Ace Rebel pilot Plokki dives his A-wing toward an Imperial base. Blasting away he incinerates two TIE Fighters before breaking off. Juking the controls, Plokki goes evasive as he peels away from the Imperial base. In hot pursuit, a pair of TIE Fighters give chase. They fire their lasers and…
…our ace pilot hero’s A-wing melts. Thanks to gravity he’s now in freefall and about to crash to his death. Thanks for playing. Roll a new character.
One of my only real complaints about Fantasy Flight Games Star Wars RPG system is the fragility of starfighters. Sure, it kind of fits the setting that starfighters are blowing up left and right. That’s how the movies work. But that’s only the no-name NPCs and bad guys. The heroes of the movies can take a few hits, or more times than not, pull some fancy flying and avoid getting hit entirely.
Unfortunately, aside from a very select few talents and the Evasive Maneuvers action there isn’t a lot a player can do to avoid getting hit in space combat. In general, I like the fixed difficulty of this system. For the most part, how well you hit with a weapon relies more on your skill in shooting than your enemies in avoiding getting hit. I was never a real fan of the previous Star Wars systems’ Reflex Defense. You’re a high level so no one can hit you.
While I like this version’s system on the ground, it works less well in space. On the ground, except in very few cases, it will still likely take between two and four hits to bring you down. In space many fighters, such as the A-Wing, are very fragile. One hit, from almost anything, and they are done for.
My current group, with the aforementioned Plokki, consists of several Rebel pilots. Our first encounter went about exactly as described at the beginning of this article. First time our ace got shot at his A-wing was destroyed. It was pretty anticlimactic. Later, our heroes’ nemesis, a smug Imperial pilot named Dirk, faces him in a brand new TIE Interceptor. That fight ends pretty quickly too.
A-Wing vs TIE Interceptor should be fast and furious. In every other version of Star Wars (video games, X-wing Miniatures, etc) these ships are a pain in the rear to hit. They are fast, they are small, they are elusive. In this RPG, they are just as easy to hit as a clunky TIE Bomber.
So to combat this let down and to give our space combat more of an epic feel we came up with two house rules. So far these have worked make our starfighter combat more exciting, more risky and more fulfilling.
Starfighter Evasion
When Force and Destiny came out it introduced rules for the long-awaited lightsaber deflect. This ability is a hallmark of Jedi in the movies. And it served as the inspiration for keeping our starfighter aces in the game.
After being hit by an attack the pilot of a Silhouette 4 or lower ship may suffer two personal and two ship strain to reduce the damage by two + ranks in Piloting (Space), up to handling of the ship.
This rule accomplishes several things. First, it gives a pilot a way to reduce the damage they take that is directly tied to how good of a pilot they are. Second, it gives those highly agile starfighters, like Interceptors and A-wings, a leg up. And third, it gives some new love to some other talents such as High-G Training.
Now, if our heroic A-Wing pilot gets hit for eight damage, he’s soaking 2 with his armor. Then he’s reducing the remaining six by five (two plus three from ship handling even though he has four ranks in piloting). His fragile six hull A-wing takes one hull damage.
But he doesn’t go unscathed. His A-wing still takes two system strain which limits him from evading every attack indefinitely. It effectively gives him two get out of being dead cards. Which is usually enough to make the encounter exciting without being overpowering.
“Disabled”
We didn’t really give this second rule a name but it stems from the ambiguity of a ship becoming “disabled/crippled.” By the rules, when a ship’s hull threshold is exceeded it’s disabled. This gets really messy when you’re in a gravity well or asteroid field.
So we decided to just ignore the “disabled” state. When a ship’s hull threshold is exceeded it can keep operating. It still takes a crit and every hit it takes after that is a new crit.
This has worked out well and added a few things to the game. First, all those low number crits that are pretty meaningless to take when you’re disabled now have some impact on the game. Second, it gives our pilots a chance to flee from the battle and race back to the carrier ship instead of drifting through space helpless or crashing to their death inside a gravity well. And third, it gives our players a chance to risk it all to keep fighting.
A space battle becomes really exciting the closer you get to eating one of those 150 crits. If the stakes are high enough, it may be worth keeping your burning ship in the air as you heroically keep up the fight.
Now, you might be saying, isn’t this just giving everyone the effects of the Unmatched Survivability signature ability? Kind of. The key difference is that that ability means you treat your ship as not disabled/crippled. Which means you aren’t taking a bunch of crits. That can be pretty huge.
These rules might not be ideal in every game. If your players only get into the occasional space fights with their group transport ship the standard rules work well. But if your group consists of pilots looking forward to lots of nailbiting starfighter action these may be worth considering to keep the action going even if they’re flying glass cannons.
Wayne Basta
Latest posts by Wayne Basta (see all)
- X-Wing Tier List – Rebels - May 10, 2023
I like the first idea pretty well, but TIEs seem like they’d be getting a much bigger benefit out of it, and it could be potentially overpowering if it’s allowed for rival TIEs. (Minions cannot suffer strain intentionally, so they aren’t an issue here.)
For example, a rival TIE/LN with only one rank of piloting could reduce incoming damage by 3 (in addition to soak from armor) four times, which makes even that single TIE pretty scary — and a TIE/IN could do five. In either case, the pilot is unlikely to be taking wounds from any other source (since rivals have no strain); even a baseline 10 WT is enough to suck up the full 10 strain for dodging five times in an Interceptor.
I’d be okay with a Nemesis Ace using this kind of evasion to really drive home that even in a tinfoil TIE he’s terrifyingly hard to kill, but I’m not sure Rivals should have this option. YMMV.
I also have a certain amount of concern about the way this mixes with small transports that have maneuver +1 or 0, because they generally already have a very high hull and strain threshold. The HWK-290 pops to mind — with size 3, maneuver +1, and 18 hull and strain, this rule make it verge on indestructible. (With any ranks of piloting, it can reduce damage by 3 nine times, which is more or less like just giving it a soak of 5. It’s likely to be the pilot’s strain that becomes the limiting factor, rather than the ship.)
Also, the way the rule is stated is a little unclear; I’d suggest saying “…to reduce the damage by 2 + the lesser of the ship’s handling and the pilot’s ranks in Piloting (Space).”
The second rule, I don’t think I’d use. I don’t have that much problem with disabled meaning disabled; narratively you can still give the player enough control over his failing ship to manage a crash-landing (like Luke’s airspeeder in Empire) or get it to a relatively safe spot in the asteroids. Unless you were fighting at a really low altitude, even a disabled fighter should have several rounds of falling in which to attempt the mechanics check for a restart, and if you’re in space but in a gravity well, you’d likely have many minutes, long enough for the fight to be over before you’re in any real danger.