Join The Infernal Brotherhood of the Scruffy Looking, Nerf Herders as they continue their How to Play West End Games’ Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game 30th Anniversary Edition. Today, we are clarifying starships.You can pick up the original sourcebooks as PDF’s here: https://www.starwarstimeline.net/Westendgames.htm
Transcript
Intro
Welcome back to The Infernal Brotherhood of the Scruffy Looking, Nerf Herders! We’ve mastered the ground game, but today, we’re leaving the atmosphere. We’re diving into Chapter Four: Starships of the Rules Companion.
In the original core rulebook, space travel and combat felt cinematic, but there were some gaps in the “crunch”—specifically how different sized ships interact and how long it actually takes to get across the galaxy. The Rules Companion fixes the math, refines the combat sequence, and introduces a Scaling system that is vital for keeping your games grounded in Star Wars reality.
Description
First, we have to talk about a major “oops” in the original core book. If you’ve been looking at the Astrogation Gazetteer, you probably noticed that journeys take a lot of days. The Rules Companion officially corrects this: those numbers should be read as hours, not days. The numbers themselves don’t change, but the scale of time does. This makes hyperspace travel feel much more like the movies—where you can cross systems in a few hours rather than weeks. You can still push your luck, though. For every hour you try to save, the difficulty increases by one; for every extra hour you take, it decreases by one. But remember: every jump takes at least one hour. You can’t just “teleport” instantly.
When the TIE fighters start closing in, we move into the Starship Combat Sequence. This follows the same four-segment structure we covered in the last episode. Low-Dexterity characters declare actions first, while high-Dexterity characters declare their reaction skills—like Evasion and Shielding—later. This is where things get tactical.
There are two types of Evasion: Full Evasion and Combat Evasion. Full Evasion is a desperate, violent maneuver. It makes your ship incredibly hard to hit, but it’s so erratic that it’s nearly impossible for your own gunners to hit anything back. In fact, any other action on a ship that is full evading suffers a plus-five difficulty penalty. Combat Evasion is more measured; it functions like a combat dodge, substituting your roll for the attacker’s difficulty without ruining your gunner’s aim.
Then we have Shielding, which works differently than you might expect. Shielding is a reaction skill. When you roll your shields, you add that result to the attacker’s difficulty to create a Shield Number. If the attacker rolls higher than your evasion but lower than the shield number, they still hit the ship—but the shield dice are added to your hull dice to resist damage. If they roll higher than the shield number, they’ve bypassed your screens entirely, and you’re relying on your bare hull to survive.
Speaking of damage, the Rules Companion clarifies Ionization. If your ship is lightly damaged and you don’t have shields, your controls are ionized. This reduces all your ship codes by 1D for two rounds. You can still act, but you’re fighting the controls. Ion Cannons are specifically designed for this; they bypass shields to strike the hull directly, causing power fluctuations that can leave a ship “Dead in Space” with destroyed controls.
We also get a significant update on Missiles and Torpedoes. In the original rules, these were terrifyingly accurate. Now, the difficulty to hit with a missile increases by 1D for every speed action the target ship is taking. It rewards pilots who stay fast and mobile. And if you find yourself caught in a Tractor Beam, it’s now an opposed roll between your sublight speed and the beam’s Strength. If you’re in a smaller ship being pulled by a massive Star Destroyer, though, prepare for a ride—you can’t leave the larger ship behind even if you win the roll; you’re just dragging it with you!
Finally, we have to talk about Scaling. In the core book, it appeared as if a bounty hunter with a heavy blaster could shoot a TIE fighter out of the sky because the numbers looked similar. The Rules Companion fixes this with Die Caps. There are six scales, from human-sized up to the Death Star. When a smaller scale attacks a larger one (or vice versa), your dice are “capped.” For example, if a character shoots at a speeder, their die cap is 6—normal. But if they try to resist damage from a starfighter-scale weapon, their Strength roll might have a Die Cap of 2. This means even if you roll a 6 on the die, it only counts as a 2. This prevents characters from punching way above their weight class and keeps the “feel” of the different ship classes intact.
Outro
With these updates, starship encounters become a high-stakes game of speed, shield management, and scale. You finally have the tools to make a Y-Wing feel like the “standard starfighter” it was meant to be, or a TIE fighter feel like the fragile but fast glass cannon we see on screen.
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Until the Infernal Brotherhood convenes again, my fellow scruffy-looking nerf herders… “May the Force be with you.