Stars Without Number Rules Explained: How Starship Combat Works

Rules Explained

May 14

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Brian breaks down starship combat in Stars Without Number, using a scene from Episode 22 as a case study.

In this episode:

How starship combat rounds work in Stars Without Number -- and why they last 15 minutes instead of seconds
The five crew departments (bridge, gunnery, comms, engineering, captain) and what each one does
Command points: the core resource that drives the action economy and what happens when they run out
Ship crises: how any player can declare one, what the GM rolls, and how to scale difficulty based on the plan
A cargo hold breach from Episode 1 that became lasting ship canon -- still referenced 20+ episodes later

New SWN Rules Explained episodes drop every other Thursday, breaking down the mechanics behind the adventure.

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# SWN Rules Explained — Episode 22 (temp title)
Paired episode: [[Episode 22 - Good Job, You Monster - Auction, Part 2|Episode 22]]
Topic: Starship Combat — structure, departments, command points, and crises
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[00:00:00] Brian: Salutations, AdventureCast fans, and welcome back once again to Stars Without Number Rules Explained with me, Assistant Star Master and occasional backup Game Master, Brian. The series where we crack open the rule books and peek behind the fiction of the AdventureCast episodes to discuss the rules and rulings that shape our stories. I'll break down some rules and give reference points to listeners who want to know more about the mechanics that drive our sessions and how they impact the way we play.
In this installment, I took inspiration from the events of the most recent AdventureCast episode, Good Job, You Monster. The crew of the Scapegoat is trapped on board their own ship while the sinister machinations of the Void Cult begin to unfold outside. If you haven't already heard it, you should give it a listen. Even though the ship never leaves the ground in this episode, I still think it's a great jumping off point to talk about starship combat in Stars Without Number. I'll be talking about the structure of starship combat and how it works, the roles of players and NPCs in starship combat, and explain ship crises and how they can shape the fiction in interesting ways.
Starship combat is a huge part of choosing a sci-fi system. There are plenty of futuristic settings that take place on a single world, but odds are, if you're playing a sci-fi game, two groups are going to try to kill each other from their respective spaceships at some point. Whether it's two fighters in a dance to the death at breakneck speed, or capital ships unleashing their payloads back and forth, the mechanics of starship combat in the system that you choose can have a real, tangible effect on the flavor of your game. I think this is one of those mechanics that can really make or break a sci-fi system. It's easy for it to get too complicated and grind the session to a halt, but if there isn't enough going on mechanically, it doesn't feel as tactical for the players, not as rewarding. You want to make sure there's something for everybody at the table to do, and not just the pilot or the gunner, especially as the ships get larger and more heavily crewed.
Stars Without Number does this by breaking starship combat into roles and responsibilities, with each station having access to unique starship combat actions. So in Stars Without Number, the starship combat rounds can take place over the course of about 15 minutes, give or take. This is a stark contrast from normal grounded combat in this system and in most others, where a round is usually no more than just a few seconds of action. Space is big, so when the ships are flying by each other or coming around, there's still a fair amount of time where interesting things can happen to your narrative. That 15 minutes isn't a hard number. There's no concrete length of time for a starship combat round, so a dogfight's rounds might be shorter than a large-scale battle.
When combat is initiated, the pilot of each ship rolls initiative normally, and then the whole crew of the ship goes when it's that ship's turn. Each ship designates a crew member to run one of the five departments: the bridge, gunnery, comms, engineering, and the captain. Not having a large enough crew to cover all of these departments means deciding who's doubling up on responsibilities and potentially choosing to prioritize one department's actions over another.
Unlike normal combat, players don't just have a main action and a move action that they can use on their turn. The round is long, so conversations, skill checks, exposition, and heck, maybe even standard combat could all feasibly happen within a single starship combat turn. So that means the action economy is a little different from normal grounded combat. At the start of a ship's turn, the captain is the one who chooses the order that the departments will work and instructs them on what actions they should take. They don't actually have to do what the captain says, but choosing to go rogue could invoke some interesting opportunities for conflict in the fiction. Different crews will handle insubordination differently.
On their turn, each player can use the unique starship combat actions for their department, as detailed on the Stars Without Number revised rules on page 117, to either generate or spend command points. And these command points are the key part of starship combat, and they determine what a ship is going to do on its turn. Oftentimes, most of the crew will use their action to do their duty, a general starship combat action that generates command points. And it represents the character tapping away at the console, refilling the coolant, monitoring the comm channels, or whatever else is thematically appropriate for their department. The rules encourage players to find unique and interesting ways to manifest their duty in play when they choose this action so that it doesn't feel like they're doing the same thing every round. But I think it's up to the GM to decide what's reasonable.
Once other departments have gone and generated some amount of command points, another department can then spend those command points on impactful actions like firing the ship's weapons or escaping from combat, performing emergency repairs, and so on. They're not even limited to a single action, either. They can continue spending command points as long as they're available, because at the end of the round, all those unspent command points are going to be gone.
[00:05:26] Brian: Because of how freeform and spread out the starship combat can be, it really opens the doors for a lot of creativity and role-playing. Each person on the ship has a job to do, and it's up to that character's player to come up with interesting ways to interact with the situation. When two ships are dead set on blowing each other up, crews will likely funnel their actions into generating command points for the gunnery. When escape seems like the most prudent option, command points might be saved for the bridge. But there are lots of other interesting encounters that a GM could come up with in space, where stealth or sabotage are more useful, giving the comms and engineering departments a chance to shine. Players could also leverage NPC crew members to fill in for certain roles on their ship at the GM's discretion. This could create interesting campaign loops where the players go out and gather skilled crewmates to join them on their interstellar adventures.
[00:06:22] Brian: One of my personal favorite parts of starship combat in Stars Without Number is the option for a player to declare a crisis. When the ship takes a hit that someone on the crew wants to avoid, they can call for a crisis. Any player can do it, and once they do, it suddenly becomes everybody's problem. There's a table on page 118 of the Stars Without Number revised rulebook that lists all the possible crises, and the GM can roll on that table to see which one happens. Some of them are ongoing problems that might make the situation more difficult, and others are so acute that leaving them unchecked even for a couple rounds could be catastrophic for the ship.
It's important that the GM take the rolled crisis and describe it as some specific, concrete problem so that when the players are dealing with it, they can also come up with interesting ways to solve it. Usually this means rolling a skill check so the GM can adjust the difficulty depending on how sound the character's plan is for solving the specific problem that they described. Generally speaking, dealing with a crisis is a difficulty of 10. But if the plan is great, maybe it's an 8. And if the plan is questionable, maybe it's closer to a 12. The book encourages players not to worry too much about the technical feasibility of their plan and more just on coming up with some sort of interesting idea.
In the very first Dark Star AdventureCast mission, the Scapegoat took some heavy fire from the Drift Rats as they fled [[_Camiri 4|Camiri 4]], and Felix declared that one of those hits generated a crisis on board. So we rolled the dice, and the dice decided that our cargo hold had a lovely new hole in it, and the team had to make use of the deal with a crisis starship combat action to seal it up. Not only did this give the party something more interesting to do on their combat turns, but that old hole came up in this most recent episode, even if only thematically. Just from wanting to avoid heavy damage in combat way back at the beginning, Scott created a new piece of canon in our fiction that we still find ways to leverage and reference some 20 episodes later.
And with that, we have reached the end of this episode of Stars Without Number Rules Explained. I hope you enjoyed this small dip into the rules behind the fiction of a Dark Star AdventureCast episode. I really appreciate all the support and feedback I've gotten on this segment from like-minded listeners like me who love the rules of a game just as much as the story. If you like this kind of content, or if you like the AdventureCast and want to show your support, then head on down to our Patreon at patreon.com/darkstaradventurecast, where subscribers get access to new episodes two weeks earlier than the other podcast platforms. It's also a great place to leave feedback, so if you have questions about rules in the book or if you want to better understand certain rulings from specific DSA episodes, drop us a comment there. I would love to hear from you. To everyone who's been listening and supporting us, please accept my heartfelt thanks. It really means a lot to all of us. And until next time, remember, keep following that signal.