It will happen. Pirates will attempt to seize the character’s ship. A pair of Brass Harpooners will wake up before the players can get them into stasis. Hostile aerofighters will attempt to shoot down the player's shuttle as it attempts to land. The characters will find themselves in the middle of an epic brawl between two fleets of starships. Any decent role-playing adventure has at least one occasion where the only way for the characters to survive is for them to fight their way out of the situation. All of the rules, creation procedures, and miscellaneous items in this rulebook lead back to one thing: how the characters, vehicles, and starships handle themselves in combat.
Combat is generally fairly straight-forward. When combat is initiated, the game begins to progress in
rounds. Each round is roughly 6 seconds long, so ten rounds is equal to a minute’s worth of time. The
combatants (anyone or anything actively involved in a combat action) roll initiative values to determine the order of battle, and ranges to figure the initial range to target. When a combatant’s turn comes up, they have several different options they can exercise. All options fall into six major categories:
- Standard: Standard actions are simple actions that only require a small amount of time in order to complete. Most actions are standard actions.
- Full-Round: Full-Round actions are more complex and time consuming than standard actions. A combatant may perform a single full-round action during a round; it will be the only thing they do during that round. Full-round actions usually have very powerful effects.
- Free Action: Free actions are actions that are considered automatic. A combatant may perform as many free actions during the course of a round as they wish. Effects of free actions are usually very mundane.
- Special: Special actions are actions that have special rules attached to them, usually indicating on-going effects.
- Move: Move actions are standard actions that involve the relocation of a particular combatant or an adjustment of their armament. The rules regarding Move actions are complex enough that they receive their own sub-section for all scales of combat (though usually movement itself is simple enough).
- Attack: Attack actions are standard actions that involve the combatant attempting to apply damage to a target (generally a hostile combatant). Attack actions are usually the most complex of the actions available to combatants, so they also have their own sub-section for all scales of combat. If an attack is declared, character skills are pitted against the target’s HD, which is used as a DC for the attack. If the attack is successful, damage is applied to the target, and any other effects that happen as a result of the attack come into play. This continues until one side fulfills the victory conditions of combat as laid out by the GM (usually until one side is either dead or destroyed, too badly beaten up to continue, or withdraws).
As with the rest of SFRPG, the combat system has been designed to be as flexible as possible in order to cater to the favorite style of the adventure group. It may be that some players want to conduct combat as a full-on simulation, or perhaps they may want to use miniatures with simultaneous combat. Other groups may prefer quick combat; just pick an option and have it resolved immediately, without having to deal with positions of combatants relative to one another. SFRPG's system is capable of handling all of these possibilities.
This chapter is devoted to combat and the particulars of how to fight. The first section discusses the basic combat in general. The second section discusses character-scale combat, including combat between characters and creatures. The third section discusses vehicle-scale combat, the fourth section discusses starship-scale combat, and the fifth section discusses what happens when combat occurs with mixed-scales.
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