We start our first game Tuesday night and I'm stoked. Main issue I'm wrestling with right now though is what is the role of the Astropath during ship to ship combat. So far, we have four in our group, the RT, an Arch-Militant (who will be acting as gunner in ship combat), and a doctor/assassin character who can spend ship combat turns doing triage. But the poor astropath in the group, I can't figure out what his role will be, and I don't want any players sitting out entire combats just because of the role they play.

Thoughts?

The astropath might be the right guy to handle the sensors and related tasks...

just an idea

Every character can only do one thing. Giving commands, firing a set of guns, maneuvring the ship. Repairing the ship. For example, you will have two sets of guns. The Arch millitant can fire one of them, no more.

The archmilitant may only be able to fire one gun, but the astropath is certainly not competent to fire any additional ones! His BS is worse than the crew. Heh.

As for sensors that takes skills that he also does not have.

I was hoping for a 'oh he can use <power here> to do ship to ship sensory things' or some such. I'll be reviewing the telepath rules and seeing if anything seems appropriate.

Sorry Sister Callidia but I may have to stop you there and direct you to page 219 of the RT core book where it clearly states "Characters may direct thre fire of more than one Weapon Component. This means th one character may direct all of the ship's weapons fire, although different Weapons Components may be fired by different characters if the party chooses".

The thing to remember is that the ship has quite possibly 10's o even 100's of guns on their ship whih all fall under the one component. The character isn't actually firing the guns themselves, they are more directing the gunning crews by providing optimal firing solutions and such.

Just thought I'd mention that. Carry on, troops!

If you can't find a regular ship function for the Astropath to manage, you might want to add something extra to give him a part. Perhaps the other ship has psyker's that are tryin to mess with your crew, or perhaps an enemy psyker boards on a hit and run attack. I think there are a lot of options outside of the regular ship combat actions.

The easiest way to handle this is to give the player a free skill advance or let him by a skill as an elite advance to allow him to fill in a missing role. As they generally have good per give him the skill for sensors (awareness I think?). Also consider what skills he has, and maybe let him use that. For example I let people use tech use to operate sensors....

Isn't it there job to interpret the feelings of the crew on the enemy ship and share that information with the rogue trader in inane and obvious ways?

...or is that an Empath....and Star Trek Next Gen...

Aside from possibilities such as using the down-time in combat rounds to hail the enemy psychically (hell, if you've got a choir as back-up, it might even be possible to puppet-master an officer on the enemy ship), there's stuff like Dis-information, or even Hold Fast! (and thanks to telepathy, that message is gonna get to every crewman). If you've got the Divination discipline, it should be possible (again, if boosted by a choir [house rule]) to apply Harm's Way, Blessed By The Emperor or Walking the Path to starship combat...

Thanks for all the insights all. For now I think I'm going to let him help out by rolling some of the NPC roles (there is no PC Navigator, Explorator, or Voidsman) so that should let him 'participate' until he can an advance (elite or otherwise) on something that will help in ship to ship combat.

Actually turns out sensors use a basic skil, so that may end up his role.

jtwing said:

So just FYI, since we had no navigator, and that seemed a more vital role for a PC, he decided to play the navigator instead. Still looking for a good role for him in ship battles, he spent the entire first ship battle as sensor guy, which he did not mind, just needs to pick up Scrutiny. His main issue was why would he ever use his Navigator Void sensing power (name escapes me) when he has ship sensors that can do the same.

I told him it was a different action all together. Now that it is the next day, I think I will allow the Navigator power to give him a bonus to sensing things in that range.

The void sensing power is useful if you aren't on the ship or the sensors are damaged. That said the warp that allows you to track thing through the warp seems much more useful.

I'm going to allow him to get a bonus to sensor roles after a successful void watch power usage, since he knows something is there and can direct the sensors at it.

I suspect he will his next 500 xp (at least partially) on scrutiny so he can stop making sensor rolls at half. And of course as a navigator his perception is really high, plus the sensors he was still rolling against a 45 while using it untrained. After his last advance, he has a 53 perception so will be rolling 47 while untrained and then 74 once trained (yikes). Then if something is in range of his sensing power (I'm looking at you mine in Into the Maw) he will get a bonus based on how many degrees of success he gets on his void watch.

I foresee him being able to pick up the number of gnats on an ork captains rear soon.

He should probably get a bonus to hail other ships too, since that is kind of his specialty! Just a thought.

I'm going to allow him to get a bonus to sensor roles after a successful void watch power usage, since he knows something is there and can direct the sensors at it.

There are another few bonuses to it: Firstly, a Master's void watcher power has about five more VUs of range than ship sensors (assuming a Perception Bonus of 5, it's 25 vs 20). Secondly, it's pretty much a free reroll, assuming that Void Watcher is a half-action power like the other Navigator powers and doesn't exactly compare to the half-hour durations of other Ship Combat actions, although I'd limit it to one free Watching per turn. Thirdly, it allows you to skimp on the ship sensors, taking either the M-100 or the R-50 for the lower energy cost and still being able to see something.