One of the things that has to be made up from scratch in my Star Wars/AGE hack is starship combat, which is iconic to SW, yet in AGE there are no vehicular combat rules of any kind. I decided that the easiest way for me to approach that, and in keeping with the spirit of the AGE system, was to treat ships as characters (and perhaps one could argue that ships in SW are characters in their own right, Falcon, I’m looking at you), and just assume that combat will take place the same way with ships as it does with characters.
So here’s what I’ve come up with:
- Like in the old D6 game, ships have a move that represents space units. In d6 this was “Space”, in my AGE hack, it’ll be the familiar “Move”. These numbers are lifted straight from d6, they work well.
- How to handle “shields”, which basically serve as a buffer before ships start taking damage? I lifted it right from 4e, yet kept it in AGE terminology. Shields have “Health”, and when that runs out from getting blasted too much, then the ship’s “Health” begins to get hit. These are 4e’s temporary hit points. Want to upgrade to better shields? Mechanically they’ll just have more health. Easy. No need to complicate things with some invented sub-system.
- Determining a ship’s health stands for right now as some arbitrary system I came up with on the fly based on some d6 rules die codes. This needs work.
- A ship’s “defense’ stat is right now based on it’s d6 rule-set “maneuverability” stat.
- Weapon damage? This was a little bit of work, but I think I may have figured it out. I took the ships found in the D6 Rules and looked at the die damage that their weapons did. I then assigned, from least to greatest, equivalents based on the Dragon Age weapons group list. So the starship weapon that dos the least damage in SW d6 would be paired with the die damage from the least weapon damage in Dragon Age. It’s rough, I admit, but since this is all relative, it may work. I want to playtest this a bit.
- Weapon ranges were lifted straight from the d6 game.
- AGE’s Armor ratings? Thinking hull plating will handle that, as you can upgrade to better hull in SW.
- Missing here is the whole thing of actually maneuvering this thing around, and using the Stunts mechanic with them… one step at a time. 🙂
So as you can see, I’ve had to tweak things a bit to have star ships in AGE, but I think I’m on the right approach. Here’s a pdf with some ships, take them for a spin and try them out.
Posted in: Dragon Age, Gaming
www. Newbie DM .com 
GregfromCanada
April 30, 2012
Cool start, I’m a big fan of the SW setting and DA system. I’m glad you are working on this.
I’d like to offer a couple of things to consider as you develop your combat system.
First think on the movies and remember how important each space combat scene was to the story. Arguably most of these scenes are worthy of being thought of as mini adventures as opposed to simple combats.
So I agree that it’s correct to treat the character’s ship as a character itself, It’s fine to not bother with Tie fighters and such but character operated ships should be more character driven (theres a pun there I think :P). The Falcon or Ebbon Hawk (from the KoToR games) are more to the story then just a way to get from point A to point B. Things that go wrong with these ships often drive the story forcing the character’s to make choices based on needed repairs etc.
Too this end the WEG system is pretty good so following their example is a good idea so I’d not be afraid keep this little complexity to the damage system. All you need is enough to identify critical systems so that they effect choices. As systems begin to get damaged and fail also adds great tension to the game. It also gives characters that are not doing the piloting and shooting something to do by trying to jury-rig repairs etc.
Which brings me to my next suggestion:
Are you familiar with the old FASA Star Trek RPG? Not the Next Gen but the classic RPG.
That game had(s) a really great basic starship combat system that pushed the role playing element better than any system I’ve seen since. Others do try this, but this is the one that stands out for me because it was specifically designed this way.
What it did was to give each player a role on the ship during combat, Capt., Helm, Engineering etc. depending on what their character was best suited for or even what role just needed to be filled.
Basically the person who was piloting, piloted. Gunners, gunned. Someone handled shields (adjusting them to best deflect incoming attacks), and someone handled Engineering (they allocated power to the rest of the characters), you could even have people using their Science Officer or Communications roles to find weaknesses or jam communications etc. Immediately you at least four players directly involved in combat – no one just sitting around waiting to other players to finish. All of these roles can be seen in the Star Wars movies to some degree.
Besides the obvious damage to ship systems the ST system was designed that there was only enough power to move and maneuver normally, shoot some, and have shields at their basic level all at once. However if you wanted to move faster or increase your shield output you needed more power which had to come from somewhere. The person playing the Engineer role had to allocate the power (represented by points) to each other role and could make rolls to increase the amounts to distribute (“Scotty I need more power!”). Each other player used what power they could get to do what they needed to do, if they didn’t have enough power they had to make different choices or use their skill to make up for the loss in some way.
But theres more because taking damage to systems not only effect what the ship was capable of but could also effect how much power you had, so someone had to try and fix those systems or eventually you’d loose the ability to act. This causes other problems such as if the Engineer is fixing the shield generator who’s allocating the power? So now either another character is involved, someone has to switch roles, or some character has to do double duty, which then effects how well and how many actions this double duty-ing character can make.
(Han was the best pilot but a couple of times he had to leave the cockpit to go fix something or we see R2D2 fixing something or trying to put out a fire).
All these things add tension to the scenes.
This may sound complex and it will add a level of complexity and time to space combat but if like I mentioned earlier you think of the ship combat as a mini adventure rather than just another combat I think you’ll see how rewarding it can be.
Anyway I just thought of this because I remember how fun it was to play it this way.