Some day, I really want to play in a Starfinder campaign, or run one (though I'm less confident about that unless I can find a player who knows it decently). As I said in a recent post, I prefer Starfinder's take on space-based sci fi over Spelljammer's version, the latter of which dispenses with many science fiction tropes and invents bizarre new physics to justify retaining D&D's more medieval setting.
As someone who grew up on Star Trek the Next Generation and Star Wars, I actually feel like we lose something by having literal wooden sailing ships out among the stars. I don't dislike Spelljammer, mind you, but I thing the futuristic sci-fi feel of Starfinder jives more with my overall aesthetic.
One of the perhaps more controversial ideas presented in the Astral Adventurer's Guide for Spelljammer is that using ship-mounted weapons is less efficient and effective than having players simply rely on their own character abilities. The siege weapons that are mounted on ships can deal a substantial amount of damage, but their use requires multiple actions (or multiple creatures using their actions) to launch ordinance. The Bombard, which has one of the most powerful weapons of any ship with its main cannon, which deals 16d10 damage on a hit, also takes four actions to fire it - three to load and one to shoot. As a result, the damage-per-action here is 4d10, and while that's still 22 damage, which is decent, player characters can pretty early on manage more damage, and likely with a better hit chance than the cannon's +6 attack bonus would give.
5th Edition D&D puts a lot of power into the players, independent of things like magic items. Player classes are the main source of power. As such, in most cases a Wizard with no magic items versus one of the same level with a bunch are not going to be all that different in terms of power. Characters are strong.
And so I think, philosophically, the intent with Spelljammer was not to overcomplicate things by driving characters to use a ship's mounted weapons when they can just cast spells instead.
Ships in 5E have damage thresholds - for example, the Bombard's is 20, so any hit that deals less than 20 damage is simply ignored - a bullet or arrow or fire bolt just bouncing off the hull.
In other systems, including Starfinder, rather than a damage threshold, large things like ships are simply operating on a different scale. A "Tiny" spaceship in Starfinder does not fit within a 1-foot cube. And shipboard weapons are assumed to be doing about 10 times as much as a personal weapon would. But they're also aiming at something that is much bigger. So, while your shipboard laser blaster is doing 1d10 fire damage, if it were to hit a person, that'd be the equivalent of 10d10 fire damage. And if you shoot a ship for 1d10 piercing damage, you're really doing next to nothing to it.
Ship combat in Starfinder also has a different rhythm to it - ships act as a unit, with players manning different stations to perform different roles. Initiative thus determines the order in which ships, not players, act.
Players then use skills that are relevant to the combat role they're playing - piloting the ship and using the weapons involves making Piloting checks (a skill in Starfinder) while you might use Computer Sciences to hack the enemy ship computer, or Deception to harass the enemy captain into making mistakes.
Again, I haven't played the game myself, so I don't know how good these systems feel in play, but one of the things I love most about the Starfinder approach to starships is their Build Point system.
In Spelljammer, the cheapest ships are 20,000 gold. That means that it's unlikely a typical adventuring party will have the gold to buy one until well into tier 2. Naturally, DMs can make these ships available to a party early on (and can always have the party come across a windfall if they still want the party to make a purchase) but it does mean that getting a cool ship (like a Bombard) creates tension with other expenses.
To be fair, this actually helps to solve an issue with 5th Edition, which is that after a certain point, gold's more or less a scorecard. But the relatively narrow range on prices for ship means that it won't be super long before a party can afford the ship they want and not have to worry about it anymore, rather than having a progression of ships that they'll upgrade from over the course of a long campaign.
In Starfinder, ships are heavily customizable, and their progression system is more like leveling up than spending Credits (the sci-fi equivalent of gold). Rather than having any components of a ship cost Credits, instead you get BP - Build Points - that are determined by the Average Party Level. As the party levels up, they get more BP to put together their ships and can make them faster, tougher, more deadly, and generally more powerful. One can even swap out for a different kind of ship.
At its core, Starfinder wants your ship to be your party's home base, and to be a source of shared identity. Each character has their own class progression, but the party as a whole has ship progression.
Indeed, the abbreviations for some things conveniently make it clear that the ship is kind of an RPG character in its own right. Player characters have Hit Points and Stamina Points (the latter being easier to regain - one takes damage to your SP before you start dipping into your HP, and this kind of distinguishes between momentary pains versus serious injuries) while your ship has Hull Points and Shield Points, which work similarly.
I would be tempted to just pull the entire Ship system from Starfinder into a Spelljammer-like D&D game, except for the one problem: while ships have their own weapons and damage and capabilities, using things in combat requires the use of Starfinder skills, and Starfinder is built to allow these skills to progress much higher than they do in D&D.
For example, if you want to play a character who's really good at piloting, you might be a Dexterity-focused character like an Operative, take the Ace Pilot theme (themes are similar to Backgrounds) and then take feats and invest skill ranks into piloting. Your Piloting bonus might go up by 1 every single level, so that by the time you're level 10 or so, you might have a +20 or something to the skill.
The most focused D&D characters cannot, I believe, get to a bonus like that unless your DM has somehow allowed you to use multiple Manuals of Quickness of Action. A level 20 Rogue with +5 to Dexterity and Expertise in Stealth has a +17 bonus - outstanding in 5E but not terribly impressive in Starfinder.
So, I wouldn't really think that you could just fully take the Starfinder system without making any adjustments.
For one thing, D&D doesn't have the sort of sci-fi proficiencies that Starfinder uses. Here, we can see how Paizo's decision to make a similar but ultimately separate game to Pathfinder helps the game grow into its own systems.
But, if we're sticking with the Spelljammer approach and not making "Stars & Spaceships" or "Star Frontiers" (the old TSR sci-fi game that some of the Spelljammer races are based on,) how can we make this work in 5E?
One thing that might help is letting the hit bonuses on weapons scale up not with player stats, but with the weapons themselves. This is already how siege weapons in D&D are treated - a Mangonel (your classic catapult, as opposed to a trebuchet) has a +5 to hit with attacks, regardless of the person operating it.
In Starfinder, the various defensive systems increase the AC or make it harder to hack the computer's systems, in addition to letting shield and hull points increase in quantity. What I might do is, rather than have the various crew abilities rely on the player character's statistics, instead allow more advanced weapons to come with larger to-hit bonuses.
Alternatively, if we really want to muck around, we could add new systems to spend build points on (and then also probably increase the build points per level) that would increase your accuracy. Do you invest in heavier weaponry that will do 3d10 damage instead of 2d10? Or do you upgrade your targeting computer to give your weapon attacks a +8 to hit instead of a +6?
Ideally, this would scale at roughly the rate that player power in Starfinder would, but because it's all integrated into the ship's systems, you could toss D&D characters in there and still let them function.
The other alternative here would be to take Starfinder's ship-building mechanics purely as an inspiration and rebuild them with D&D's numbers and skill proficiencies in mind. This might make keeping that science fiction flavor a little difficult - perhaps instead of a computer that uses the computer science skill, you have some kind of arcane matrix that uses the Arcana skill. And then, the armor plating on your ship only raises the AC of the ship a few times - maybe taking it from 14 to 20 at the most.
To do it this way, I think the number of upgrades you would get over time would be far fewer - weapon scaling in D&D is a much flatter curve than it is in Starfinder. But I think you could still implement the Build Point system to have a ship gradually get more powerful as the party does.
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