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It's way too early to start talking about what we want for starship combat in Starfinder 2e. We haven't seen the new starship combat options in Starfinder Enhanced yet. So instead, I thought I'd start a thread to talk about starship combat in other games we play and what we like about them, and what from them might benefit starship combat in Starfinder.
To start, I'll just list other games I play are have looked into, and then later dive deeper into them. Please feel free to list what other games with starship combat you play, have played, or are interested in, and share your thoughts on them and what from them could benefit Starfinder starship combat.
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Game I play frequently:
Starfinder and Pathfinder 2e
Star Wars armada
Star wars x-wing
Games I have at least one of the books but haven't played yet
Savage worlds (Flash Gorden, Slipstream, Space1889)
Star Trek Adventures
Stars Without Number
Games I have looked into that look interesting:
Mother Ship
Death in Space
Games I played so long ago that I have completely forgotten:
Traveler
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The one of those I really know well is Stars Without Number. I like how it spreads your action points around, though Starfinder does that fairly well already, though it also ties those to actions you may or may not be able to do because of a greater emphasis on skills.
I also appreciate how SWN's ship combat is largely abstracted. Things like distance and position don't matter a terribly large amount save in the most broad of senses. That style of combat suits what I am personally looking for in starship combat because, even with the actual size of the hexes not being terribly well-defined, Starfinder's starship combat is pretty granular with things like facing and projectile distances mattering more than even ground combat cares about.
In current Starfnder ship combat the pilot probably has the most fun/interesting role on the ship. How does the pilot in SWN feel or work?
Is it abstract enough to be played in the theater of the mind?
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A simple rule-neutral way to make any Starship combat more interesting is to add obstacles. In both Star Wars Armada and X-wing, you always have at least six obstacles in the play area. Obstacles can be asteroids, debris fields, dust clouds, mines, and Starship-sized creatures. Armad and X-wing also typically have more pieces on the board than we do in Starfinder.
I'll just use X-wing as an example here because the play area is closer in size. In a typical X-wing game, each player has around 3 to 5 ships. There are 6 obstacles. Each player places 3 of the obstacles so it's never the same setup. There are also one to 5 objective objects, such as satellites and cargo containers to collect or control. That's 13 to 21 objects to create an interesting tactical situation. Of those objects, 7 to 11 of them are static, and the rest moving around.
It's hard to tell what the typical setup for Starship combat in Starfinder is. I've only played in a few. Some groups I played completely avoided them. I've seen a few in recorded live plays, and searching through the adventures, I haven't seen any maps showing to place obstacles. If you know of a better example than the ones I use, please share.
From Dawn of Flames:
Starship Combat: Start with the mystery ship 15 hexes in
front of the fire whale, which is near the center top of the map.
Far Portal Station is just off the map’s bottom right corner. The
PCs’ ship is its speed away from Far Portal Station, moving
toward the mystery ship. The sun and the Far Portal itself are
also off the map, behind the fire whale.
So that’s one enemy, one NPC ship, and one ship controlled by the PCs, and both obstacles are off the map.
I’m guessing typical is 1 to 3 enemy ships vs 1 PC ship without obstacles?
Most complicated ship combat I was in had 1 enemy orbital station (static object) sending attack drones after us. We ended up fighting 3 drones but have heard there could have been as many as 9 to 12 if we had played it differently but not likely all at one time. So I’ll say 6 drones vs. one PC ship and one static object.
If we compare the Ship combat encounter design to normal combat in a room, where the starfield map is the room. That would be like having all normal combat encounters in the same size and empty room, with the only variable being to place obstacles. The party would also only have one PC to move around the room with. So there is no movement interaction or tactics for the PCs working together.
One of the challenges of playing Armada and X-wing is not to ram your own ships. And can be challenging to get and maintain advantageous formations and positions with constantly moving ships.
The first easy thing to do to make ship combat more interesting is to add obstacles. We already have rules for space hazards. They just need to be included in more adventures. The other thing we're missing is space obstacle and hazard pawn, similar to the tech terrain collection. I have lots of small obstacles from Armada and X-wing I can use in Starfiner. One thing that those other games are missing I’d love to have is a big 7-inch diameter moon to really help break up the play area. Something big enough for a ship to hide behind.
Now to the players only have one ship issue. One complaint I hear is the pilot has the most interesting role, and the gunners have the most impact, and everyone else is just support. A simple way to help fix some of that is to give the party a second ship, assuming they have a 2nd pilot. There are two ships in X-wing that have smaller ships they can launch and become a second ship in the game. The ships are Lando’s Millennium Falcon and the Ghost.
Some starships in Starfinder could be designed to have small fighter/shuttlecraft that could be deployed in combat, giving two players a chance to pilot and an extra gunner as well. If the party doesn't have a second pilot, it could be possible for someone to control the smaller ship. Remotely. Could be a fun thing for a mechanic or technomancer to do. And having two PC ships on the map changes up the dynamics of the tactical a lot. Making them more interesting and allow for more teamwork.
So that’s two things that are easy fixes without messing much with the rules and could be used in both editions of Starfinder. I have lots of ideas and suggestions for rules but I will save that for another day. And hoping to hear more from other people's experiences with other games, or Starfinder if it's the only one you play with starship combat.
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A simple rule-neutral way to make any Starship combat more interesting is to add obstacles.
This only works for the pilot: who isn't the weak point in the system. The engineer is still stuck down in engineering shoveling uranium into the engine to restore the shields whether the pilot is flying in a straight line or pulling loop de loops. The gunners still making the same roll to fire etc.
In fact, the pilot taking longer to figure out the flight plan can make things worse for the rest of the party.
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This is all just off the top of my head, so just some brainstorming ideas. First I'll address the pilot taking too long issue here, I'll do a separate post on my ideas for the rest of the crew another time.
So in Armada and X-wing, precise movement is MUCH more important than in Srarfinder ship combat. By precise, I mean you might use a laser pointer to see if there is a micro sliver of a gap between ships to avoid tacking collision damage. Despite this, you don't get to accurately measure moves on the board. In Armada, you can use the movement tool to help visualize your move but not actually place it against the ship to get a truly accurate measurement once you lock in the tool that's your move. In X-wing, it's even harder. Everyone preselects their movement before any of the ships move without measuring. Yes this causes lots of crashes, it's part of the fun. Some ships will let you take extra maneuvers after your predetermined move is finished.
I'm going to give our Starfinder pilot a 3-action economy to work with.
I'll give the pilot some common actions to take. Each is one action.
1: Simple Move: A straight or simple banked curve, nothing fancy. does not require a dice roll, just like walking and running.
2: Change speed:
...1: Speed only changes if you use an action to do so.
...2: Staying at the same speed takes no action.
...3: You can set your speed at the start of the encounter for free unless your speed is 0.
...4: Changing speed does not require a dice roll.
...5: Ships engines could determine how much of a speed change you can make in one action.
3: Fire a weapon non-turret forward-facing weapon, likely a nose gun.
4: Maneuver: One of many fancy maneuvers or stunts. Requires a dice roll.
5: Correct course:
...After making a simple move or maneuver, you can course correct.
...This requires a piloting check.
...The DC is higher to course correct a maneuver.
...Cost 1 action or 1 hero point.
...Feats could be used to improve correct course’s effectiveness.
.....Critical success: Move one hex and change facing by one hex face.
.....Success: Move one hex or chage facing by one hex face.
.....Failure: The ship does not move.
.....Critical failure: The ship ends up in the wrong hex and facing.
6: Other non-piloting actions like attempting to stop persistent fire damage. Or shooting a pistol at someone entering the bridge. (saving this for another post.)
Note: the pilot is not allowed to touch the map until after they say what move they are making is, and has to follow that move. Making mistakes should be part of the fun of being a pilot. If the ship doesn’t land where they like, that's what the course correct action is for.
(There will need to be some rules and or visual templates defining moves.) For now, let's define a bank turn as (x hexes forward, y hexes left or right, and turn to face one hex face in the direction of the turn.) where x is the ship's current speed and y is the ship maneuver rating.
The first action the pilot makes a simple banked turn. The pilot says I’m going to move x hexes forward, y left. Then makes the move and turns the ship facing one hex facing left. NOTE: x is = to the ship's speed, so all the pilot has to decide is how far left or right within the ship's maneuver rating.
The second action, the pilot makes a barrel roll maneuver. Rolls a success. Slides the ship sideways to the left 2 hexes without changing the facing.
Third action, the ship did not land where the pilot was hoping. Or was not far enough, so they roll for a course correction and got success, allowing the ship to move one hex.
Time saving opportunities:
1: pilot makes any combination of simple moves or speed changes, requiring no dice rolling.
2: Hands off the map, Pilot eyeballs the move and calls out a predetermined template name for the move or simple formula (x forward, y left), then makes the move. Don’t allow endless move plotting. Gets easier with practice.
3: Correct course compensates for player error and is used to show off the piloting skills of the PC. Takes the pain out of having to make quick move decisions. Should create a lot of Oh pronk!, Hold on, I can save this, moments.
4: The pilot can take non-piloting actions could save time plotting moves.
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When is the fight over? Followed by, Fights over now what?
(mostly just brain storming out loud here, feel free to join the storming)
How do you know when the fight is over? Most of the time in Starfinder, it’s when one side is completely destroyed, or you have a starship chase and escape. In X-wing there are 4 ways the game ends.
1: Time runs out.
2: The number of turns runs out.
3: One player reaches 20 objective points
4: One side losses all their ships (not very common)
Most of this is GM advice or encounter advice, but some of it becomes relevant later, setting the stage to talk about crew actions in another post.
How would these work in Starfinder?
1: Time runs out.
The GM feels the game is dragging, and people are not having a fun time. It’s to move on. The enemy ship decides to flee. To avoid this turning into a chase, there would need to be a way to jump to the drift quickly or a quick chase flee option that is just one die roll. (nothing wrong with longer chases, but this is not the time for one.)
Enemy surrenders. Easy to do, but need to be ready to answer the question, “Fights over now what.”
2: Number of turns runs out. Very similar to time runs out but is set by the encounter, usually with something being triggered at the end. Fights over now what is part of the encounter plan.
3: One side gets x number of objective points. Objective points could be something only the PC can get, or both sides get racing to win by getting the required amount first. Fights over now what becomes the mission is over no what. You can fight on or flee, or completing the mission causes something to happen you now have to deal with.
One thing that will likely happen when objectives are in play is some of the crew will be in ship combat while the rest of the crew are trying to complete objectives. This is where replacing the current ship combat rules with modified normal combat rules would be required.
4: One side losses all their ships. If the PC doesn’t have some personal reason to be destroying all the other ships, an encounter like this is likely just feel like a ship combat just to have a ship combat. But having something gained by the ship battle helps a lot to make it feel more like a worthwhile encounter.
Fights over now what?
The opening ship combat in Dawn of Flames comes to mind as a good example of having a good ending. PCs kill the space whale chasing the mysterious ship. With the fight over and now the PCs have a ship to explore, this is a great reward for a ship battle.
In a scenario I played in, we had one ship combat in it. It fit the story well, The mission was to investigate why ships were being attacked around a planet, so we expected it would happen, and it did right when we arrived. But winning the battle had no real impact on the rest of the scenario. Fights over now what? Just move on to the next part of the scenario. The mission was to investigate had we gained more info from winning the battle, it would have tied it to the story better. This could be an opportunity to have some of the crew fighting while others were investigating by doing scans or whatnot. Or The investigation could have been after the fight. Clues might have been found in the wreckage.
So in most fights in normal combat in a room tend to end, being followed by searching the room. Having more to find and gain by searching the wreckage of a defeated ship would be much more interesting than just moving to the next plot point in the story.
What to do with prisoners when you do not have room or time for them. You could drift them. Set their ship to jump to the drift on a timer so you can get out. You could drift them randomly just to get them from following you or send them in the direction of the stewards.
If their ship has escape pods, then they can get away on their own, leaving their ship free for you to explore. A good reason to build escape pods into more NPC ships.
I’m all stormed out for tonight. The next topic will likely be:
“Less risk to the ship and more risk to the crew.” Here we'll start seeing more non-ship combat crew actions during ship combat.
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I reread most of the rules for ship combat damage, and the risk to the ship was less than I thought, so my only suggestion is to make it easier for the crew to take damage. People will feel like their actions have more value if there is individual risk. This makes the battle feel more personal and not like a win or TPK situation. PCs getting damaged also give healers a chance to be healers.
My thought is that PCs should have a chance to be damaged anytime the shields are down on the section of the ship they are in. So a hit that takes out the shields and does damage would not affect the crew yet, but any hits after that would. Using a center turret gun would become risky and might require replacing the gunner or healing them. When the shields on one side are down gunner on that side may want to move to another area, and the whole combat becomes more dynamic. And before some board, the ship and starts normal combat in the middle of the ship combat.
Everyone that’s been on a ship before is likely trained in basic damage control and basic ship functions, like how to use the ship's guns. Gaining basic damage control and ship skills could be part of a background, archetype, or even a down time activity, which would basically be on-the-job ship crew training and drills. Learning a ship's station could also be a downtime activity to learn other stations or improve on one you know. Learning ship skills through downtime activities is a good way for PC to gain ship skills without interfering with their class and other freat or skill progression.
It’s also a great way for a Pathfinder character to learn to be part of a ship's crew without normally having access to those skills. And actually, RP the training out in downtime will give characters more buy-in to their ship and ship combat. Doing ship training as part of session zero is a great way for the crew to come together and be better prepared for ship combat and have more interest init.
Now that you’re trained in damage control, that gives the crew other activities to do during ship combat, patching small hull breaches, putting out fires, and shoring up damaged areas of the ship (restoring a few temp hull points.)
That’s it for tonight. Next time I’ll talk about initiative and how mixing ship and regular combat could work. If anyone else has other ideas, I’d love to hear them. All of this is just me brainstorming out loud, feel free to join in.
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So I come from a background where I played a fair amount of Advanced Squad Leader (ASL), Starfleet Battles (SFB) and Babylon 5 Wars (B5W). All of these are games where it is one player handling each side rather than a group vs GM.
On the Starfinder side of things, I’ve been playing since release.
SFB and B5W both used checkboxes to indicate damage to shields or items. In B5W they intentionally made it so a ship would fall apart as the battle progressed. There was shield recharge, but very little in battle repair of systems. In many ways Babylon 5 Wars (B5W) was a simpler version of Starfleet Battles.
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One of the best Starfinder starship combats in my mind is still the one in #1-04 Cries from the Drift. There are several good ones, but that one still sticks out in my mind. It had the obstacles that Driftbourne mentions plus additional things that the Science Officer could do that were important to the fight.
In my mind, Starfinder needs starship combat that continues to emphasize individual ships over fleet movement. We are supposed to be explorers so we are going to have the Traveler model of single ship for the vast majority of tasks.
We probably want to allow a little more of the small ‘gunboat’ or fighter class ships, but need to keep them extremely easy to operate.
We need to have ship roles better balanced and need them to interact more.
Right now the ships are built so you don’t have to budget energy. In SFB you didn’t have enough energy to power all systems at maximum value. It has been long enough that I don’t recall exactly how it worked, but you would budget your energy between the systems including some systems that you could overcharge.
Giving an energy budget would give the engineer something more to do and cause those decisions to interact with the gunners and pilot. The engineer would still need to balance this against time spent on repair actions as well.
Giving less shielding would help a lot both to make the battles faster and to allow people to chip away at defenses. You probably want the shields set so a single hit from a light weapon can take them down and/or you want to limit how much they can regenerate. It is much too easy to restore a downed shield in Starfinder.
Giving the science officer things they can do to block enemy sensors, shift shields, tune shields to a particular weapon, and continue to allow targeting of systems should help make that position more interesting. Maybe you put them completely in charge of handling the shields so the engineer is just giving them a power budget and then they decide how to spend it. Autopilot would be to spread it evenly.
I like some of the things they gave the Magic Officer, but really need to add more options for that as well.
The captain always felt like a small buff to a single action rather than the one coordinating a team. I don’t mind if they keep the captain giving bonuses to actions, but we need to make it so it feels like a tactical decision on that player’s part rather than the first position you give up when you don’t have enough players to fill all positions.
The important thing is giving tactical decisions to each of the ship officer positions and have some interactions between the roles.
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BretI brought up the subject of shields, so I'll explain how they work in X-wing and Armada. Armada has some ways of dealing with shields that might be of interest. And I agree with BretI less shields would help.
Shields in X-wing normally don't regenerate unless you have an upgrade card that lets you. And regenerating is just one point, and overall not very common. Typically the maximum number of shields is 5. Shields cover the whole ship. There are no shield zones.
Shields in Armada range from 1 to 6 points. Each of the shield zones has a separate maximum value. Shields don't regenerate automatically without having an upgrade card that lets you. Some ships can take shield damage from another friendly ship near by. Some ships can also restore the shields of a nearby friendly ship. Generally, automatic regeneration of shields is rare, and small enough to not be a huge advantage.
Having shield zones with a different set max value makes ship tactics for maneuvering feel very different from one ship to another. All ships in Armada have a week-aft shield. Most are heavy on the front. Some are heavy on the side, mostly on ships that also have higher armaments on the side as well.
To restore damage or shields, you can spend engineering points
1 point lets you move 1 shield to an adjacent shield
2 points let you restore 1 shield point
3 points lets you remove one hull damage or crit.
The tricky part is you only have engineering points if you planned ahead to have them. The bigger the ship you have, the more turns in advance you have to plan your commands to get those points. So restoring damage and shields has a cost, and only if you plan for it.
As a defensive reaction, you can spend a redirect defense token as a reaction to taking damage to redirect the damage to an adjacent hull zone.
Moving shield points around, either proactively or defensively as a reaction, are great ways to give the crew actions that improve their tactical situation without regaining shield points which tends to drag out the combat. But Shields likely still needs to be a bit more fragile to start with. It's very common in Armada that one attack could destroy all your shields in one zone in a single attack or for you to redirect it all to another zone, leaving you exposed from a different angle of attack.
There are other defensive tokens you can use as reactions to mitigate damage (to shields or the hull) in different ways. Exhausting the defender's defense token reactions is an important part of the gameplay. Some of those could be turned into crew or pilot actions/reactions. A smaller ship with few shields depends more on its defense token reactions than its shields. The size of ships that the PC normally has would fall into this category.
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Something else BretI said I wanted to add to
In my mind, Starfinder needs starship combat that continues to emphasize individual ships over fleet movement. We are supposed to be explorers so we are going to have the Traveler model of single ship for the vast majority of tasks.
We probably want to allow a little more of the small ‘gunboat’ or fighter class ships, but need to keep them extremely easy to operate.
I've been thinking about starship size and what works best for a crew of 4 to 6. I've been looking for ships in movies that are big enough for a crew of 4 to 6 to live on and small enough only to need a crew of that size too. Most of those ships are also the right size to fit on a flip mat.
In Stafinder, ships like the Sunrise Maiden, Pegasus, and Drake come to mind. In Star Wars, the Millennium Falcon, Ghosts, and Decimators. In the net flicks versions of Lost in Space, Jupiter 2. These are all roughly the size to fit on a flip map.
There's another category of ship a crew of 4 to 6 could use. These are freighters and transport ships, typically 2 to 3 times the size of the ships in the first group. Altho larger can be crewed with just 4 to 6 people. Most of the increase in ship size is for cargo or passengers. These ships have room for there to be more than one set of crew that work in shifts. (a great way to have backup characters in case someone's first character dies. Also, a great way to have the player have one set of characters playing the ship's crew specialized in being the ship's crew, and a second set of characters that are the away team for missions.
From Star Wars, examples of ships like this are, the rebel GR-75 medium transport, the Gozanti class cruiser, and the C-Roc class cruiser.
Of the ships just big enough for a crew of 4 to 6, the Ghost and Jupiter stand out as great ships for an adventuring party. The Ghost has a smaller attack shuttle/fighter docked to it. This is great to allow a second character to pilot in ship combat. I think this would make ship battles much more dynamic. The Jupiter-2 has a garage bay for a ground vehicle, a great way to add vehicle use to an adventure. The Ghost is more combat-oriented but is still versatile enough for almost any mission and is a ship you can live on and call home. The Jupiter-2 is the ship you want if you get standard alone on a planet without help. It's got everything you need to set up a home on a new planet. Altho it lacks weapons, those are easy to add on.
My thought is, ship combat would primarily be focused on the size of ships listed above or smaller (maybe just in the core rule book with bigger ships covered in a later book?.) Most of the time in movie, when a crew of 4 to 6 goes up against larger ships, it'd either running a blockade, sneeking onto the bigger ship to rescue someone, or escaping from the bigger ship. We haven't seen the narrative ship combat rules in Enhanced yet I wonder if those might be better for this type of combat.
Another thought I had on Giant size ship combat, where the party is commanding a huge crew, is if this situation would not be similar to running a castle siege. Where the crew's actions involve making commands to the crew and then dealing with a small portion of the battle directly. The PC's preparations of the ship for combat would come into play too.
Managing Creative Director (Starfinder)
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One element of how I think the team wants to approach a system like this, is that we want it to feel natural and not like you're playing an entirely different game when you go into Starship Combat. IF we were to do a different game, then I think we should market it as a different game and it should be akin to how something like Battletech/Mechwarrior can crossover when they want to.
I think there's room for a really mechanically crunchy starship combat game, with lots of intricacies and details. I also think there's a lot of room for a system that has the players still controlling their PCs during a starship combat, and having them influence what's going on in that encounter directly.
We're still a ways off from discussing this in any formal capacity, but know that the team has been talking on a lot of different approaches for how we can do this.
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Interesting that you should say that Thurston as I was really hoping for something like that in the Vehicle rules. Allow for a battle like the speeder bike chase on Endor. It would most likely require that the combat no longer use a normal map and go for more of a theater of the mind combat, but could make it work more seamlessly with other elements of the game in encounter mode.
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Since Bretl mentions Vehicles, why not throw everything in...
A starship lands and provides cover fire while several of the crew jump onto speeder bikes in the ship's cargo hold and race out of the ship to engage the attacking mech and a few ground troops.
Technically speaking, Mechs and Starships are just types of vehicles. The weapons on a spaceship the size most PCs use are not that different from a tank or large mech. So maybe mixing everything is not as crazy as it sounds, now if there's enough coffee available to do all of that's is another question.
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One element of how I think the team wants to approach a system like this, is that we want it to feel natural and not like you're playing an entirely different game when you go into Starship Combat.
If it's something you can reference from your character sheet, it likely won't feel like a different game.
I think there's room for a really mechanically crunchy starship combat game, with lots of intricacies and details. I also think there's a lot of room for a system that has the players still controlling their PCs during a starship combat, and having them influence what's going on in that encounter directly.We're still a ways off from discussing this in any formal capacity, but know that the team has been talking on a lot of different approaches for how we can do this.
I figured it was way early in the process, so I thought it would be a good time to see what pieces could be picked out of other games to help the brainstorming. Can't wait to see see what you and your team's ideas are when the time comes. No idea if it's helpful, but I'll finish out my ideas as I get time.
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You know, I remember Fragged Empire being similar to Starfinder but better, but I can't remember how it goes exactly..
Fragged Empire, your starship is basically your home base and a lot of your resources are part of it, but starship combat is more for feel rather than mechanics. you're doing skill checks not miniature combat skills.
However, having a skim though, it seems like it's largely just slightly more streamlined than SF1e was [/QUOTE
I like the idea of your ship being a home base. Do you remember what resources it gave you?
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I like a lot of what Bretl said, including my realization that it's actually not the Sci officer who controls shields like I'd for some reason assumed.
Reduced ship defenses, increased risk to crew, reduced energy resources. All really insightful ideas. The base level of a ship should be mediocre, with the crew making up the difference.
Where crew combat really suffers, I think, is that only the pilot (and maybe gunner) has decision points. The pilot is deciding where to go and how to get there, and the rest of the crew just makes that possible.
Now, I really don't have a good grasp of how long the average space encounter lasts, but I'd like to see something where a crewmember has to invest in an action. The more turns they spend on it, the better the results or bonus. Then there's some weight to deciding if they should, fer instance, sacrifice their +3 targeting bonus against one ship in order to start building up shields against another. An engineer can spend one turn getting a system working for two turns, or can spend three turns to fix it permanently.
Like, make the crew actions skill challenges, if that's still a term we use.
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Not having to learn a second game for starship combat would be nice. I remember that being the biggest hurdle when we played sf1. It was a big shifting of gears from what you had been doing mechanically, which drastically increased the time needed to resolve. This resulted in us feeling like the starship portion of the game dragged on pacing wise more than it actually did.
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A simple rule-neutral way to make any Starship combat more interesting is to add obstacles.This only works for the pilot: who isn't the weak point in the system. The engineer is still stuck down in engineering shoveling uranium into the engine to restore the shields whether the pilot is flying in a straight line or pulling loop de loops. The gunners still making the same roll to fire etc.
In fact, the pilot taking longer to figure out the flight plan can make things worse for the rest of the party.
This is my main complaint about space combat, and why my group mostly skipped space combat. The pilot is the only one with any real choice. Pretty much every other role on the ship has precisely one thing it should do based on the circumstances. And what some people can do depends a lot of what and how well the pilot does their job.
The science officer is going to spend most of their time rebalancing shields. The first round they'll probably do a scan to identify if the enemy has any arcs that are less armed or which shield quadrants are the weakest. Gunners are going to fire. Maybe if there's only one gunner instead of multiple you fire at will instead of shoot, but there's not much choice here. The engineer is usually going to divert, to recharge the shields. The first round of combat you might divert to increase speed.
A captain can spend time encouraging people, but chances are the whole ship is better off if the captain becomes an additional gunner.
There are some other crew roles that I can't remember the rules for, but they all kind of boil down to doing 1 of 2 things, and usually the circumstances of the current take make it pretty obvious which choice is the best.
At some point I jokingly made a flow chart for every position on the ship but pilot, wrote down each characters skill for the appropriate role(s) the could fill. The flow chart even included when a character would switch between roles. Then the GM and the pilot would play out the space combat while the rest of us talked and joked around. After doing that twice we just kinda hand waved space combat unless there was something that made it more interesting.
Too many space combats felt like it was just you and another ship and your only goal was to shoot them down before they could shoot you down. Even "terrain" (I remember a few combat with asteroids that you could hide behind) didn't do much except slow combat down. Like one ship would get hurt, go hide behind the asteroid. If we won imitative we could follow them, if they won we couldn't. If they successfully hid then their shield repairs were more effective because we didn't shoot them again while we were also generally getting better because our shield also didn't get shot. I mainly remember winning the fight by scoring a critical hit with a spore torpedo which somehow didn't get repaired (I think because they were at a point where they needed to recharge shield or repair and couldn't do both and then botch a repair roll later). And eventually the cascading effect of the spores caused their downfall. But it was mostly a terrible boring slog.
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Currently the Engineer repairs shields, the Science Officer can move shields from one quadrant to another. One of my suggestions was the Engineer causes the Science Officer to have a budget they can use on shields and all shield repair, movement, and such is done by the Science Officer.
Currently the time for a turn of Starship combat is nebulous as the scale of the combat can change depending on what you are doing. This is explained in Starship Operations Manual, and while convenient for that it would make it harder to integrate with the three action system.
If they can fit the Starship Combat into the three action system, it would make boarding actions work a lot smoother. On the other hand, it would make for some crazy speeds on the craft depending on the scale used for the battle. I doubt the designers really want to get into the velocity calculations for different scales of space combat so I suspect there will be some hand waving there. That or past a certain scale the starships do not move a hex in a single round. Basically some minor theatre of the mind maneuvering of the ships while the boarding action happens.
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I think one thing that needs to be considered, is maybe starship fights just don't have every campaign. Or maybe only happen a few times through a whole campaign. You make them more interesting by having differing success goals, and things to interact with besides just the other ship.
At most I think one starship fight per book is all you need.
And I think it might also be worth considering setting up campaigns where the PCs are given a ship that they don't get to optimize for fights, but rather just have to deal with what is given. This allows for much more fine tuning of the enemy ship and the things players can interact with, because you'll have a good baseline of this is what players have access to and can do.
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This is my main complaint about space combat, and why my group mostly skipped space combat. The pilot is the only one with any real choice. Pretty much every other role on the ship has precisely one thing it should do based on the circumstances. And what some people can do depends a lot of what and how well the pilot does their job.
The science officer is going to spend most of their time rebalancing shields. The first round they'll probably do a scan to identify if the enemy has any arcs that are less armed or which shield quadrants are the weakest. Gunners are going to fire. Maybe if there's only one gunner instead of multiple you fire at will instead of shoot, but there's not much choice here. The engineer is usually going to divert, to recharge the shields. The first round of combat you might divert to increase speed.
A captain can spend time encouraging people, but chances are the whole ship is better off if the captain becomes an additional gunner.
I've been trying ways to integrate space (or crewed vehicle) combat into RPGs since 1983 when I was a playtester for FASA Star Trek.
You've described the crux of the problem.
If there's combat _on the map_ with spaceships, you're hitching dolphins to the front of your chariot.
If the combat on the map is interesting, the only person who gets to make meaningful choices is the pilot, everyone else is either a gunner, or waiting for something to go wrong on the ship. You're making the dolphins happy and everyone in the chariot is holding their breath or drowning.
If the combat on the map isn't interesting, the dolphins are flopping around on the dirt, while the people in the chariot are rocking it back and forth to make it seem like they're dodging javelins or cutting down infantry.
FASA Trek tried very hard to give everyone other than the captain a mini-game where they each conveyed a small amount of the tactical picture for the captain to make decisions from. This works great, exactly twice.
The GM is running 1-3 smaller ships, and doesn't have the "I have to understand what Bill is saying through a mouth full of cheetos" bottleneck to contend with.
So the first time, the GM gets a coordination advantage, the ship the PCs are on is qualitatively better, the PCs overcome the difficulties imposed by them, they win, everyone feels accomplished. Yaaaay!
The _second_ game, the PCs know their mini games better, and the introduced friction of "What the hell is Bill saying again?" is greatly reduced. The PCs blow up all three of the NPC ships, and...nobody feels that thrill of overcoming a challenge, a tough fight.
Because they all know that their PCs aren't going to die in the fight. And it being Star Trek, they're not going to have to worry about paying to have the dents pounded out of the hull, or buy replacement missiles and ruin their profit margins a'la Traveller.
The third game, they switch to the tactical game and try to do something similar to the first game with the players doing mini games, and...it's as much fun as changing diapers. That third game is about where Starfinder starts.
I have a mini game that I think comes _closer_ to a solution to this, and am perfectly willing to throw this to the Starfinder dev team. It's not something that fits the products I publish, and it's not 'big enough' to be a product of its own.
I've wanted to see a good fix for this problem published for 40 years...
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So one of the useful techniques for a design thing like this, especially when you start to stall, is to return to the requirements. What would a good starship battle for SF2 look like? How would it feel? What would be the experience of it?
We will assume that we don't just want to have a starship battle game that works once. We want to have the same party on more or less the same ship able to have multiple encounters (if called for) and enjoy all of them. Ideally, it would be nice if it were possible to have an AP that was really into starship battles (for whatever reason) and had a bunch of them, and have them all be fun.
So what does it take to be fun? Well... here's my list:
- Everyone needs to have something to do that feels useful. Ideally, they all feel roughly the same amount of useful.
- Everyone needs to have nontrivial decisions to make as part of that.
- Ideally, everyone should feel like they're working together, with a result that's greater than the sum of its parts. Cooperating with your party under conditions of stress releases the happy chemicals.
- Ideally, there should be some form of advancement that adjusts the gameplay in nontrivial ways (ie, changing available options in ways that are tactically interesting, rather than just making numbers go up).
- It shouldn't just be identical to standard combat, because if it is, what's the point?
Additionally, serving your role on a ship should *probably* be simpler than doing your thing in standard combat. Starship combat isn't as critical to the game as party combat, it wont' happen as often, and it shouldn't call for the same investment.
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So... thoughts on a design that maybe gets there.
- Each player takes on a role in the ship. It's a good start. Each role gets a set of basic actions. Let's say three of them. We try to tune it so that in any given battle, each role might have reason to use any of their three basic actions in any given round, and each set of basic actions is tuned to be (very roughly) as useful as any other set.
- The ship is, among other things, the party's gear for starship fights. It should be built accordingly. In particular, there should be (limited) gearlike ways to augment the actions of each role, ideally with a moderately interesting choice or two to make for each. It should make sense for each position to pick one or two interesting things to make their own contribution in a fight better. It should *not* make sense to cram all of the buffs into one or two characters and leave everyone else high and dry.
- PCs should also get better at shipfighting. This shoudl actually be on a different track than their standard class leveling system, and should be significantly simpler. Something like... every role has a series of feats associated that make you better at that role in some way, and don't really do much when not flying a starship. You get to start with one, and as you get experience in your role, you get to add a few more. Basically, this is intended to give you a sense of personal advancement for those campaigns that do a lot of starship fights, without dumping a whole bunch of unnecessary complexity on people who *don't* do a lot of starship fights. But, like, 8-12 feats per role, and a party that did a *lot* of stuff with their starships shoudl expect to eventually have something like 4-5 each.
Various roles and their three basic actions:
- Gunner: takes a position at one of the Big Guns of the ship
--- Attack: Basic attack for damage against a single target
--- Covering Fire: throw more shots downrange with worse accuracy. Less likely to hit, and takes more energy, but applies penalties to certain enemy actions.
--- Called Shot: throw fewer shots downrange and spend more time aiming.
Deals less damage overall, but more likely to cripple important systems.
- Engineer: sees to the health fo the ship in general
--- Repair: for when some obnoxious gunner has crippled an important system, attempt to uncripple it.
--- Manage Power Systems: boosts the amount the generator puts out this turn, and shunts the energy aroudn in useful ways to make sure that everyone has what they need
--- Power Surge: costs extra energy, but gives a significant temporary buff to one other station.
- Pilot: manages the ship's position in space. (This is not a hex-map. the only thing we actually track is how far you are from various enemies.)
--- Evasive Maneuvers: makes you less likely to be hit.
--- Adjust Position: try to get closer to the enemy or get away. The closer you are, the easier it is for each side to hit the other (especially with short-range weaponry) and if you get close enough you can make it a boarding action. If one side is trying to get closer and the other is trying to get away, it's a contested action, and could go either way.
--- Full Broadside: Attempt to position for best attack. Offer an accuracy buff to your gunners
- Arcana: run all of that funny finicky magic/science stuff:
--- Activate Sensors: try to figure out what your sensors are telling you. Basically, this is the equivalent of Recall Knowledge.
--- Restore Shields: Doesn't always work, but if your shields are down, there are things you can do to try to bring them back up again.
--- Analyze Shielding: Attempt to figure out vulnerabilities in enemy shields which will make them much easier to bring down.
- Captain: manages crew coordination and morale
--- Inspiring Speech: gives a small bonus to rolls for everyone this round
--- Enable: adjust things to make life easier for one of your crew. They get an additional action this turn, but may not perform the same action twice. You may not enable the same crew two turns in a row.
--- Encourage: offers one of your crew the opportunity to make an additional save this round against any effects that they might wish to save against.
Something like that. Then you maybe add an "environment" system to handle stuff like "you're having this fight in an asteroid field. These three things are different." and you pretty much have the core of it.
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I'm not saying that this is the be-all and end-all of starship combat or anything, but I feel like you could use it as a (very) preliminary first draft and come out the end of the dev cycle with something that was a fun alternate encounter style - enough to be an entertaining variation in a standard AP, or even a frequent event in an AP that was built around such things.
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One thing I think is good in the current rules is the pilot with the highest initiative goes last. This gives their ship a better position because they know where the other has moved to first. Winning the initiative roll is one of the most important rolls a pilot can make. So I think to show how important this is, the pilots should roll for initiative each round to reflect trying to outmaneuver each other.
Everyone else rolls initiative normally. Anyone rolling higher than the winning pilot can choose to take their actions before or after the ship is moved in initiative order. Over wise, after the ships are moved, all remaining crew actions happen in initiative order.
Everyone uses a normal 3-action economy. Ship station actions can be taken using one of the stations like we currently do, but actions are not limited to just those station actions. Actions like putting out fires that could spread if not contained and put out. Healing injured crew members. Working to complete objectives. Fighting an escaped prisoner who is trying to get to the bridge or sabotage the engines.
To make ship combat not feel like a separate game, your ship actions should be part of your character sheet or an optional character sheet page. (same for mechs and vehicles.) If you didn't think about ship combat at character creation you're not likely to think about it until the GM says roll initiative.
Because classes are not built for ship combat, I feel ship combat should maybe have its own character progression.
I think the best test of a ship combat system being fun, is to be able to write a one-shot adventure, that is all ship combat, that is fun for the whole crew. (some of that could be normal combat during the ship combat.)
One problem we have with ship combats dragging on is that you can't just jump to the drift to escape. My suggestion is to make it possible to jump to the drift while moving, but it would require making 6 successful navigation checks to plot the course. With four degrees of success, with luckily, rolls that could take as little as 3 rounds to make the jump, or with bad rolls not even happen. This could and some drama for a crew trying to escape a much bigger shi. But more likely, would be used by the enemy to escape the party, in which case the MG would have the ability to stop a dragging fight as they see fit.
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To make GMing ship combat easier, would it help if the NPC ship were like monster stat blocks so the GM doesn't have to play the entire crew of one or more ships? Each firing arc listing as an attack. Pilot and crew actions are listed as special predefined abilities.
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To make GMing ship combat easier, would it help if the NPC ship were like monster stat blocks so the GM doesn't have to play the entire crew of one or more ships? Each firing arc listing as an attack. Pilot and crew actions are listed as special predefined abilities.
Definitely. I know that the default system having it be symmetrical was an aspect I loathed as a GM.
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I’ve been thinking that the best way to give all the PCs something to do in starship combat is to give everyone their own starfighter. They would work as a squadron to fight other squadrons, or take on one ship of the line. Or perhaps two or three smaller gunboats.
They wouldn’t be tiny starfighters, probably four seaters with a tiny restroom and sleeping area.
Maybe with an NPC operated support ship. Or maybe not.
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I'd love a fighter squadron AP, but I wouldn't ask for that to be the default solution.
I like the direction Sanityfaerie is going in, especially not tracking map positions, just relative ones. I'd just been saying how much a fan I was of the 1st Ed WotC Star Wars space combat system in another thread, and that's what it's based on. I also like the idea of starship position feat trees, especially if they're like PF2's 'gain new ability rather than increased power' approach to feats.
SW's relative space map combined with Starfleet's "not enough power for everybody" and crew results that grow over the course of battle I think is what I'd be happy with.
I think the only other element I'd like addressed is to change the name of the Science Officer to Navigator. I don't have a great reason for it, I just like it better.
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While I don't have first-hand experience with it myself, I have been thinking about how PF2 Kingmaker's kingdom-building and warfare rules can serve as a conceptual blueprint for how SF2 might go about handling building starships and space combat.
Kingdom building has a lot in common with building a character (especially in that 2e incarnation, with kingdom feats and skills and attributes and whatnot), something that Paizogame players are already accustomed to and generally enjoy on its own merits, and they too follow that same 1-20 level advancement that can make for a smooth mathematical progression; Obviously, kingdoms and starships are structured very differently (I would expect much more in the way of ship 'upgrades' than ship 'feats', hearkening to the bevvy of options that SF1 provides, even if a lot of them were really fiddly and minute for modern design standards), but it would make for something that feels like a natural extension of the existing game language than an entire bespoke mini-game that only sort of connects to the existing ruleset - incidentally, this is the route that a friend and GM of mine took when developing her own naval ship combat system for PF2 (when the normal vehicle rules proved insufficient), so that's a data point towards that being a workable model at least.
If some extra narrative elements can be put in this way, like ship backgrounds (scrap-built, inherited, company-owned, gifted, hijacked, salvaged, bought from a shady dealership, etc.), then that's all the more fun.
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Thinking of how heavily SF1e favors lots of guns and gunners, plus gunner and pilot feeling like the only roles that really move the encounter forward...
What if SF2e leaned into that and made lots of guns and gunners the norm? And finally, what if a starship gun's accuracy was completely decoupled from a character's proficiency in ranged handheld weapons? If a starship gun's accuracy was a function only of ship tier plus ship's tracking computer, it would solve a lot of problems such as melee fighters being sub-par gunners in SF1e.
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One thing I'd like to see is for you to really feel the damage to your ship. In 1e your ship would take damage to its hull points, but unless there was some critical system damage it wouldn't really make a difference. I'd like it if every time you were hit, some function of your ship would stop working. I'd *especially* like it if lots of things broke, all the time, at a rate that would be difficult or impossible to stay ahead of, and that people got *hurt*. Then you'd have to balance whether to keep firing or start fixing things and healing people, which sounds to me like the kind of meaningful choices that keep combat interesting.
I like the previewed system. All the players still make checks, but the starship combat itself should whip by in 30 minutes or so (no evidence just assumptions based on previous SF1e experience and how these new rules 'look'). 20 to 40 minutes with theatre of the mind seems like a sweet spot for me as far as the role starship combat serves for the larger system (not a focus at all but an important narrative component). I'll still use a map and minnies to add more texture but I really like how snappy this sounds (assuming the PC ships role checks aren't mountains of text).
Liking the preview, interested to see the player sides of the action. Though it does seem like it might need another editing pass.
As written all successes keep going round by round, so threshold will be automatically meet after the first round or two which doesn't seem to be the intent.
NOT super thrilled about the new ship combat, players want to see the star map, their ship and the enemy, and see it all manuever around. This should not be 5th Ed theatre of the mind thing here 24/7. But might be some nuggets to grab for SF II.
Me thinks at best for SF II there should be 2 kinds of ship combat, Quick and lite as above, then a more meatier one but still streamlined compared to what we have now in SF I.
Tom
NOT super thrilled about the new ship combat, players want to see the star map, their ship and the enemy, and see it all manuever around. This should not be 5th Ed theatre of the mind thing here 24/7. But might be some nuggets to grab for SF II.
Me thinks at best for SF II there should be 2 kinds of ship combat, Quick and lite as above, then a more meatier one but still streamlined compared to what we have now in SF I.
Tom
That's pretty much what I expect will happen. The base system will use a theatre of the mind version, if only because anything else is just too much effort for the handful of times you usually need it in a campaign. Later on we'll get a more complex version for those who want this to be a focus of their game.
You can still have a map and minis as a visual aid even if the starship system is more theatre of the mind
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Well. This looks like it basically kills off... pretty much every actual bit of tactics on the part of the players. Like, really all you do is figure out the best dice pool you can justify, roll that every round, and hope that the enemy runs out of hits before you do. That's not great.
Hopefully they've made it more interesting than that?
Regardless, this is SF Enhanced. This is the thing that they're going to be looking at the live-on-the-table feedback for while they try to come up with the SF2 starship combat rules.
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if Starship Combat was left out of the initial deployment. It seems like the sort of thing that would benefit from getting focused attention. Possibly brought out as part of a release cycle that included an AP that was heavy on the starship combat side of things?
I really think that making starship stuff a separate game would probably be the best. Too many people won't use starship combat if its in a non starship game for it to be worth the page spaces for a very detailed game. And if it is a detailed game, it will be stuck to the rest of starfinder, so just using the ship combat and not the character combat will get weird. Separating these two games like Lancer and Battlegroup did will allow both games to thrive and take their own shape and would allow GMs to use one or the other or both much easier then trying to manually separate them from the same game.
I don't think I agree with this.
It might work if you had a system where each player was expected to have a ship of their own, with "two people sharing a ship" being a weird cool thing that you could get if you really wanted to. That's not going to be the default, though. The default is going to be one large ship with a number of unique individuals as important crew... and a situation where having even one of those crew die is a Big Deal. That doesn't really lend itself well to a spaceship battles wargame. You could build a potentially interesting RPG around it where spaceship battles were the core conflict adjudication system, but the existence of unique important characters played by different people means that you're going to want to have a downtime part for what these crew do when they're not on the ship and not fighting for their collective lives, and the obvious answer there is, well, SF2.
Now, I do think that the Starship Battles part is going to call for subsystems of its own, that people who aren't doing starship battles should maybe not bother engaging with at all. It might be interesting to have an alternate ruleset for a crew that was *only* doing starship battles, and therefore didn't really require things like "a class". Importantly, I feel like coming up with a crude version of that alternate ruleset, and then trying to make *that* play experience fun would be a useful tool for tuning the spaceship battles rules in general. I think that trying to completely sever it from SF2 would be a mistake though.