this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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Have you looked into Starfinder at all?
Starfinder's more sci-fantasy than sci-fi, no?
Running starfinder now, and I love it... But it is a lot more fantasy sci-fi than the IPs OP mentioned. It's a great "dnd but in space" setting, but it is mostly based on og Pathfinder so it's quite a crunchy system and ship battles can be a slog and kinda unbalanced from a "what each player gets to do" perspective. Really sucks to be the engineer or science officer as far as excitement goes compared to the pilot or a gunner.
We've had good luck with atypical ship encounters though, like trying to chase down and board a ship before they escape or some people are on the enemy ship during the fight. Having to be fast and loose with the rules about ship roles though when you've only got 2 or 3 people on the ship. It feels like it is really designed to have a minimum of 5 people strictly RAW. We've also played with concepts from other systems, like allowing the Bard equivalent to use influencing spells on enemy ship crew despite being wildly out of range (but not being able to use ship actions in the same turn).
My experience as a GM is that starship combat in Starfinder is a bit of a slog. It has loads of cool mechanics but the main issue is that the rules are so different from regular encounters that generally you don’t have much of a chance to internalise them.
also GMing Starfinder. I love starship combat but it is a slog. Any time my players get into starship combat it is almost garanteed to take the entire 3 hour session if not more. Its difficult for players to switch over to the different gameplay. for my current campaign I ended up just giving them a ship that can outrun just about anything so they wouldnt complain about starship combat anymore.
I ended up just using the starship chase mechanics instead and oh boy that was such a breath of fresh air (figuratively speaking). We had such a blast. Threw in the old chase down a ravine chestnut, that kind of thing. Highly recommend this!
As others have suggested, it doesn't fit the more grounded sci fi feel. I'd end up having to redo a bunch of stuff. Was rather hoping that a system was just ready to use and get people's comments on it :)