| Terry Bigrigg |
So our group plays 3 main RPGs Starfinder, D&D, Savage Worlds, and occasionally something else that might strike our fancy. We rotate between the games, and occasionally GM so I don't get bored with the system, or burnt out as the GM.
We jumped back into Dead Suns after a 6 month or so break. I'm prepping and get excited for GMing the game we are starting book 5, and last week we finished up the encounter with Quillus at the beginning and last night the group goes up against the Singularity and the 2 Fang Fighter escorts. They disable the Singularity and destroy the fighters we left off with them boarding. I was doing an AAR with a couple of the players and doing some thinking today I realized a couple of things.
I love ship combat as it's written. It plays great in my head but it generally sucks at the table, or at least my table. Why?
It sucks b/c it's such an infrequent encounter in the APs that the players never really gain mastery in it, or in the case of my group we are exclusive Starfinder players so it's both the infrequency and the time away. It's a departure from how the rest of the system plays out.
I said prior I love the system. I think as it's written it makes sense and gives all the players some things to do. It's one of my favorite ship combat systems, and I've played a lot of them, Star Fleet Battles, Spelljammer, Babylon 5, Silent Death just to name of few.
In Dead Suns there's not going to be a lot of opportunity left for ship combat unless I add some stuff in myself. So in future Starfinder games how do I make the experience at the table suck less?
One idea I had is to run some boot camp one shots that just deal with ship combat so the players are more familiar with what the various roles can do. The problem with that is we play once a week for about 3-4 hours and I don't want to eat up valuable story time b/c some of the players and it's something I would have to do every time we jumped back into Starfinder.
We play via Fantasy Grounds so I have a ton of little "cheat" sheets made up that the players can pin to the hot bars for how combat works, and what the various roles are capable of. It helps but there's still a lot of slow down as things get looked up.
After some thought today I realized what would really help is I need one player ideally the Captain to really know what all the other roles are capable of and to be the conductor of that ship. For example, during the various phases less of the player in that role heming and hawing over what to do. I need the Captain to tell the Engineer, or Science Office what to do like IRL. It will take some autonomy from the players but it would also stop some of the analysis paralysis and speed things up somewhat. I just need to get the Captain to know the roles.
I think that's enough venting from me for now. Thanks for listening.