I'm beginning to brainstorm my first non premade session that I will run for my group. It will be the first adventure for a brand new group of characters.

My idea is to have them start as passengers on a Consular Cruiser and then get attacked and boarded by a couple pirate ships. By the end of the adventure I want them to have the Cruiser for their own, but I'm not sure how to discourage them from trying to take one of the pirate ships. Or trying to take all 3 and starting their own pirate fleet. Which, granted, could be fun for a while, it just wasn't really the game I was intending to run.

Off the top of my head I'm thinking:

1) The ships may be well known as pirate ships and may cause the PCs to be treated like pirates by normal folk.

2) Damage during the fighting may destroy the controls to the pirate ships.

3) There will be other passengers/captives of the pirates, maybe they will need to take one of the pirate ships for ~*reasons*~.

4) The pirate ships are in such poor condition that it's astounding that they work at all. If the PCs attempt to interact with the ship systems begin to fail.


Any ideas would be appreciated. I don't want to give them any ship but the Consular cruiser but I don't want to come off as overly arbitrary in denying them the other ships. I feel I'm being lenient giving them the Consular since it's way above what the game recommends as a starter but I just really dig that ship.

Have the pirate's ships attack and dock disgorging all but a skeleton crew then pull back to a safe distance until thier men give the all clear. Once the players have defeated the boarders the pirate's ships jump to hyperspace leaving their captured men behind (assuming the players left any alive). The players get the cruiser and the pirate ships are gone.

The simplest answer for if the players try to capture the opposing ships which don't escape to hyperspace (escaping to hyperspace makes this a moot point of course) would be "crew requirements". For example, if you're thinking of the Consular -class cruiser from Episode I, then you could have a crew of anywhere from 2 to 9 -- perfectly appropriate for a PC party in crew requirement. Thing is, it's a capital ship (at 115 meters, whereas you start seeing Silhouette 5 as low as 50 meters) so you'd be looking at multiple starfighters, transports or armed freighters, or even capital ships being used to attempt a raid, so you can determine that the players just don't have enough allied NPCs to actually crew all of the ships to fighting effectiveness without being a rinky-dink not-even-a-flotilla that the Empire can squash whenever the players don't or can't flee.

Here's a suggestion: let them have all the ships if they want. You might think it's a huge advantage for them, but it's really not.

First of all, each ship is going to need at least one pilot. Which means that if your players are going to use more than one at a time, several of them are going to have to increase the Piloting (space) skill and probably Astrogation as well. And for at least some of them, that won't be a career skill either. I don't know about your group, but my players would balk at the notion of spending that kind of XP on a skill someone else already is better at. Then there's the fact that most ships require more tasks than just piloting; there's Damage Control (Mechanics), Jamming (Computers), Scan the Enemy (Perception) and so on. That means they'll have to choose between one ship that's properly manned, or several ships at a skeleton crew.

Second, it's going to be a drain on their resources. At 500 credits per Hull Trauma that needs fixing, having two or three damaged ships is going to cost them an awful lot of credits. And since some of those ships will be piloted by less skilled pilots, they're going to take more damage.

And third, there's the fact that they won't be able to put down in "civillized" ports. Places like that, officials check your captain's license, proof of ownership, and so on. Plus, like you said, those ships will be wanted. That means local law enforcement, Sector Rangers, bounty hunters, and possibly the Empire as well.

My advice would be to let your players choose, but make sure they know what they're getting into first. No sane group of players will willingly saddle themselves with that kind of handicap. Just tell them that if they want other/more ships, they can of course get them later in the campaign. If you let your players be part of the process and make the decision themselves, they'll enjoy the campaign more because they'll feel that it was their choice, not you forcing it on them, and that their decisions matter.

Have one of the players that is a pilot/smuggler or even a Thief made a simple knowledge check. Then explain to them why trying to take over the pirate ships would be a bad idea. Think of it as a common sense check, use it when your players are about to do something STOOOPID

Similar in Long arm of the hutt when the players were thinking of selling the speeder used by the Bounty hunters. One of them thought this was a good idea, and I told them, unless they had a way of making themselves fake the identity of the now dead bounty hunters this was not going to work. With the bounty on thier head it was going to be difficult to find someone to pawn it off on, without getting captured

Also the Empire has a simple solution when dealing with known pirate ships. blast them to smithereen's

It seems to me a pirate ship should be a piece of junk. Maybe decent speed, well-armed, but rusty, loose cables everywhere, a weird knocking sound coming from the engine, and the whole thing smells like damp weequay. Now, if they want to take the ships, I would let them. If it were me I would stash them somewhere for later. Find a crag on an uninhabitable planet, park it there, and mark the coordinates. You never know when you'll meet some renegades or rebels in desperate need of an armed attack boat.

Pirate ships are not necessarily any worse off in care and maintenance than any ship of the Rebel Alliance or of a freelance smuggler.

Thanks guys. I will either have them attacked by a ship they couldn't hope to crew or go with making them aware that these ships will be more trouble than their worth due to their pirate reputation.

I had a somewhat similar scenario a few months ago. It was the first adventure of an ongoing campaign. The PCs were prisoners on Kessel and they made it to the docking bay where there were a ton of ships. Luckily my players played it cool. They only had one pilot and since they were so close to the Maw, any botched pilot checks from those untrained sorts wouldn't end well.

I had it that way on purpose. I wanted the players to choose their starting ship organically, it went a long way to making that ship very special to them.

Take advantage of the mechanics of the game:

You can have the consular ship for free, or the pirate ship will increase the group's overall Obligation by 15.

After one or two run-ins with the law or pirate-hunting privateers, give them the opportunity to trade.

You already have some great advice here, but I'll toss in a bit as well:

1) I agree that Obligation is a good way to go, especially if the ship stolen is much better than what you want them to have. If they steal the "flagship," I'd be okay with adding a Bounty obligation that is high enough to put the party well over the 100 threshold (as a "group" obligation).

2) It was mentioned about leaving "skeleton crew" members aboard the pirating ships to leave. Smart idea, and very few groups would leave a ship defenseless and attached, or without crew to leave.

3) Have some sort of restrictor on the ship. Classics include a defense system that only the crew know about, a "shutdown" that occurs if certain conditions are not met (like a chip in someone's armor, a bio-scan, etc), or even ways of making it impossible to be on the ship, such as a poisonous atmosphere (Imagine a ship filled only with Gand!). My personal favourite is to have enough droid brains to function as an AI that will shut things down if someone where to try to steal the ship.

4) Design the ships to only be operable (or at least "easily" operable) by a specific species. There are multiple comments about the issues a human faces while commanding a Mon Calamari cruiser, or a Wookie trying to fit in a chair for a human, or the discomfort of being in a ship with a breathable atmosphere but containing enough moisture or heat to make anyone unconfortable; with enough setback dice, the party may not even want to use it.

5) As otherss have mentioned, pirate ships can be in really bad shape depending on how well the pirates have been doing. Smugglers have a hit or a miss on their own ships; now expand that to bigger ships with more that can go wrong. Entine systems can simply be MISSING, sure, they can take it, but it won't be worth it in the end.

6) If the party does find a way to steal multiple ships and get them all to lightspeed (slave circuits, one person Astrogates and the rest get those plots, etc), they won't be able to operate them all for long. Selling them would also be a huge challenge depending on how much of a reputation the pirates have. Basically, it will be more trouble than it's worth.

In a game I ran a few years ago, the group "recovered" a modified TY-2400 from a pirate/slaver and brought it (and the pirate) to the Hutt that put the bounty on his head. The party was told to destroy the ship in orbit to "put on a show" and "make an example" of anyone who would cross him. They tried to talk him into allowing them to keep the ship for a job well done, but once they were told that this was to be an example , and hinted to make them part of said example, they fell into line.

In EotE terms, they would have had a pretty high Obligation rating for it to happen.