Space Combat House Rules, v2

After playing a little with the house rules posted previously, there's some problems I want to address. In no particular order:

• Consistency & Complexity. Using different mechanics make everything harder to remember.
• Gain the Advantage is still too slow and cumbersome, and almost no one used it, even my NPCs. RAW is even worse; mathematically it's always better to fire instead.
• Faster speed doesn't matter enough. In order for risk/reward to matter in difficult terrain, there must be a definitive benefit to traveling at a higher speed. Otherwise the smart pilot just drops to speed 1 whenever possible.
• The following should all matter in space combat: Speed, Handling, Silhouette, and Pilot skill. These are in addition to regular combat properties, like Armor, Defense, etc.

My new idea is to make Evasive Maneuvers and Stay on Target use Handling. Combat checks already include Silhouette, and I'll add a little dash of Speed in there to help cover that.

Pilot skill is always the hangup, and my solution is to bring Gain the Advantage back to an action, and then juice it up a bit to make it more appealing.

So, without further blabbery, here's version 2 of my house rules for Star Wars space combat in Edge of the Empire / Age of Rebellion.

Star Wars: 3D Animation Crawler

I did another Star Wars crawler for our Edge of the Empire game. This time, I took it even further and did some 3-d animation sequencing.

It was a lot of fun working on this and I have a whole new appreciation for what goes into feature films now.  The "fight" sequence, as brief and amateur as it is, took about 1 hour of my time per second of final footage.

Enjoy!



Star Wars: Rogue Giant from Mr. Blue on Vimeo.

Star Wars: Space Combat House Rules, and a new Scroller

Within the context of ship-to-ship combat, I want to make the piloting skills more interesting and useful in Star Wars: Edge of the Empire (Age of Rebellion, Force and Destiny, et al); right now I view them as only useful in asteroid fields or such, and while that’s cool, I want to see them used more in combat. Abstraction is great for this game, but I want the pilot to have a skill-based effect on dogfighting.

Additionally, I want to slightly alter how a ship’s Handling and Speed affected ship combat. Flying a more maneuverable ship should be advantageous.  However, I do not want to over-complicate things, I want to keep combat resolution fast, and I want to keep the baseline design spirit for the game as much as possible.

So, I have sought the smallest set of changes possible for these and other minor design goals, like getting rid of speed prerequisites.  Here's the new rules for Gain the Advantage, Evasive Maneuvers, and Stay on Target.

Before that, though, here's my new video star wars scroller for the next adventure, which I once again made with Adobe After Effects.



Star Wars: Rogue from Mr. Blue on Vimeo.