Leading into our last BE game there was a good chance a Firefight was going to happen. We’d talked about it before and decided for our first Firefight we’d just use the mini-firefight rules. (This ended up not happening)
Anyhow, before the session I was brushing up on Firefight and I realized the only option presented for any kind of mini-Firefight is using close-quarters.
Has anyone done anything similar but with ships? My first thought was to do something like the mini-Firefight where you can only use advance, withdraw, or close combat. But, maybe, instead of close combat, use direct fire.
Would that work?
Or, with ships, would we be better off just going into a full Firefight?
If you assume a fight between two ships takes place in clear shies, no positions or cover, even a full firefight is pretty simple. We did this in the game I’m in and the fight lasted one exchange and only took about 15 minutes to do. Sorting through the chase rules before the fight took some time, but that’s another story.
Can you tell us what’s at stake? Who’s in which ship and what do they want?
Sometimes this should be a color scene before a boarding-action Firefight/mini-firefight. Sometimes it should be its own deal and you should simply minimize the complexity of the fight, as Will advises above. I suppose you could kludge together a close-combat-with-vehicles mini-firefight, but I really do wonder what purpose that serves. (The purpose of the regular mini-firefight is that it’s personal, between you and me. With ships, not so much.)
Originally the situation had been that a GM FoN was smuggling a Makara onto the planet. I used my building scenes to try and catch the smuggler. I chased him near the surface of the planet (all water), but before I caught him, he ejected the pod. I tried interrogating, but I was unable to discover who he was working for.
We figured there’d be a Firefight as I went in to try and get the pod and the GM FoN was coming for his property (and it seemed like a good opportunity to get our feet wet with the Firefight mechanices.). That ended up not happening for a few reasons, so there’s not a situation for this now, although there might still be in the future.