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I know ship v ship combat isn't released yet, with Cinematic ship combat announced for GM Core and Tactical ship combat as of yet unannounced AFAIK.
But still, what info is out there regarding ships?
How fast are they? How many people can they hold? What are their names? Armaments?
Literally anything and everything about ships in 2E.
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You listed pretty much entirely stuff that we wouldn't know.
Point taken on the list of questions I chose.
But what DO we know?
I never got a playtest adventure so I don't know if there's anything there. The Free RPG day product was pretty scant, but it has a ship with some details to work with.
I'll take any info about any ships in 2E.
I can list my expectations.
I expect:
* The party's ship options will include ships large enough to have up to 6 crew and ones that can be run with as few as 3.
* Some NPC ships will have options that are similar to the PC ships.
* Some NPC ships will also have options that are not generally available to PCs.
* PC ships can also be configured to have some reasonable amount of cargo/passenger space.
These are my expectations because anything else is going to cause problems with creating stories with in a TTRPG framework.
As a bonus, I suspect:
* The narrative ship combat rules in GM Core will be some form of Victory Point Subsystem.
That subsystem can be used to run a form of physical combat such as a barroom brawl (I have done so before). I think it would be quite suitable for a starship combat too.
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I suspect that Battle for Nova Rush is a preview of how the narrative ship encounters rules can be used. The entire adventure takes place in a starship, during a starship battle. It was a lot of fun, more so than any SF1e starship combat I've been in. It felt like being the crew in a Star Trek episode where you have to fix damaged systems, deal with hazards when the ship's hull is breached near you, and then fight to take back the bridge, while taking damage as the ship gets hit, and then finishing with a chase to get away. None of this involved stopping to learn a subsystem; everything you needed to do was already on your character sheet.
There's a small example in Murder in Metal City, despite that there are no flying starships in the adventure. It shows a way to do PCs vs ship encounters.
I think this is just the tip of the iceberg for what can be done with the narrative ship encounters rules. As much as I would like the full shipbuilding and tactical rules. I think it's better to wait at least long enough to see and try out the narrative ship encounters rules first, because it might even be possable to combind the 2, where the pilot and gunners deal with the tactical part more, and the other PCs deal with damage control and boarding parties, and the crew's healer actually gets to heal other PCs during the ship combat.
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As a bonus, I suspect:
* The narrative ship combat rules in GM Core will be some form of Victory Point Subsystem.That subsystem can be used to run a form of physical combat such as a barroom brawl (I have done so before). I think it would be quite suitable for a starship combat too.
The developers have said several times that the narrative ship combat rules take a lot from the complex hazards subsystem. But I think Victory Points would work well with that too. I think Battle for Nova Rush used a bit of both, plus chase rules, actually, the chase might have used victory points, not full chase rules.
I think Victory Points would be a great way to have the PCs fight a MUCH larger starship, like a small hero ship vs a city size starship. Kind of like how castle segies have been done in PF2e.
I also think using a combination of complex hazards, chase, and victory points could allow for some encounters to have mixed vehicle types fighting against each other, like mechs vs smaller starships, or tanks, and even PCs vs vehicles.
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But what DO we know?
I never got a playtest adventure so I don't know if there's anything there. The Free RPG day product was pretty scant, but it has a ship with some details to work with.I'll take any info about any ships in 2E.
The play test was mostly a class playtest; there's nothing in it about starship rules.
Did you play Battle for Nova Rush or just read it? After I played it as a player, when I read it afterward, I was surprised that the adventure text part of it was only 6 pages; it felt like it would have been a lot longer. I think it's a great example of how efficiently an adventure can be written word space wise. From the players' perspective, it felt like being on a ship in the middle of a battle. For the GM rule wise it's like running any adventure that didn't even have a starship in it. It's all about how to use existing rules to tell a story that takes place during a ship combat. Using complex hazards is a great way to make ship battle damage very interesting to deal with in a way that doesn't require anything extra for the PCs that isn't already on their character sheet. For the GM, it's either prewritten into the adventure, like in Battle for Nova Rush, or as I suspect we will get pre-written examples of starship battle damage hazards in the GM Core that could be applied more randomly or as needed as a battle progresses narratively.
The Nove Rush is the new iconic starship for Sf2e. It's an extremely well-designed starship. It's clever how they found a way to make the interior space of the ship fill a map, without the outside of the ship just being a rectangle. It's also BIG Our GM printed out the maps, and they would fill up both sides of an enormous-sized flip mat. In other words, it's big enough to have an entire game session just in the ship. It also opens up the possibility of more shipboarding-type encounters and combats. The Nove Rush also has two large cargo bays that could be used to store mechs, vehicles, or tiny starships, maybe even some of each. This opens up a lot of storytelling possibilities that would not have been available with SF1e ship design. So even though the Nove Rush doesn't even have a starship stat block, it tells us a lot about the direction starship combat could be going in SF2e.
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I believe there was a statement that tactical space combat will be the next playtest, but they didn't give an ETA.
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I would like there to be a system that allows for PCs to essentially be bridge officers of very large vessels that would have NPC crews doing a lot of the work of keeping the ship running, much like how we expect Star Trek to work.
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I would like there to be a system that allows for PCs to essentially be bridge officers of very large vessels that would have NPC crews doing a lot of the work of keeping the ship running, much like how we expect Star Trek to work.
I think that would play a lot like the PCs commanding the defence of a castle under siege in PF2e using victory points. The big difference would be that the castle is moving, and the siege is from another moving castle or a group of smaller forts.
The PCs would get victory points for planning and preparations, like training and drilling the crew, and making decisions on what systems to upgrade. During the battle, inspiring the crew, choosing what systems to have the crew repair first. scanning the opponent for weaknesses to pass on to the crew. The PCs might also engage directly in the combat, like in a multi-table special, where each table is only fighting a part of the overall battle; how they do in combat adds to victory points.
I could see something like that being in the GM Core, or just using the normal victory point system, and what the new narrative ship rules. This could be expanded once we get full ship design rules. Even without full ship-building rules, you could do something like having the PCs choose between two types of ship weapons, one of which has an advantage against the opponent's ship, so choosing it gives the PCs some advantage or victory points. The PCs could even have a chance to research the opponents to help make that choice.
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This gives me an idea for a two shot.
a big space battle where, yeah, the players are bridge officers commanding the ship, with a mention early on of a hull breach, and dispatching a group of officers to investigate. at the end of the ship to ship combat (end of first session) you reveal that hull breach was actually a boarding party, the group of officer who went to investigate... well we find out about them next week.
Then based on how the ship-to-ship battle went, certain hazards get introduced as the players now take the role of the officers investigating the breach/boarding party. hazards and events feeding back between one and the other.
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This gives me an idea for a two shot.
a big space battle where, yeah, the players are bridge officers commanding the ship, with a mention early on of a hull breach, and dispatching a group of officers to investigate. at the end of the ship to ship combat (end of first session) you reveal that hull breach was actually a boarding party, the group of officer who went to investigate... well we find out about them next week.
Then based on how the ship-to-ship battle went, certain hazards get introduced as the players now take the role of the officers investigating the breach/boarding party. hazards and events feeding back between one and the other.
That sounds like the perfect set-up for a pair of co-GMs to run in adjacent rooms - I'm at a table that does something similar for a different system.