FGU's Space Opera Combat Tables

All my current Space Opera charts in PDF are found on the Summonings page of this blog.

Your typical one-on-one close, personal combat rules in Space Opera are called (section) 8.0 Ground Combat. This is to cover the fact you are supposed to be able to run small party combat actions as well as large mass battles involving thousands of troops. The rules make no bones about the fact they are a continuing treatment of their rules for miniature mass combat Space Marines. It is also a continuing treatment of the shit editing job which went into the rule book. It starts hard and fast; the first action in the turn sequence is to toss for “move or countermove.” WTF happened to “Initiative”, one of the basic characteristics which “all” in-game action is usually resolved? Maybe we will find out, but yeah, your Initiative score doesn't apply here. Or you could drop this step. Space Opera is cool with you jettisoning whole mechanics. Do it, you won't break it. The game sometimes even offers two different methods to resolve the same action. Yes, instead of move/countermove each side writes down their moves and the moves are revealed and played out simultaneously. This is code for Game Masters everywhere that “yeah you will have to wing it”. Just plow through this crap. You know what the rules really mean. Turn sequence 1. Play a hex-map-based-wargame first. This will take at least one other interested player and like forty hours of your time.

So if you are like me this means you turn to the players and say “Your side lost, bad. What do you want to do?”

And if the players know the rules they will say “covering fire.” But that is sequence #5. Ignore them. Your players are just trying to make you forget sequence #2. Indirect Fire. This is a whole world of random hurt the StarMaster can literally rain down upon the players. Tough talk breaking down at the local spacer bar? PC's smoothly going for their hardware to blast their way out of trouble? Sorry, StarMaster needs to resolve sequence #2. Full salvo of APROBDIF Projectors coming in from the unisex! Oh yeah, the effects are not resolved until sequence #7. Does that mean between sequence #3. and sequence #6 the PC's could move away? On space ships? On power cycles? Humping ass burning Wind? Yes it does. The whole sequence will work to give you hair-breath escapes, but should only be used when you and the players need to drill down to that level of detail cause that is where the game has taken the action. Space Opera is not going to work for newbies. Folks using this game are going to have to be confident gamers and know when to role-play and when to get out the rulebook.

Seriously, it takes a judgmental asshole like myself to run Space Opera. You need to be able to look your players in the eye and say “roll initiative” and get them not to scramble to the rulebook looking for a way out. Because the rules are so poorly edited they will find it.

What I remember from running Space Opera in the early 80's was constantly jettisoning combat rules to get to a “roll to hit” situation. And this is one table and a percentile number. That is it. Again, dead simple. For Direct Fire/Ranged Attacks you roll 1D100 on the Range to Target Table. Shooting someone at Short Range 80% chance or less to hit. Long 15% chance, etc. Now there are six separate tables of DMs to the Direct Fire Roll, I get that. But use my PDF sheets attached and you will have the information you want at your fingertips at the table. Hand-to-Hand, Close Combat is a base 35% to hit for any attack, subject to a very small set of DMs. No, in Close Combat Initiative; deciding who strikes first, has all the multiple DM tables! Space Opera makes a big production out of producing your Hand-to-Hand Capability. But once you have this number, and you need compute it for thirteen different weapon categories, you only use it for establishing strike order for each combat turn! I can see where many folks turn their head, hand out in the universal symbol of “No thank you” and pass on trying to run the game. In this instance it asks you to crunch simple, but time consuming formula for a number which again gets multiple DMs to consider every time you use it. But it does give a sharp distinction between Direct Fire Combat. You don't use the same resolution method for either one of these combats and in real life these are two very different methods of combat. I will have to go with this as a feature of Space Opera and not a bug. Embrace it. And you are going to have to embrace the Penetration Tables. (p. 43-51) Which means rolling on the Hit Location chart. But who doesn't love Hit Location charts?!? Put the tables on a sheet durable enough to last at the actual game table and everyone should get dialed into their Penetration numbers quickly.

Both these methods of combat funnel back into the same method of resolving damage once a penetrating hit has been won. In fact, all weapons do the same damage! Regardless of weapon/attack used damage in Ground Combat is resolved the same way, roll for severity and apply the corresponding amount of damage to the character. There are additional degrees of complexity you can add in from the rules or just as well leave out. You have two described methods of achieving an initiative/turn order for Pete's sake! You can take the Combat Turn Sequence in its entirety or you can trim it down to only the steps you wish to execute in a given combat. In each sequence, each step in the combat “turn” can have additional DMs to add in. The key to using however many combat mechanics you want is having these DM tables not in the book but out on the table to use. And with this reread so far I see nothing which would stop you from scaling the combat mechanics when considering large engagements of troops. The resolution mechanics can be both applied to an individual character as well as an individual combat “unit”. Need to know the rate of fire of your gun in Close Combat? They have rules for that. Don't need that level of detail. No worries. Toss the rule entirely and combat still works.

The attached PDF file is to make generating these numerous DM tables for use in one place easier. I believe once these tables are removed from the book and made more accessible as a two-sided, laminated sheet the game would become remarkably easy to run.