Stars Without Number: Starship Combat

Stars Without Number: Starship Combat

Starship combat is the part of Stars Without Number that most changes what your players are doing. In a normal fight, five characters each decide what one person does. In a ship fight, five players crew one object and the ship does one thing. That is a genuinely different game, and it is the reason ship combat either becomes a table's favourite scene or falls flat.

Here is how it works in the VTT, and what to know before you run one.

The Shape of a Ship Fight

Ship combat runs from any session. You place the participating ships with their stat blocks, assign crew roles to player characters, and resolve actions in initiative order while tracking hull and system damage.

The pieces that make it its own subsystem rather than a reskinned brawl:

Crew roles. Each player takes a station rather than acting as an individual. What you can do on your turn depends on the chair you're sitting in.

Distance bands. Position is abstracted into bands rather than a grid. Closing and opening range is a decision someone at the table is actively making, and it changes what the rest of the crew can do.

System damage with knock-on effects. Ships don't just lose hit points until they stop. They lose capabilities, and losing a capability removes options from a specific player. Damage lands on somebody's job.

NPC ship behaviour. Enemy ships operate on a selected posture — aggressive, defensive, evasive, or running — so the GM isn't hand-driving every hostile in a fleet action.

Fleet combat. Multiple ships per side, for when it stops being a duel.

Why This Plays Differently

The interesting problem in ship combat is not tactics, it's that everyone's contribution is mediated. A gunner cannot shoot if the pilot never closes. The engineer's repairs matter only in proportion to what's already broken. Nobody's turn is self-contained.

That is why it either sings or dies. When the table is talking to each other — asking for range, calling for power, arguing about whether to run — it is the best scene in the campaign. When each player is quietly optimising their own station in isolation, it's five people taking turns doing arithmetic.

Running One Well

Make the crew talk before the roll. The pilot announcing intent before the gunner declares is what turns parallel turns into a crew. If your table is quiet, ask the pilot out loud what they're doing and let the others react.

Give every station something to do at every range. If your scenario means the boarding specialist has nothing to contribute for six rounds, that's a scenario problem, not a player problem. Put a reason to close in the fight.

Damage the ship, not the numbers. When a system goes down, say whose console just went dark. System damage is the mechanic that gives ship combat its stakes, and it only lands if the player affected hears about it.

Have a reason to fight that isn't destruction. Ship fights are long. If the win condition is "reduce the other ship to zero", you are committing to the full length every time. Escape, delay, board, protect something, get a scan off — all of these end the scene when the fiction is satisfied rather than when the arithmetic finishes.

Let them run. Fleeing is a supported posture for a reason. A party that learns they can disengage will engage more often.

Give a first ship fight fewer moving parts. One enemy, no fleet, a clear objective. The subsystem has enough going on without three hostiles on the board while people are still learning what their chair does.

Where It Lives

Ship combat starts from any session with the party's ship and the opposition placed on the board. The sector map guide covers travel between the fights, and the faction turns guide covers the political layer that produces something worth fighting over in the first place.