Capital Ship Battles
Capital Ship Battles
You can run capital ship battles just as you would any other full-scale combat (as defined above). Use scenes to set up the action and encounters to get the player characters involved. Pick critical moments when the efforts of the characters may push the battle in either their ally's or their enemy's favor.
Major Battles
This confrontation lasts a relatively short amount of time and involves relatively few ships. You can create momentous battles that conclude major story lines in your campaigns, or you and your players could even spend an entire night replaying the Battle of Hoth or Endor.
Add more ships, more scenes, and more encounters, and make the engagement seem epic, with devastating consequences for the loser. It usually makes the battle more exciting if the characters' allies look like they'll suffer defeat during at least one moment (if not most) of the conflict.
Just remember to let the characters' actions have some effect on the combat, especially near the end when the last few decisions can spell the doom of one side or the other.
Other Long-Term Actions
This technique also works well for other long-term situations, such as: • travel between cities • long hyperspace journeys • extended chases • other long-term events
When resolving these actions, decide the difficulties for the encounters, using just one roll or using a multi-roll task.
Through the use of scenes and encounters, the gamemaster can convey excitement and drama without having to play out every action round by round. Bargaining with traders, bribing diplomats, extorting stormtroopers into (misinformed) actions—all these scenes can be resolved either by quick, dry, uninteresting dice rolls, or by innovative and exciting roleplaying where the dice are rolled only occasionally and rounds are used only at the appropriate times.
Source: REUP:144