So most examples I can think of, of space combat, involving the PC's, has the PC's in fighters, or at most, Sil 4 ships that still behave like fighters. I'm curious if any of you have run games, or played in games, where the PC's were actually controlling a cap ship, and how that played out if you did.

Was it fundamentally different from the fighter scale combat? Was it more/less enjoyable for the players? What different problems did you run into?

I've run a few, our Ace enjoyed them, our Engineer less so, everyone else not at all (Solider and Bounty Hunter). They take time if you don't speed things up with hand-waves/shortcuts, of course that depends on the size of the battle, 2 or 3 cap ships on each side wouldn't be too bad. But once you get to 6-8 per side, they can take a while. Another thing that I think is different (I may have interpreted the rules wrong on this one) is that capital ships don't always have all of their weapons/crew go at the same time, the way that I understand initiative means that the slots are for the crew, not the ship.

The problems? If the dice are against you and you want to destroy that sil. 7 heavy cruiser then it may take a while unless you give the PC's the option of having it blow up once it exceeds its H.T threshold. Since some of my players stated they weren't having fun during space battles I've speed them up, I'm not sure if it is more the careers they chose makes them feel like they can't do anything or they just don't like how long they can take, based on the responses I've gotten it would seem to be the former. I think that because of how many weapons capital ships can have it can take longer, but you don't have to keep track of all the maneuvers that fighters can, just the various actions that capital ships can undertake, so if I had to sum up how it was different I would say that capital ship combat is more complicated in some areas compared to fighter combat and less in others.

Did the soldier/bounty hunter pc's not hop into a gun turret and shoot? That seems like something they would be at least semi-competent at. And the Engineer, I would think could do a lot of mid-combat repair checks to help with strain, like the rest of the crew would be doing.

The solider is a medic and they only had agility 2, so their thought line was minions are better than my at shooting, the bounty hunter probably could have done something, but it was their first game with that character. The Engineer was doing those things, and they had fun, but I've noticed they seem to slightly more fun during personal scale encounters, which is why I worded it that way.

Ah, well, one thing I heard to help with having poor gunnery skills, in case this comes up again, is to make sure they know to Aim. Since they are in a gun bubble, and thus are unlikely to be moving around, sacrificing their movement to Aim, and getting boost die, would significantly help shore up their lack of skill dice. Just a thought.

We've had one situation where players briefly gained control over a Dreadnought Cruiser and rammed it into an Interdictor. That was basically just using the base rules of the game.

If I was going to run an actual capital ship based campaign I'd write some more extensive rules for it. I really hate that for example making a gunnery check with an entire battery of heavy turbolasers uses your Agility. That just makes no sense. It should use Presence, or Intellect, because we're talking about Sil 4 sized turrets crewed by two dozen people each. There is no way being very agile would make the slightest difference toward plotting an effective barrage for those weapons. Being able to effectively command gun crews or work a computer to plot a firing pattern would.

For an effective capital ship based campaign all the players would have to be command crew though I think, otherwise they have no reason to always be in the same room together or talk to each other on a mile long ship. I mean you could get all Star Trek about it and have the command crew do everything themselves while the rest of the ship is just there to showcase how you die if you're not bridge crew, but if you want to be more realistic about it there would be loads of mass combat checks involved as you're landing marines to take care of personal scale objectives and so on. Also a ton of logistics, a ship that big above all else needs stuff, so having something like a Quartermaster who's in charge of finding ports where you can take on supplies would be much more important. A replacement heavy turbolaser just isn't as easy to come by as a new blaster pistol.

The operating budget for a game like that would probably be huge, with objectives paying out in the hundreds of thousands of credits, but you'd have to pay the crew, keep the ship stocked etc.

If you're dealing with a large capital ship encounter then don't bother playing out most of it. Pick a few things that the PC's ship will be interacting with (on both sides) and use that as the on-camera encounter; the rest of the battle is going on in the background, though Adv/Thr/Tri/Des symbols might be used to represent an effect straying into the PCs' battle zone.

28 minutes ago, Garran said:

If you're dealing with a large capital ship encounter then don't bother playing out most of it. Pick a few things that the PC's ship will be interacting with (on both sides) and use that as the on-camera encounter; the rest of the battle is going on in the background, though Adv/Thr/Tri/Des symbols might be used to represent an effect straying into the PCs' battle zone.

This is great advice. I've been in a ton of capital ship focused campaigns or battles and the above advice is all I've seen that makes big battles (More then six or seven capships) work. I still come close to having nightmares about the one time we tried playing out a full major fleet battle (20+ capships and dozens of fighter squadrons per side)

On 4/28/2017 at 3:29 PM, RogueCorona said:

This is great advice. I've been in a ton of capital ship focused campaigns or battles and the above advice is all I've seen that makes big battles (More then six or seven capships) work. I still come close to having nightmares about the one time we tried playing out a full major fleet battle (20+ capships and dozens of fighter squadrons per side)

Definitely go use the mass combat rules for this. I am considering a Cap ship campaign, and might use mass combat for any encounter. Capital ship combat seems to turn into a big grinder if you run each roll.

I'm currently running WEG's Far Orbit Project , converted to FFG, via PbP on this external site . The PCs begin aboard a Sil-6 Nebulon-B, which they control (more or less) as the ship's senior officers. The PCs are now sufficiently wealthy that one of them (the Weapons Officer, who's 3rd in the chain of command) owns a (Sil-5) Gozanti of his own. I haven't had to use Mass Combat rules, yet, and really don't see much need to anytime soon.

Rolling isn't a grind when one considers that the weapons are being operated by NPC minions who all have identical stat blocks, and when the rolls are made on Orokos.com, which allows multiple identical dice pools to be rolled at one click using the '#' multiple-roll operator. The players deciding what to do takes less time than it does to resolve their actions. PCs only roll for things they do themselves, personally. Most combat actions on a capital ship are executed my minions, not the senior officers giving the orders. So Leadership, and minion-boosting talents, are crucial. Except for social encounters, or for PCs flying starfighters, and other such low-level, hands-on stuff.

Two words for you: Boarding Actions! Have the boarding missiles from Force Unleashed slam into the hull and then your soldiers have to hold off stormtroopers while your pilot and engineers run the ship's crew. Always fun! Gives everyone a LOT to do. I always have the crew need to do SOMETHING more than just drive the big boat. Cap Ships are AWESOME in this system... you just need to treat them differently a bit.

On 4/28/2017 at 3:00 PM, Aetrion said:

We've had one situation where players briefly gained control over a Dreadnought Cruiser and rammed it into an Interdictor. That was basically just using the base rules of the game.

If I was going to run an actual capital ship based campaign I'd write some more extensive rules for it. I really hate that for example making a gunnery check with an entire battery of heavy turbolasers uses your Agility. That just makes no sense. It should use Presence, or Intellect, because we're talking about Sil 4 sized turrets crewed by two dozen people each. There is no way being very agile would make the slightest difference toward plotting an effective barrage for those weapons. Being able to effectively command gun crews or work a computer to plot a firing pattern would.

For an effective capital ship based campaign all the players would have to be command crew though I think, otherwise they have no reason to always be in the same room together or talk to each other on a mile long ship. I mean you could get all Star Trek about it and have the command crew do everything themselves while the rest of the ship is just there to showcase how you die if you're not bridge crew, but if you want to be more realistic about it there would be loads of mass combat checks involved as you're landing marines to take care of personal scale objectives and so on. Also a ton of logistics, a ship that big above all else needs stuff, so having something like a Quartermaster who's in charge of finding ports where you can take on supplies would be much more important. A replacement heavy turbolaser just isn't as easy to come by as a new blaster pistol.

The operating budget for a game like that would probably be huge, with objectives paying out in the hundreds of thousands of credits, but you'd have to pay the crew, keep the ship stocked etc.

I'm not sure that you need any more rules. It's supposed to be open and narrative. And the only time an entire bank fires is one of the special actions for a large ship. However... the Order 66 Podcast did a whole show on running cap ship combat and even ran one at the end of the show. A good listen if you haven't heard it. It's called "Capital Interest" if you look for it.

Definitely listen to that order 66 podcast episode it will give you a lot of great ideas.

The important part is to have reasons for the PCs to work together. It's really something that works best if it is decided upon at the beginning of the campaign. The captain of the ship and a low ranking soldier are unlikely to spend much time together. But the grizzled commander of the ships soldiers will often speak with the captain and be a part of operational meetings.

On 5/3/2017 at 5:55 PM, Richardbuxton said:

Definitely listen to that order 66 podcast episode it will give you a lot of great ideas.

The important part is to have reasons for the PCs to work together. It's really something that works best if it is decided upon at the beginning of the campaign. The captain of the ship and a low ranking soldier are unlikely to spend much time together. But the grizzled commander of the ships soldiers will often speak with the captain and be a part of operational meetings.

Yeah, think of the PC's as the main cast of Star Trek, while the the NPC's are all the red shirts. Picard and Riker will talk with Geordi in Engineering while a battle is going on, but they generally aren't talking to Random Engineer Tech 27 during a fight.

And don't forget, the PC's can work together, while not being in the same room. Again, look to Star Trek for inspiration for this. Times when Riker or Picard has an idea for a tactic, but they can't implement it until Geordi does something involving Jeffery's Tubes and Warp Conduits, and the Deflector Dish (it's always the Deflector Dish). So they can be doing Leadership checks, while they are waiting for the Engineer PC to do his hotwiring of the system, then they can enact their Crazy Plan That Just Might Work.

I favor episodic play, where each session feels like an episode of a show, be it The Clone Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Tour of Duty , or whatever. If I were to theme a campaign around capital-ship combat, I'd probably have each player create two or three PCs:

• a staff officer (captain, helmsman/navigator, PWO, CAG, chief surgeon, chief engineer, etc.)
• a starfighter or gunboat pilot/astromech
• a marine, special forces, or other ground-combat designator

This lets you theme each "episode" around a different part of the action. Heck, it can even be different parts of the same fight! Meanwhile, everybody's PCs are gaining XP and the story's progressing. Players are trying out different characters in different scenarios, some of which they are optimized for and some they are not.

Once you & the players get sufficiently comfortable with the PCs and their roles, you can utilize the mass combat rules (definitely listen to the Order 66 episode "Mass Effect") to let each PC adopt a different role in a climactic battle: the Ace/Squadron Commander leads the fighter wing in support of the Commodore, who's not only fighting his ship but leading a fleet, while the Vanguard leads a boarding party to deliver a Slicer to cripple key systems on the enemy flagship.

This kind of thing can be incredibly awesome and memorable, but takes a lot of preparation. Resist the urge to allow players to control more than one PC at a time.

31 minutes ago, SFC Snuffy said:

I favor episodic play, where each session feels like an episode of a show, be it The Clone Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Tour of Duty , or whatever. If I were to theme a campaign around capital-ship combat, I'd probably have each player create two or three PCs:

• a staff officer (captain, helmsman/navigator, PWO, CAG, chief surgeon, chief engineer, etc.)
• a starfighter or gunboat pilot/astromech
• a marine, special forces, or other ground-combat designator

This lets you theme each "episode" around a different part of the action. Heck, it can even be different parts of the same fight! Meanwhile, everybody's PCs are gaining XP and the story's progressing. Players are trying out different characters in different scenarios, some of which they are optimized for and some they are not.

Once you & the players get sufficiently comfortable with the PCs and their roles, you can utilize the mass combat rules (definitely listen to the Order 66 episode "Mass Effect") to let each PC adopt a different role in a climactic battle: the Ace/Squadron Commander leads the fighter wing in support of the Commodore, who's not only fighting his ship but leading a fleet, while the Vanguard leads a boarding party to deliver a Slicer to cripple key systems on the enemy flagship.

This kind of thing can be incredibly awesome and memorable, but takes a lot of preparation. Resist the urge to allow players to control more than one PC at a time.

My group does something similar a lot. But we usually keep our different PCs away from each other as much as possible.

One group is the commodore or admiral and captains of a small fleet of capital ships

Another is the captain and department heads or cag on a capital ship

A third is the officers a commander and the pilots of a fighter unit.

And finally have the leader and soldiers of a commando unit.

The different units are either assigned to different areas within a sector or different sectors within a region so the only time they are on the same battlefield is if we run something where our faction committed everything it had to one battle like the Alliance did at Endor and even then they are assigned to different sections of the battle. However the successes or failures of one unit might effect the others by either changing what missions they are sent on or affecting the strength of the forces opposing them. And sometimes we only do two or three of the four options.

Edit I actually described our current campagin where we are running the first three options in the Ship Talk topic on the EOE board in fact.

We're on the same page, I think, but I didn't explain myself very well. For the climactic battle - something that caps a story arc or the entire campaign - each player would command whichever PC that they like best from their stable of PCs. The player that likes cap ship combat would fill that role in the mass combat, while the starfighter guru took that PC into the appropriate encounter(s), and so on. Running that kind of encounter can be pretty taxing, so I would only do it for a "special occasion."

Otherwise, you're right in that it can get awkward when PCs from different groups are interacting with each other, so I try to limit that. Some groups love that sort of thing, but mine does not.

On 5/2/2017 at 7:33 PM, ShadoWarrior said:

I'm currently running WEG's Far Orbit Project , converted to FFG, via PbP on this external site . The PCs begin aboard a Sil-6 Nebulon-B, which they control (more or less) as the ship's senior officers. The PCs are now sufficiently wealthy that one of them (the Weapons Officer, who's 3rd in the chain of command) owns a (Sil-5) Gozanti of his own. I haven't had to use Mass Combat rules, yet, and really don't see much need to anytime soon.

Rolling isn't a grind when one considers that the weapons are being operated by NPC minions who all have identical stat blocks, and when the rolls are made on Orokos.com, which allows multiple identical dice pools to be rolled at one click using the '#' multiple-roll operator. The players deciding what to do takes less time than it does to resolve their actions. PCs only roll for things they do themselves, personally. Most combat actions on a capital ship are executed my minions, not the senior officers giving the orders. So Leadership, and minion-boosting talents, are crucial. Except for social encounters, or for PCs flying starfighters, and other such low-level, hands-on stuff.

Could you give an example of this in a mock scenario?

There are two typos in my post. The first is "the players deciding what to do takes less time than it does to resolve their actions" should say "takes more time". The second one is more obvious: "execute my minions" (lol) should be "executed by minions".

As for an example in a mock scenario, example of what, exactly?

Just a few rolls of a mock battle, I'm thinking of doing this but not sure how the combat rolls would work... Was going to use orokos.com

Before we got a look at the alliance book my group had already come up with a rule to keep cap ships simple and avoid excessive rolling and non-player related action and even after looking at the rules in alliance we plan to keep using these rules mostly.

First was treating a cap ship as a single entity, everything happened on its turn. Each set of weapons were treated as a single weapon system and fired in an anti-capital-ship fashion or ant-fighter fashion.

Second was basing all rolls or difficulties off the Leadership skill of the captain. Idea being that a capital ship is more reliant on a large number of people working together in tandem and a ships captain giving confident and concise orders to lead and direct his people is the defining skill of a capital ship in our minds. Also while it hasn't come into play yet we also talked about things like inflicting 1 to 3 black dice when dealing with a new captain or if the captain was knocked out and now the next in command is leading the ship, etc...

So our anti-capital ship action is; As a maneuver the captain declares any number of weapon groups to start firing on a silhouette 5+ ship, these weapons continue to do so each round after the captain finishes declaring all his orders for the turn and the target ship is in the arc of the declared weapon(s). Make a combat check using the captains Leadership skill and if the attack hits it deals damage equal to the base damage plus net successes plus the number of weapons in the weapon set beyond the first. Linked and auto-fire qualities also deal this damage. Notes: this was done to speed capital ship vs. capital ship fire and the alliance book has its own version, we still kind of like ours, but eh..

And our anti-fighter action is; As a Maneuver the captain declares any number of weapon groups to start performing this action against silhouette 4 or less ships, these weapons continue to do so until ordered to stop. If a ship of silhouette 4 or less starts its turn in range of an arc performing this action or enters within range of an arc performing this action the ship must perform an Avoid-incoming-fire maneuver, which is an opposed pilot (space) skill +your defense dice as advantage dice (don't forget handling) vs. the capital ship's Captains Leadership skill +1 disadvantage dice for each full 5 weapons in the arc beyond the first 5 weapons. Damage is the weapons base damage plus net misses and the capital ship may spend threat to activate weapon qualities. Notes: this was done again to avoid excessive rolling but also because in this case we wanted to make avoiding incoming fire more about what the players were doing, thus our anti-fighter action is more like a fighter hazard. Also while it didn't come up for us at the time afterwards we felt that if you didn't take the avoid incoming fire maneuver or couldn't take it, once your turn was over the check would still be made but on the pilot side the only dice used would be the defense dice. Last we kind of never considered whole silhouette issue since this is more about filling volume with fire then anything else.

Now the only times we have used this is when we were tasked to rescue a prisoner off a victory stardestroyer, as part of the mission the ones asking for our help came in with two CR90 corvettes that started distracting the victories fire (anti-capital fire) so that we could run the gauntlet past the victories fighter screen to the docking bay in our G9 Rigger, get the prisoner then make a run for it as the victory switched to us and started using the anti-fighter action as we did a mini-chase while making our astrogation check to escape.

Personally it was a good mission, was a fun kind of tense as our pilot was also the only good gunner we had and before we could take down enough of the fighters to make the docking bay, one of the corvettes had to make a run for it because of taking too much damage, making us decide to go for the more dangerous quick "crash" landing that may have resulted in us leaving on a lambda shuttle due to circumstances. As for the escape, that was pretty scary as well but between pushing all shields to the rear and boosting for the max 4 dice, running scared and some of the worst astrogation checks you can imagine that almost made us think the computer was going to explode we made it out.

Basing things on the captain's Leadership sounds a lot like the Mass Combat rules from Lead by Example .