So I am running a game and the party currently has a YT-1760, I am not sure if that is actually in the books or if it is a fan creation, but the speed of it is typically a 4 in all the stuff I have seen so far. And right now the players are thinking of upgrading their smuggling ship to a speed of 5 with some engine mods. Now that is a good idea, it would be a very hard to catch ship, but the problem I am currently running into is they've already chosen to disengage completely from several space fights. Normally that is fine, but if they get the ship up to a speed 5 that means that the TIE fighters they keep running into will not be able to catch them.

I am concerned that having a smuggling freighter that fast would trivialize space combat and/or make patrol and custom ships totally irrelevant since they could fly off at max speed.

I am looking for ideas to make sure that giving them a speed 5 freighter won't make space aspects of the game inconsequential to them.

If they are disengaging from space fights, then they clearly don't want to fight them

To make any fight worthwhile, and this goes double for space encounters, you've gotta have an actual reason for the fight. If the fight is just survival or to get someplace specific, then by escaping they've probably done their job.

But if the fight is for something more important, like say they are trying to protect something floating in space, or trying to board an enemy ship, then they might not be so ready to cut and run.

TL;DR: Make sure there's a good motivation first, before you start worrying about speed and escaping space combat encounters

Oh! Also: chases. If they are running away and a customs frigate is after them, the encounter should change to a Chase, not a straight-up combat encounter.

I need to look into the chase rules again. Would a ship with a much lower speed rating like a customs frigate actually be able to get involved in a chase with a ship potentially twice their speed rating?

Consider having your "veteran" TIE Pilots have Full Throttle, allowing them to keep up.

Have Star Destroyers fire on them with Turbolasers... Doesn't matter how fast they are, they still have to get out of range...

Use terrain to channel them through combat areas and lower their speed (asteroid fields and nebulae are perfect for this).

Start with TIEs are Speed 5, so the freighter isn't faster than they are, at least without a better pilot. Plus handling will be quite lower.

Without official stats for the 1760, it is hard to say, but looking at Wookieepedia, it trades in almost everything for speed. Even cargo is a fraction of the YT1300. And if you trade in shields, cargo and hull for speed? I guess you can outrun most things. But be careful of the turbolasers. 1 hit and you are sidelined. And you can't get out of their range very fast.

Also, unless they run back the way they came, they don't know what's ahead of them. They could easily run into additional TIEs which were warned of their approach.

Don't forget that most customs ships will have tractor beams, too. That puts a damper on the running right there.

1 hour ago, FlightyBombJack said:

I need to look into the chase rules again. Would a ship with a much lower speed rating like a customs frigate actually be able to get involved in a chase with a ship potentially twice their speed rating?

Check out the rules for stellar terrain. When traveling through an asteroid field, going really fast is a dangerous idea.

51 minutes ago, FlightyBombJack said:

I need to look into the chase rules again. Would a ship with a much lower speed rating like a customs frigate actually be able to get involved in a chase with a ship potentially twice their speed rating?

Sure thing. They can get involved. They won't have an easy time of it, but they can use other tools to level the playing field. Things like tractor beams help And with 6 gunners, the frigate should be able to keep pressure on the PCs. The frigate doesn't need to match ships for speed; it's got firepower and tractor beams. It can disable ships and bring them in.

And like @kaosoe mentioned, going fast through difficult terrain means that your Competitive Checks are gonna be a lot more dangerous. And difficult terrain should be a constant feature in Star Wars Your heroes will be making a Formidable check, upgraded thrice, while your customs frigate is only making a Hard check, upgraded twice, to navigate the same difficult terrain. So the heroes will be rolling more failures (which can cause them to lose the competitive check), threats (which can cause them to lower their speed), and despair (which can cause collisions) than their pursuers.

Not to mention that we're talking about the Empire. If they lose you, they can just call ahead along your hyperspace vector and try and close in on you by virtue of the fact that they are everywhere . The amount of resources they dedicate to catching you just depends on how bad they want you!

13 hours ago, kaosoe said:

Check out the rules for stellar terrain. When traveling through an asteroid field, going really fast is a dangerous idea.

Almost a lethal idea, in fact. I was looking at those rules recently and I remember thinking "Ouch".

Throw in a small tie squad escorting the customs ship. The leader could be an adversary with the talents that let you reduce the speed of the ship you hit or there's the one that causes the target ship to suffer strain every time they move.

23 hours ago, FlightyBombJack said:

I need to look into the chase rules again. Would a ship with a much lower speed rating like a customs frigate actually be able to get involved in a chase with a ship potentially twice their speed rating?

The short answer is, yes, any ship can chase any ship regardless of speed, with the usual caveat of "subject to the GM".

Rather than going through all the mechanics here, I would recommend reading the chase rules very closely, and perhaps even running some test scenarios on your own, using the PCs ship (and pilot skill) vs a pursing force.

What if the party just elects to try hyperspacing away from a chase?

making the hyperspace jump is a very good idea, but it takes time. I would suggest at least 5 rounds, modified by successes. When discussed over at Order 66, one of the guys suggested 10 rounds, but you could shorten it to 5 rounds by adding a setback die per round removed, with each extra success cutting the time by an additional round. This makes Talents like Galaxy mapper quite handy. Once you determine how long the calculations take, the ship has to survive that many rounds with TIEs or whatever chasing after it.

On 18.4.2017 at 0:02 AM, FlightyBombJack said:

So I am running a game and the party currently has a YT-1760, I am not sure if that is actually in the books or if it is a fan creation, but the speed of it is typically a 4 in all the stuff I have seen so far. And right now the players are thinking of upgrading their smuggling ship to a speed of 5 with some engine mods. Now that is a good idea, it would be a very hard to catch ship, but the problem I am currently running into is they've already chosen to disengage completely from several space fights. Normally that is fine, but if they get the ship up to a speed 5 that means that the TIE fighters they keep running into will not be able to catch them.

I am concerned that having a smuggling freighter that fast would trivialize space combat and/or make patrol and custom ships totally irrelevant since they could fly off at max speed.

I am looking for ideas to make sure that giving them a speed 5 freighter won't make space aspects of the game inconsequential to them.

TIE-Fighters have better handling and nothing is stopping you from giving out a rank for supreme full throttle to their squadron leader, who happens to an Ace and Baron of the Empire. So if you use the Squadron rules, that Baron WILL catch up with his whole squadron and if he is anything like my hotshot, he WILL generate a lot of triumphs for his squadron to fire too. If he is just a reasonable commander, he might individual flights let loose once his squadron is in range and regroup if the players manage to get away again.

Now if you want something really special, the 181st had plenty of battles with rebel scum and never a problem with catching freighters. A whole squad of nemesis and rivals and Piloting Space 5 aces usually is rather good in a chase. Don't kill your players

Running is a noble and time honored tradition

That's why the 1760 our party has is all "run and hide" because there's no way we are going to engage in a battle where a bad dice roll could accidentally make everyone suck hard vacuum. The 1760 is fast and agile, its not meant to fight... the gun it has is barely enough to deal with a swoop bike let alone another actual star ship, and its "armor" is a joke of the highest caliber.

Honestly if the bounty hunter didn't mind i'd remove the gun entirely just to take that option completely off the table. Some one MIGHT die in actual combat, but surrounded by the literal death void of space combat is just a bad bad way to go, in any ship that isn't specifically made for that sort of thing.

If you want your party to fight you need to come up with REALLY good reasons for them to. You don't see people in Ferrari's trying to take on Abram tanks with out a super good reason to attempt that suicide mission. Just because there is a combat to be had isnt a good enough reason to fight, because thats asking the characters to risk an almost assured death for no gain to themselves. And assuming by some miracle they make it out alive it will bring all kinds of unwanted attention that will cause more situations like that happen for still no real gain.

Seriously if i gave you a knife and told you to charge a group of soldiers with machine guns you'd probably think i was insane. I'd have to put a VERY compelling argument in for you to even consider doing something so insane. Its the same for the characters/players, if nothing but "getting in a space combat encounter" exists for motivation i dont blame them for running instead of fighting.

As to not making space inconsequential, there is always the narrative. The above mentioned TIE aces, or trackers put on while they are landed that allows them to be hunted almost constantly, tractor beams, making the combats or space aspect being integral to something they greatly desire or want to protect, or necessary for them to do the next thing they want to. Lots of ways to make space a thing they have to deal with, with out them just having to get into combat just to fight some TIEs

As a player who has been involved with 2 space battles using the SW RPG rules, our group ALSO avoids space combat like the plague!

Space combat is really really nasty and it becomes expensive if you survive. And some costs have nothing to do with the bottom line!

Your players and their tricked out YT-1760 is a great idea for them. I applaud them for figuring out how to avoid certain death!

That said, there are going to be situations where they may need to make hard decisions.

IF they are looking to visit an Imperial world with a fleet enforced interdiction in place then they will have to fly through Tie Fighter screens to get to their destination. If they opt to NOT run a blockade, then that's a fairly safe option. Unless their employer is a Hutt who want's that blockade run and doesn't accept failure as an option. (But I digress).

In short, don't bend yourself out of shape over your players finding and using an effective survival mechanism. They're doing good, and they can face other obstacles to deal with.

If the players have decided that they'd rather not get involved in space combat then taking the "How DARE they make their ship good at something!" attitude isn't going to accomplish anything other than to put them off, so I definitely don't support the suggestions that everyone and everything else be powered up to absurd lengths to counter it. "Send a frigate with a TIE squadron led by some high powered counter-everything-they-have pilot" amounts to pulling a "rocks fall, everyone dies". Unless you're trying to get replaced as GM or put them off the game system (or both), it's a bad move.

They're only going to be interested in sticking around when there's something worth sticking around to fight for. As the last couple of posts have noted, space combat is really dangerous in this system, so it needs to be a big enough prize to be worth taking a stupid risk with your life to get (or protect).

Taking a look at the films, most of the time that you see a freighter/transport on the screen, it's trying to get away from a prolonged fight.

Tantive IV is feeling Vader's Star Destroyer in the opening of ANH, and the Falcon is generally racing away from trouble as fast as it can, with the only prolonged starship battle the Falcon participated in being the attack on the second Death Star in RotJ, and even then it was a different pilot at the helm.

I'd say the GM's best option is to simply employ the chase rules, and perhaps letting the enemy fighters get off an attack or two during the course of the round. In that vein, the Falcon's escape from the first Death Star is a good example of how such a sequence might play out, with a small group of enemy ships in pursuit while the PCs try to get safely away to hyperspace.

Garran's got an excellent point, in that if you try to force starship combat onto a group that's got no interest in participating in starship combat, it's not going to go well. It'd be akin to trying to force a group of self-centered EotE characters to constantly take up charitable missions for the Alliance without ever getting paid for it.

One thing you can always do is the old have a capitol ship come out of hyperspace ahead of them as their fleeing causing them to have Tie's at their back and maybe an Interdictor ahead of them. Another idea is have the Empire hire bounty hunters that use the new fang fighters from No Disintegrations. They have a base speed of 6 and a handling +3. It'll be hard to run from that.

On 4/21/2017 at 4:12 AM, Donovan Morningfire said:

Garran's got an excellent point, in that if you try to force starship combat onto a group that's got no interest in participating in starship combat, it's not going to go well. It'd be akin to trying to force a group of self-centered EotE characters to constantly take up charitable missions for the Alliance without ever getting paid for it.

My players didn't want to face ship combat any more than necessary. I knew it, set up a corvette for them to run from. It led to a new problem, though, as they chose to let themselves get caught, tractored in, and hooked up, then started slaughtering the crew to take over the corvette. I had a difficult time fending them off without resorting to tactics which seem unreasonable. After all most of the crew would be minions with minimal armor and weapons. They went so far as to keep kill counts, knowing a corvette should only have 100 or so crew. I need to be more prepared to keep capital ships out of their hands.

49 minutes ago, Rozial said:

One thing you can always do is the old have a capitol ship come out of hyperspace ahead of them as their fleeing causing them to have Tie's at their back and maybe an Interdictor ahead of them. Another idea is have the Empire hire bounty hunters that use the new fang fighters from No Disintegrations. They have a base speed of 6 and a handling +3. It'll be hard to run from that.

Holy crap thats a terrifying ship... against a 1760, thats a quick way to murder the whole party. Even our modded out one couldnt run from those things.

26 minutes ago, Edgookin said:

My players didn't want to face ship combat any more than necessary. I knew it, set up a corvette for them to run from. It led to a new problem, though, as they chose to let themselves get caught, tractored in, and hooked up, then started slaughtering the crew to take over the corvette. I had a difficult time fending them off without resorting to tactics which seem unreasonable. After all most of the crew would be minions with minimal armor and weapons. They went so far as to keep kill counts, knowing a corvette should only have 100 or so crew. I need to be more prepared to keep capital ships out of their hands.

Yeah sometimes its easier to just steal the capital ship than to run from it lol

Got to give it to them for ingenuity though

2 hours ago, Edgookin said:

My players didn't want to face ship combat any more than necessary. I knew it, set up a corvette for them to run from. It led to a new problem, though, as they chose to let themselves get caught, tractored in, and hooked up, then started slaughtering the crew to take over the corvette. I had a difficult time fending them off without resorting to tactics which seem unreasonable. After all most of the crew would be minions with minimal armor and weapons. They went so far as to keep kill counts, knowing a corvette should only have 100 or so crew. I need to be more prepared to keep capital ships out of their hands.

Ha ha ha that sounds so much like my old play group. I miss that game.

Did they end up clearing out the Corvette?

5 hours ago, awayputurwpn said:

Ha ha ha that sounds so much like my old play group. I miss that game.

Did they end up clearing out the Corvette?

Almost. Engineering was open to space and had a frag missile go off in it. Then the loyalty officer blew the bridge rather than let the corvette be captured. They might have been able to salvage it, but they took off rather than get caught by reinforcements.

11 hours ago, Edgookin said:

Almost. Engineering was open to space and had a frag missile go off in it. Then the loyalty officer blew the bridge rather than let the corvette be captured. They might have been able to salvage it, but they took off rather than get caught by reinforcements.

Well then they were smarter than my old group

I feel like I should give some updates here because recent developments have been pretty amusing. The party stopped down on planet Socorro and has used the numerous ship repair and refitting services to further upgrade their 1760's speed and handling... basically anything but their weapons have been upgraded at that point. But that hasn't stopped them from finding some local pirates and going out to raid a convoy of Gozanti freighters (the pirates are paying for people to help them steal weapons). So I don't think they are too concerned about space combat, or well more likely they are overconfident to the max.

Or they are crazy. Because they are thinking of double crossing the pirates (stealing bacta for their rebel contacts instead)... and then stealing a Gozanti. I swear my party is suicidal.