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Stegyre
2011-01-14, 05:34 PM
I'm looking for recommendations for a starship combat system that I may be able to port to an rpg. Some quick comments on what I am (and am not) already familiar with, although it is all quite old:

Classic Traveller: I love the starship design of High Guard, except for the silly restrictions imposed by the extremely bad combat system . . . and the extremely bad combat system, itself. Did later Travellers fix this?

Star Fleet Battles: Ah, the joy . . . but not really suitable for porting to an rpg. In SFB, the starships are the characters.

Starfire: simple design and simple combat; a little too simple; made to make large fleet actions manageable.

d20 Modern: heard about it but haven't looked into it; have not heard anything good about it, which somewhat kills my incentive.

Starships and Spacement: (Yeah, going way back for this one); the less said, the better.

Warp War: Oldie but goodie; could benefit from slightly greater complexity, plus fixes for some obvious faults (e.g., dodge 5 or faster automatically avoids any missiles); thinking back on it though, I have to tip my hat at them for what they managed to do with so very little.

GURPS 4th: I have a number of the 4th edition books, but none for spaceship combat; anyone have a review for me?

golentan
2011-01-14, 06:14 PM
Well, what are you looking to port it into? Mongoose traveller is a recent update of some of the classic traveller stuff, and I've used it for the occasional war-game type battle. Grabbing the core rules and high-guard gets you far. If you're looking for a D20 port, T20 (a traveller conversion) handles it better than D20 modern. By approximately infinity percentage points. Going off the traveller rails completely, I've heard good things about Battletech's spinoff Battlespace from a source I trust implicitly, though I've never played it myself.

Stegyre
2011-01-14, 06:20 PM
Well, what are you looking to port it into?
Good point of clarification: a homebrew of GURPS and d20.

I'll look into those two Travellers. Less sure about Battlespace: does anyone have more info or actual experience?

golentan
2011-01-14, 07:17 PM
Good point of clarification: a homebrew of GURPS and d20.

I'll look into those two Travellers. Less sure about Battlespace: does anyone have more info or actual experience?

But... what? How? Does... not... compute... ???

kalkyrie
2011-01-14, 08:00 PM
One worth a look at is Rogue Trader (sister book of Dark Heresy).
While the basic rules for ship combat aren't amazing, it does include a nice list of actions that people other than the helmsman can do.
This means that if you have a largish group, the characters who aren't on the guns/helm can still feel involved in the combat.

On this note, I had some 'fun' recently for the finale of my Rogue Trader game.
Basically, they had to flee a solar system, being chased down by reavers.
My idea was to use the system from Battlefleet Gothic to model the game, which is a old 2-player game made by Games Workshop.
Problem is, another gaming group cancelled, thus I had 12 people for the group, when I expected 4-6.

Obviously, a 2-player game and 12 players doesn't work well. Thus I made stuff up. I drew a basic map of the ship, with several major systems marked on it. In a combat round (about 30 mins of in-game time), a PC could man one system (multiple PCs could man one system).
When the ship needed to use that system, all PCs manning it could make a roll, and all successes were added together.
If there were no PCs manning a system, they were trusting redshirts to run it for them. Ie- not much use.

I think the systems were 'Sensors, Shields, Engines (ie, speed control), Broadside Guns, Forward Firing MegaGun(tm), Helm (direction control), Fighters, and Psyker-Choir (for the mage-equivalents)'. Added a nice amount of complexity to the basic system. Another possible system is the Medical Bay/Morale Station. Or Ship Security, if you are cruel enough to have the enemy launch boarding parties during the ship battle (Hint: Do this, it is amusing).
A lot of fun came from players arguing amongst themselves what the ship should be doing. Particularly since the PCs manning a system had complete control over that system (Seperate speed and direction control. Adventure occuring in a asteroid field. Noone on sensors meant that you couldn't see the asteroids.)

The basic system being Battlefleet Gothic is a fairly minor point- this basic idea should work for most systems (though for smaller groups I would reduce the number of systems).

Gnoman
2011-01-14, 09:32 PM
Battlespace (the battletech space combat game) is almost as complex as basic-set SFB minus tractors. Not too suitable. You may want to consider Federation Commander, which is sort of a lobotomized SFB.

The Glyphstone
2011-01-14, 10:03 PM
I just got my copy of the Saganami Island Tactical Simulator (the Honorverse tabletop space combat game); it's an excellent and very detailed system, but it has the failing of its rules being rather intimately tied into how the setting's physics and technology function, so it might not be the best.

Swordguy
2011-01-14, 10:14 PM
What scale of starship combat are you looking for? A game centered around capital craft (Star Destroyers, Honorverse, etc) will be VERY different from a game centered around starfighters.

There are several very good starfighter (+light capital craft such as corvettes) games, and some even have good RPG tie-ins. A Time of War, the new BattleTech RPG, has easy tie-ins with Total Warfare, which includes the current areospace fighter combat system for both atmospheric and space ops. Another good (if older) choice is the Renegade Legion game setting, with the very highly-regarded Interceptor starfighter combat boxed set tying in with the Legionnare RPG for the same setting.

There's also the old school way to do it - which is pick a system for both RPGs and starship combat you like, and figure out a way to glue them together. This would allow you to play, say Alternity as an RPG, and then hop in the cockpit for a game of Silent Death (a fighter-scale space combat game that I cannot recommend highly enough!)

As a note - pretty much all of the d20 products abstract space combat fairly heavily. The best ones will tie the RPG and a full-on wargame together, so when you jump in the cockpit, you've got a fully-developed game to play, as opposed to a genericized set of add-on rules (see also: Star Wars and all its d20 variants).

Game centering around capital ships are tougher - individual characters have to head up ship departments, and either one person gets to be the captain and boss everyone around, or the captain is a DMPC. Neither are good solutions. There's even fewer of these that tie into RPGs, most have to be made to fit. Tying together the various Babylon 5-themed products from Mongoose is a good start, as is tying together the old Last Unicorn Star Trek game and StarFleet Battles.

The Glyphstone
2011-01-14, 10:16 PM
Game centering around capital ships are tougher - individual characters have to head up ship departments, and either one person gets to be the captain and boss everyone around, or the captain is a DMPC. Neither are good solutions. There's even fewer of these that tie into RPGs, most have to be made to fit. Tying together the various Babylon 5-themed products from Mongoose is a good start, as is tying together the old Last Unicorn Star Trek game and StarFleet Battles.

Or in very rare circumstances, the party is leading a fleet, with all of the characters captaining their own ship...but those are very rare circumstances indeed.

Swordguy
2011-01-16, 12:58 PM
Or in very rare circumstances, the party is leading a fleet, with all of the characters captaining their own ship...but those are very rare circumstances indeed.

Totally true...but that can sort of stop being an RPG and go more into a full-bore wargame. A bunch of PCs standing around the bridge of a capital craft running departments can still interact with each other very easily, whereas folks in different capital ships feel so detached from each other...

Maybe it's just me.

Plus, you're quite correct in referring to them as "rare circumstances". The big fight at the end of the campaign seems to be about the only time you'd expect to see this sort of thing.