Play-by-Post: Starfinder Ship Combat

Just wanted to come here to brainstorm about running Starfinder's ship combat in a PbP setting. I thoroughly enjoy the system, but ship combat is annoying to run in a forum setting. As written, it REQUIRES a grid and a single round can take days because of the way the ship phases are handled in order. What are some ways to speed it up or should it just be ignored?

What about using a shared Google sheet? The cells can be resized to be as a square grid. (I've not played this game and likely wouldn't, but I'd be happy to facilitate the creation of the Google Sheets map)

I used square grids through Google Sheets for my battles in most games, but Starfinder is heavily predicated on the idea of hex grids for space combat. Anything else would feel super strange.

There's also the complication that things are done in phases (engineer, then pilot and science officer, and then gunners) which have to play out in order to really work well. I usually run all players and then all enemies in side-based initiative because it's faster. Being forced into rigid turns makes it take a lot longer, I think.

Hex grids -- yeah that clearly wouldn't work inside of Sheets. Sounds like a tough game to implement in PbP; I can see your point.

Last time I ran it, I made a Roll20 game and took screenshots for my players to see the action. It worked alright, but seemed more trouble than it was worth in my opinion to do it that way.

Yeah, I was thinking of the roll20 integration but that's a bit messy -- screenshots and all.

Could you do something like this in Slides? You'd have to do a bit of legwork first to set up the different hex sizes, depending on how much space (heh) was needed.

That would work well for the mapping, I think.

I don't know how familiar you are with Starfinder, but what might speed up the space combat? If all the players are very active, it doesn't matter much, but if some stick by the 1/day rule, then it could take 3-4 days for a single round.

I have the book and flipped through it once. Let me check the space combat rules again and see if I can think of anything.

So at a first glance (and for a rough summary here to facilitate brainstorming), combat works like this (correct me if I'm wrong):

Step 1: Engineers boost or repair. All starships do this at the same time, no initiative-type order present.
Step 2: Pilots make their movement decisions. For nonstandard movement (tricks, redlining, whatever) additional checks are made. Also, Science Officers scan/target at the same time.
Step 3: Everyone shoots, in the same order as piloting, although everyone gets to shoot.
Step 4: Resolve all damage.

As a means of speeding things up, I almost see it like doing a DM-rolled init.

Combat is encountered and round/turn based timing starts. Have the players indicate their overall goal (kill ship A, disable ship A, run away from the fight, whatever).
DM rolls piloting checks for all parties (players included).
DM posts call to combat and the piloting order.
Either Engineers make a call and post now, or they set a standard action of "I repair damage if I have it, otherwise I boost us". Then the DM can adjudicate which happens based on that.
During the adjudication of Engineering, if the NPC ships go first, their movement is addressed in the same post. Otherwise, the PCs address their movement.

Here's where I see it getting kind of funky, and that's that the players can post indicating their goal for this gunnery session whenever their teams piloting time comes up (I want to shoot A unless they turn tail, then I'll forgo shooting) or something like that. In an absence of that, the DM can make the decision as to what the ship does in order to advance their earlier overall goal. If they set out to obliterate the ship, they will fire on A every turn unless they intervene.

I think this may be too much on the DM, but so long as the players set up their goals at the outset accordingly, it may be OK. I still think this is a minimum 2 day/round kind of combat situation.


Now, if we step outside their general standpoint and way of thinking a bit, try this on:

DM rolls all starship Responsiveness (using Piloting as the baseline), and posts the combat order immediately. When a ship is up in the order, they take all their actions immediately. They engineer, move, and make gunnery decisions right away. Then, once all inputs are in, the DM resolves everything similar to the book (all engineering is done first across the board, responsiveness dictates who moves where when and what damage occurs when). Yes, it takes out a BIT of the tactical back and forth that could be there in a tabletop setting where rapid fire back and forth can occur in minutes rather than days, but that's ALWAYS been the turned-based TTRPG PBP trade off. Players and DMs have to be willing to do a bit of fuzzy fudging to make the story play nice.

You basically nailed the RAW procedure on the head.

I really like your final idea and I think I'll present it like this:
1. I would have players declare a default combat philosophy for their role
2. I would roll piloting/initiative
3. Everyone declares their action. If someone fails to respond withing a certain timeframe, I would take their round for them, trying to go along with their normal philosophy
4. I resolve all actions and do it all again.

That makes a lot of sense to me Naat. I'm intrigued to see how it plays out in an actual combat setting. Realistically, I like the idea of having players put up a combat philosophy at the start of initiative even for D&D/PF games. It could certainly make botting them as needed a lot easier.

Well, I was hoping to start another Starfinder game sometime in the near future (probably after I finish up at least one of my other games), so if you want to give it a try... :P

Oh absolutely. :)

I would love to play some Starfinder. Haven't had the change yet, even if I do own the book.

Regarding spaceship combat. I don't think that tabletop rules should match pbp rules all the time. I really like Dramasailor more narratively driven idea