I'm thinking of resuming my work with porting Starfinder "Dead Suns" to Genesys, and wanted to cherry pick the best Star Wars rules and supplements for

• ship building
• ship combat options
• good ship examples
• a more elaborate list of gear and attachments than in the core SW books.

Does anyone have recommendations for the best of the supplements that I can pick up? I don't want to buy them all since we're not actually going to be playing Star Wars. I just need mechanical inspiration. I have the Edge and Rebellion core books, so I already have a decent launching point for Genesys.

Recommendations for existing Geneysis home brews is good too. I'm already planning to mine nuggets from GM Huzz's Sci-Fi Armory as well as Tom Cruise's Dark Heresy.

Off the top of my head, Special Modifications for Edge is excellent for crafting gear, droids and attachments and the like. I think Fully Operational for Age has the full vehicle creation and modding rules too. Between those two, I think you should have everything you need, or at least a really solid starting point.

Ship building is a mess. Star Wars' crafting, compared to RoT crafting, can be very unbalanced.

Poorly thought out vehicle design in Star Wars is one of the leading causes behind the messy vehicle rules and headaches therein. Vehicles in the silhouette 4-5 range are typically fine, but smaller vehicles like fighters can be problematic, and vehicles silhouette 6+ are basically scenery. Chase rules are functional though.

A lot of the small-scale gear is pretty nice, though there may be some redundant options. Things like the intelligent toolbox and the weapon maintenance kit are fun for what they do, but it can feel very min/max if mishandled. For example, there are tool kits, custom tool kits, and tool belts. The latter two options are better overall, but more expensive. It can feel like gear tiers.

I personally like Star Wars' cybernetic rules more than what Genesys offers (except for the whole ion shenanigans). Special Modifications and Lords of Nal Hutta offer the most options for cybernetics.

thanks!

I could swear I read about a revamping of the ship combat rules in a later book, but I think Edge and Rebellion look identical. Was something officially errata'ed? I realize this isn't the SW forum, but I'd say the topic is useful to anyone running space opera.

The only thing I noticed was it was dangerous as **** to fly a starfighter. While that may be more "realistic" it's not really more Star Wars-y, where any significant character flying a flghter was either guaranteed to survive a battle of any size, or would die in a spectacularly heroic fashion. I toyed with just having space combat act like a series of tests rather than PC's/NPC's encased in statted vehicles that can explode when the dice go south.

1 minute ago, Dragonshadow said:

thanks!

I could swear I read about a revamping of the ship combat rules in a later book, but I think Edge and Rebellion look identical. Was something officially errata'ed? I realize this isn't the SW forum, but I'd say the topic is useful to anyone running space opera.

The only thing I noticed was it was dangerous as **** to fly a starfighter. While that may be more "realistic" it's not really more Star Wars-y, where any significant character flying a flghter was either guaranteed to survive a battle of any size, or would die in a spectacularly heroic fashion. I toyed with just having space combat act like a series of tests rather than PC's/NPC's encased in statted vehicles that can explode when the dice go south.

There were some additions to AoR's rules, but not significantly to really be called a "revamp." Stay on Target offered some extra rules that aided things, but the core problems weren't fixed. Genesys' rules can be seen as a true attempt at fixing some problems. The AoR GM screen also offered the squad/squadron rules, which does make things a little longer-lasting, but many players don't like the idea of sacrificing their NPC allies to hold off dying.

The biggest problem with vehicles is relatively high damage and relatively low defenses. Vehicle-scale is 10 to personal scale's 1. Rules-wise, this means the game plays the same way across the board. This is a good design philosophy, but it causes problems with scaling, which I think is unavoidable.

Think of it this way: a starfighter is essentially a character. It has wounds, strain, and soak. For all intents and purposes, these values mean the same thing regardless of whether you are on the ground or in a vehicle. The problem is the values of vehicle hull/strain/armor is really low compared to a PC. Like, lower than pre-character generation characters. If a human has a minimum of 12 wounds, 12 strain, and 3 soak (after wearing heavy clothes), a starfighter's are 10 hull, 8 system strain, and 2 armor. And of course, PCs can raise these values naturally during a campaign, while vehicles mostly remain static, outside of a small handful of very expensive areas. Compounding this problem is vehicle weapons do higher damage than average; laser cannons either have a base damage of 5 or 6, which means they do a minimum of 6 or 7 damage per hit. However, they have linked almost on all ships, so for 2 advantage, all damage is doubled.

Swordbreaker, as an aside, you mentioned chase rules. It's been a while since I've cracked open the core books. Are the rules detailed therein or are they too in a supplement? Genesys core seemed pretty skimpy on such rules.

1 minute ago, Dragonshadow said:

Swordbreaker, as an aside, you mentioned chase rules. It's been a while since I've cracked open the core books. Are the rules detailed therein or are they too in a supplement? Genesys core seemed pretty skimpy on such rules.

It's in every Star Wars core rulebook, in the vehicle section. P. 255 of Age of Rebellion.