Let’s start at the beginning… 

What is a role playing game? Broadly speaking, something where players act out their characters’ choices/reactions and also face challenges in the game. Those challenges and the character powers to face those challenges are often highly tied to the settling/genre. So fantasy gets swords, arrows, world bending magic, and dashing tricksters with feathers in their caps over bardic charisma while sci-fi gets energy swords, lasers, world bending technology, and dashing tricksters with vests over their Harrison Ford-like charisma…

Yep, those are totally different things. 

But either way, I have always tried to build games that are high on impact and interesting decisions and low on minor technical fiddly bits. That means avoiding +1 bonuses, they neither change decisions and these are the most fiddly of bits. I prefer combat which has a healthy back and forth between the enemies and the players. This means avoiding combat where players charge in, unleash all their powers on turn 1 or 2, and then the enemy is dead before there is any back or forth much less adaptation by the players. I want my players to have real choice and for those choices to play out over a dozen rounds of combat or so. There needs to be time to punish the usual tactics if relevant, allow the players to adapt, and then overcome the enemy.

But that is at the ground level, the infantry level. When you get into fantasy you start to ask about how Kingdoms and large monsters affect the world. While in sci-fi you have to wrestle with the limits of different kinds of technologies, space travel, how industrialization or automation affects daily life, and even how just the scale of it all affects it all. 

For this blog post, I want to zoom in on just one of those Sci-fi ideas: space combat. So same goal here, I want my space captains, crews, and ace fighter pilots to have real choices and for those choices to play out over a dozen rounds of combat or so. 

So what are the options that came before me for this genre? Well, there are 3 approaches and sure enough these 3 align with 3 big sci-fi IPs. I have never seen official names for these approaches so forgive the over dramatic names I will be making up. The first is the “multiple different phase command bridge” which is used in multiple Star Trek games. The second is “WW2 IN SPACE!!” which is used by fantasy flight in their Star Wars minotaur game. The final is not a well known IP but it has become a bit of a darling in the tabletop community, and that is Lancer, specially Lancer:  Battlegroup whose playstyle I would describe as “stack +1, 2 rounds of nothing, then everything dies in round 3”. 

So let’s start with the Star Trek example because I think in many ways it is the most telling. Trekkies… are nerds, and like all good nerds and other people of great taste they have a long and deep love for table top games. This is where I started my hunt for an example of a good space combat system I could bring into my game. It is also a place I failed very, very quickly. I start to grab the many, many, many archives of Let’s Play the videos of Star Trek games. Many had additional small but devoted reddit communities. I started to run a few in the background and once I heard space combat I was going to start taking notes. 3 days of podcasts later I stopped that approach without a single instance of space combat. So to reddit I went to ask why. Across many games and many different versions of Star Trek tabletop, there was a surprising universal answer. Space combat sucks, you play this for the interesting away missions or not at all. This was universally agreed on across niche fan communities that it was just an unspoken rule. 

The reason? The phases were very complicated. There was no room for imagination. And even if you did it right, it was very hard to follow the battle or make it feel impactful. It was a lot of work for all involved for no narrative or imaginative reward. To make this worse, the away mission play was solid so no one wanted to give up that bit of play time for the other. Thus, the space rules are largely ignored. I was able to find 1, only 1 example of play during a let’s play. At the start of the episode after that one, they announced they were not going to do space battles any more and apologized to their fans. Yikes. When your space combat is so bad Trekkies apologize for it to other Trekkies for being too niche and nerdy, that is saying something. 

The problem is other games have followed suit. Stars Without Number and the classic Traveler also split their roles into pilot, engineering, sensors, weapons, or repair with people doubling up in the last two as is needed. Things tend to be balanced around “energy” with a pool of it being smaller than the number of systems it could run. So power is moved around to meet the needs at that moment. Once again this quickly gets into the fiddly bits of design and while the goal is for everyone to do something useful, power may limit that and basically cost someone their turn. Also, not all of those roles are anywhere near equal to each other. If you want things like sensors and engineering to be meaningful, multiple phases with their own complex or set of bonuses will likely be needed which just adds in more complications. 

I get why people like this design and I think it does have potential… but has the potential shown itself? If a few hundred Trekkies can’t fix it, I doubt a lowly normie like me has a chance. So what is the next option? The Star Wars miniature game. 

So this is a really fun game and can still be found in most game shops. The mechanics are taken from an older WW1 war game and is overall a good design. Each player has limited movement options, hides their movement choice, and then both sides reveals it at the same time. You fire but only at the end of your turn. This means both players or teams of players have to find a way to maneuver around their enemies and out-think them. This matches great for Star Wars as many of the original space battles were actually modeled directly off of WW2 footage. 

This is actually the best version I have tested thus far. The problem is: role playing stops once this mode starts. It also requires a Star Fox like set up where everyone is a fighter pilot or they have nothing to do. The hidden maneuvering and only firing forward with those you maneuvered behind is the limitation that makes this puzzle engaging. Add in turrets or larger ships and it quickly loses its spark. It does the fighter niche well, but fails if you push on it any other way. That inflexibility makes it a bad fit for a tabletop game.

So this takes us to Lancer: Battlegroup. As you would expect from a Lancer game: great art, great story, and tons of customization options. But most things are not impactful. So some slight context. The whole battlegroup acts as your character, so they all stick together and share an action economy. There are 3 kinds of ships: Battleships for long range fire power but only after spinning up big weapons for a few turns. Carriers which can launch your expected fighters and bombers but also medium sized escort ships for defense and boarding pods filled with mechs…. because this is Lancer after all. All of those launched assets are only good at short range; it takes a few turns to get in range. And finally Frigates provide defenses bonus and just extra hulls to hit. You get 20 points to build your battlegroup. Ships cost between 3-5 points and most have 0-4 point worth of optional upgrades. Battlegroups run 3-5 ships depending on where you fall on the quality vs. quantity line. 

The result of this design are two fold: 

1. There are only 2 kinds of battlegroups 
2. Nothing happens in turns 1 and 2, tons of death in turn 3, little happens in turns 4 and 5. 

So how does this happen? Well, basically the optimal way to play is to build your fleet around either Battleships or Carriers but never both because they are optimized to play at different ranges. Mix in Frigates to your desired level of protection. 

The first two turns are just maneuvering a bit, spinning up large weapons, and maybe gaining some minor bonuses that will most likely not be relevant. What does not happen here is decision making. If you build your battlegroup to do X, then you do X. There are zero situations where you switch gears and do Y instead. This makes the game almost programmatical in nature. It is less a tabletop game and more like the novelty electric football game from the 1970’s that was based on vibrations. You set it up and then let it go and what happens, happens. Everything is built to do something specific so there is limited room to do something else. 

With turns 1 and 2 out of the way the Carriers are now in range and the big guns of the Battleships come on line. The big guns are hit big, miss big and a few lucky rolls hit make or break the whole battle. Expect to see 20 health Battleships with +2 bonuses from maneuvers get hit for 35 points. Carriers do a bit more consistent damage per turn but less upfront. So you either break their back, or they break your back, and then the Carriers clean up over a few turns. That is every battle in Lancer: Battlegroup. The NPC fleet is weaker than the PC fleet, so you will win most fights but bad luck will catch up to you sooner or later and you will lose everything quickly. Nothing you can do about it. This is just a really complex weighted coin flip. 

So which of these best fits a sci-fi campaign? None of them. The “multiple different phase command bridge” is a known loser and while it does leave some room for RP moments it is largely an exercise in tediousness and favors some roles far over others. “WW2 IN SPACE!!” only works if it makes sense for everyone to be a fighter pilot. And even then, I am unsure if there is role play potencial there. And finally the “stack +1, 2 rounds of nothing, then everything dies in round 3” may be the most scientifically accurate and worse option. If you are a 5e player that likes to go nova the exact same way in every fight, you will like this. I think that good stories do not come out of those kinds of mechanics. Or most specifically, that kind of combat shuts stories down faster than they can carry the narrative forward. 

… and so I return to my journey to find option 4….