9 hours ago, TheShard said:

I'm a game Im in you have the choice between 2 wing men or using snap roll http://fragmentsfromtherim.blogspot.ca/2015/02/suspending-rules-snap-roll-action.html#comment-form

I can second this. All our group has done is add Snap Roll and our many starship battle have been much more fun. Our fighters have dominated in some, and have been dominated in others. All the rest have had a much more dramatic feel without excessive handwavium added. Narrative system - yes, but when you have rules that help suspend disbelief and help accentuate the narrative, it keeps you from needing to build a campfire and just listen to a story.

True, you still have to set up the encounter correctly, but with the current system as-is, piloting skill matters for poodoo. (Leaving that statement there. Not going to re-hash THAT old argument :-P).

I think a couple evenings of doing just straighter combat playing out scenarios to get a feel for the system with no consequences would be worth doing...

5 hours ago, Daeglan said:

That just means the GM has to set the scenario up right.

Daeglan, sometimes you don't have the time to set up any scenario at all, sometimes you are suddendly in the middle of a space combat and you have to adjudicate rules and run it as it is. I am not saying that was my case, because I goofed and i admit it, but as rules are written they are pretty deadly regarding dogfight, and happyDaze is right when saying that good gunnery and high initiative beats a good pilot since pilots cannot use that skill to completely avoid a hit (something possible in sw d6, i.e.). That's what exactly happened in my game: good initiative rolls, deadly first shots and rebels unable to do almost no damage to the PC's.

Regarding the Empire counting missiles shot: maybe it's a valid point after all, remember Episode IV when they didn't shot C-3PO and R2-D2 in the escape pod. Maybe they are on a short budget. I guess building Death Star imposes a heavy toll on resources... xD

3 hours ago, Daeglan said:

I think a couple evenings of doing just straighter combat playing out scenarios to get a feel for the system with no consequences would be worth doing...

Have done this repeatedly, which is where I know (for our group) something is missing from the current rules as-is. Been running this for over 2 years. Have a couple of player that have no problems just grabbing random NPC cards and ships and just experimenting. It's how we get used to new rules before bringing them in mainstream. For us, still needs something more, but YMMV.

14 hours ago, SEApocalypse said:

Torpedos and Missiles at the other hand are anti-capital weapons and if you use those as base line you might as well mention thermal detonators, ewebs, and personal missile launchers as personal weapon options.

Most fighters carry missiles/torpedoes, whilst most characters do not carry thermal detonators/E-Webs/missile launchers. Encumbrance and legality are concerns at personal scale, but they don't apply to fighter combat.

Ordnance intended role may be anti-capital but mechanically it's just as effective as an anti-fighter weapon. Nobody is going to refuse to fire a torpedo at a TIE/D and voluntarily die with their torpedo racks fully-loaded instead.

Edit: Forum software is terrible

Edit: Forum software is terrible

19 hours ago, TheShard said:

I'm a game Im in you have the choice between 2 wing men or using snap roll http://fragmentsfromtherim.blogspot.ca/2015/02/suspending-rules-snap-roll-action.html#comment-form

This does look pretty good, I think I'll give this a try.

Of course, nobody's mentioned the obvious yet (and it took me until this morning to think of this obvious thing ): if you want space battles to last longer, just double the Hull points (and perhaps add 1 Armour and a bit of Strain). Combined with the snap-roll rules above, dogfights could approach movie-style duration.

One side-effect is that crits will be more common, and these are often what add interest and drama to the scene, more so than a hull point number. The way it is now, if you get one-shotted, crits are irrelevant; even a two-shot means crits are incidental to the pilot's problems.

6 hours ago, Talkie Toaster said:

Most fighters carry missiles/torpedoes, whilst most characters do not carry thermal detonators/E-Webs/missile launchers. Encumbrance and legality are concerns at personal scale, but they don't apply to fighter combat.

Ordnance intended role may be anti-capital but mechanically it's just as effective as an anti-fighter weapon. Nobody is going to refuse to fire a torpedo at a TIE/D and voluntarily die with their torpedo racks fully-loaded instead.

Legally concerns are just as valid for starships as they are for personal gear. More so even considering that bigger space ports have BoSS and custom agents checking for this kind of thing.

The argument that most characters don't carry heavy personal scale weapons seems odd when most character are not using fighters, but freighters or shuttles instead. All three lines let the characters usually start with one big group ship, only AoR has the option to hand out instead 1 Y-Wing per 2 characters and that is the WAR setting which puts players against imperial military units on regular base. Now stormtroopers come per default with grenades, usually can call for fire support from vehicles like walkers, tanks or fighters and the players would foolish to engage in such combat without the tools to deal which such threats, be it be retreating in time or having missile tubes and similar weapons ready. Ironically is that one of the good reasons not to waste such weapons on grunts, when they are your only tool to deal with a AT-ST or similar support armored vehicles.

The same applies to some degree to your torpedos. Sure you will rather fire them at that TIE-Defender before dying, but at the same time you rather not waste them on that TIE-Defender which you can blow up in one or two decent hits with your laser cannons, because that Imperial-Class, that Victory-Class or Interdictor or Raider-Class Star Destroyer behind them is mostly ignoring fighters laser cannons based on their high armor. You would be a lot more effective with your torpedos against those, while your laser weapons should be sufficient against enemy fighters.

Now I am not a fan of how easy the rules make it to require proton torpedos. Especially not when canon shows us what big of a deal gaining such supplies is. I think FFG screwed up in general in with their system for acquiring rare equipment because a skilled face character can acquire basically anything even on backwater planets on short notice. The mechanics seems to be unbalance in this regard.

edit:
BTW Odd that they never fixed snap roll. as pointed out last year already, damage control actions would allow you to keep doing the snap roll basically infinitive often, so all ships which have an astromech slot and a PC astromech become a lot tougher. All freighters become basically immune to standard TIE-Fighters. Now it is not totally movie unlike, Han could take a lot of incoming turbolaser fighter from an ISD, but it might break the game at several points and changes the game for sure in a very dramatic way.

Still it most certainly achieves the wanted effect of making space combat a bullet sponge encounter style.

I like the Snap Roll mechanic but yes, a freighter full of PC's taking Damage Control every round can break the game. What if that strain cannot be recovered in combat? What if you can only recover 1 strain per round of that loss? That would require a "separate" account of strain ofc but may balance things a little bit.

I agree with the posters that state that the PC's will need to justify their use of missiles. In the case you quoted, they clearly outclassed the enemy in equipment and skill. It would be hard to justify the use of missiles against fighters here. Now if they were outnumbered 3 to 1, and used the missiles to even the odds, their officer probably won't mind as much. But a missile against a fighter is drastic overkill.

In today's Army, image what your officer would say if you used your squad's anti-tank missile to take out a jeep carrying 2 men. He'd be pissed, unless you could show him that 1 of the two men had a 50 cal pinning down your men, or you thought he was a suicide bomber, and you didn't have time to do anything else. Or worse, using an anti-tank missile against a squad of infantry.

1 hour ago, arunwe2012 said:

I like the Snap Roll mechanic but yes, a freighter full of PC's taking Damage Control every round can break the game. What if that strain cannot be recovered in combat? What if you can only recover 1 strain per round of that loss? That would require a "separate" account of strain ofc but may balance things a little bit.

And you end up with sil zero style fighters which are already avoiding nearly all hits and now become nearly immune to the few hits they do take.

Imagine a Nimbus with a PC astromech, g.suit and flight suit pilot/modder/rigger with tricky target, ECM, pseudo cloaking device and for the fun of it a nightshadow coating. The shot does not get easier than a daunting check with 4 setbacks and one upgrade and exceeds this often up to a formidable check with 3 or more upgrades and 6 or more setback dice. So hitting the thing becomes already rare and the ship can negate then 5 (pilot skill) + 4 (handling) + 3 (armor) damage on top.
With double evasive maneuvers and a few advantages spend on elusive or similar upgrades it becomes likely that the amount of despair literally kills an attacking ship with collisions into the environmental hazards or other ships around while being literally forced to shoot a few times before any damage can get through.

And the pilot does only gain very moderate strain while doing so either. If you add hotshot and remove for example the modder for that, you get a build which can take the ship strain onto the pilot via the High-G maneuver talent and simply snap roll forever as personal strain can be negated with just rolling enough advantages or the heal force power.

Adding another resource counter can solve that issues too, but than we are reaching the point when you might think that just rebuilding the piloting talent trees around a Snap Roll parry talent and just using the parry rules might be less trouble.
In general I do like the idea behind Snap Roll, but the system is very intertwined with all its mechanics and talent builds, so snap roll is not easy to integrate without breaking the game at other places. If your only goal is to make battles last longer than just increase HT and SS. If your goal is to prevent missile dominance in fighter combat, just limit Snap Roll use against weapons with Slow Firing and/or Limited Ammo. Or just downright against missile systems. Though personally i would not mind a way for fighters to reduce Turbolaser damage further.

1 hour ago, Edgookin said:

I agree with the posters that state that the PC's will need to justify their use of missiles. In the case you quoted, they clearly outclassed the enemy in equipment and skill. It would be hard to justify the use of missiles against fighters here. Now if they were outnumbered 3 to 1, and used the missiles to even the odds, their officer probably won't mind as much. But a missile against a fighter is drastic overkill.

In today's Army, image what your officer would say if you used your squad's anti-tank missile to take out a jeep carrying 2 men. He'd be pissed, unless you could show him that 1 of the two men had a 50 cal pinning down your men, or you thought he was a suicide bomber, and you didn't have time to do anything else. Or worse, using an anti-tank missile against a squad of infantry.

Please. The missile costs the same as repairing 1 point of HTT to your fighter, and those repairs take much longer than requisitioning replacement missiles. If firing missiles in a first strike prevents you from taking any damage, then it was worth it.

Remember, these are not modern missiles that cost tens of thousands of dollars (or more) each. You get five concussion missiles for the cost of a basic set of laminate armor. That's incredibly cheap. Trying to say the Empire won't like you using ordinance is a lame attempt to restrict a very reasonable action. The problem is that the mechanics for starfighter combat blow donkeys, and trying to reel it in by using costs doesn't make any sense when the costs for missiles is so low.

1 hour ago, SEApocalypse said:

the system is very intertwined with all its mechanics and talent builds, so snap roll is not easy to integrate without breaking the game at other places.

I really don't get the impression from the spacecraft combat rules that they wrote an intricate web of finely-tuned components and all our problems are because we're not running it with the delicate balance point in mind. I think they just wrote stuff that 'seemed right' and didn't playtest it as much as the personal scale combat.

11 minutes ago, Talkie Toaster said:

I really don't get the impression from the spacecraft combat rules that they wrote an intricate web of finely-tuned components and all our problems are because we're not running it with the delicate balance point in mind. I think they just wrote stuff that 'seemed right' and didn't playtest it as much as the personal scale combat.

Im sure it got more attention than capital scale ships. The Commodore is a red headed step child because the game handles cap ships so poorly in the foreground. In almost every case they are handled abstractly or even as terrain, so an entire spec that's supposed to mechanically interact with them just drips of failure.

Spaceship combat is just wonky in FFG Star Wars. It is the one major complaint I have about the system. I tried to write some rules that improved it a couple of years back, and I think it improved things, but in the end... it still is wonky.

21 minutes ago, Emperor Norton said:

It is the one major complaint I have about the system. I tried to write some rules that improved it a couple of years back, and I think it improved things, but in the end... it still is wonky.

These are great and I used them for a few sessions, but there hasn't been a lot of space combat lately. Thanks for reposting, I misplaced my copy.

1 hour ago, Emperor Norton said:

Spaceship combat is just wonky in FFG Star Wars. It is the one major complaint I have about the system. I tried to write some rules that improved it a couple of years back, and I think it improved things, but in the end... it still is wonky.

Spaceship combat is just personal scale combat with some bolt one. Behaves like melee really

Just now, Daeglan said:

Spaceship combat is just personal scale combat with some bolt one. Behaves like melee really

I'll admit that starship combat works fine in the game if you are working from the perspective of the players being in a freighter, but once you move to starfighter scale it turns into rocket tag.

Add in that y-wings are harder to hit than a-wings, the frankly (and this is the only part I think is truly broken) broken sensors rules (an X-Wing can actually move farther in one move than it can see with its sensors), the fact that no Cap ships in the system should ever need a fighter screen (A cap ship can take out a squadron of fighters at ranges so long that the fighters couldn't even tell it was there), and the whole thing just feels... off for the source material it is supposed to represent.

If it works for you, more power to you.

28 minutes ago, Emperor Norton said:

I'll admit that starship combat works fine in the game if you are working from the perspective of the players being in a freighter, but once you move to starfighter scale it turns into rocket tag.

Add in that y-wings are harder to hit than a-wings, the frankly (and this is the only part I think is truly broken) broken sensors rules (an X-Wing can actually move farther in one move than it can see with its sensors), the fact that no Cap ships in the system should ever need a fighter screen (A cap ship can take out a squadron of fighters at ranges so long that the fighters couldn't even tell it was there), and the whole thing just feels... off for the source material it is supposed to represent.

If it works for you, more power to you.

The source material shows straighter combat is rocket tag.

5 hours ago, Emperor Norton said:

Spaceship combat is just wonky in FFG Star Wars. It is the one major complaint I have about the system. I tried to write some rules that improved it a couple of years back, and I think it improved things, but in the end... it still is wonky.

Emperor Norton I didn't know of your rules, I've downloaded them and at first glance looks like a major improvement. Definitely going to try them next space combat. I love all of them, specially the smart use of sensors and Active Targeting.

One think keeps me wondering about, is using a Pilot's roll (as an out of turn incidental) to try to evade a hit. I know this can slow down things a lot, but maybe using it instead of changing shields to a passive defense like you propose in your document. So shields would still be black dice and now a Pilot roll (benefiting from high handling) vs number of hits can work to soak some damage? average for 1 success, hard for 2, etc. If success, you can soak 1 point of damage + 1 per success, or +1 additional per two advantages. A triumph allows you to soak half the damage automatically and counts as a success for soaking the rest. This would cause strain to both the ship and the pilot (3 minimum, can be more depending of number of successes in the initial combat check, this is a DM decision). The strain to the ship cannot be restored while in combat (has to be taken into account apart)

Just an idea.

10 minutes ago, arunwe2012 said:

Emperor Norton I didn't know of your rules, I've downloaded them and at first glance looks like a major improvement. Definitely going to try them next space combat. I love all of them, specially the smart use of sensors and Active Targeting.

One think keeps me wondering about, is using a Pilot's roll (as an out of turn incidental) to try to evade a hit. I know this can slow down things a lot, but maybe using it instead of changing shields to a passive defense like you propose in your document. So shields would still be black dice and now a Pilot roll (benefiting from high handling) vs number of hits can work to soak some damage? average for 1 success, hard for 2, etc. If success, you can soak 1 point of damage + 1 per success, or +1 additional per two advantages. A triumph allows you to soak half the damage automatically and counts as a success for soaking the rest. This would cause strain to both the ship and the pilot (3 minimum, can be more depending of number of successes in the initial combat check, this is a DM decision). The strain to the ship cannot be restored while in combat (has to be taken into account apart)

Just an idea.

Adding extra checks will slow down combat. Also, you end up with an odd situation where shields make hits less likely but don't reduce their damage, whilst piloting well does nothing to avoid hits but mitigates their impact. Plus adding a second type of system strain is a bit iffy.

Honestly, as long as you limit Damage Control to 1/round I don't think you need to worry about PCs tanking too much damage. Rebel ships with astromechs that can damage control each round becoming durable regen machines is perfectly fitting with how FFG handle them in X-Wing. May not *quite* fit with the portrayal in the movies but it creates fun gameplay.

Limiting damage control to one per round only works if the results are proportionate to the size of vessel. Repairing 2 SS on a fighter is great, repairing 2 SS on a Mon Cal cruiser is a bad joke.

I jhave always thought that the rules should be for player interaction scale. A MonCal cruiser goes well above what most of us (I guess) will have under our command and control on a regular basis, so rules for how a MonCal cruiser should be repaired are not be a thing that player scale rules should reflect. Not for my table, at lweast. YMMV Fighter, or freighter, that is it for me

I am following you all intently on these startship topics. We are fleshing up a campaign for an explorer in an A24 sleuth, so it is relevant for us. Seems a hot issue and having no experience at all in this kind of combat I am looking forward to see what possible agreed fixes are. However, the fact that a fighter can resist few hits is not a problem IMO, since this is what the movies seem to show. If you cannot dodge, you die. Except if you are Luke.

My own very opersonal take on what the shields seem to reflect in the old trilogy (my reference point; have not seen tep 1-3 since... 2005 or so) seem to show that ships get their shields degraded, but they take a lot of punishment out of the hull until that happens. Once shields are busted the ship takes massive ammounts of damage per hit (lethal for fighters, criticals for freighters). Remember that TIEs do not ahve shields, so they simply die if hit.

Cheers,

Xavi

1 hour ago, MonCal said:

I jhave always thought that the rules should be for player interaction scale. A MonCal cruiser goes well above what most of us (I guess) will have under our command and control on a regular basis, so rules for how a MonCal cruiser should be repaired are not be a thing that player scale rules should reflect. Not for my table, at lweast. YMMV Fighter, or freighter, that is it for me

I am following you all intently on these startship topics. We are fleshing up a campaign for an explorer in an A24 sleuth, so it is relevant for us. Seems a hot issue and having no experience at all in this kind of combat I am looking forward to see what possible agreed fixes are. However, the fact that a fighter can resist few hits is not a problem IMO, since this is what the movies seem to show. If you cannot dodge, you die. Except if you are Luke.

My own very opersonal take on what the shields seem to reflect in the old trilogy (my reference point; have not seen tep 1-3 since... 2005 or so) seem to show that ships get their shields degraded, but they take a lot of punishment out of the hull until that happens. Once shields are busted the ship takes massive ammounts of damage per hit (lethal for fighters, criticals for freighters). Remember that TIEs do not ahve shields, so they simply die if hit.

Cheers,

Xavi

Aye, that is what the rules are assuming, but I fondly recall Pirates & Privateers and I'd be happy with a PC group running a smaller capital ship (CR90, Hammerhead, or even a Nebulon-B). I just wish the rules for it were more well developed.