With the initial Starfinder 2e playtest rules wrapping up, has anyone done any Starship combat? I’m using the SF2e rules to run the Dead Suns Adventure Path, and I want to at least try to incorporate Starship combat into it. The Playtest hasn’t released any rules for it, and I was thinking about using the old rules, but wondered if anyone had any suggestions for anything better?
Thanks! Peace to you!
100% agree.
I’ve run 2 Starfinder APs for my group and having a starship tracking sheet is crucial for space combat. I found a few homebrew sheets online that are not great.
I really hope Demiplane releases (even a very simple) ship tracking sheet that can be shared amongst the PCs when Starfinder 2e finalizes starship combat rules.
I’m running the Dead Suns AP using the SF2e rules, and we got to our first Starship combat a few weeks ago. I used the SF1e rules almost exactly as written, and they worked pretty well.
One really important thing I did was to create “role packets” to hand to my players. Each role packet was designed for a specific role… the “Pilot Packet” had everything a pilot could do and the DCs, same for the Captain, the Science officer, and all the others.
That way my players only had to learn the basics of Starship combat and what their role could do.
Back in the day, when I tried to run Starship combat, I didn’t do that and it was a confused and frustrating mess; this time around, my players really enjoyed it and were excited about it. It still took nearly a full session (three hours) but they had fun.
The only thing I can recommend is to change the DCs a bit. Instead of 10+1.5(starship tier) I would bump them up to 15+1.5x(starship tier), since that’s a lot closer to the standard PF2e basic DCs, and for the hard rolls, 20+1.5(starship tier). None of my players failed any of their rolls, and the combat seemed overly easy: In one of them, the Engineer set the computers to target the enemy engines and the gunner broke three critical thresholds on the next shot, meaning they were completely disabled.
My players seemed indifferent about starship combat and we made some changes to make it a bit more snappy.
First, we mounted all fixed weapons on multiple turrets so that they could be fired no matter where the ship was facing. This allowed all Gunners to be able to do something no matter where the Pilot placed the Starship.
Second, I added the option of Minor Crew Actions from the Starship Operations Manual to be performed. This allowed the crew to do a few different things during Starship combat rather than the same thing repeatedly.
Third, occasionally I interspersed starship combat where each player was piloting a single fighter rather than as crew of a single starship versus a single enemy vessel. This also allowed the use of Minor Crew Actions and had the result of the group preferring the extra shields and armor afforded by a larger team crewed ship compared to the terror of being on their own in a smaller more vulnerable fighter.