Let’s talk chases, or speed (esp. ships) in general. How do you handle it? Any particular methods that went well, or didn’t? Coming from Adventures on Dungeon Planet (and others) I have to admit that I kinda miss having a ‘speed’ rating for vehicles. Looking at Vehicles (p120), I see Agile for both land and flyers, and Boosters for only Land vehicles (?). Has anyone added ‘Fast’? Has it even been necessary to?
And as a side note, what about characteristics for Ships? Or is that handled through workstations? How would you distinguish one ship being tougher than another, in the same size class? Entirely fictional, and determine threats from there, or mechanically, or…?
If you wanted, you could give ships an “armour” or “shields” rating, which would act as a modifier on their “raise shields” move.
I never had a good way of doing that until D&D 4e skill challenges came around and those seemed to work for me.
I’d look at any special aspects one could add to a ship. Since I favor a more realistic setting, a larger ship will have more delta-v to spend and bigger drives. In deep space, they will always catch up to a smaller ship.
But smaller ships are more maneuverable, so if they can get into orbit or pass through a planetary ring, they can out maneuver the bigger ship, which might take damage or end up dipping into the atmosphere of a planet.
As a GM, I’d allow 1 upgrade for a class 2 ship and 2 upgrades for a class 3 ship. Upgrades let you move one of the four stations up one class. Want a faster ship, upgrade Engineering. Want a better chance doing a Wild Jump, upgrade Helm.
Something like the Millennium Falcon, a Class 2 cargo ship, has a Class 3 Navigation Suite. While not faster in normal space, it can do the Kessle Run in 12 parsecs.
I would keep most of it narrative. If you say that an enemy ship is heavily armored you can create a Tag but just let the pcs know that if they are trying to defeat this thing attacking it might not be the best option. They may need to get creative and make an assessment roll to determine a weak spot or figure out how to target drives or weapons or something.
For speed I say keep it in the fiction. Add a tag if the ship is fast or slow or agile or whatever.
Personally, I always keep things narratively relative. There’s no such thing as “fast” or “slow” or “armored”, really. It’s about More and Less. This ship is Faster Than Yours, but it Has Lighter Armor. That ship outguns you by a factor of 3 to 1, it has more firepower than your defenses can withstand.
It’s part of making the players the protagonists of the story; I try to frame things as they compare to the players. And of course I use words rather than numbers to give myself narrative leeway (They’re much faster than you… but they still haven’t caught up yet, you have a few seconds, What Do You Do?)