Been working on sprucing up ship combat with a load of house rules, including plenty of stuff from these forums (thanks to all, BTW).

One of the things I want to do is to bring the party mechanic into space combat a bit more. I'm thinking of Han Solo running around the Millennium Falcon trying to fix the hyperdrive while dodging TIE fighter blasts, or Kaylee setting Serenity up for a crazy ivan - trying to capture that slightly mad feeling of being down in engineering, rewiring things and putting out fires and staggering around in a Star Trek way when the ship gets hit.

I was playing Captain Sonar recently, and one thing I quite liked was the way different components went offline and had to be repaired in order to be used (albeit in a somewhat abstract way). I was thinking that instead of each ship having System Strain, each system (e.g. shields, hyperdrive, sublight engines, etc.) would have System Strain. Over the course of a combat, the ship's mechanic would have to work to keep different systems operational, either by repairing the System Strain or simply redistributing it, deciding which system was most important. If a system exceeded its threshold, it would go offline; maybe if it exceeded its threshold, it would suffer a Component Critical hit. This would give the mechanic some actual decisions to make, rather than simply "make a generic Mechanics check".

Anyone have any thoughts on how that might work/not work?

That's going to be a lot of extra bookkeeping. It reminds me of some of the Palladium games where every location of a ship/vehicle/mecha had MDC capacity but 90% of the time nobody cared about anything but the "Main Body" anyway. Also, are you intending to do the same for NPC ships? Either way, it's going to get really cumbersome as soon as the PCs are using 2+ ships (which is something that starts to make starship/vehicle combat more interesting--and survivable).

My initial gut feeling is that it would risk slowing down the action if during a high-energy space battle the Mechanic is spending his turn trying to puzzle out the optimal distribution of their remaining System Strain between the different components.

An easier way to capture the frenetic craziness of trying to keep a ship together whilst under attack is to make creative use of Threat/Advantage and GM/player description. For example, his first "generic Mechanics check" could be focused on keeping the turrets from overheating but - oh no! - that Threat he generated means the engines are now at risk of combustion and he's going to have to spend a manuever sprinting to the other end of the ship and he has to blindly navigate his way through the now smoke-filled engine room before he can make his next Mechanics check to get the situation under control again.

Sounds interesting. I like where your head is at, it just needs some refinement. Kualan has some great advice. This is beginning to sound similar to the Critical Hit chart. Perhaps you could leverage that in some way. Or come up with a chart of your own to roll on.

1 hour ago, HappyDaze said:

That's going to be a lot of extra bookkeeping. It reminds me of some of the Palladium games where every location of a ship/vehicle/mecha had MDC capacity but 90% of the time nobody cared about anything but the "Main Body" anyway. Also, are you intending to do the same for NPC ships? Either way, it's going to get really cumbersome as soon as the PCs are using 2+ ships (which is something that starts to make starship/vehicle combat more interesting--and survivable).

Hmm. I don’t mind a little bit extra book-keeping, and I don’t anticipate the “only worried about Main body”’problem with the way I’m going to break it down. However, you’re right that I haven’t thought about how I’m going to extend this to NPCs, or multiple PC ships. Good point. Will think.

1 hour ago, Kualan said:

My initial gut feeling is that it would risk slowing down the action if during a high-energy space battle the Mechanic is spending his turn trying to puzzle out the optimal distribution of their remaining System Strain between the different components.

An easier way to capture the frenetic craziness of trying to keep a ship together whilst under attack is to make creative use of Threat/Advantage and GM/player description. For example, his first "generic Mechanics check" could be focused on keeping the turrets from overheating but - oh no! - that Threat he generated means the engines are now at risk of combustion and he's going to have to spend a manuever sprinting to the other end of the ship and he has to blindly navigate his way through the now smoke-filled engine room before he can make his next Mechanics check to get the situation under control again.

Yeah, it could slow things down a bit, but I want to give the engineer some actual decisions - I would keep it simple enough that “puzzling out” wouldn’t necessarily take too long, but while I really like your narrative suggestions, they don’t actually give the engineer any decision to make: it’s just the GM saying what happens, and the engineer having no real choice but to fix it. Does that make sense?

Your idea can definitely be designed for a game, though Star Wars and FFG SWRPG present mechanical and setting challenges.

Mechanically, most ships will suffer serious Hull Trauma before system power balance/repair opportunities become interesting, at which point I think HappyDaze is right that the players will focus on saving the ship and their characters' lives. Thematically, there's risk that power balance can feel a little like managing leaks in a man-of-war taking water. I'll opine here that Nineties-early-Aughts Star Trek really overdid it with the "Shields at 53 percent! Oof — now, 34 ¼ percent!" stuff, and that narrative emphasis in neo-BSG, where Galactica got hit by nuclear warheads but viewers were instead engaged by story and character stakes, finally broke that tedium. (I can't believe somebody let the "Shields at 70 percent" line stand for Rogue One. Ugh.)

As Kaosoe suggests, a strictly component-based critical hit chart may be the way to go. FFG already has guidelines for equipment damage, so through use of Damage Control, a character could use Mechanics to reverse effects of malfunctioning or inoperative systems. Similar play experience but simpler and more consistent with RAW.

Edit: Just saw your new post. "[T]he engineer having no real choice but to fix it." What if characters could recover more System Strain than RAW Damage Control for the price of component damage?

33 minutes ago, wilsch said:

Your idea can definitely be designed for a game, though Star Wars and FFG SWRPG present mechanical and setting challenges.

Mechanically, most ships will suffer serious Hull Trauma before system power balance/repair opportunities become interesting, at which point I think HappyDaze is right that the players will focus on saving the ship and their characters' lives. Thematically, there's risk that power balance can feel a little like managing leaks in a man-of-war taking water. I'll opine here that Nineties-early-Aughts Star Trek really overdid it with the "Shields at 53 percent! Oof — now, 34 ¼ percent!" stuff, and that narrative emphasis in neo-BSG, where Galactica got hit by nuclear warheads but viewers were instead engaged by story and character stakes, finally broke that tedium. (I can't believe somebody let the "Shields at 70 percent" line stand for Rogue One. Ugh.)

As Kaosoe suggests, a strictly component-based critical hit chart may be the way to go. FFG already has guidelines for equipment damage, so through use of Damage Control, a character could use Mechanics to reverse effects of malfunctioning or inoperative systems. Similar play experience but simpler and more consistent with RAW.

Edit: Just saw your new post. "[T]he engineer having no real choice but to fix it." What if characters could recover more System Strain than RAW Damage Control for the price of component damage?

The idea of sacrificing component damage for a reduction in the HT or SST of an attack isn't inherently a bad one, but it does again make things more complicated if NPCs can do it too. Players are going to be annoyed if they have to blast through their opponents' communications, landing gear, shields, escape pods, etc. before they can get a kill. Sure, you could limit this to just PC ships, and with a narrative game that can work fine, but I tend to dislike unnecessarily asymmetric systems with PC/NPC divisions. In any event, I think this would be a great use of Destiny Points along with a chart listing what can be sacrificed along with how many HT/SST it mitigates and the repair difficulty (plus cost) to fix it.

1 hour ago, HappyDaze said:

The idea of sacrificing component damage for a reduction in the HT or SST of an attack isn't inherently a bad one, but it does again make things more complicated if NPCs can do it too.

Oh, definitely. I'm okay with asymmetry, though, my fig leaf being the Minion/Rival/Adversary breakdown. In my own (different, I don't use component sacrifice) house rules for vehicle combat and actual GMing, I try to reserve anything complicated for the most important enemies.

As far as component disablement, I'm still in agreement with you that at best it adds flavor; Star Wars is about simply blasting stuff.

3 hours ago, HappyDaze said:

The idea of sacrificing component damage for a reduction in the HT or SST of an attack isn't inherently a bad one, but it does again make things more complicated if NPCs can do it too. Players are going to be annoyed if they have to blast through their opponents' communications, landing gear, shields, escape pods, etc. before they can get a kill. Sure, you could limit this to just PC ships, and with a narrative game that can work fine, but I tend to dislike unnecessarily asymmetric systems with PC/NPC divisions. In any event, I think this would be a great use of Destiny Points along with a chart listing what can be sacrificed along with how many HT/SST it mitigates and the repair difficulty (plus cost) to fix it.

I wouldn’t make it so that the components had be disabled before a kill can be made! This is to replace System Strain, not Hull Trauma. So even if I do it for NPCs as well, the PCs can still just blast them from the sky.

10 minutes ago, edwardavern said:

I wouldn’t make it so that the components had be disabled before a kill can be made! This is to replace System Strain, not Hull Trauma. So even if I do it for NPCs as well, the PCs can still just blast them from the sky.

If SST damage can be "soaked" by temporarily shorting out a system, then HT damage should be similarly capable of being "soaked" by having it disable systems (and requiring real repairs to fix them).

3 hours ago, HappyDaze said:

If SST damage can be "soaked" by temporarily shorting out a system, then HT damage should be similarly capable of being "soaked" by having it disable systems (and requiring real repairs to fix them).

... er, why? Isn't "hull trauma", you know, trauma to the hull?

Or, to be less facetious, I suppose I always interpreted HT as actual damage, while SST was more... electronic damage, or overheating, and stuff. In fact... *goes to check book* ... the CR says "the strength of a capital ship's keel, the studiness of a speeder truck's chassis, or the general spaceworthiness of a starfighter's spaceframe are all measured by hull trauma threshold", while "System strain... is an aggregate of the efficiency and status of computer and navigation systems, engines and hyperspace drives, power generators, and a host of other delicate systems necessary to ensure peak performance". Obviously I'm not wedded to RAW, given that this whole post is about a HR, but I feel that it's not unreasonable to break SST down and not HT.

Actually, reading your comment back, I feel like there may have been some crossed wires. I'm not suggested that SST can be "soaked" by temporarily shorting out a system. I'm suggesting that I do away with shipwide SST, and instead break it down into constituent System STs of considerably lower value. The aggregate of these is equivalent to RAW SST; taken individually, however, they short out specific systems if thresholds are exceeded. Does that make more sense? (Apologies for confusion.)

15 minutes ago, edwardavern said:

... er, why? Isn't "hull trauma", you know, trauma to the hull?

Or, to be less facetious, I suppose I always interpreted HT as actual damage, while SST was more... electronic damage, or overheating, and stuff. In fact... *goes to check book* ... the CR says "the strength of a capital ship's keel, the studiness of a speeder truck's chassis, or the general spaceworthiness of a starfighter's spaceframe are all measured by hull trauma threshold", while "System strain... is an aggregate of the efficiency and status of computer and navigation systems, engines and hyperspace drives, power generators, and a host of other delicate systems necessary to ensure peak performance". Obviously I'm not wedded to RAW, given that this whole post is about a HR, but I feel that it's not unreasonable to break SST down and not HT.

Actually, reading your comment back, I feel like there may have been some crossed wires. I'm not suggested that SST can be "soaked" by temporarily shorting out a system. I'm suggesting that I do away with shipwide SST, and instead break it down into constituent System STs of considerably lower value. The aggregate of these is equivalent to RAW SST; taken individually, however, they short out specific systems if thresholds are exceeded. Does that make more sense? (Apologies for confusion.)

You didn't suggest the "soaking hits by sacrificing components," that was wilsch. I liked his idea and was playing with it. The idea of extending it to HT hits is that it could be possible for a laser blast to shear off a gun or sensor array rather than landing on the hull proper, and this would pretty much work like the SS version except it would require greater time & money to repair.

21 hours ago, HappyDaze said:

You didn't suggest the "soaking hits by sacrificing components," that was wilsch. I liked his idea and was playing with it. The idea of extending it to HT hits is that it could be possible for a laser blast to shear off a gun or sensor array rather than landing on the hull proper, and this would pretty much work like the SS version except it would require greater time & money to repair.

Ah, I see.

This is a great idea. I would enjoy being a player in this game. Kuala' suggestion is good too. I would use the disadvantage that way and not codify the system strain so you can throw it out as GM when the dice aren't giving an opportunity for it.

there is a mobile game I think called space team that would give a ton of ideas and vocabulary for this.

I trialled the new system the other day, with component strain instead of universal system strain. Worked OK - a few kinks, but TBH the main issue was that I had forgotten how good the ship's mechanic is. I swear she doesn't even have that much XP, but she managed to get the ship out of the encounter in better condition than it went in.

Next trial I'll be hitting them with some heavy ion weapons.