Was there a particular reason given for the scaling of starship weapon damage at 10x that of personal weapons...other than multiplying by 10 making for easy math? Would using a multiplier of five bork* the system in some manner that I'm just not seeing yet?

The reason I'm asking is I'm toying with an idea for an alternative critical injury resolution (a topic that is of some interest to a few forum participants), and it would be preferable to keep the scaling multiplier at five for two reasons: 1- the core of my alternative resolution, and 2- when explaining the scale to players they are given one multiplier value for scaling starship weapon damage to personal , rather than one for scaling starship weapon damage to personal and another for critical injury resolution.

Thanks in advance for your input.

* I've seen this word used frequently on the forums as a descriptive expletive, but if in doing so here I've inadvertently offended any Swedish chefs I offer my sincere apologies.

FFG's design ideas is to keep things simple and narrative, without getting into a high degree of complexity. Introducing a 5x multiplier wouldn't necessarily Bork the system, but if you notice vehicle profiles would get incredibly weak if there was a middle-step introduced. Planetary Scale is easy to work with, and it does play fine with the system as it stands at the moment.

Vehicle-to-vehicle mechanics wouldn't be altered at all. When it comes to vehicle weapon damage vs a character, I would multiply the damage by five, rather than ten. And that would really be the only change, other than how critical injuries are then resolved.

My root question remains: Why a multiplier of ten?

Is it because when someone hears "Vehicle weapons are ten times more powerful than personal arms" it gets the point across? Or is there a specific mathematical foundation for the multiplier of ten?

I wonder if the silhouette numbers would have been better if they did not stop at 10. I agree that using 0.5's would be confusing to calculate, but 10 doesn't seem like a good range of silhouette for me.

1 speeder bike's length is 5 meters at 1 silhouette. A Death Star is 1,200,000 meters at 10 sil... So it would be nice if whatever is at silhouette 5 was the average of the two, 5m and 120km. A sil 5 ship is nowhere near 60km... Now if they made the Death Star 100 sil, the SSD a, I dunno, 70 sil? Then that would give a greater sense of scale. You could say they should have made the Death Star 240,000 Sil, if a speeder bike is 5 meters and is the baseline for 1... but then that's getting out of hand, haha.

See post #3 for clarification.

I'm not really concerned with Sil values. It's vehicle weapon damage vs characters that I'm questioning.

As a bare-bones example:

I'm considering doing away with the maximum wounds by which a character exceeds WT. Instead, each wound (or point of damage) by which a characters exceeds his/her WT adds +5 to the critical injury d% roll. A vehicle weapon listed as doing 6 damage would add +30 (6x5) to the critical injury roll, rather than +60 (6x10). This would make critical injuries more severe, I know, but please remember this is a bare-bones example- I don't want to get nuts-deep in this if the multiplier of ten is founded on something I'm not seeing.

I'm hoping those with more time in the game and a better understanding of the interacting game mechanics can positively finger "this (specifically) is why vehicle weapon damage is ten times that of personal arms."

@Hencook: Silhouette numbers don't stop at 10... but Sam Stewart and others at FFG have said as much that silhouette scale is approximately exponential. Centerpoint Station, for example, is clearly a minimum of Silhouette 10, probably larger as it is physically much bigger than either Death Star. Cloud city and the Executor are presumably silhouette 9, as the Praetor in the AoR Beta book is that big. Between these two examples is a huge gap.

Looking at the basic starship-level weapons, the numbers make sense to me.
Keep in mind, vehicles do mount personal scale weaponry (74-Z speeder bike, I'm looking at you).


Example: The auto-blaster --smallest vehicle weapon that does planetary scale damage. Damage of 3, crit value of 5. In standard terms, the auto-blaster would do 30 points of damage at a personal scale. If reduced to a 5x damage, then it's the same damage level as the heavy repeating blaster, effectively making the weapon redundant. Autoblasters are commonly mounted on Firesprays... so it makes sense to me that these do 30 points damage, rather than 15 on a personal scale.

I don't really think your example shows the AB to be redundant, but that's neither here nor there. However, the more I cross-reference the more I get the sense that I would need to "fiddle" with weapon qualities...

...and that's the nut-deep I don't need to be.

Thanks for participating in the discussion.

Back to the drawing board...

I dont see much of a problem with changing the planetary to personal to mulitples of 5. An autoblaster shot is still going to ruin your day if you get hit, and with autofire it makes it even more likely youll get wrecked. An added bonus means that the heavier ground weapons will now have a chance to damage light vehicles. A Heavy repeater now is a threat to speeders and low flying fighters (as it should) and you damage ground vehicles with the heavier firearms too.

The notion of changing the scaling to a 1 (character) to 5 (planetary vehicles) to 10 (starships) was suggested in the EotE Beta, mostly out of a concern that vehicle weapons could take out a PC with a single lucky shot, leaving them incapacitated for a very long time, possibly the bulk of the session if the vehicle combat encounter happened early enough in the adventure.

For reasons that have not been publicly mentioned, the design team opted to stick with the published scale. As others have noted, it's likely due to simplicity and making it easier to convert vehicle damage to character-scale damage and vice-versa.

As for auto-blasters, they really wouldn't be 'redundant' at planetary scale (presuming the GM adopts the 1/5/10 ratio), since the base damage of 3 plus successes would then be multiplied by 5 to get the character scale damage, where the heavy repeating blaster rifle is stuck at character scale. To put it in numbers, an attack roll with three successes would only do 18 damage with a heavy repeating blaster rifle, which would convert to 3 damage in planetary vehicle scale or 1 damage at starship scale, while the vehicular-scale auto-blaster would deal 30 damage at character scale (base 3 plus 3 successes = 6 damage, times 5) and 3 damage at starship scale (figuring you'd divide the planetary vehicle scale damage to get the starship scale damage rating). So with a planetary vehicle scale, vehicle-specific weapons are still nasty, but not to the degree of "Sorry boss, but Bob's going to be sitting in medbay for a several days while he recovers from getting shot-up by that airspeeder's blaster cannons." Conversely, several heavier character-scale weapons are now a more imposing threat to planetary vehicles, namely the heavy repeating blaster rifle and the missile tube, which would deal a base of 4 damage to a planetary vehicle, making it capable of taking out most speeders and at least putting a dent into an AT-ST.

But, as the above paragraph shows, it's a bit more work, and the design team may have simply felt that extra level of detail just didn't serve a useful enough purpose to warrant inclusion. Given that at least a few of the folks listed in the Writing and Development portion of the Credits page have worked on the D6 version of Star Wars, the idea of more than two scales isn't a foreign concept as WEG had a whole bunch of scales (how it was implemented changed from one edition to the next).

It is because the x100 damage Rifts/Robotech/palladium uses is ridicilous.

I wasnt even thinking of adding the successes before multiplying, but now i really like that idea. Ima add that to my houserules.

I have two questions:

1) How are you thinking to change the crit system? And anything else related to injuries damage healing and repair? If we knew your whole plot that might help decide if your borking anything.

2) Is scaling that big an issue? I've been playing a long time and I'm having a lot of trouble thinking of the number of times I've seen people vs vehicles. And when I can, there have been mitigating circumstances.

I can see where Dono is coming from about a player getting knocked out for a full session, and if there's a good solution to that other then "don't have a TIE strafe your players in act 1" I'd like to hear it... Getting strafed might make a good opening scene...

You know, I've been running for almost a year now and it's never been a problem. The common sense advice to my players: Vehicle weapons are deadly. Don't get shot by them.

10x does make it slightly easier to do the math after a few beers. I'm interested to see actual play results from the modifications mentioned here - some nice ideas being tossed about.

"Ideally" you would simply narrate any personal-ship combat out of the way, but it always doesn't work that smoothly, and several people have stated on this forum that this is causing an issue with their games. A change to scale by 5 doesnt nerf vehicle weapons in the slightest (they still one shot most things in personal scale) and lets personal scale ahve a chance of damaging vehicles with the heavier weaponry, I.E. the Heavy Repeater and the Missile Tube. As it stands a Heavy repeater would need two shots to drop a Speeder Bike while a missile tube barely applies damage to airspeeders, and cant even scratch the paint on the light military vehicles (AT-PT and AT-ST)

1 armor is equivalent to 10 soak. Ok I see how this prevents small arms weapons from doing damage to a vehicle. However, some small arms weapons should and would be able to accomplish getting through to do some hull damage, however slight. I mean we had guns now that fire armor piercing armor and we don't have space ships that fly in and out of space like a plane, why wouldn't a personal scale weapon with a high damage rate possibly penetrate armor?

In combat where vehicles are going against PC’s and NPC’s, vehicle armor reduced to 1 armor equals 5 soak give a high damage weapon a chance to do some damage while this value makes small arms fire worthless.

As for x10 being easier then x5 to calculate, I hate math but don't see that being an issue because all your doing is cutting the armor in half. Simple math. I can see that x5 should only apply to personal vs vehicle combat. That's not half as confusing as some of this other stuff I have tried to figure out. To look at a ule that says "All vehicle armor in combat involving vehicle vs personal combat armor is equal to 1 armor is equal 5 soak instead of 1 armor is equal to 10 soak." I served in the military as a truck driver delivering ammo to tanks and ammo pads in the 2nd Armor division. Believe me. a weapon that penetrated armor, no matter how small, if it hit anybody, any rounds or any important components it could cause some problems.That's all I see dropping this in personal vs vehicle only adding this possibility.

You know, I've been running for almost a year now and it's never been a problem. The common sense advice to my players: Vehicle weapons are deadly. Don't get shot by them.

10x does make it slightly easier to do the math after a few beers. I'm interested to see actual play results from the modifications mentioned here - some nice ideas being tossed about.

Over a year later and my thread requesting AP results in the GM section hasn't yielded much in the way of reports from people who have tried this. Some good suggestions have been:

1. Use 5x for non-armored vehicles (pretty much anything on the ground that's not a military vehicle) and use 10x for armored targets and starships

2. Use Silhouette +1 instead of a flat 10x, so a swoop bike would be something like 3x and a star destroyer would be something like 24x. So, a blaster could hurt a swoop, anti-vehicle weapons like the missile launcher could hurt a speeder, but neither will hurt a Star Destroyer.

I know we are all recalcitrant to add more crunch to this narrative system, but even after semi-weekly sessions for 2 years we still argue a little about this insofar as how it does or does not make sense. No other rule evokes such consternation at our table. We could suspend our disbelief a little better if there weren't canon examples to back up "dude with blaster shoots speeder bike and it blows up."

I wonder if the silhouette numbers would have been better if they did not stop at 10. I agree that using 0.5's would be confusing to calculate, but 10 doesn't seem like a good range of silhouette for me.

1 speeder bike's length is 5 meters at 1 silhouette. A Death Star is 1,200,000 meters at 10 sil... So it would be nice if whatever is at silhouette 5 was the average of the two, 5m and 120km. A sil 5 ship is nowhere near 60km... Now if they made the Death Star 100 sil, the SSD a, I dunno, 70 sil? Then that would give a greater sense of scale. You could say they should have made the Death Star 240,000 Sil, if a speeder bike is 5 meters and is the baseline for 1... but then that's getting out of hand, haha.

Because it seems that Silhouette isn't a flat scale, but a geometric scale or a logarithmic scale. So, 10 isn't 10x the size of 1. More like it is 10 or more times the size of 9 which might be some multiple the size of 8 which is some multiple the size of 7, etc... Also, remember that silhouette is an abstract of MASS AND SIZE, not just a single value. Same thing with Encumbrance.

Oh wow, what's with all the thread necro lately?
Haven't been in the habit of checking dates of topics on front page lately, seems I may need to start again.

*embarrassed*