HI everyone. I’m new to UW, but experienced with a variety of PbtA games.
My question is this: how does starship combat end up working at the table? The description in the book seems too vague, and starships don’t seem to have much in the way of stats, in contrast to the vehicle chapter. It says to treat starships and their components as threats, but doesn’t seem to have much in the way of establishing the potency of those threats.
Am I missing something? Thanks.
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The story arc that I ran did not have ship-to-ship combat, so I can’t answer that directly. But, I can say that I treat UW star ships as plot devices more than game pieces. An actual war ship could generate unease or outright terror across a whole solar system.
First, welcome, Willow Palecek. As an Awesome Adventures fan, it is nice to see you here!
Starships kind of work like weapons in terms of being tools and abstractions in the fiction. Page 67 discusses damage to vehicles, but in play, it is less of a concern than damage to characters, because eventually every vehicle situation becomes an adversity for the PC to confront once the vehicle deorbits, breaks up, hull breaches, etc. These consequences eventually get translated to the personal level, and that is when it comes home for the PCs.
I don’t know that I am clarifying there. I am sure one of us here will explain it better.
I tend to break it down in terms of what sort of actions ship combat can take: surely there’s weapons fire, and maneuvering, maybe chasing and fleeing, and also perhaps targeting and jamming signals. Maybe even remote hacking.
So when a ship they can fight rolls up, lay it out like “Ok so ship combat you’re gonna be fighting on three fronts: electronics like their targeting and hacking attempts, maneuvering to avoid their fire, and weapons fire back at them. Who’s doing what?”
Then, maybe they have incoming fire because they waited too long. Oh no, move move. Pilot tries to maneuver, but shit it won’t be enough – you can direct the impact to cargo bay or the living quarters; which one you wanna lose? You on weapons, are you returning fire? Oh you’re gonna try to shoot down the incoming rocket? Awesome. Cool, you did it, it explodes. Now your ship is listing funny due to the pilot rolling it, and there’s debris everywhere, so scanners are going bananas. You can’t tell where the ship is. You on comms, give me an Assessment to try to re-establish the enemy ship’s position. An 8? It’s easy to find, but it’s behind the fire arc of your turrets! What do you doooooo?!?
Awesome Aaron Griffin. I wanna play that!
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I was about to ask the same question because in the next session I’ll have my group try to run a blockade. Glad to find some good answers!