With other systems, using things like Challenge Ratings, I like to think I could calculate the scale of an encounter; if I was running Saga Edition Star Wars, I probably have a good idea what a TIE fighter is worth, challenge-wise, and thus how many a group of x-level players can handle. With AoR, I'm less certain. A Star Destroyer is a massive threat, and even if it stayed mostly as a background element, and the fight stayed mostly fighters v. fighters, said Star Destroyer can spew forth a fair number of TIE fighters, whether the Rebels have cruiser filled with fighters, or just one squadron of X-Wings happened to stumble upon a roving SD, and don't jump away fast enough.

I'm trying to envision how I'd conduct a specific fight. In my scenario, some number of Rebel fighters, possibly X-Wings or B-Wings, encounter the Chimera, commanded by Grand Admiral Thrawn. Now, normally, even Thrawn's ship is just a Star Destroyer, but I'd probably see if there were a couple of good Talents he could use, as the commander of a capital ship, to inflate its abilities, or it would have his Adversary benefits, but the primary "surprise" would be that at least some of the fighters aboard the Chimera would be the vaunted TIE Defenders, which would sally forth to engage Rebel pilots. Since they are criminally expensive, he'd still have some regular TIE Fighters/Interceptors to round out his squadrons, and maybe a few TIE Bombers to deploy a few turns into the battle, to go try and wreck their capital ship, if they have one, hoping they are distracted by the Defenders. The problem? I don't know how many fighters would just become ridiculous for a party to face, on average. With squadron rules, even a fair number of fighters can become just a few, with upped stats and health, but I don't know how you decide how many TIEs is too many, and my imagination of the epic clash to try and challenge the Grand Admiral isn't helping. Can anyone give me some idea of how this rules set figures out how big an encounter can be, and still be fair? I'm sure some of it "How many players do you have? How qualified are they? What kind of ships are they flying?", but if there is at least some baseline of how many enemy fighters for each PC fighter available, that would still help.

As an aside, are there any Talents in the Commodore tree, or some other, that might help a Thrawn-like character with a capital ship, or several? I wouldn't be looking for something to just hammer the players into submission, but there is a vibe I'd want to maintain of Thrawn's impressive skill with tactics, especially in space engagements, and he would have the benefits of at least one Star Destroyer.

Thanks much, and please have a wonderful day!

The words "epic" implies consequences far beyond the characters.... so determine the stakes for the encounter and work backward from that on both sides of the conflict. The PCs don't have to win all on their own there can be massive allied npcs in the background.... just determine some critical task the PCs need to accomplish that will turn the tide... scope that as a small encounter and everything else happens in the background.

This sounds like time for the Mass Combat rules. You set a number of rounds for the goal you have.

You have the PCs engage the TIE/ln's, and if they wipe out those fighters, then when you roll the first round of Mass Combat, then the effects of the PCs encounter will remove the Boost provided by those TIEs.

Then you have one PC roll the Mass Combat check. You narrate the results of that round.

Then run another PC encounter. Maybe they spot the Bombers, and have to take them out.

Run the 2nd round of Mass Combat, influenced by the PC's actions and the results of the 1st round of Mass Combat. Have a different PC make the roll.

Rinse and repeat.

For all it's faults, the Module "Friends Like These" has a good Mass Combat in it.

@venkelos

This requires capital ships on both sides, and clear objectives for both sides as well.

Play test. That’s what I had to do until I got a good feel for the group’s capabilities in space combat. How many TIEs? Try 3 groups of 4 against the PCs. Adjust and repeat until you get a good sense of how the number of minion groups and number of minions in each group will work with your PCs. Make sure you run good tests. My PCs all have a “squadron” of 1 wingman each - essentially a free hit. Include things like that in your tests. Then switch up the enemies to TIE interceptors or whatever to see how that changes things. It won’t take too many test until you have a good feel and can just look at stats and know that your PCs can handle X many of ship Y. Then rinse and repeat with capital ships.

From testing, I know my 2 x Delta 7Bs with an ARC-170 each with a V-19 wingman can take on 3 groups of 3 Vulture Droids or 2 groups of 4 Vultures or 3x4 Scarab Droids or 2x5 Scarabs. They might lose 1 or 2 wingmen, but likely not.

As for how epic, the sky is the limit. However, more usually equals much more time and more boring (hence the mass combat rules). If you go standard combat, don’t make it too big. My typical space combats are 1 capital ship on each side making Concentrated Barrage attacks (maybe 3 per ship, max), the 3 PC ships with a wingman each, and a few groups of enemy minion star fighters.

Part of the challenge is that the Space Combat rules don't work very well for FFG Star Wars.

And the other part of the challenge that I have in answering your question is that I've altered the FFG rules sufficiently that my game won't resemble yours . . .

That said, FFG Space Combat rules reflect Age of Iron ship combat pretty well in the fact that the bigger ship is almost always likely to win.

As for your specific scenario the Chimera has 72 Fighters. It's going to start pretty much any combat situation with a dozen or so fighters which will be flying perimeter defense patterns. So they're not in a bunch, but will be flying in wing elements of three ships.

And after the Rebels begin the fights, expect an ISD to become a spawn point where they kick out a new flight of three like ships per turn.

Using those two principles should make "most" fights manageable for the attacking rebels. And if there are enough TIE's that the Rebels realize, "There's too many of them," then it's time for the good guys to bug out. Strike and Fade!

One of the alterations that I've toyed with is that the weapons systems are what determine the difficulty of the attack, not the ship that they're mounted on. So those Ultra Heavy Turbo Blasters actually have a difficult time targeting smaller ships, so they normally don't attack them. (Sure roll a couple of salvos for effect, but let's not get overboard by rolling 60 individual attacks. You do that and that IDS will wipe the board clean in no time, no matter how bad the battery teams are).

This bit isn't helpful, but I don't use minions. I'm not one of the Despicable Me GM's (inc, TM).

Also I've added shield rules. The TIE's don't have shields, but they're great for keeping the advanced fighters on the board MUCH longer. At this point, in my game, the TIE's are usually killed with a single salvo from any attack so that makes my record keeping pretty easy. (Also my TIE pilots who survive an attack usually disengage to fight another day! Sadly, the PC's generally just continue to attack them and gun them all down . . . ).

But yeah . . . trial and error. And good luck avoiding a Total Party Kill with the Rules as Written (RAW).

Hmm. This is Thrawn we're talking about. and you're attacking him where he is strongest, in his own element. His ace in the hole isn't going to be a handful of superTIEs.

And he's far beyond the regular capital ship combat Talents.

What would work on a regular Star Destroyer is not going to have any real effect here.

If you're fighting Thrawn, assuming thrawn is played correctly, he probably knows you're coming, and what you'll be bringing, and the moment you engage, two more Star Destroyers jump out of hyperspace long with an Interdictor cruiser. Or Thrawn is just not even going to be there. Or he'll have hostages aboard, aquaintances and allies of the PCs.

And I don't think he'll risk his Chimaera in open combat unles he has an extremely good reason for doing so. If he does get ambushed, he's jumping to hyperspace ASAP. He has very little to gain by sticking around a potentially a lot to lose.

On 12/7/2020 at 8:57 PM, micheldebruyn said:

Hmm. This is Thrawn we're talking about. and you're attacking him where he is strongest, in his own element. His ace in the hole isn't going to be a handful of superTIEs.

And he's far beyond the regular capital ship combat Talents.

What would work on a regular Star Destroyer is not going to have any real effect here.

If you're fighting Thrawn, assuming thrawn is played correctly, he probably knows you're coming, and what you'll be bringing, and the moment you engage, two more Star Destroyers jump out of hyperspace long with an Interdictor cruiser. Or Thrawn is just not even going to be there. Or he'll have hostages aboard, aquaintances and allies of the PCs.

And I don't think he'll risk his Chimaera in open combat unles he has an extremely good reason for doing so. If he does get ambushed, he's jumping to hyperspace ASAP. He has very little to gain by sticking around a potentially a lot to lose.

I'm having flashbacks to a scenario I hear they used in this game line, where the party can "run into Darth Vader". They don't give his stats; they just say "he talks for a turn. If they don't run away he attacks once. If they don't run away, TPK." While I have to admit I vaguely liked that, after playing games where you always had to balance the willingness of introducing the critical NPC with the risk of that NPC being critically injured, I can still imagine my players of any game ranting that, if they didn't have a chance; if it wasn't just a shock factor, and a chance for the GM to beat on the players for fun, why introduce the encounter? I can imagine Thrawn being a total Admiral Badass; he's probably my favorite non-Force sensitive character, and that from his intro in the 90s, but his ship could still be beaten, and he was merced in the lamest of ways, Legends. Lastly, while I could see him pulling a surprise hyperjump-counter, I don't know if there would be a way for any party to counter that, or be ready. When I was running 5e D&D - Dungeon of the Mad Mage, we had this sort of scenario come up, do to the dungeon-crawl nature of the campaign. Did enemies in other rooms exist? Could they hear the ruckus? Would they come investigate? Would an NPC enemy "kite" the party into what was otherwise supposed to be a separate encounter, and overwhelm the party, or stand their ground, as if they don't have any support, and face the party alone, leaving other encounters none the wiser? Would there be a fair way for the party to deal with Thrawn suddenly tripling his capital ship complement, while scrambling three Star Destroyers worth of TIE Fighters, to stomp one group of player ships? He's awesome, and this sort of thing could be a "why he never lost" scenario, but it could also smack of me just punching the players for fun, because I know they didn't have a means to prevent it; I didn't give them one.

On the other hand, this could be just one reason not to depend on the big names bad guys; they can prove hard to incorporate in an organic, "fair" way. In my head, it could play something more like the Arc Hammer, and Dark Troopers, from Legends. Rom Mohc had a capital ship, and he had his Dark Troopers, but they were built on the ship, and I don't recall him mobilizing multiple fleet elements, so if the player could find the ship, infiltrate it, and destroy the assets, they could take out a serious risk. In this way, Thrawn could be similar. If I ignore Lothal, he could have most of the TIE Defenders aboard the Chimera, and it not be traveling in fleet-formation; those assets were led elsewhere. The Rebels could be a mobile starfighter unit, without a capital ship, and find the Chimera, and hope to take out the majority of the Empire's new super-TIEs, leading to possibly a space battle, possibly a boarding action, and possibly Thrawn *allowing* a certain amount of this to transpire, to better determine how these Rebels work. The problem, then, is not losing Thrawn, or the Chimera, without resorting to " but the GM said no" tactics.

If it is a chance encounter, "Rebels, hit refueling station Beta-6328!" "OH FOR KRIFF'S SAKE! IT'S THRAWN!!!" you'll solve a lot of your problems. Thrawn just happens to be at the refueling station when the Rebels show up, and now he's put on the defensive without support. This allows you to showcase his abilities and go "awesome admiral" without having the PCs ask "And why didn't he have support?"

If you send them to attack Thrawn, it is necessary, in my opinion, to have the encounter be a trap. This will fulfill the PCs' fears and expectations and make for a more interesting story. Later on, after probably another trap or two, you can have them get intel about Thrawn that may be genuine, no trap, but they'll be nervous, going "He seems to always know our moves, are we sure this isn't another trap?"

In the Thrawn novels, he had an intel source feeding him information. You can pretty easily adapt this, and then it makes for a fun counter-intel adventure when the PCs learn that there's a mole.

Thrawn had plans within plans. Think of it like multiple parallel chains. Any time the parallel chains hook to the same link, he makes sure that link is well protected. He may have two moles, neither of whom know of the other's existence. Then you capture a mole and take a sigh of relief, we've plugged the leak. But you actually haven't, and now you have to realize that there is still a mole feeding information. If you can, it would be good to have two types of moles: SigInt and HumInt.
Not all of the above perfectly represents the character, but I think it does fulfil the myth around him, and that's much of what you'd be going for in an RPG as it makes for a more exciting experience for the players, in my opinion.

Back to the idea of discovering Thrawn at a refueling station: He's likely to feign weakness to draw the PCs in. "We can't take Thrawn!" "But look, [weakness], this could be our one opportunity!" Perhaps his shields are down, or something similar. The key would be to measure what Thrawn's goal is in the encounter. Does he want to draw in and destroy the rebels, or is he only looking to defend the station and his ship? Is he looking to track the rebels back to their ship, or let them escape to win some psychological victory?

If he wants to destroy them, he'll have to strike a balance between making them think he is weak and being too weak to actually stop them retreating. For example, does he not scramble any of his own TIEs, or just a single squadron of TIE/lns, relying mostly on support from the station, making the rebels think he can't bring his fighters to bear, then sends in the Defenders once they are closer and can't retreat? Or does he send a strong offense against them?

You should also manipulate the stellar terrain to give him something to exploit, whether that's asteroids, mines, or something else. Anything that would prevent the rebels from jumping out at will is good. Make them have to get past a certain distance marker, which could put them into a chase and require piloting checks to clear the obstacle. Ideally, they'd pass the obstacle before they can realize it's Thrawn (though that isn't essential). Perhaps place it at Extreme range.

For number of TIE/ds, you might want to split the squadrons up into flights. A single flight is four fighters, a third of a squadron. Have each TIE/d piloted by an ace (Rival), and have each backed up by a flight (minion group) of three TIE/lns (in the Imperial starfighter corp, a flight was either two elements or three fighters).

That gives you six enemies, three aces and three minion groups. That's one squadron of TIE/lns and a flight of TIE/ds. A fully-stocked ISD II has a capacity of 6 squadrons. Two bombers, one TIE/d, two TIE/ln, and one TIE/in sounds about right, in my opinion. Maybe drop it to four, as not all ISDs are going to be fully stocked, and just have one of each.

I don't know how much you're bringing in the way of rebel firepower though, so I can't tailor it to match. How many PCs do you have?

Oh, almost forgot the questions about abilities for Thrawn: He's statted in Allies and Adversaries (I can give you the info on that if you'd like), so here are the abilities and talents they give him: Adversary 2, Command 2, Commanding Presence 2, Nobody's Fool 2. Art of War (Hard Knowledge Lore, Outer Rim, or Xenology check, for each net Success, add automatic Success to all skill checks Thrawn makes against that opponent, species, or group until the end of the session.), Infravision (may remove one Setback added to checks due to lighting conditions).

I think he might have been statted elsewhere earlier, as he does not have the ability Starship Adversary, which I think was introduced in Allies and Adversaries. Starship Adversary operates identically to Adversary, except that it applies to a ship the character is commanding. I'd suggest adding Starship Adversary 1, putting him on par with Admiral Ackbar.

13 hours ago, venkelos said:

I'm having flashbacks to a scenario I hear they used in this game line, where the party can "run into Darth Vader". They don't give his stats; they just say "he talks for a turn. If they don't run away he attacks once. If they don't run away, TPK." While I have to admit I vaguely liked that, after playing games where you always had to balance the willingness of introducing the critical NPC with the risk of that NPC being critically injured, I can still imagine my players of any game ranting that, if they didn't have a chance; if it wasn't just a shock factor, and a chance for the GM to beat on the players for fun, why introduce the encounter? I can imagine Thrawn being a total Admiral Badass; he's probably my favorite non-Force sensitive character, and that from his intro in the 90s, but his ship could still be beaten, and he was merced in the lamest of ways, Legends. Lastly, while I could see him pulling a surprise hyperjump-counter, I don't know if there would be a way for any party to counter that, or be ready. When I was running 5e D&D - Dungeon of the Mad Mage, we had this sort of scenario come up, do to the dungeon-crawl nature of the campaign. Did enemies in other rooms exist? Could they hear the ruckus? Would they come investigate? Would an NPC enemy "kite" the party into what was otherwise supposed to be a separate encounter, and overwhelm the party, or stand their ground, as if they don't have any support, and face the party alone, leaving other encounters none the wiser? Would there be a fair way for the party to deal with Thrawn suddenly tripling his capital ship complement, while scrambling three Star Destroyers worth of TIE Fighters, to stomp one group of player ships? He's awesome, and this sort of thing could be a "why he never lost" scenario, but it could also smack of me just punching the players for fun, because I know they didn't have a means to prevent it; I didn't give them one.

That set-up reminds me of the excellent Alien: Isolation videogame.

But my point was that if it is thrawn, he should have plans and contingencies.

And if this is just a chance random encounter, well, why would you use Thrawn for a random encounter?

Quote

On the other hand, this could be just one reason not to depend on the big names bad guys; they can prove hard to incorporate in an organic, "fair" way. In my head, it could play something more like the Arc Hammer, and Dark Troopers, from Legends. Rom Mohc had a capital ship, and he had his Dark Troopers, but they were built on the ship, and I don't recall him mobilizing multiple fleet elements, so if the player could find the ship, infiltrate it, and destroy the assets, they could take out a serious risk. In this way, Thrawn could be similar. If I ignore Lothal, he could have most of the TIE Defenders aboard the Chimera, and it not be traveling in fleet-formation; those assets were led elsewhere. The Rebels could be a mobile starfighter unit, without a capital ship, and find the Chimera, and hope to take out the majority of the Empire's new super-TIEs, leading to possibly a space battle, possibly a boarding action, and possibly Thrawn *allowing* a certain amount of this to transpire, to better determine how these Rebels work. The problem, then, is not losing Thrawn, or the Chimera, without resorting to " but the GM said no" tactics.

If you ignore Lothal...

If you mean ignore that factory getting blown up... Those TIE Defenders weren't for the Chimaera. They were for the whole Empire. If Thrawn's endeavour on Lothal have been succesful, then the Death Star would not have been completed (or completed much later than it was), and instead those resources would have been spent replacing all those crappy TIE/lns with TIE Defenders, and the Rebel Alliance would have been dead.

9 hours ago, micheldebruyn said:

If you ignore Lothal...

If you mean ignore that factory getting blown up... Those TIE Defenders weren't for the Chimaera. They were for the whole Empire. If Thrawn's endeavour on Lothal have been succesful, then the Death Star would not have been completed (or completed much later than it was), and instead those resources would have been spent replacing all those crappy TIE/lns with TIE Defenders, and the Rebel Alliance would have been dead.

Personally, I sort of liked the idea that he only had a some left, and possibly the equipment aboard ship to make them, but slowly, meaning there was actually a chance to stop it. Honestly, so long as the data exists *somewhere*, someone could always resume it later; see Moff Gideon's Dark Troopers, but it might be a long time later, again, as with Moff Gideon years later.

I don't think any effort on Thrawn's part would've gotten the Death Star project shelved; the Emperor originally didn't plan on having ANY fighters aboard his Star Destroyers, and it was only his most loyal admirals practically begging for it that he relented, to the tune of "fine, if the big ships need support, they will, but we'll make the cheapest, most mass-produced option, and send them out in BIG swarms, because the Empire does big." And if anything happened to a few...no big loss. Thrawn liked conserving his resources; in this case his capable pilots, and had a more tactical viewpoint of the galaxy than Palpatine, so an improved, cutting-edge fighter made sense, and unlike the Death Star, which could only be in one place, and had to justify the expense of ending a world (even Palpatine wanted an empire of living people; even the 40K universe only occasionally justified Exterminatus, and they are grimdark as ****), they could go wherever, and deal with issues with reduced collateral damage. The Emperor just liked big, and nipping problems preemptively with the fear of using his big solutions. He would have his Death Star regardless.

Personally, I've never quite subscribed to the theory that TIEs were junk; they were built to task, which was support of their carrier vessel. They lacked certain bells and whistles they didn't need (hyperdrive, droid socket/navicomputer), and a few that made them more slaved to their mothership (shields), since they weren't built to fill in for absent capital ships, like some Rebel ships were, when the Rebel Fleet didn't have a lot of capital ships to spare. They were also intended to work in droves, so each ship could be less; be more part of the swarm that was like one ship. Sure, I love TIE Defenders; they, Predators, X-83 Twintails, and expanded B-Wings are some of my favorite Star Wars ships, and it's mostly *because* they take the fighter, and try to push it to the best edge of what it might be able to be, at least in certain areas, but I still felt the TIE Fighters did what they were made to do just fine; they were simply made by an organization with different values. Costs could mount up there, where they were ignored in larger scale, and the Empire ALWAYS had more expendable people to pilot them. These people died heroes, I guess, and didn't live long enough to join the Rebellion. If you look at the old lore, and possibly current, that's also why the Emperor got rid of clones, and created his military. It was an opportunity to grab all of the best and brightest of the young generation of the Empire, and indoctrinate them into loyalty to the Emperor, instead of leaving them to ponder if the Rebels were actually onto something.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to belly ache this long, and I'll hop off my SW soapbox now. These last two days have been some of the worst in my life, and this was a wonderful distraction. Apologies for burying you in it, especially if anything I said ends up being patently wrong, and more just my erroneous opinion. Please have a good one!