Im enamored with ship combat. In space, on the ocean, in the ocean,  in crystal spheres suspended in flamable gas.
But I can never seem to find a good rulesystem thats both easy to play and allows the ship combat to be satisfactory, while also not becoming its core tennant.
What sort of systems have you read that have good ship combat?

Preferably for a D&D type thing, but I think good design principles can be carried over from any system.

Edit: Something with good and simple and easy to implement boarding action would be hot as well.

Star Frontiers has a fairly solid ship-to-ship combat system

I remember having a lot of fun with the 1st edition 7th Sea rules but I can't remember if that was due to the rules or the group.  It was also about 16-17 years ago.

I liked the Star Wars d20 and Star Wars FFG systems with range bands and facings.  Just mark where everything is on the player's hud.

I'm going to sound like a broken record at some point but Alternity (not the abomination from 2017 using that name), It was the last game released under TSR and it is a nice mix of class/level and skill based systems. There are things everyone can do during combat. Core book is solid. Spaceship supplement adds more options. Warships drops the entire space craft system that existed and creates a whole new construction system and turns it in to a tactical game for the commanding of fleets. Core/Spaceships keeps it limited to corvette and smaller ships.

Quote from: Omega;1132331Star Frontiers has a fairly solid ship-to-ship combat system

I don't recall what it was. Can you offer a summary? I remember LOVING Star Frontiers.

Just to be extra clear Im looking something with good boarding rules as well. Something that allows quick boarding action without requiring a fug ton of work on my end.

Fantasy

Palladium Adventures on the High Seas is a pretty good one, particularly for that game.  It has all of what you are asking for, while still not a wargame.  Provides a pretty wide selection of ships, fairly historical and full fantasy too.  The way the various spells of Palladium affect ships is also covered.

Honestly never had a problem running these type of things with the rules in AD&D 1, but that is from already being very familiar with the rest of it.

Spacemaster Privateers.  What it gets right is that it remembers the game is an rpg.  Player characters are more detailed and complex than ships which boil down to armor type, defensive bonus, weapons / attack bonus, hit points.  You can run bording actions with the squad based combat attack tables.  The purchasing of crew skills is nicely detailed and makes taking a super crack crew really expensive.

GURPS Space first edition plus mass combat do a good job of abstract ship to ship and boarding actions.

GURPS Spaceships is decent enough though you'd want to use the mass combat system for bording actions.

Traveller Snapshot + Mayday are quite functional and give you the tools you're looking for where CT Book 1 & 2 don't quite.

Personally, Knight Hawks for Star Frontiers isn't great but that may be colored by a campaign I played with a friend last year where his house rules really screwed up and wrecked the system.

Quote from: Kuroth;1132364Fantasy

Palladium Adventures on the High Seas is a pretty good one, particularly for that game.  It has all of what you are asking for, while still not a wargame.  Provides a pretty wide selection of ships, fairly historical and full fantasy too.  The way the various spells of Palladium affect ships is also covered.

Honestly never had a problem running these type of things with the rules in AD&D 1, but that is from already being very familiar with the rest of it.

If your going with Palladium stick with the 1st edition. No dual health pools for people. You have HP only, bonuses are low enough that armor matters, combat skill varies by class (spell casters do not have access to all the same combat skills as warriors making them obsolete). Those are just a few examples of why it works better.

Quote from: lordmalachdrim;1132389If your going with Palladium stick with the 1st edition. No dual health pools for people. You have HP only, bonuses are low enough that armor matters, combat skill varies by class (spell casters do not have access to all the same combat skills as warriors making them obsolete). Those are just a few examples of why it works better.

Requoted for emphasis.

Frankly, one of the biggest mistakes I think Palladium made was that in order to promote their "megaversal" system aspect, KS decided that every setting needed to use the same mechanics (and that Rifts would be the basis for them).

One thing experience has taught me when it comes to RPGs is that different genres really do play better with rules tailored to them over a generic set. Palladium Fantasy 1e had better fantasy related options than genericized 2e did.

For one thing you could actually fight dragons or demons when you reached higher levels while converting them back from Rifts where they needed to fight Glitter Boys resulted in them having stats too big to fight (to put it in D&D perspective... it'd be like importing a 3e Great Wyrm Red Dragon (660 hp, AC -21, breathes for 24d10 damage every 1d4 rounds) into a 1e AD&D game.

In other words, yes, stick with 1e Palladium Fantasy.

D6 star wars. With D6 system can be easily adapted to pirate ships or roman era war galleys if need be.

Quote from: Slipshot762;1132470D6 star wars. With D6 system can be easily adapted to pirate ships or roman era war galleys if need be.

I'll agree with that option too. Somewhere I've got notes on using it for a Star Trek campaign and it worked extremely well (the rules for coordinated fire to overcome shields worked really well for 24th Century collimated phaser arrays and photon torpedo spreads too).

Ironically, I think D6 Star Wars worked better with Star Trek ship physics than it did for Star Wars while Star Wars ship combat would be better resolved using something like Palladium's space combat rules.

Star Wars often had massive war machines disabled by precision attacks to more critical locations by much smaller attackers (the classic is the destruction of the Executor's shield generator followed by the ramming attack on its bridge, but other battles have involved taking out a vessel's gun emplacements or specific subsystems) that are not well modeled by the scale rules and generalized damage effects after the soak roll.

By contrast, Star Trek typically sees combats between ships of relatively close scale and general degradation of performance (i.e. shields down to X percent = shields blown in D6 Star Wars; engines, weapons and various random subsystems being commonly described) without specifically observable damage to hero ships while non-hero ships just explode like they're made of cardboard.

Likewise, the fact that D6 Star Wars includes rolls for Command to give bonuses to actions (Captain), Sensors/Jamming (Science), Shield Management (Ops), Weapon Fire (Tactical), Dodging (Helm), Damage Control (Engineering) and Triage (Medical) lets everyone in the party make a contribution to the outcome of ship to ship combat even if its just your ship vs. one other opponent ship.

does pirate ships better than i had thought it might, for sure.

Quote from: Chris24601;1132476I'll agree with that option too. Somewhere I've got notes on using it for a Star Trek campaign and it worked extremely well (the rules for coordinated fire to overcome shields worked really well for 24th Century collimated phaser arrays and photon torpedo spreads too).

Ironically, I think D6 Star Wars worked better with Star Trek ship physics than it did for Star Wars while Star Wars ship combat would be better resolved using something like Palladium's space combat rules.

Star Wars often had massive war machines disabled by precision attacks to more critical locations by much smaller attackers (the classic is the destruction of the Executor's shield generator followed by the ramming attack on its bridge, but other battles have involved taking out a vessel's gun emplacements or specific subsystems) that are not well modeled by the scale rules and generalized damage effects after the soak roll.

By contrast, Star Trek typically sees combats between ships of relatively close scale and general degradation of performance (i.e. shields down to X percent = shields blown in D6 Star Wars; engines, weapons and various random subsystems being commonly described) without specifically observable damage to hero ships while non-hero ships just explode like they're made of cardboard.

Likewise, the fact that D6 Star Wars includes rolls for Command to give bonuses to actions (Captain), Sensors/Jamming (Science), Shield Management (Ops), Weapon Fire (Tactical), Dodging (Helm), Damage Control (Engineering) and Triage (Medical) lets everyone in the party make a contribution to the outcome of ship to ship combat even if its just your ship vs. one other opponent ship.

I want to concur with this - I've not actually run a Star Trek game, but I ran a ton of D6 Star Wars and this fits my experience. And I was working recently on converting the Lucanii Drift campaign (for Starships & Spacemen, a Star Trek homage) to D6/Mini-Six, I was statting up the hero ship and I too noticed that the D6 System seemed to fit Star Trek physics a lot better than Star Wars physics!

I'll toss a couple out there...

I had TONS of fun doing ship-combat in Spelljammer. Tons of ships. Lots of modifications. Could transition from ship-to-personal combat pretty easy.

One that will likely get me hate-mail...

FFG Star Wars. Yep. It works really well. Good scalability. Easy transitions. Everyone has stuff to do (very Star Trek in that regard, but it can also be a detriment because if you don't have people with the approrpiate skills... there's a good chance for a TPK).