Starship crew / roles


Advice


So... you have 6 members in your crew.

An envoy captain
An ace pilot mechanic pilot
A soldier engineer
A mystic science officer
A solarian gunner

You also have an operative who could fill any of the roles, as needed. Those who have theorycrafted or those who have played some already, what is the most important role between gunner, science officer, and engineer (i.e. where should the operative spend most of his rounds)?

6 is a decent-sized group of people... when you start using the larger ships, do you just assume they are filled with extra people and make additional rolls? If you had a group of 4, do you have npcs for some of the roles on the ship?

Thanks!


Gunner is a good one for an extra PC to fill, as it lets you use more weapons in space combat. In most cases this will mean all gunners will make less shots, but at higher bonuses.

As for which role is the most important, I say they go from most to least:
Pilot
Engineer
Gunner
Science Officer
Captain

Having a PC in each of the Rolls is your best option though, but some times you just don't have the Players.

Larger ships run more like Officers for the NPC crew. A Capital ship might have 50 gunners but only the Gunnery Officers(1-3 PC) will be making rolls for the Role.
As for a party of less then 5, having NPCs run Crew Roles should be fine. If it was my game, and one of the PC was a mechanic, would let the mechanic's Drone work as a crew in combat. But if you have a lower number of PCs and don't want to have any NPC crew members, that is fine too, as you can run a ship combat with 3 crew, they are just less capable, and you should take that into account when building space encounters.


Quote:


As for which role is the most important, I say they go from most to least:
Pilot
Engineer
Gunner
Science Officer
Captain

You can debate exact placement, but I'd simplify and say there's 3 tiers, at least at low levels:

Tier 1: Pilot
Tier 2: Engineer/Gunner
Tier 3: Science Officer/Captain

These tiers might change as high level abilities are unlocked; I haven't thought about those much yet.

Sometimes rebalancing shields is critical, as is the initial roll to determine facing, but the rest of the time the Science Officer is mostly useless, while the Captain is at least providing minor bonuses where they're needed.

Note that you can make use of multiple engineers if systems are damaged (each Engineering action can be done once per round, which means up to 3 Engineers can be utilized). So having multiple people who can shift to Engineering in a tight spot seems smart. In particular, your Science Officer can easily have a decent Engineering check and could serve as backup Engineer.

Taking damage to systems seems like something that's only going to happen in a very tough fight. Then again, in any other sort of fight, it doesn't matter so much what choices the crew makes.


The Science Officer is actually critical, because until he succeeds at a Scan action you have zero information about any ship you encounter. Is that a Fighter or a Dreadnaught? No way to tell without a successful scanner (observed speed might give you an idea if they're exceptionally fast, but that could be a big ship with powerful thrusters using the 1.5 speed pilot maneuver). And no way to even guess if it's a stock model or an upgraded one with high CR until you succeed at a second Scan action.

Without a science officer you're just fighting unidentified ships with unknown capabilities (except when they hit you and you get an idea of their damage range) and don't know whether to defend, flee, or prioritize one target over another.

Most combats should start with ships maneuvering and either scanning or talking to try to figure out what the hell is going on before they dare open fire.


In other words, a GM who is determined to make the Scan action useful could make it useful. But that's true of every ability.

Science Officers are obviously better than Gunners outside combat. I think the question here is what's useful to do in combat.

In the early content Paizo has generated, every battle is an ambush. Scan has not been useful because you'll learn about the enemy ship's capabilities from actually fighting them long before Scan tells you anything useful you can actually act on.

The most useful knowledge is the enemy's weapon systems, since your Pilot can use the knowledge to try to stay out of their firing arc. But it will take 3 successes before you learn about their biggest weapon, which is very likely to be fired on the first round of combat.

Using Scan to prioritize one target over the other is even harder -- if there are 3 ships, it will take you 9 successes to learn anything about all their weapons. Even if you're rolling well and learning things 2 at a time, odds are you'll have pretty thorough knowledge of the enemy's weapons before Scan tells you anything you didn't know.

If you wanted to make Scan useful in combat, the most obvious way would be to give the enemy ship some secret weapon that has a huge effect that is easily negated if you know about it, but it can't be used for the first 3 rounds of combat. Or maybe the ship has a secret weakness that Scan can reveal. I suppose you could have a whole campaign where every starship fight was like that. But this isn't the expectation the initial rules and content have set up.


Again, until you make at least one successful scan you have zero information about the hull type you're facing and the potential CR of the encounter. Are you supposed to fight, talk, run? The smartest thing to do is keep your distance and scan first when an unknown ship appears, even if it shoots at you (unless it hits and the damage is so low or high you can judge whether it's in your league or not). And that should go both ways. No pirate should ever attack a ship without scanning it first to make sure it isn't a cruiser on patrol.

If your GM is trying to have random ships attack you call him on it. If they aren't insane people who just attack every ship on sight (why are they still alive?) they have to scan you first to see if you're a worthy target or even the precise target they are looking for. Ship movement in SF should involve nonstop unknown contacts on your passive sensors followed by a friendly active scan and maybe "hello neighbor" communication if they look suspicious or are a vector bringing them closer. Unless a ship has longer range sensors that allow them to passively spot you first, then I'd allow a "surprise round" scan before starting regular initiative.

Shadow Lodge

In our first ship combat I was the Engineer and we didn't have a Science Officer.

Until the second round when we took a hit and needed to adjust our shields. Science Officers are incredibly valuable to keep the shields balanced/matching facing.

I never went back to the Engineer chair, because we didn't take enough HP damage to gives us a critical thanks to the shield adjustments.


Xenocrat wrote:
Again, until you make at least one successful scan you have zero information about the hull type you're facing and the potential CR of the encounter. Are you supposed to fight, talk, run?

What I'm gathering is most of your comments are coming from the standpoint of a sandbox homebrew game, while I'm looking at things in terms of combat in SFS and maybe APs. My expectation (which was set by the early Paizo content) is that starship fights will be mostly like fights in any Paizo dungeon crawl; encounters are level-appropriate and opportunities for negotiation are few.

There's no sense ranking the usefulness of various roles (which is what the OP was asking for) when you have a homebrew game with a GM who has their own ideas about the setting and what the roles are up to outside combat. Then sure, the roles are all as useful as the GM chooses for them to be.

Now, the useful action for the Science Officer in a fight, as I said above, is rebalancing shields. My early take was the opposite of Euan's, but I suppose the value of SO rebalancing vs. Engineer restoring depends on the specifics of the encounter. The longer the fight, the better the Engineer; at some point, there are no shields left to rebalance.


A Science Officer is also good for figuring out what kinds of weapons the enemy ship has, so that the pilot knows which of the enemy's firing arcs are the least dangerous to fly into.

It's probably better to know ahead of time if the enemy can fire tactical nukes from their rear arc rather than discover that first-hand.


Slurmalyst wrote:
Xenocrat wrote:
Again, until you make at least one successful scan you have zero information about the hull type you're facing and the potential CR of the encounter. Are you supposed to fight, talk, run?

What I'm gathering is most of your comments are coming from the standpoint of a sandbox homebrew game, while I'm looking at things in terms of combat in SFS and maybe APs. My expectation (which was set by the early Paizo content) is that starship fights will be mostly like fights in any Paizo dungeon crawl; encounters are level-appropriate and opportunities for negotiation are few.

There's no sense ranking the usefulness of various roles (which is what the OP was asking for) when you have a homebrew game with a GM who has their own ideas about the setting and what the roles are up to outside combat. Then sure, the roles are all as useful as the GM chooses for them to be.

Now, the useful action for the Science Officer in a fight, as I said above, is rebalancing shields. My early take was the opposite of Euan's, but I suppose the value of SO rebalancing vs. Engineer restoring depends on the specifics of the encounter. The longer the fight, the better the Engineer; at some point, there are no shields left to rebalance.

I'm writing from the standpoint of someone who understands the published rules on how Scan action works in combat, what that means for player and NPC knowledge of other ships when they encounter each other, and the actions necessary to make any non-psychotic or cheating actions to initiate combat. It's not uncommon for Pathfinder adventures to overlook some rules interaction, and it sounds like the Starfinder adventures or the GMs running them may not be aware yet that ships that initially detect each other have no idea what is actually in front of them without succeeding at a Scan action. That's ok, it's a new system with complex and late development of the rules simultaneous with the adventure creation. But that's no excuse not to run starship combats in accordance with the rules and not grant free information not justified by the rules to either party


Thanks for the replies!

As a side note, anyone have a smart way to raise a mystic's computers score besides skill focus or skill synergy? It's not a class skill for mystic, and none of the themes make it so. Themeless perhaps?

hmm.

Thanks

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Slurmalyst wrote:
Quote:


As for which role is the most important, I say they go from most to least:
Pilot
Engineer
Gunner
Science Officer
Captain

You can debate exact placement, but I'd simplify and say there's 3 tiers, at least at low levels:

Tier 1: Pilot
Tier 2: Engineer/Gunner
Tier 3: Science Officer/Captain

Our group only has 3 players, and we naturally came to cover the first two tiers as you've put them. We now have an AI doing the Science Officer role.

My Solarion often starts combat trying to taunt the enemy as Captain and making a quick shot (with the penalty), then moving to Gunner full time.

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