Since Day 1 of playing the FFG Star Wars, I've been wanting for a good shields rules. And plot wise, the players have forced my hand and we'll be playing out a pretty extensive space battle rather soon . . . HappyDaze and I came up with the following and I'll be putting these to the test relatively soon.

Shields.

Certain ships have shield systems which provide added protections. Most ships of size Sil 4+ are equipped with shields. (Older ship models will not have added shield systems). Only newer or specialized Sil 3 ships can be equipped with advanced micronized shield systems.

Shielded ships have two qualities. Shield Max & Refresh rate. Max Shields are 20 points and Refresh rate is 5 points per turn.

Shields take damage before Armor and HT or SS is affected.

If Deflectors are doubled up or shifted, the shield points also rotate (and can be doubled). However the refresh rate stays at 5 points per turn and the “open” section does not refresh its shields coverage.

<end rule set>

This will the the seventh rule set alteration that I've made for my campaign.

I'm also going to be adopting the Weapon Tracking Quality optional rules (Found elsewhere on these forums, but another GM) and I'm liking how this is shaping up. I guess that's eight rule alterations.

I like the sound of this and look forward to hearing how it pans out.

I might suggest taking a page (literally, in this case :p) out of Genesys and have a look at the Brace for Impact manoeuvre:

Brace for Impact
Pilot Only: Yes
Silhouette: Any
Speed: Any
Once per round, the pilot may use this maneuver to adjust the vehicle’s position to minimize incoming damage. Until the beginning of the pilot’s next turn, whenever the vehicle is dealt damage, the pilot may have the vehicle suffer system strain up to its silhouette to reduce the damage it suffers by that amount, to a minimum of 0.

Additionally, until the beginning of the pilot’s next turn, whenever the vehicle suffers a Critical Hit, the pilot may have the vehicle suffer system strain up to its silhouette to reduce the Critical Hit result by ten per point of strain it gains this way, to a minimum of 0. If the result is reduced to 0 this way, the Critical Hit is canceled.

This manoeuvre allows for bigger ships to use SST almost like a "shield battery" without adding any additional rules. Heck, since large ships are limited to only one pilot-only manoeuvre a round (a restriction that Genesys doesn't have) I wouldn't feel bad letting silhouette 5+ ships perform this as an incidental for 1 SS.

I would only add that crits should still have system effects, even if they don't get through. Or maybe they can be used to apply double damage to shields only (any overflow is lost).

The mechanic I've wished for but never had time to work on was a better way to use components to build a ship. You'd have a power plant: which drives sublight speed, weapons, and shields. Each requirement has a different "draw" on the power plant. You could then divert draw to different components as necessary. Fully charged weapons would be at their most potent, but would lose power unless recharged sufficiently. You could ask R2 to "see if you can boost the power" by temporarily bypassing some systems. You could recharge your shields by slowing down and/or letting your weapons degrade.

I think this would capture more of that SW flavour than the current system (which doesn't at all imho).

The side benefit is you can have different levels of price and tech (brands) for each component, and allow them to be tweaked, making crafting a bit more sensible.

is your rule for Ray or Particle shields? 😃 (half TIC)

Pleasantly surprising but we actually kicked off the big battle last night.

It may be a little early to make a final decision on the shields, but I'm liking the results so far.

We've only played through three turns of combat (ISD Vindicator vs C-ROC Gozanti both with fighter support) and the only ships affected by the shields are the two capital ships. The C-ROC is still alive because it was able to initiate a sneak attack and caught the Vindicator totally and completely by surprise.

They PC's are facing off against TIE in's and without shields the TIE's continue to burst like gas soaked bottles of nitroglycerin. But now that the TIE's know that they're in combat, they're flying defensively and they're proving a very difficult target.

Next week we'll definitely get a chance to test how well the shields work for the fighters as the Vindicator gunnery batteries crew up and start shooting BACK! (Last night the only battery in place were the Main Port Side gunners and only as a 'precaution'). The PC's also did a REALLY good job of scratching most of the TIE in's on their first approach so they haven't been an issue yet. But with the Vindicator fast launching it's fighter compliment, that's likely to change soon as the TIE's start maneuvering and attacking the X-Wings and Y-Wings in earnest.

It makes combat a bit longer (obviously) but if you're running a game centered on X-Wings vs TIE's this might be a very good rule set to give the Alliance fighters that edge that we see in the source materials.

More next week . . .

On 1/30/2020 at 11:06 PM, Funk Fu master said:

is your rule for Ray or Particle shields? 😃

Yes . . .

Every time I've tried a shields house rule I've fallen back on the RAW rules because they are just much more intuitive and easier to explain.

That said, I really like your rule set, it looks pretty good. One thing I particularly like is that it can prevent hull damage rather than just potentially reducing (with, of course, the off chance to completely deflect). Gives them that extra bit of survivability that is especially important for less-than very durable party ships that come under fire on a regular basis.

A clarification on your rule set, am I to presume that each point of Defense equates to 5 points of shields? So a Sil 4 ship with 1/-/-/1 would be 5/-/-/5?

-watching this thread to see how it goes, honestly hoping it works-

I'll place a bet of 5 imaginary credits: after playing it feels like there's potential but the constant number tracking may get too daunting/tedious (possibly in a scum battle with multiple shields going on at once).

If you have X-Wing 2.0 minis/tokens ... those double-sided shield tokens may help reduce the paperwork involved with this.

Another thought is to give Ion weapons bonus damage against shields, or on a crit they can drop the shields entirely. Something to make them more potent.

6 hours ago, P-47 Thunderbolt said:

Another thought is to give Ion weapons bonus damage against shields, or on a crit they can drop the shields entirely. Something to make them more potent.

You can already spend three advantage to knock out the target's shields. That's even the example in AoR.

1 minute ago, c__beck said:

You can already spend three advantage to knock out the target's shields. That's even the example in AoR.

Well, if you want to get really nit-picky about it, it says "while dealing damage" and that would require penetrating the shields and armor. (You're talking about "spending Advantage, Threat, Triumph, and Despair" right?)

However, considering that it is an option, then bonus damage seems like it would make sense.

9 hours ago, P-47 Thunderbolt said:

A clarification on your rule set, am I to presume that each point of Defense equates to 5 points of shields? So a Sil 4 ship with 1/-/-/1 would be 5/-/-/5?

Nope.

If a ship has shields, it has 20 points of shields and recovers 5 points per turn (per active facing). Period.

As for "paperwork" we're just writing down the current shield number adjacent to the Defense Grid.

I do have some damage tracking forms for the NPC ships and they're overly simplified to track only shields and damage.

As for next week, we'll have a CR-90 and a VCX-100 joining the C-ROC. The Empire also has an Action IV and a couple of Lambda shuttles in system as well (for Phase I of this battle).

But that's how I'm running this.

Yeah, this is the most 'ambitious' and complex space battle that I've tried so far with the FFG Star Wars rules. It is going to be complex with a bunch of moving parts. We are using a combination of Armada & X-Wing mini's to good effect

But in part (for this battle) one thing that is helping is that with so many ships on the board, each player is tracking and rolling for multiple NPC's in addition to the PC's. Everyone is busy and if you blink, you might miss something. It's keeping everyone engaged. (But I digress).

I suppose if you wanted to change the "max shield" value to be a variable, that might work too. But for now 20 seems to be a good working number for me.

The issue with that is that different ships have different shield strengths. I think that the general idea of your system has potential, but it really needs to have allowances for different strengths of shields given what we see both in lore and in stats. When you are fiddling with both shield max and shield refresh rate, there is a lot of potential for greater granularity, though with that comes greater complexity.

The biggest issue I see with it is that on starfighters, shields pretty much triple their health before you even factor in refresh rate, and at the same time, they take much less fire. On the other hand, with capital ships (say, sil 6-7 at about 6 armor 65 HTT) it is possibly a 25% increase, and they take significantly more fire, meaning that shields are significantly less useful.

I've got more flight time in X-Wings and TIE Fighters than pretty much any other ship in the 'verse.

YES, the shields DO triple the damage you can soak up in an Alliance Fighter. And if you manage inbound damage, those shields can keep you in a desperate fight for a very long time.

And sure, some of the bigger ships do have more shields to punch through, but for the time being, I don't really need the capital ships to get buffed out any more than they are. I do understand the desire to give ships higher shield strength as you increase your access to power, but that's not something that will make things better at my table right now.

Next week's session will let us get our hands on more hard data and it will be interesting to see how devastating the Lacerator becomes once the gunnery crews man their stations. Darkness knows that they are in a target rich environment right now . . .

On 2/4/2020 at 7:28 PM, P-47 Thunderbolt said:

Well, if you want to get really nit-picky about it, it says "while dealing damage" and that would require penetrating the shields and armor. (You're talking about "spending Advantage, Threat, Triumph, and Despair" right?)

However, considering that it is an option, then bonus damage seems like it would make sense.

True, thick enough armour and bad luck on the setback dice will mean you can't, since you didn't do any damage.

Last night's session went well enough but I don't think I have sufficient data from last night for a conclusive result.

Tactically the in close rebels maneuvered into the aft quadrant of the ISD and through a series of Triumphs and Advanatages, were able to keep the ISD Gunners adequately suppressed.

And the PC's were able to manage the battlefield to clear the area of the handful of TIE's that were able to launch. One TIE fighter was able to make a pass on one Y-Wing and was able to do damage to the shields.

The ISD's shields DID help it endure a bit longer, but it's high armor also helped keep it into the battle (almost as much).

The PC's also benefited from the timely arrival of their CR-90 support ship and the ISD got "buck fever" and laid in an intercept course on the newcomer, thinking that the Interceptors would be able to quickly dispatch the archaic Y-Wings . . .

However the Y-Wings were able to fend for themselves like the flight of TBD Devastators did in the first wave of the Battle of Coral Seas against the A6M's. Quite surprising really.

But in short, the Rebels didn't take many hits and certainly not enough to really test out these optional rules.

We have one more space battle to try out next week so that should give me another chance. However the Rebels will STILL outnumber the opposition significantly . . .

And as follow up:

We had another quick battle where I got to test out the shield rules (again) but my biggest gripe isn't with the shield rules and how they mechanically work (because they seem to work out fairly well) . . .

No, my biggest issue with trying to test this out is the fact that "regular" gunners can't hit the broad side of a barn! Or the broad side of a starship!

In essence, there wasn't a single attack made by the bad guys that came close to hitting any of the Alliance ships!

But otherwise, I think these Shield rules help and work well enough.

8 hours ago, Mark Caliber said:

And as follow up:

We had another quick battle where I got to test out the shield rules (again) but my biggest gripe isn't with the shield rules and how they mechanically work (because they seem to work out fairly well) . . .

No, my biggest issue with trying to test this out is the fact that "regular" gunners can't hit the broad side of a barn! Or the broad side of a starship!

In essence, there wasn't a single attack made by the bad guys that came close to hitting any of the Alliance ships!

But otherwise, I think these Shield rules help and work well enough.

Are you using the gunners as a minion group? and using the barrage rules from AOR (I think its stay on target but it could be CRB)

a group of 5 gunners (representing 5 weapons) would be YYYG +boost for aiming - that's pretty hard hitting for turbolasers, regardless of difficulty for silhouette difference

41 minutes ago, Funk Fu master said:

Are you using the gunners as a minion group? and using the barrage rules from AOR (I think its stay on target but it could be CRB)

The AoR CRB had rules for Concentrated Barrage, Blanket Barrage, and Overwhelming Barrage.

43 minutes ago, Funk Fu master said:

a group of 5 gunners (representing 5 weapons) would be YYYG +boost for aiming - that's pretty hard hitting for turbolasers, regardless of difficulty for silhouette difference

Small correction, YYGG +Boosts. Imperial gunnery crews actually only have an Agility of 2.

It's still great odds for Average checks, though. Even Hard difficulty checks.

51 minutes ago, P-47 Thunderbolt said:

The AoR CRB had rules for Concentrated Barrage, Blanket Barrage, and Overwhelming Barrage.

Small correction, YYGG +Boosts. Imperial gunnery crews actually only have an Agility of 2.

It's still great odds for Average checks, though. Even Hard difficulty checks.

In that case it would be YYY+ Boosts ... first 3 get you to YY then 4 is YYG, 5 is YYY.

Depending on the ship that is attacking the bad guys and it weapon complement would determine how many groups of gunners you have, as you can never represent ALL the weapons on a star destroyer.

if your being attacked by one bigger ship, I would say give them a Commander Rival, and then gunner groups equal to half PC numbers, with the number in each group dependent on the weapon loadout of the ship

(Think of this as the escape from Mos Eisley or Hoth (Or rebel assault 1), where it was the Falcon vs a star destroyer, and the Falcon was fighting different components of the ship)

If your being attacked by multiple capital ships, I would streamline that by having a fleet commander/BBEG slot to give out orders, then each ship having an initiative slot where it moves and all of its gunner groups fire using barrages)

(many clone wars examples here)

Anything bigger than that, I would go to mass combat rules, particularly once you add fighters into the mix

9 minutes ago, Funk Fu master said:

In that case it would be YYY+ Boosts ... first 3 get you to YY then 4 is YYG, 5 is YYY.

No, actually additional minions aren't Upgrades, they are skill ranks. 5 minions gives you a skill of 4, so with the characteristic of 2, you get YYGG.

10 minutes ago, Funk Fu master said:

Depending on the ship that is attacking the bad guys and it weapon complement would determine how many groups of gunners you have, as you can never represent ALL the weapons on a star destroyer.

if your being attacked by one bigger ship, I would say give them a Commander Rival, and then gunner groups equal to half PC numbers, with the number in each group dependent on the weapon loadout of the ship

(Think of this as the escape from Mos Eisley or Hoth (Or rebel assault 1), where it was the Falcon vs a star destroyer, and the Falcon was fighting different components of the ship)

If your being attacked by multiple capital ships, I would streamline that by having a fleet commander/BBEG slot to give out orders, then each ship having an initiative slot where it moves and all of its gunner groups fire using barrages)

(many clone wars examples here)

Anything bigger than that, I would go to mass combat rules, particularly once you add fighters into the mix

Actually, you can represent them all, as there is no hard limit on the number of minions in a group. You could group all the weapons in a fire arc into a minion group (though if they are Slow-Firing 1 or 2, it would be more efficient to group half/a third of them). If there were 6+ minions, you'd top out at 5 ranks. A better way to handle something like a Star Destroyer would be to use the Barrage actions, which make more sense narratively for using significant quantities of weapons.

The way I handle larger ships (which has, admittedly, not had much field testing due to my aversion to using large ships) is I give it a single initiative slot. I have the crew as a single NPC (which gets one Pilot Only maneuver, an Action, and two Not Pilot Only Maneuvers), and I use separate minion groups for gunners, distributed as needed. If I include a captain NPC (rare), they get a separate Initiative slot. I don't think I'd ever have more than one captain NPC in a battle, and in a situation where they are commanding a group and not just one ship, I might treat them narratively and not even give them a slot as they give out orders on a macro scale.

Ohh...oh crap... your right.

I just reread the minions section in the CRB..

I've been treating it as upgrades for 4 years...

Don't tell my PCs, they have been moaning about my squads of 6 stormtroopers all the time. YYYY Blaster rifle shots hurt

7 hours ago, Funk Fu master said:

Ohh...oh crap... your right.

I just reread the minions section in the CRB..

I've been treating it as upgrades for 4 years...

Don't tell my PCs, they have been moaning about my squads of 6 stormtroopers all the time. YYYY Blaster rifle shots hurt

A squad of six is actually more effective under the raw, not less. At least I for one would rather be rolling YYYGG

Thanks for the clarification on the Minion rules. I might use those the next time they go toe to toe with a Cap ship (which have batteries of cannons and would be an appropriate mechanic for dealing with scores of guns being fired at a target).

But otherwise I don't use the minion rules at all. No nay never.

And in the battle in question I'm not sure how you would use the minion rules for a single YT-1300 . . . I guess it has two turrets, but statistically that ship might be able to do more damage with the two single hits (If the gunners had sufficient skill to hit anything). (And in combat, the freighter did attack two different targets . . . while it lasted).

But to answer the original inquiry. No. Not using the minion rules. I don't have minions in my campaign.

I guess as an aside, we found that the gunners with the dice pool of YGB (Single skill gunner with targeting computer) were finding it nearly impossible to hit any enemy ships vs PPB (Similar silhouette ship with 1 Def). It didn't matter if that gunner was Rebel or Imperial for this particular mission.

It felt very much like a Zander Willow fight . . .

Although the dice can be very weird that way. I had a fight months ago where the PC's were fighting some moderate ranking thugs and I thought the PC's would absolutely MOP the floor with these two thugs, but the thugs actually incapacitated one PC, beat another PC senseless and forced the group to retreat . . . Sometimes the dice giveth and sometimes they taketh . . . but I digress.