My thoughts on Starship Combat

[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.

[Yakman]

I've been holding onto starship combat since Starfinder came out... and last night was my final straw.

3 hours of low stakes, wasted table time. Captain just says "you get a +2", one guy moves the token around the roll20 screen, i move my ships around, we roll, and it's just... we spent the last 30 minutes actually doing fun things when we got back to players controlling their PCs. That was great.

I'm done. Out. I'll just run starship chases from now on.

[kaid]

Yakman wrote:

I've been holding onto starship combat since Starfinder came out... and last night was my final straw.

3 hours of low stakes, wasted table time. Captain just says "you get a +2", one guy moves the token around the roll20 screen, i move my ships around, we roll, and it's just... we spent the last 30 minutes actually doing fun things when we got back to players controlling their PCs. That was great.

I'm done. Out. I'll just run starship chases from now on.

This is pretty much why they are taking a deep look at the starship stuff before doing playtests on it. The current system just doesn't hit the mark the pilot is doing most of the actions while everybody else is I will do my one somewhat generic action and then it moves on. It would be really nice if they can incorporate the 3 action system and make your characters still feel like they are playing their characters in space combat.

[Tim Emrick]

I realize that the original post is from a few years ago, well before Starfinder Enhanced provided Narrative Starship Combat rules as an alternative, but I fully understand the OP's and Yakman's frustration. Starship combat is a rules subsystem that can be difficult to master, because the rules are even further removed from the core rules than, say, vehicle chases or influence encounters.

Even with my character who is built to dominate starship combat (ace pilot operative with Skill Focus [Piloting] and skill mastery), it's just not that fun to play out all the fiddly tactical bits. And if your character isn't built with a starship combat role in mind, it can get frustrating quickly. I almost exclusively play Starfinder Society, and for a while now, I've largely avoided GMing scenarios with starship combat, except for a few low-level games I've been running for new players. And that's only because starship combat is such a core part of the Starfinder experience that it seems like an injustice to newbies to not introduce them to it early on. They're going to see plenty more if they keep playing, so learning the ropes on more simple, straightforward encounters is best. And, IME, lower-level combats are more likely to be stacked in the PCs' favor, so there's a little bit of a safety net while they learn.

I'm trying out the Narrative Starship Combat rules for the Scoured Stars AP that I'm running now. We've only played through one starship combat so far (our next one is coming up next, in Part 4) but it's already a game-changer. My home group strongly dislikes playing out starship combats with the original rules, but this time, everyone was fully engaged and having fun. The combat was over pretty quickly, even accounting for needing some time to teach them the new rules. Hopefully this choice will continue to pay off as we continue through higher levels. (The final starship combat of the AP was a high-level meat-grinder when I played the original scenario, and while it should still feel like one, resolving it more quickly would be highly desirable.) These rules aren't available for use in SFS, so we still have to play those the hard way.

I hope that the starship combat rules for 2E end up closer to the Narrative Starship Combat rules than to the original 1E CRB rules. The former is abstract enough that a battle plays out very much like an extended skill challenge encounter, and doesn't get bogged down in tactical minutiae. Save the fiddly stuff for the character-scale combat rules, which everyone is expected to learn anyway, because they'll need to use them every adventure.

[Taja the Barbarian]

Yep, Narrative Starship Combat rules do a nice job of streamlining Starship combat: Low level battles can easily be resolved in two rounds with each player making just a single skill check.

[Yakman]

kaid wrote:

Yakman wrote:

I've been holding onto starship combat since Starfinder came out... and last night was my final straw.

3 hours of low stakes, wasted table time. Captain just says "you get a +2", one guy moves the token around the roll20 screen, i move my ships around, we roll, and it's just... we spent the last 30 minutes actually doing fun things when we got back to players controlling their PCs. That was great.

I'm done. Out. I'll just run starship chases from now on.

This is pretty much why they are taking a deep look at the starship stuff before doing playtests on it. The current system just doesn't hit the mark the pilot is doing most of the actions while everybody else is I will do my one somewhat generic action and then it moves on. It would be really nice if they can incorporate the 3 action system and make your characters still feel like they are playing their characters in space combat.

I don't know what the answer is. Make it all narrative in core, and then have a later supplement on the topic, which just covers starships and more detailed starship combat?

That being said, I have two players who LOVE building starships and were mildly put out, if understanding, about my decision.

We had fun running a homebrew starship combat in our last adventure path [had a Tier 20 and a Tier 19 ship blasting away at each other]. That was pretty fun - it did eat up a whole session though. I don't want to waste table time like that.

[Lord Fyre]

My sense is that if Paizo doesn't include space combat in the CORE, some 3rd party will happily step in.

[Taja the Barbarian]

Yakman wrote:

kaid wrote:

Yakman wrote:

I've been holding onto starship combat since Starfinder came out... and last night was my final straw.

3 hours of low stakes, wasted table time. Captain just says "you get a +2", one guy moves the token around the roll20 screen, i move my ships around, we roll, and it's just... we spent the last 30 minutes actually doing fun things when we got back to players controlling their PCs. That was great.

I'm done. Out. I'll just run starship chases from now on.

This is pretty much why they are taking a deep look at the starship stuff before doing playtests on it. The current system just doesn't hit the mark the pilot is doing most of the actions while everybody else is I will do my one somewhat generic action and then it moves on. It would be really nice if they can incorporate the 3 action system and make your characters still feel like they are playing their characters in space combat.

I don't know what the answer is. Make it all narrative in core, and then have a later supplement on the topic, which just covers starships and more detailed starship combat?

That being said, I have two players who LOVE building starships and were mildly put out, if understanding, about my decision.

We had fun running a homebrew starship combat in our last adventure path [had a Tier 20 and a Tier 19 ship blasting away at each other]. That was pretty fun - it did eat up a whole session though. I don't want to waste table time like that.

The problem with issuing streamlined rules in the core and more elaborate rules in a supplement is that means the streamlined rules would be used in all published adventures and the GM would have to add all the details (actual hex map, ship handling, weapon arcs, etc) to make the elaborate rules work.

They have to either start with the elaborate version or just not have them at all...

[Yakman]

one alternative is to make it more like mecha combat, where every player has access to every action. i've only run it like... 2x? but it was pretty fun, i thought, although one of my players wasn't a big fan.