Optional Rules
Vehicle Experience. At the option of the Game Master, a Player can receive Experience Points for any rolls involving the operation of vehicles. However, as these rolls are made so often and are generally so easy to accomplish, each individual award is relatively small. Specifically, any time a roll for vehicular use is 'successful', the Character of the one making the roll will receive a number of Experience Points equal to the result on the dice (not the difficulty of the Check involved).
Left-handed advantage. Given that there tends to be far more right-handed people in the universe, that is what everyone gets used to fighting. Those who are left-handed can, at the Player's option, gain a bonus of +1 to their Defense Score but at the same time suffer a loss of -1 to Presence, as people are always uncomfortable with things they are not used to.
Crash landings. Given that each of the Sourcebooks provide full percentage proportions for what kinds of regions and terrains make up each known world, whenever someone crashes on any one of them the GM can choose to roll D100 to determine the type of area that a crash landing takes places in. Following the listings in order, he counts the dice ranges upwards from there. For example, in Sourcebook 4, the planet of Aeduran is listed as desert 69%, volcanic 13%, alien 8%, arctic 7%, civilization 3%. If he rolled an '85', the crash would take place in an 'alien' zone. Another way of looking at it, deserts would be 1-69, volcanic zones 70-82, etc.
Critical Attacks. Since the Player Characters are attacked far more often than anyone else in the game, they stand to suffer from Critical Hits and their own Critical Misses the most. Now, a reasonable argument is that this is an absurd argument, as there is an equal chance for anyone to roll Critical Hits and Misses alike, and so the benefits balance with the consequences. None-the-less, we offer an option to Critical Hits, and it is this: The Critical Attack rules (both Hits and Misses) apply only for Attack Rolls made by Player Characters, not NPCs or enemies of any kind. As the GM for my group, I can also see the added bonus of this saving the GM from having to keep track of which Imperial Trooper out of twenty or thirty ran out of ammunition, which one loses their next turn due to bad roll, etc.
Swapping Ability Scores. As this is a classic part of role-playing games, inevitably some Players insist on doing this. If one wishes to, the best system we have found is that it requires the loss of two Points from one Ability Score to raise another, and that one cannot lower any single Ability Score more than once, nor lower or raise any Score below or above the lowest and highest that was originally rolled, reflecting the Character's inherent potential.
Choosing targets. While 'called shots' are not a part of the Starquest game, it is still good strategy to select one's opponents in battle and concentrate their attacks based on how effective they can be against particular targets. Battle-wise Players will do this naturally. However, if one does not specifically state which foe they are attacking in a given Round ("The one who had his clip empty", "The one that Scott shot last Round", etc.) then the GM should randomly determine which foe is blasted every time someone scores a successful Attack.
