provide command buffs to specific parts of the ship and gives out the orders.

Make it a bit of a resource game. Place a pool of (awesomely coloured) dice in the centre of the table and say that that's the reactor's charge. Now make them (or the captain) distribute the tokens into the various ship systems and make sure there's always a trade-off somewhere, then give them the ability to overcharge systems temporarily or with a cooldown.

How would this relate to armada rules? Just use what's already in place and think of "overcharging" as the command dials (or maybe better than the command dials). E.g. if they put lot of power into the weapons system, treat it as a concentrate fire that adds 3 extra dice.

Assign the functions of the defense tokens out to crew members as well, they're in charge of using them and making a skill check to see if they exhaust them, maybe crits or a good enough roll means that they can use it without spending it.

With manoeuvring, giving the pilot more control should mean they can outmanoeuvre most other things on the board which have a fixed speed, maybe tie a piloting skill roll to how many clicks of yaw they get on the chart (maybe make the default a ship with a I in all boxes, you'll probably want to design your own ship's stats anyway, just use the existing ship cards as a template).

That leaves engineering who would be in charge or repairing crits/damage, eeking out extra power of the reactor, distributing and regenerating shields

Edit: sorry this got really rambly - just had a tooth out and feeling giddy.

OK, so I'm currently playing in a Star Wars SAGA Edition (SWSE) game, which occupies a quaint & curious ruleset somewhere between D&D 3.5 & 4th Edition. While not germane to your setting, it does have the benefit of having space-combat mechanics already in place. Most or all of the SWSE rules can be found on file-sharing sites. It does great things with combat for fighters & freighters, but fails miserably at capital ship combat.

Another alternative would be the d20 Modern system, which has rules for ships, battlemechs, and all sorts of futuristic technology without ties to any specific setting. As an additional bonus d20 Modern also has rules for magic, which makes it a bit easier in that regard. You can download the entire System Reference Document from Wizards of the Coast, here. I don't know what rule set you're using (I wasn't able to parse anything from your posts other than it's the Spelljammer setting), so I can't say which will be easier to modify to fit your existing rules. I really like the SWSE rules, but don't have a ton of experience with d20 Modern.

If you expect to spend a lot of game time with elven men o' war clashing with illithid nautiloids and squid-ships, etc. it might be easier to just adopt another system wholesale, and convert the fiddly bits rather than trying to shoehorn a naval combat system into your existing rules. I expect that's where some of the others were coming from with their suggestions.

EDIT: On a more practical note, the ship stands for Armada, with their shield dials and fitted maneuver template would probably work quite well if you want to get away from the D&D standard 1"-square gridded battlemat.

OK, so I'm currently playing in a Star Wars SAGA Edition (SWSE) game, which occupies a quaint & curious ruleset somewhere between D&D 3.5 & 4th Edition. While not germane to your setting, it does have the benefit of having space-combat mechanics already in place. Most or all of the SWSE rules can be found on file-sharing sites. It does great things with combat for fighters & freighters, but fails miserably at capital ship combat.

Another alternative would be the d20 Modern system, which has rules for ships, battlemechs, and all sorts of futuristic technology without ties to any specific setting. As an additional bonus d20 Modern also has rules for magic, which makes it a bit easier in that regard. You can download the entire System Reference Document from Wizards of the Coast, here. I don't know what rule set you're using (I wasn't able to parse anything from your posts other than it's the Spelljammer setting), so I can't say which will be easier to modify to fit your existing rules. I really like the SWSE rules, but don't have a ton of experience with d20 Modern.

If you expect to spend a lot of game time with elven men o' war clashing with illithid nautiloids and squid-ships, etc. it might be easier to just adopt another system wholesale, and convert the fiddly bits rather than trying to shoehorn a naval combat system into your existing rules. I expect that's where some of the others were coming from with their suggestions.

EDIT: On a more practical note, the ship stands for Armada, with their shield dials and fitted maneuver template would probably work quite well if you want to get away from the D&D standard 1"-square gridded battlemat.

That's part of the reason I wanted to use a variation on Armada. I do not like using a grid for ship-to-ship combat due to how much more goes into that sort of stuff.

I probably should have clarified this earlier, but I am converting the game from AD&D to the Pathfinder ruleset.

Might be going off the deepend, but Star Fleet Battles / Federation Commander are pretty fun, might be something there.