Star Wars Wednesday - Starship & Vehicle Sheets

One of the design philosophies behind the Star Wars RPG Saga Edition products is to make them useful at the table during game play, rather than books that are only used between sessions to build characters, adventures, and so forth. To that end, one of the early decisions by the design team was to build vehicle and ship stat blocks as though they were operated by the crew most likely to use the vehicle. This makes the ships and vehicles instantly usable to gamemasters, without any preparation time, so long as they are satisfied with the skill level and CL predetermined by the designer. This is analogous to using an enemy character or creature straight from the book, with no modifications.

In most game play, this presentation style works fine. The player characters normally have their own vehicles and ships,  with their stats most likely worked out ahead of time. The gamemaster, on the other hand, juggles any number of starships and speeders over the course of a session or adventure, so this approach saves him or her a lot of time. 

However, the biggest drawback to this approach is that many of the vehicle's raw stats are not immediatly obvious or quickly derived, should the player characters or the gamemaster want to use a vehicle unexpectedly during the game. Stopping to look up the correct calculations kills game play. To help speed this process, I've created these Starship and Vehicle Sheets.

The first page has the Starship and Vehicle Stat Block Cheat Sheet. This takes the standard stat block format and spells out two things: exactly which numbers are adjusted by a change in crew, and how to recalculate those numbers. It still requires you to do the math, but at least you won't have to rifle through the rulebook looking for formulas. They're also small enough to cut out for use as handouts (and bookmarks), to have at the table when needed.

The second page is a full-blown ship and vehicle "character" sheet. This is patterned off the standard stat block and the cheat sheet, but with enough room to note all of the numbers needed to calculate the stats. It is as much a worksheet as a character sheet.

Hopefully, you'll find them useful in your games. As usual, if you find something awry with the formatting or formulas, drop me a message via the contact page, and I'll get it corrected.