I'm going to be running an Imperials game soon, and am considering a number of house rules on Starship combat. I'm looking for some feedback both in general as well as specifically on potential unintended consequences (except for increased complexity, which the table is both aware of and not troubled by.)

Rather than comparing silhouette vs. silhouette for shooting difficulty, compare the sum of handling & either piloting skill or knowledge warfare of the ship's pilot/commander (piloting for ships of silhouette 4 or less, knowledge warfare for silhouette 5+) Minion groups would count as having a skill of 1. Mods/talents that change effective silhouette would change effective piloting/knowledge warfare. The intent here is to make space combat less of a glass cannon situation for PCs/ named antagonist types, as well as encourage increasing the mentioned skills.

We'll be using miniatures on a table, so movement will be speed in inches/turn. I'm thinking that close range is 0-3 inches, short is 3-6, medium 6-12, long is 12-18 and extreme is anything beyond that. I'm considering changing your facing more than 90 or 180 degrees to require piloting checks of difficulty 2 or 3, respectively. Gain the advantage would still work to choose defense zone regardless of what the angle of on the table is. Using minis on the table makes firing arcs/shield quadrants clearer/more tactical.

Upgrade difficulty of attacks by 1 for each ranged band beyond close for most weapons. For turbolasers/ion equivalent, upgrade difficulty of attacks at close by 1, and for each range band beyond short by 1. The intent is to make both "snipering" when opponents are outranged less effective, as well as to reflect the difficulty of traversing what are effectively battleship cannons at close range.

Comms/sensor range is the range at which it's a difficulty 2 check to detect another ship. Increase the difficulty by 1 for each range band beyond that. As the PCs will be on the side of customs enforcement, there needs to be a mechanic other than "if they're in range, you see them."

Mass combat will hopefully see the table, as I intend to increase scope greatly over the course of the campaign. Rather than having turning points affect mass combat rolls, I'm thinking of doing the reverse- successes/advantage on mass combat add boost/setback dice or upgrade difficulties of tasks depending on who wins... then the entire battle would be determined by the result of the turning point. The goal is to put the spotlight in a mass battle even more on the PCs without resorting to putting too many minis on the table for a mass battle.

Thoughts, or glaring issues that might crop up?

Stuff will crop up, you're designing a new system.

Why not just use Armada or Xwing rules? Increased complexity is going to lead to long fights, seems like a tactical simulator is what you're looking for.

54 minutes ago, ugthak said:

The intent here is to make space combat less of a glass cannon situation for PCs/ named antagonist types

You seen the Squadron rules? Pretty much written to allow the players to lead TIE squadrons and live to tell about it.

I think you have a good set of assumptions for these alternate rules.

I would think that the narrative dice pools would be relatively easy to assemble.

Using the opposed pilots skill as the base for the attacker's opposition will definitely favor well skilled pilots, but that would seem to model aerial combat pretty well. So most mooks would be targeted with an opposition of RP (Red Purple).

If a target ship has a Positive handling rating just add an equal number of black dice to the pool & if the handling is negative, that would add blue dice to the attackers pool.

And I would recommend increasing the difficulty (not upgrading difficulty) of attacks based on range. So Close Range adds no difficulty, Short range adds 1 purple, Medium Range adds 2 purple, and Long would increase difficulty by 3 purple. This makes a lot of sense. I like it.

So by way of clarification, is this what you are thinking of doing? If so, this doesn't sound all that difficult to me and I'd be interested to hear about how this system works for your group. We're using the starship combat rules as written, but the group is using Sil 4 freighters vs mostly TIE Fighters and those TIE's tend to die rather quickly. (One hit is usually sufficient to take out a TIE Fighter. Kind of like how the Mitsubishi Zeros would light up like a fourth of July firework if you hit it with a single incendiary round).

And on pain of repeating myself, I think this would be a better mechanic overall. Not bad. And by keeping the existing rules, to further encourage survivability, I think you have a good model.

@2P51 Running an RPG rather than a regular tabletop minis night is the goal (and unless the players decide to go all-in on vehicle focused PCs starship combat is unlikely to happen every session.) Swapping out on those occasions and using the X-Wing and Armada rules isn't an option as they don't "mesh" with the PCs stats in the RPG, unfortunately- that would have been an absolutely amazing feat to have pulled off from a design perspective, so I don't fault FFG in the slightest for not attempting to make it happen.

@Ghostofman Thanks for pointing those out- I hadn't looked them over. I definitely like them as a whole- the feeling of throwing away the lives of tie fighter pilots definitely fits some of the themes that will be involved in an Imperial campaign. The downside is the feeling of invulnerability the PCs will have until their wingmen are all shot down, which I'm less excited about. Also of concern would be needing to always place them in a larger squadron environment, which might not be the narrative place where I'd like to go. I'm definitely going to consider this as a top tier option, both in addition to my original idea as well as an alternative to them.

@Mark Caliber The opposed skill roll with black and blue dice for handling is a slightly different interpretation of what I was going for- I was going to add silhouette plus handling together then use that as the number on the existing "compare the silhouette" difficulty chart, for a base difficulty that only had purple dice. I also like what you've suggested, and I'm likely to do a test run before the campaign to see how both my original idea and your idea work. In the context of your idea, increasing rather than upgrading difficulty for range is definitely better as there would already be some red dice on the table. As originally written, the highest possible difficulty would be PPRRR, for a superior ship/skill at range. A concern with using opposed skill and adding range on afterwards, is that the PCs could get it very high very fast... with cybernetics an agility 7 piloting 5 character would be almost impossible to hit, and would take shockingly few xp to make happen (and is absolutely something that would be done. I'm expecting some power gaming at the table and am not troubled by that in the slightest, but no need to make it easy for them.) A third alternative would be to use skill rating alone as the difficulty, upgrading with range, then add handling as black/blue dice as you suggested. I'll let you know how this works for our group, with the caveat that the campaign itself won't start until the fall.

The starting resource choice on the table is going to be a Lambda, some tie interceptors (based on a Gozanti commanded by an NPC, because hyperspace) or a berth on a Victory (where they'll get carted around to hot spots, though with much less autonomy.) I wanted to have something in place before they chose their starting resource so that the choice of interceptors wouldn't be looked at as the death sentence they are in RAW.

Thanks all for the feedback, I appreciate everyone's ideas!

Cool, I'm interested in hearing about your findings.

Thanks.

On ‎8‎/‎16‎/‎2018 at 6:18 PM, Mark Caliber said:

Cool, I'm interested in hearing about your findings.

Thanks.

I second this.

I've theorycrafted some ideas around making ships a bit tougher. One thought was to give each ship 5 HP per shield point.

Another was to change linked so that it was the number that you increase dice by rather than extra hits. So for example, with linked 1 each net success would increase damage by 2 rather than 1. Linked 3 would increase it by 4, etc. The idea was to reign in some of the deadliness of the weapons. Attacks are narrative so it felt like it fit the game better.

I also considered a few ways to use handling as a way to modify the dice pool. I like the setback/boost idea, but using it to affect the base pool could work too.

I've seen mention, but haven't read myself, of a few ideas others use like "snap roles" and such. I've seen comments that they really help to bring piloting skills into play. I need to look at them one of these days.

To follow up here after we did some playtesting - unsurprisingly, we ended up differently than the initial plan. What we landed on was this:

Kept the difficulty tied to silhouette differences as normal.

Find the difference between the handling of attacking and defending ship, then add that many blue or black dice as appropriate (so, an x-wing attacking a tie fighter has two black dice in the pool, while a tie attacking an x-wing has 2 blue dice.)

Each range band past close, upgrade the difficulty by 1.

Shields act as armor instead of adding black dice.

For Silhouette 4 and under ships - for each rank of piloting, increase armor and hull trauma by 1. For minion groups this counts as 1 (regardless of how many are left.)

For Silhouette 5 and over ships - identical as above, but using knowledge (warfare) instead of piloting.

The net effect of this is that ships are far less fragile, and there's a "rock-paper-scissors" effect of different size ships in the same battle. It very much rewards pilot-focused characters in terms of "letting them shine," but that cuts both ways with enemy aces. Crucially, while x-wings and tie fighters are very much still a threat to each other, tie fighters are no longer an uncompromising death trap for PCs- which was my single biggest goal here, though I'm likely to use the same modifications in any other starfighter focused campaign.

14 minutes ago, ugthak said:

To follow up here after we did some playtesting - unsurprisingly, we ended up differently than the initial plan. What we landed on was this:

Kept the difficulty tied to silhouette differences as normal.

Find the difference between the handling of attacking and defending ship, then add that many blue or black dice as appropriate (so, an x-wing attacking a tie fighter has two black dice in the pool, while a tie attacking an x-wing has 2 blue dice.)

Each range band past close, upgrade the difficulty by 1.

Shields act as armor instead of adding black dice.

For Silhouette 4 and under ships - for each rank of piloting, increase armor and hull trauma by 1. For minion groups this counts as 1 (regardless of how many are left.)

For Silhouette 5 and over ships - identical as above, but using knowledge (warfare) instead of piloting.

The net effect of this is that ships are far less fragile, and there's a "rock-paper-scissors" effect of different size ships in the same battle. It very much rewards pilot-focused characters in terms of "letting them shine," but that cuts both ways with enemy aces. Crucially, while x-wings and tie fighters are very much still a threat to each other, tie fighters are no longer an uncompromising death trap for PCs- which was my single biggest goal here, though I'm likely to use the same modifications in any other starfighter focused campaign.

There’s one major flaw in your rule on Sil 5 ships. Not all Sil 5 ships are capital ships with large crews. You also have medium freighters, such as the VCX-100, YZ-775, and my personal favorite, the YZ-900. These are all piloted by a single pilot and co-pilot, with a small number of other crew, not a massive bridge crew commanded by a “commander” (be he a Captain or Admiral) simply directing their actions, like on a Star Destroyer.

1 hour ago, Tramp Graphics said:

There’s one major flaw in your rule on Sil 5 ships. Not all Sil 5 ships are capital ships with large crews. You also have medium freighters, such as the VCX-100, YZ-775, and my personal favorite, the YZ-900. These are all piloted by a single pilot and co-pilot, with a small number of other crew, not a massive bridge crew commanded by a “commander” (be he a Captain or Admiral) simply directing their actions, like on a Star Destroyer.

Just make a distinction between the two varieties of sil 5 ships, maybe a sil 5 and a sil 5.5. Treat the smaller sil 5 ships you’re referencing as sil 4 and continue on as normal.

@ugthak gotta say I like where your head is at. I have been brainstorming more tactical style of rules for larger space combats too. I’d been considering using a hex map and basing turning on handling and speed, but I like your idea a bit better.

Depending on the scale you’re playing at I’d consider doubling the range bands to spread things out a bit more, but yours will work fine if the ship models/tokens are pretty darned small.

Let us know how your system plays out, because I may just knick it for myself ? .

7 hours ago, ugthak said:

To follow up here after we did some playtesting - unsurprisingly, we ended up differently than the initial plan. What we landed on was this:

Kept the difficulty tied to silhouette differences as normal.

Find the difference between the handling of attacking and defending ship, then add that many blue or black dice as appropriate (so, an x-wing attacking a tie fighter has two black dice in the pool, while a tie attacking an x-wing has 2 blue dice.)

Each range band past close, upgrade the difficulty by 1.

Shields act as armor instead of adding black dice.

For Silhouette 4 and under ships - for each rank of piloting, increase armor and hull trauma by 1. For minion groups this counts as 1 (regardless of how many are left.)

For Silhouette 5 and over ships - identical as above, but using knowledge (warfare) instead of piloting.

The net effect of this is that ships are far less fragile, and there's a "rock-paper-scissors" effect of different size ships in the same battle. It very much rewards pilot-focused characters in terms of "letting them shine," but that cuts both ways with enemy aces. Crucially, while x-wings and tie fighters are very much still a threat to each other, tie fighters are no longer an uncompromising death trap for PCs- which was my single biggest goal here, though I'm likely to use the same modifications in any other starfighter focused campaign.

2

Just looking at this, did you adjust weapon damages? Just thinking of

Y-wing, Pilot skill 2, Shields 1 (if not rearranged), Base armor 3. Yields Net Armor of 6? Up to 10 (with skill 5, and boosted or rearranged shields)?

TIE Fighter, Pilot 2, 0 Shields, Base armor 2. Yields net armor 4? Up to 8?

The base guns on both ships do 6 damage, which will whittle down a TIE in 2-3 shots instead of 1-2. But suddenly, the Y-wing goes from surviving 2-3 shots, to surviving 5-10 shots, increasing to virtually invulnerable (needing 5 successes to scratch 10 armor).

And none of that includes mods, or rigger talent adjustments.

Have you tried battles beyond starting characters? My initial reaction says that any pilot would be a fool not to max his pilot skill immediately, ignoring all pilot based talents until reaching rank 5 pilot.

I do like the shields acting as armor. They seem rather underpowered to only add defense dice.

@Tramp Graphics I'm drawing the line at Silhouette 5 because that's where small capital ships such as the Corellian Corvette and Lancer Frigate are. As I both expect the campaign to reach a point where the PCs have access to ships such as this and want them to feel different than starfighters, that made the most sense to me. Edge cases like the ships you mentioned (which are already so out of place at Silhouette 5 that some users on the forum have already mentioned house-ruling them to silhouette 4) don't trouble me much, both because the PCs won't be flying freighters in this campaign and because even if they were they'd already be avoiding them in favor of a low a silhouette ship to make themselves harder to hit. If there is a strong attachment to these specific ships, I'd be more likely to revisit their stat lines individually on PC request than a different solution.

@ghatt Basing turning on handling/speed as you were thinking was something we considered... what ended up coming up, though, was the added time it took for ships to come about, which just takes up too much of a session to be worth it- any PC round spent only on turning around definitely doesn't match the "rule of cool." For range, I'm using Armada ships (due to wanting the campaign to finish at a pretty large scale and so being able to put an Imperial ISD on the table eventually matters.) For some campaigns that would be the wrong choice and so I agree X-Wing scale/different range band distances is something to really think about.

@Edgookin I did not adjust weapon damages, as a large part of the intent was to make survivability for PCs more reliable even at the cost of making NPCs harder to shoot down. Your math on the Y-Wing and Tie fighter is spot on to what I'm describing doing. The Y-Wing you describe with an armor of 6 would already be above average (with minion groups making up the majority of fighters to ever hit the board) and would likely be targeted by a starting PC (3 agility, 2 gunnery) in a tie fighter at , which makes pretty short work even at 6 armor. You're correct that increasing piloting would become a very high priority for a pilot character... which I think is a feature not a bug. At higher levels, adding talents that enhance this and then putting mods on things, you're correct that minion groups or "average" level aces become minor concerns- though even at 10 armor a minion group is not completely trivial, either due to ordnance (which has significant breach) or just sheer number of dice that a minion group gets. With the amount of XP you're throwing at that single speciality, though, minions/ordinary pilots should be reduced to minor concerns at that point. Once you're that beefed up, these are the characters that are making the equivalent of trench runs and such - the challenges such characters face in their area of expertise are either heroic in scale or named nemesis... the latter of which benefit just as much as the PCs do from their skills.

You've got some interesting ideas.

One that we've tried and tested for multiple battles is increasing the advantage needed to activate linked (or autofire in personal combat) by the number of red dice rolled to hit the target.

So an X-Wing that is at high speed and performing evasive maneuvers might have 2 red dice in its defensive pool. When the TIE Fighter shooting it hits he needs 4 advantage to activate linked with his lasers (2 base plus 2 for the defensive upgrades). This has had the effect of making starfighter combat much less instantly lethal for PCs and named NPCs while allowing minion groups to be plowed through. The high cost of activating also makes it easier to choose to spend the advantage on something else (like a crit which is more interesting if ultimately less effective than doubling damage).

We also do use the "snap roll" rules allowing the pilot to spend 3 systems strain to reduce damage from a single hit by ranks in piloting. It's been very well received.