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So my first starship combat in Starfinder lasted 17 days (play by post) That got me wondering how other games deal with starship combat. So I looked into and or tried several other games. Here is what I found.
I took a look at Star Trek Adventures it seemed like it would be the closest to Starfinder I bought one of the book but never got a chance to play. I found it interesting that some people in their reddit were wishing starship combat was more like Starfinder. But there was something I did find very interesting about their starship combat. If your in a starship combat situation and your character is not skilled in anything useful for it you can switch to playing one of the support crew members during the Combat. This makes sense on a larger ship with a big crew. On a smaller ship that Starfinders tend to use in adventures, it wouldn't be too out of place to have an extra crew member or two or even a second crew (one sleeping while the other runs the ship.) These could be NPCs maybe even some of the pregens or 2nd characters the players make that can switch between which could also act as backup characters if your main character is killed or captured. Another advantage of having at least one or two extra crew members is you would have some one to stay with the ship to keep it safe while the rest of the party goes out to explore or whatever the mission is. Having 2nd characters as extra crew could lead to making characters more optimized for starship combat.
I also looked at and got into playing Star Wars X-wing and Armada. I haven't had a chance to do squadron and fleet combat in Starfinder, so can't compare them to those types of combat. So for games that are nothing but ship combat, I've yet to play in a game where either side had lost all ships, altho it certainly can happen, just not very often. I have all so lost more games to objective points than ship loss, so having secondary mission goals besides killing the opponent can help to make combat more interesting and prevent the combat from dragging on trying to kill all the ships.
In X-wing the games can end when all the oponets ships are destroyed, or you have enough objective points, or run out of turns or time. In Starfinder this could be done by having the enemy surrender or flee after x turns or time, or certain objectives are met, combat doesn't have to always drag on until every ship is dead.
Both X-wing and Armada always use obstacles to make the combat more interesting and challenging. Obstacles can be asteroids, debris fields, gas clouds, and giant creatures that eat starships.
Two ships in X-wing the Ghost and Lando's millennium falcon both have smaller ships that can be launched from them. For Starfinder having smaller ships to launch in combat would make room for a second pilot and gunner giving more players a chance to be more involved in the combat other than in support roles. Having a 2nd PC ship on the table might be more interesting too, and could help speed up the combat.
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I might be the only person who liked the original, WotC Star Wars spaceship rules. Instead of a hex map, it used range and threat bands around each ship, and you'd maneuver to get into or shake someone out of different bands.
I liked it a lot. It felt a lot more atmospheric and chaotic like a real dogfight, and it's almost "theater of the mind" approach felt richer than trying to accept this 2D hex map as 3D space.
The rest of my group didn't care for it, though, and it was replaced in the 2nd edition with 2D hex maneuvers so they certainly weren't alone.
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This has turned into a longer conversation over here:
Starship Combat, the pre-fieldtest session zero conversation .
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Squadron strike from Ad astra games does a really good job of putting a 3d environment onto a 2d map.
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Mothership 1e uses four abstracted range bands, 3 stats for the ship, and is generally a lightweight experience that’s supposed to be hideously dangerous. It works!
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How were the threat bands measured, marked, or defined?
Vaguely. You'd basically do pilot checks to get into your attack range band while the other ship makes checks to move out of your target band and/or get into the attack range band of a different ship.
There's also a special tailing position that you can pilot skill into and gives you bonuses to attacks and you're harder to shake.
That's not a great description, but let my pull the book when I get home and I'll link a photo of the graphic.
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My first time linking an image on these boards, but fingers crossed.
That's the space combat "map" from the 1st D20 Star Wars version. Each ship (or fighter wing) would have one and use tokens to mark where the other ships were relative to you.
Maneuvering your ship would change where the other ships were relative to you (fer instance, turning left moved everybody one firing arc clockwise).
Opening the book again, I realize I'd forgotten that even speeds were abstracted too. "Attack speed" was faster than "cruising speed" for example, and each category is speed had bonuses and penalties for different attacks or maneuvers (and bigger ships couldn't reach the faster speeds)
I vaguely remember our first battle went pretty well, but then someone pointed out that I hadn't run it exactly right, and correcting those errors kind of bogged it down. I specifically remember the biggest frustration came when we couldn't figure out how to move out of a pirate frigate's firing arc, since turning your ship only affects your arcs and not theirs (as I remember it).
Looking back on it, though, it really did give a fun experience of a fast and furious space battle, but it needed to shore up some specifics.
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My first time linking an image on these boards, but fingers crossed.
You links worked but it's liked to the wrong page, it links back to this thread. When I copy and past your link, it says "That page doesn't exist
The requested page was not found."I think this was what you were trying to do, if the imgbb link had worked. I left off the end ] so you could see the code.
[url=https://ibb.co/tZxR5nH]space combat map[/url
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Stars Without Number is my favourite TTRPG for spaceship combat. Light, abstract but with roles, meaningful.
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Thanks. I'll try it one more time. Copy and paste has worked initially, I hope this photo site isn't temporary
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Exactly. It strikes a nice balance between complexity and playability.
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I got a look at the Stars Without Number ship combat map with ranges on it. I'm guessing by the look of it, it only works if the players only have one ship?
What actions does the pilot get to take? is there more than just speed and moving the other ship's tokens around you as your ship turns?
Does it allow for the use of obstacles?
The biggest complaint against current Sf ship combat is other than the point, the rest of the crew doesn't have as much fun stuff to do. What does the rest of the crew do in Stars Without Number ship combat?
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I don't know that SWN has a range band map, so I'm going to assume you meant Star Wars and apologies if I'm sniping someone elses questions.
And I'm going to be very longwinded about it too.
The big error we discovered after our first space encounter was that we did in fact only use one band chart for the PC's freighter and I just placed the pirate raiders around it. I didn't keep separate charts for each of the enemy ships and just rolled their generic skills to move and attack relative to the PCs map. To be honest, it played pretty smoothly and is actually how I recommend it be used. However, there's obvious complications if the PCs have more than one ship, there's more than one side, or the enemy ship(s) are expected to make tactical choices beyond basic fight or flee type actions.
We didn't play with multiple PC ships, but I feel like the spirit would still hold up. The strength of the concept, to me, is that it boils the space melee down into just what matters to each ship: how many are out there and where are they relative to me. To be honest, I don't even think I'd include my friend's ship on my range template. It wouldn't matter how close you were to them, just how close you were to ships that were attacking them.
There are specific pilot actions that require skill checks, like closing range or shaking pursuit. There's also a check for avoiding hazards, although I'm not sure how hazards are intended to come into play. With no map, there's nothing that needs specifically to be flown around. I assume a pilot could choose to risk a hazard in order to force a pursuing ship to make the same Avoid Hazard check, but that's not spelled out in the rules that I know of. I could also see a game master deciding that an asteroid field, fer instance, might require a check in order to change range bands, but again, that's just a possibility and not a rule that I remember.
Not for nothing, moving enemy counters around the map ranged from tedious to fun for everyone. There can be a lot of moving parts, but sometimes the excitement lead to everyone grabbing tokens and moving them around. I don't think it was an intentional design goal, but it was a fun little extra point of engagement for other players around the table.
Attacks are just like basic combat, the size of the ship decides how far away you can attack (fighters need to get to point blank while cruisers can shoot farther (but notably NOT point blank)). There isn't any system targetting or anything nuanced like that, just blasting away.
Weirdly, now that I'm flipping back through the rulebook, I can't find any mention of what other crewmembers would be doing. It's weird because I totally remember them doing stuff. We must've dragged in some rules from another game, but the guy playing the repair droid was definitely making repair rolls and we had some sort of system damage going on. (I wonder if we cribbed from GURPS, one of my players had a huge library of GURPS books.) Anyways, unless it's hiding in some other chapter, that's definitely a shortcoming of these rules.