Question about Narrative Starship Combat


Rules Questions


2 people marked this as FAQ candidate.

How have people been interpreting the line "Any skill check successes carry over into the next round."?

From my read it seems that once you surpass the threshold once and gotten a hit, that ship will be taking hits every turn because the skill checks are still carrying over.

Is it meant to be only the succcesses that didn't reach threshold and become hits that carry over? Is there something I'm missing?


I haven't read the applicable rules in any kind of detail, but I'd assume it was the latter - that it's saying that you don't lose successes just because they didn't make the breakpoint that round.

Making it so that all damage is now no-save ongoing damage would be... odd.


It is odd, thus why I'm asking if there is a thing I'm missing or something.

Shadow Lodge

I've been reading this as:

  • A threshold 3 ship takes 1 damage for every three successes scored by the PCs.
  • If the PCs get 4 successes in round 1, the PCs 'spend' 3 successes to inflict 1 damage on the target and any remaining successes (1 in this case) are carried forward into the next round rather than being lost completely.
Of course, the rules don't clearly state this: An actual example of how the system is supposed to play would have been helpful...

My GM and I went over these rules earlier this week and we were a bit puzzled by the large array of mostly useless 'Enemy Tactics' options: In a typical 1v1 starship encounter, only the 'All-Out Attack' and 'Open Fire' tactics seem particularly useful as most of the others are just penalizing the PCs at the cost of actually damaging them at all. Most of these tactics should only come into play when fighting 3+ opponents* due to the rather odd (if understandable) 'No two enemy ships can choose the same tactic in a round' restriction...

*With 2 or more enemies, the 'Ram' tactic becomes viable given the overall HP advantage the enemy should have, but 'All-Out Attack' presumably becomes less viable as the individual enemies are presumably lower tier than the PCs and will have an even tougher time than normal scoring two 'hard DC' successes (still might be worth trying given how much damage it can do).

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