SW Rules Vehicles

Star Wars – Rules Update

FFG – Vehicles

The vehicles (or Starships) of Star Wars are quite complex and have a bunch of unique rules associated with them. They have many iterations and changes over different rulesets and here is the rules that are used in my game based on a combination of Fantasy Flight Games Star Wars and Genesys rulesets.

Note: This is a work in progress rules modification.

Vehicle Characteristics

All vehicles are defined through a number of characteristics. These characteristics delineate such attributes as the strength of a starship’s shields or how quickly a race car accelerates off the line. The characteristics described here cover the bulk of important mechanical information about vehicles.

• Handling: The measure of a vehicle’s agility and how well it responds to its pilot.
• Maximum Speed: A vehicle’s top speed.
• Silhouette: An abstract of the vehicle’s size.
• Defense: A vehicle’s first line of defense against attack and accident. Typically representative of a starship’s ray shields and particle shields, defense also represents any factors, technological or otherwise, that prevent damage from reaching a vehicle’s armor.
• Armor: The measure of a vehicle’s armor, similar to soak on the personal scale.
• Hull Trauma Threshold: A reflection of the sturdiness of a vehicle’s construction and its ability to sustain damage and keep operating.
• System Strain Threshold: The limit to which a vehicle can be pushed or knocked about before important systems overload or shut down.

Movement in an Abstract Game System

As this is an abstract game system, it is using range bands to represent distance in an abstract way that is purely theatre of the minds eyes. What this means is if you have two targets, both at close range, and you move to engaged with one, the Games Master (GM) can choose to have you also engaged with the second, close with the second or medium distance with the second based purely on what they feel the story needs at the time. While this makes the GM’s able to plan out the events and how they will unfold easily, it also takes away a lot of strategy from the players and makes many tactics or plans unworkable.

When choosing to use squares of movement with vehicles we come across comparisons to personal scale and space travel as each have their own issues and struggle to contend with.

I have an article on Planetary movement that I will be updating based on this work so it is consistent throughout the notes.

I wanted to make Scale or Silhouette a part of the movement, so as to show how larger vehicles move slower than small vehicles. As per the rules as written, any vehicle moving at speed 1 travels the same distance as any other vehicle moving at speed 1. This is also moving beyond what a personal scale character could shoot with a sniper rifle.

So how do you incorporate square movement into a system without a reference. Say your using a city block for example and wanted to demonstrate moving through the city with combat between people and vehicles. By the base rules a character can never get away from any vehicle, and if people are riding a mount treated like a character, those mounts can never match a vehicle for speed.

Brining in the Genesys rules for movement I can bring in extra rules based on the current speed of the vehicle.

Vehicle Speeds in Structured Encounters

Source: Genesys Core Rules (gen-bas-cr p221)

• Speed 0, Forced – 0 range band, Other Effects –
• Speed 1-2, Forced – 2 range bands, Other Effects –
• Speed 3-4, Forced – 3 range bands, Other Effects – Upgrade the difficulty of all Piloting checks once. Add +20 to the result of any Critical Hit suffered as a result of a collision.
• Speed 5, Forced – 4 range bands, Other Effects – Upgrade the difficulty of combat checks targeting the vehicle once. Upgrade the difficulty of all Piloting checks twice. Add +40 to the result of any Critical Hit suffered as a result of a collision.

House Rules

Now making this a house rule has a few challenges, I would like there to be a chance to do something is city locations, but the lowest speed a character can move could cover the city in a round or two that would take a few hours on foot. So they type of vehicle should be take into account. So building this into movement would change the table to the following.

• Speed 0, Forced Movement = Movement from last round.
• Speed 1+, Forced Movement = Movement from last round plus speed from this round.
• Speed 1-, Forced Movement = Movement from last round minus speed from this round.

Vehicle Maneuvers

Pilot Only

• Accelerate/Decelerate (any speed) You increase or decrease the speed by 1, now goes to negative speed. By dealing 1 or more system strain to the vehicle you can the speed of the vehicle further by the amount of strain taken to a maximum of the vehicles speed rating.
• Brace for Impact (any speed) Angle the vehicle to reduce damage based on the silhouette size by taking strain. Till next action any critical hit is also reduced by 10x silhouette taking strain equal to silhouette. Both can reduce the damage or crit to zero negating the effect.
• Evade/Evasive Maneuvers (any speed) Upgrade checks to hit vehicle, reduces speed by Silhouette. Note: was speed 3+
• Fly/Drive (any speed) You can travel the vehicles movement with an additionals modification of the vehicles speed to your distance.
• Stay on Target (any speed – Pilot check) Your vehicle upgrades attacks again a chosen target, all attacks against your vehicle are upgraded in return, as are all other piloting checks difficulties.

Other Crew

• Angle Deflector Shields (any speed) For a vehicle with shields, move one point of shield from one defense zone to another.

Vehicle Actions

Pilot Only

• Dangerous Driving (any speed – Pilot check) any piloting that is not sticking to the flow of traffic. Movement reduced by silhouette, success can further reduce or increase your movement.
• Gain the Advantage (any speed – Pilot check) vs opponent, if successful upgrade all checks against target by 2 and any by the target against you by 2.

Other Crew

• Blanket Barrage (Gunnery Check) all smaller sized vehicles/characters in one vehicle arc within the weapons range have their ability to target the vehicle (or fly through the effected area) checks upgrades on a success and with each two Advantages from the check. When other vehicles make their check and gain two disadvantages (or Threats) they take half damage rounded up, If they rolled a Despair they instead take full damage.
• Boost Shields (Mechanics Check) Mechanics (Hard) Success increases one zones value by 1, lasting one round, and an additional round per success.
• Concentrated Barrage (Gunnery Check) target a vehicle larger or silhouette 5. On a successful hit, an Advantage adds damage equal to the number of weapons in the attack.
• Copilot (Piloting Check) Pilot (Average) success reduces next piloting check by 1.
• Damage Control (Mechanics Check) Repair Strain, Damage and Critical Hits.
• Fire Discipline (Leadership (Hard) or Discipline (Hard)) Success grants next weapon attack one Boost (Blue) dice, with additional two successes granting it to additional attacks against the same target. Three Advantages also cause each hit to also deal 1 strain to target.
• Jamming (Computers check) Computers (Average) forces others wanting to use communications to make a Computers (Average) check with their check increased by one for every two further successes, and effects another target for every Advantage.
• Manual Repairs (Athletics – Hard) Success reduces hull trama by 1 plus 1 per every two additional successes.
• Plot Course – Astrogation (Average) or Perception (Hard) Successes reduce Setback (Black) dice for difficult terrain.
• Scan the Enemy (Perception – Hard)
• Slice Enemy Systems (Computers – Hard)
• Spoofing Missile (Computers – Average, Vigilance – Hard)
• Weapon Attack (Gunnery Check) Basic attack with single ship weapon.

Note: more work to be done on this section of the rules.

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