This is an old episode but they do a great job explaining how to use the Genesys rules for ship & vehicle combat in the Star Wars RPG. Spoiler warning: many players find the Genesys rules work much better.
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Man, Order66 used to be such a go-to listen back when the game first released.
Our first campaign had the players planet hopping from the edges of the outer rim, through Hutt space, to the corporate sector, and all the way to the center of the galaxy. I took a different tack with our current campaign and have basically had the players stranded on a single (homebrew) planet.
This means basically no starships so far! And we have not really missed having to engage with the vehicle rules. In “Season 2” there’s probably going to be some space flight again, so I’ll have to give this a listen and see if the Genesys rules seem more workable.
Their rules have a fair bit of overhead per ship. If you’re using a lot of the same stuff it’s not bad and the Genesys rules are better, but I value being able to improvise encounters a bit too much to use it personally.
I felt the same way when I first listened to it. I was not happy about having to convert the stats for every ship & vehicle. I do a little bit of programming, and I already had a dataset with a lot of stat blocks in it. So I wrote a little script to convert them, and that made it easier for me. I also wrote up my own cheat sheet on the combined rules. I’m not saying everyone should do this sort of thing.
I think the main takeaway here is to use the parts that you like and ignore the parts that you don’t. I think they went crunchy with it because it’s easier to omit stuff than to add missing stuff, and they wanted to try to cover all aspects of it for listeners who are rules heavy.
I think the main thing I like about the Genesys vehicle rules is that they make it easier to combine vehicle combat with combat on foot. There are so many settings (urban, military bases, hangars, etc.) where players are naturally going to want to jump in a vehicle if they can. With the SW rules this is a PITA.
Yep the intersection of the scales is definitely the main pain point in the Star Wars rules and the main improvement of the Genesys ones. I’ve considered figuring out a simpler port just for those situations, but haven’t had a game that needed it enough yet. And of course if you’re working from a data set you can manipulate all at once that’s fairly clean too.
