We are now into the second week of the Reign of Discordia Kickstarter and I want to address a question that I’m sure is on everyone’s mind: space combat. How are we going to do it? What makes it different from other systems out there? To answer that question, let’s look briefly at the past. The first edition of Reign of Discordia was designed for the True20 System, which didn’t have native support for space combat. To that end, I wrote a system that was functional and playable. And after running a few games using it, I hated it. Why? As it turns out, a lot of players hate running space combat. By adding a ship into the game, any ship, you’re effectively adding an extra layer of rules between the players and the story. In RPGs, any time you do this, you slow the game down. The original system also used a square play grid, attacks of opportunity, and had a number of other elements that worked better for character combat than ship-to-ship combat in space.
So given that space combat is going to be slowed down, the real question is by how much? And can anything be done to mitigate the slowdown?
The Basics
There are a few elements common to every tactical space combat system:
- Command
- Movement
- Shooting
- Shields
- Power Management
- Damage
- Damage Control
That’s a fair amount of things to worry about compared to PC combat. So how do we make this manageable, easy to understand, and fast? Here’s what we’ve come up with:
- Ship stats are stacked in such a way that the things you need to know for combat are right at the top. This includes Armor Class, Hull Points, and a maneuverability rating.
- Space combat takes place on a hex grid, and your ship’s maneuverability indicates how many facings you can change in one round.
- Combat is broken up between a quick and dirty mode and a more complicated tactical mode (more on this below).
- Every PC takes on a role aboard the ship: captain, tactical officer, engineer, and so on. Every ship has a rating for every system—which is a number that is added to a D20 roll and compared to a difficulty class to accomplish whatever it is you’re trying to do. Your character’s ability modifier that applies to the role you took aboard the ship is added to your ship’s rating.
- The initiative order is handled normally. The one exception to this is that the captain always gets to go before the other player characters every round. The round might progress in the following way: the enemy ship or ships might go first. Then the captain gives orders or tries to inspire her crew. Then one of the player characters comes up and he decides what he wants to do that round within options for the role he took on. This proceeds to the end of the initiative order and then it goes back to the top of the round. This repeats until one of the ships is destroyed, disabled, or is fleeing the battle.
Quick and Dirty vs Tactical Combat
As I mentioned earlier, there is a quick and dirty method for handling combat, and a tactical mode. Quick and dirty would be the easiest method to use if all the characters are on one ship and you are only facing one or two opponents, or if only one or two characters are engaged in a battle using fighters or other small craft. With the quick and dirty method, you have a circular display (most likely printed out for your convenience) where you track where other spacecraft are in relation to you. From there, you act normally, but the only thing you need to worry about in terms of movement is where you want to be in relation to those other ships—remain where you’re at, get closer, or move farther away. Anything more complex, like wanting to use an asteroid for cover, or deciding you want to flee into a cloud of charged particles is handled narratively between the GM and you.
Tactical combat is a bit more complex. You’re going to use this mode when there are more than two or three ships in the field of battle. Gameplay takes place on a hex grid and uses ship counters to track the positions of your ship and others. In this mode, if you see an asteroid you want to take cover behind, you have to adjust your speed and heading to plot your course, and it may take a few rounds to get there. Also, more ships have to make movements, attacks, and so on. It’s just shy of a wargame. While this method takes longer, it is the preferred way to conduct a larger-scale battle.
Maneuvers
Maneuvers are things your ship can do to turn the odds in your favor. This includes things like evasive maneuver, barrel rolls, hairpin turns, and so on. As maneuvers, your pilot must declare one of these actions and then they must make a piloting roll. If the roll succeeds, there is a benefit you receive from the action. For example, evasive maneuvers adds a bonus to your ship’s armor class, making you harder to hit. A barrel roll is more difficult and gives you a greater bonus to armor class. A hairpin turn is difficult to pull off in any starship, but if you do, your ship flips 180 degrees and goes back in the opposite direction. There are, of course more.
Systems Failures
In most games, system failures are one of the areas that really start to bog down combat. There will be optional rules for system failures in the new rules. However, the GM will be encouraged to handle these issues narratively. In other words, your ship’s shields are failing and you just took a huge hit. The GM decides that a fire has broken out on two decks. The captain then orders firefighting crews deployed to handle it. The GM makes a roll to determine how long it will take for the crew to put out the fires. Alternatively, the ship is already battered and a fire breaks out. The captain doesn’t have any more crew to send to fight the fire, so she lets it burn out of control, at least until they’ve survived the fight. The GM knows the fire is burning so he decides that after a few rounds it will start affecting the navigational system.
And this goes on until the end of the battle.
The optional system might end up with the same effects and decision making, but tables will be provided to make the system more balanced. Using these tables does slow game play down somewhat.
So that’s a quick preview of the starship combat you can look forward to in the new edition of Reign of Discordia. The ultimate goal is to keep with 5th edition design principles and make combat smooth and fast.
