Vehicles and Mounted Combat

A speeder bike is not a starship, and it is not a piece of gear either. It is a thing you sit on that moves faster than you can run, that someone can shoot at, and that you can fall off. This page covers all three.

Reach for it when the vehicle is part of the fight — a chase through a canyon, a walker on the objective, a swoop grabbed off a landing pad mid-pursuit. A routine trip across a continent needs no rules at all; narrate it and move on.

For ships, see Starship Combat. The two systems share their DNA deliberately, and a crewed ground vehicle hands straight back to it.

Reading a vehicle stat block

Vehicle AC = 10 + Handling Bonus + Size Modifier + Armor Bonus

Use the ground size modifiers from Combat → Size Modifiers to AC — Large −1, Huge −2, Gargantuan −3. Not the starship table. Ground vehicles share a battlefield with characters and get shot at by character weapons; running an AT-ST off the starship table would put it near AC 6, which is nonsense on a grid.

Damage Resistance is what keeps a walker a walker

Vehicles use Damage Resistance X (Flat) — subtract X from each incoming hit, minimum 0. A vehicle's Damage Resistance applies to every damage type except Ion.

That one line does most of the work on this page. A swoop with Damage Resistance 1 is only barely tougher than a person, and a party with blasters can bring it down. An AT-AT with Damage Resistance 18 cannot be meaningfully hurt by small arms at all — a Heavy Blaster Cannon averages 16 and bounces. If that sounds familiar, it is the Battle of Hoth: the snowspeeders could not shoot the walkers down, so they used tow cables.

Ion is the exception, and that is the point. Ion weapons ignore a vehicle's Damage Resistance entirely. An Ion Grenade is a serious answer to an armored vehicle in a way a blaster rifle never will be, which is exactly how it works everywhere else in the galaxy.

Riding

No training is required. There is no vehicle proficiency, no trait to spend, no trained-versus- untrained split. Anyone can get on a speeder bike and ride it. Pilot is the skill for doing it well — maneuvers, hazards, a hard turn at speed, a swoop commandeered off a rack mid-chase — and a character without Pilot proficiency simply rolls without the bonus.

The vehicle's Speed replaces yours. Riding costs nothing. You keep your Action, your Bonus Action and your Reaction. You are a character who moves faster, not a character who has given something up for the privilege.

One station, one rider. A vehicle with a single crew station is ridden by a character using the ordinary action economy above. A vehicle with two or more stations uses the crew roles from starship combat — Pilot, Gunner, Engineer, Commander — with range bands read as street blocks rather than kilometers. That single seam is what lets a speeder bike and an AT-TE be the same system.

Terrain. A repulsorlift vehicle floats over ground-based difficult terrain, hazards, gaps and low obstacles, the same way a flyer does. A walker does not — legs are the price of armor. A living mount follows its own stat block.

Full Throttle

Full Throttle (Action). Move up to double the vehicle's Speed. Until the start of your next turn, every Pilot check and hazard check you make is at Disadvantage.

This is the vehicle's Dash, and it is the only decision on this page that genuinely costs you something. Burning your Action to cover ground means you are not shooting, and the terrain stops forgiving you at the worst possible moment.

Fighting from a vehicle

Attacks are normal. Firing from a moving vehicle at cruising speed carries no penalty. If you used Full Throttle this turn, your attacks are at Disadvantage — the penalty attaches to how hard you are pushing, not to who you are.

Cover is a property of the chassis

Everyone aboard gets the vehicle's Rider Cover value, and it is printed in the stat block rather than argued about at the table:

Terrain cover stacks on top of this and works the ordinary way (see Cover). A rider who pulls in behind a rock outcropping gets the rock's bonus as well as the chassis's.

Staying aboard

When you take damage while riding, make a DC 13 Dexterity saving throw. On a failure you come off: you land Prone and take falling damage per the falling guideline, scaled by how far you fell.

This is the same save a jetpack user makes when they are hit in the air (Jetpacks & Personal Flight), and it applies to everyone equally. It is a consequence of riding, not a punishment for being untrained.

Ramming and crashing

Ramming needs no special rules. A vehicle driving into something is a large object hitting a target at speed, so use the existing Improvised, Thrown & Falling Objects table and read the damage off the ramming vehicle's size:

That table already lists "swoop bike" and "landspeeder" by name, because it was always the right table for this. Both parties to a collision take the damage unless the GM rules the size gap makes that absurd — an AT-AT stepping on a swoop is not a mutual event. The GM may also rule a struck creature is knocked Prone or thrown clear, and a wrecked vehicle is wrecked.

Living mounts

A dewback, a bantha, a ronto or a loth-wolf uses every rule above, with three differences that come from it being alive:

• The mount acts on the rider's initiative, and on its turn it can move or attack, not both. The rider directs the movement. Without that limit a mount would be a free extra attack every round and riding would be strictly better than walking.
• Rider Cover is +0. You are sitting on the animal, not behind it — a mount makes you higher and more visible, not safer. A character who has dismounted may use the animal's body as ordinary cover like any other obstacle.
• The mount is a target in its own right. It has its own AC and HP, and an enemy may choose to shoot it instead of you. That is what actually absorbs fire on your behalf — target selection, not a cover bonus. The two get confused constantly; they are not the same thing.

Stat blocks for the common beasts of burden live in the bestiary: Dewback, Bantha, Ronto and Loth-Wolf. Note the speeds before you plan around them — a dewback moves 30 ft, exactly as fast as a walking human. Most mounts are about carrying capacity, rough country and having a second body in the fight, not about going quickly. If you want speed, you want an engine.

Vehicle hazard table (1d8)

Vehicle hazard DCs are GM-set — the same convention as space hazards. Pick a DC from the terrain, the speed and the stakes (suggested range: 10–18).

Don't roll one every round. A hazard or two is what turns a chase from a movement-rate comparison into a scene.

Statting a vehicle

Until the vehicle catalog lands, these are the bands to build inside. Pick a point in each row rather than averaging everything to the middle — a chassis should be good at something.

Vehicle weapons come from the ordinary catalog. A speeder bike's forward gun is the Blaster Cannon (3d8), a walker's is a Heavy Blaster Cannon (3d10). There is no separate ground-vehicle weapon list — the Ranged (Heavy) band is already the right power level. Only starship weapons needed their own scale.