SWN Rules Explained: Ditching Command Points: House Rules in Stars Without Number

Rules Explained

Sep 3

This episode of SWN Rules Explained looks at house rules in Stars Without Number: why a group might want to introduce them, examples straight from the rulebook's house rules section on page 237, and what to watch for when you start changing things. Brian pulls his case study from the crew's escape from Patrol Boat 6 in Episode 30, "You Broke the Ship, Robert," where the group dropped command points from ship combat so every department gets a single action each round instead of spending it on duty rolls. He walks through the ripple effects of that change, plus a few other house rules the table has tried, from cutting shock damage to borrowing mechanics like clocks from Blades in the Dark.

[00:00:03] Brian: Access approved. Howdy out there, Dark Star Adventure cast listeners, and welcome to another exciting rendition of Stars Without Number, Rules Explained, the DSA miniseries where we peer beyond the veil of the story and witness the rules and mechanics in all their splendor that power the worlds of our imagination. As is customary, I am Brian, the voice for the scapegoats Captain Thorn, assistant star master, occasional backup game master, and your guide on this journey through the pages of the Stars Without Number revised edition rulebook. Everyone loves exciting stories about heroes and the struggles of characters in interesting situations. But sometimes telling those stories is easier with a few prompts and restrictions. That's the point of choosing the right game system for your adventures. The rules aren't meant to restrict your fun, but to give you the tools to build novel and compelling scenarios without too much work. In this segment, I like to highlight those rules and how respecting and enforcing them can actually make for more fun at the table. If you like to think about the rules of the game and how they shape your play, then listen on. The content for today's episode was chosen based on feedback from our listeners, as well as the events of the most recent episode of the main AdventureCast story, You Broke the Ship, Robert. Viridine's security patrol ship is upon them, and the crew of the scapegoat scrambles to get away with their lives and the precious information they hacked from Causeway 3. If they manage to escape, they'll be on their way to finding their lost friend. If you haven't already heard the episode and learned their fates, go ahead and check that out first. On today's segment, I'm going to talk about something a little different than usual. Normally I like to focus on the rules as they are written, and how you can leverage them to make your games fun. But sometimes, with any system, you might find that you want to flex your creative muscles in a way that the system isn't built to handle. Or maybe an existing mechanic is slowing down play or making things less fun for some or all of your players. In those cases, you may want to introduce your own house rules. We're going to talk about why you might want to introduce house rules, examples of house rules from the AdventureCast and from the rulebook, and things to look out for when making your own custom changes to any rule system. Many episodes back, the crew of the scapegoat found themselves fleeing the station of Khmeri IV with a group of angry miscreants hot on their tails. For the combat encounter that followed, the group used the default space combat rules as they are described starting on page 114 of the rulebook. I also talked about those rules in a previous Rules Explained segment. But when Patrol Boat 6 descended upon the crew in the latest episode, we decided to try things a little differently. Page 237 of the revised rulebook has a small section on house rules. The book gives many examples of different ways a group might want to play, depending on their desired campaign and just what they find fun. For our group, it felt like the command point system we were using in the beginning was slowing things down, and we started to discuss how we wanted to handle it. One of the optional rules in the book recommends just dropping command points altogether, but there are a couple caveats that also need to be considered if a group wants to try things that way. Let's take a look at how the book describes this rule change and talk about why those considerations are important. First of all, since some ship combat actions generate command points, you need to ignore those and don't use them. When each PC takes their turn, they simply choose a single action from their department to use. The Captain's Support Department action can be used to give one department an additional action instead of reducing their command point cost. The gunnery gains a new action called Fire at a System that lets them take a minus four penalty to their attack roll in order to target a specific system on the target vessel. And finally, NPC ships can either fire all their weapons on their turn, or fire a single weapon and perform one other action relevant to their immediate needs, like repair a system, deal with a crisis, or whatever. So ultimately, this change is fairly simple. Each station still gets to take an action on their turn, but suddenly the crew is able to accomplish way more in a single round. Instead of players spending their action doing their duty, now every player gets an action every turn. Plus, the NPC ships might be more limited in what they can accomplish in a single turn, since there's no considerations made for the sizes of their crew. These changes could have a significant impact on the action economy in space combat. It's important to consider how a change like this will affect the tone and the challenge of your games when you implement it. But since each department only gets a single action now, the gunnery's target systems action becomes difficult to use, hence the new additional action that lets them fire directly at a system. Technically, the rules could have left the gunnery as is and forced the captain to use their action to give the gunnery an extra action that they could then use to target a system and fire at it. But the designers chose to give them this extra option instead. Whether or not this specific change makes sense is always up to you and your group. This is true with any and all alterations you might want to make to how you play the game. But it goes to show that when you change one thing, you need to be prepared for how other areas of the game could be affected, for better or for worse. There are other great examples of this listed in the house rules section of the book. Two rules that come to mind for me specifically are the no shock damage rule and the no ranged weapon binding rule. Simply put, the first rule tells you to ignore all shock damage, and the second rule tells you to ignore the rule that disallows using a two-handed ranged weapon when engaged with a melee combatant. These rules changes could be applied to any group who want to simplify their combat encounters. But don't forget to look for the neighboring systems that can be affected as well. Primarily, the book highlights how these changes may negatively impact melee combat for some people. If you choose to remove shock damage, many melee weapons suddenly become much worse. They have no real advantage over a ranged weapon anymore, and they still have the added cost of requiring the attacker to get up close. Likewise, with the ranged attack rule, if a player can use a rifle at point-blank range with no downside, then what would be their incentive to use a melee weapon? If everyone in your group is using guns anyway, maybe these considerations don't matter for you. But maybe you have a player who's fully built for melee combat, and they're going to suddenly feel stifled by these changes, or they might think they've been made redundant or inferior. Either way, the point is that the needs of every group will be different, and the only people who know what rules are fun for your group will be your group. The book has plenty of interesting examples that were probably suggested by groups that were playing the game and wanted to make these adjustments. But there are other kinds of house rules that you might want to consider too. One of the most common sorts of house rules that I've seen over the years is to just borrow mechanics from other game systems. You could think about borrowing things like critical hits or fumbles from D20 systems like Dungeons & Dragons or Dungeon Crawl Classics, where a max roll or a minimum roll of a D20 in combat leads to some kind of additional effects. But as with any rules change, make sure you think about the potential implications of your changes, and don't be afraid to adjust or remove a rule if you find out it isn't working right. You could borrow the concept of a clock from games like Blades in the Dark, for example, where the players have to achieve some number of successful skill checks in order to accomplish a greater goal, or some negative outcome takes effect after so many failures. Or you could even implement a simple rule where an NPC, or even all NPCs, always roll randomly to decide who they attack in combat, similar to games like Fabula Ultima. One of my favorite reasons for learning the mechanics of a new game system is how it expands my understanding of the hobby as a whole, and it gives me ideas that I can use in the other games that I play. Sometimes when you're writing a session or an encounter, you might want to gamify the situation a little bit. You can always present challenges to your players' mechanics first and explain what they need to do to complete it or what happens if they fail. For example, Jeff made an interesting minigame out of the Electro Scarab attack on Causeway 3. Each turn, the bots moved closer to Felix, and the players had extra options on their turns in combat to handle the swarms rather than outright killing them, brushing them aside or getting in the way. A lot of encounters in tabletop games can be boiled down to either a combat or a series of skill checks. But don't be afraid to conjure up some kind of weird mini-game like this to spice up a session. You can roll dice, you can use playing cards, or any other kinds of props to give players new, interesting ways to interact with their world. As long as you and your players are having fun, there's no wrong way to play TTRPGs. But I will leave you with a word of caution. It's your game, and you and your group can play it however they like. But don't forget that the further you stray from the core rule set of the system that you choose, the harder it's going to be to assimilate other players into your game, or for you and your players to assimilate into their groups. You can change the rules as much as you want, but if you go too far, you may find that you're no longer playing the game that you thought you were. And, well, that's it. We have once again reached the end of Stars Without Number, Rules Explained. This episode was a little different, but I hope you still learned something that'll be useful for you at your games. Talking about how to handle and implement house rules was requested from listeners like you. So if you have ideas for future Rules Explained segments or a question on specific rules or rulings, then drop us a line. We'd love it if you could rate and comment the podcast wherever you listen to it and share the link with your friends. It's the best way to help our podcast grow. And if you want to get in touch, you can head over to our Patreon at patreon.com slash darkstaradventurecast, where subscribers get access to new episodes two weeks earlier. So from me and everyone else here at DSA, please accept our heartfelt thanks for listening and for all of the support we've gotten. And as always, keep following that signal.