Fleet/capital ship combat rules

[Kemper Boyd]

Hello everyone,

I'm going to be running a campaign where there will be a significant amount of fleet action, with player characters being in charge of capital ships and whole fighter squadrons.

I once found some decent house rules for streamlining capital ship combat and making them last longer (instead of Star Destroyers being destroyed by one hit), but the page has disappeared from the net.

I was wondering if anyone here has any experience with running fleet combat and would have any house rules for that.

[Sabre]

I've done a few cap ship battles and all I can say is, don't roll dice when the players aren't involved. Keep the focus on the players at all times and tell the battle from their perspective.

There may come one or two points in the battle where the players' actions can turn the tide but, in my opinion, you as the game master should know the outcome of the conflict before the battle begins so that you can fluidly and cinematically describe the action of the combat from the players' point of view, and this is MUCH easier without large amounts of rolling done by you alone behind the scenes.

If the players are the ones commanding the fight as you seem to be describing; they aren't the ones manning the guns, flying the fighters or even directly giving orders to the bridge crew to keep their own ship alive. Instead, they are going to be hovering over tactical displays watching as their soldiers kill and die carrying out their orders toward whatever grand strategy they have orchestrated. The tactics may change as the fight develops and opportunities present themselves, but otherwise the fight is decided before it begins in training, planning, maintenance of equipment and all the other factors that add up to combat readiness.

Edit: You will actually be creating two scenarios for each 'turning point', one for if the players succeed and one for if they fail. Knowing what happens in the battle ahead of time doesn't mean you guarantee the outcome either way, only that you know what happens given success or failure by the players at each point in the battle.

[Kemper Boyd]

[Sabre]

For more 'flavor' you can translate