Making a minor change to the personal/planetary scale interface.

By HappyDaze, in Star Wars: Edge of the Empire RPG

OK, we all know about the x10 modifier. fine. I get that. However, what if we were able to 'keep the change' when personal scale weapons damage planetary scale objects?

IOW, if a vehicle with Armor 1 is hit by a blaster rifle for 11 Damage, the weapon penetrates the armor but doesn't do anything. With this variant, it would do 0.1 damage. It may seem insignificant, but it does mean that a withering hail of blaster bolts could potentially destroy a lightly armored vehicle. It also means that the successes matter (right now, 2-11 successes in this example all have the effect of penetrating the armor but doing no damage).

It could be a perfectly fine house rule, but it will negate some of the inherent protection of military vehicles. Perhaps you would want to keep a hybrid system where that applies to civilian / unarmored vehicles.

If that appeals to you, run with it. Heck, you could just convert everything into personal combat and be done with it.

I personally like the system the way it is, but I also liked the concept of MDC (Palladium Books/Rifts) even if I thought the 100 SDC to 1 MDC was a bit much. Then 10 to 1 ratio works better for my sensibilities. This way the weakest unarmed human in the world could not simply bash a tank into oblivion... eventually.

It could be a perfectly fine house rule, but it will negate some of the inherent protection of military vehicles. Perhaps you would want to keep a hybrid system where that applies to civilian / unarmored vehicles.

Well, a blaster rifle is still hard pressed to hurt anything with Armor 2, and Armor 3 would still be almost impervious to even a heavy repeating blaster. However, it will allow edge cases - like a heavy repeating blaster against an Armor 1 vehicle - to be more effective.

As long as you don't mind crunching the numbers, I don't think it'll break anything...

There have been many threads on this subject of planetary vs. personal scale damage. Here are my two cents.

I think you should just treat any weapon with the breach quality as a planetary scale weapon for purposes of damage against vehicles. Extra successes against vehicles would increase the damage against them by one (planetary scale). Successes against a personal scale target would act as normal.

Weapons without the breach quality are inherently not designed to destroy vehicles. Against unarmored targets they still can and will if powerful enough, but a rifle shouldn't be able to destroy an armored vehicle. No matter how many time you shoot at it.

So you are multiplying a vehicle's stat block by 10 (Soak = Armour x10; WT = Hull x10) while it's being shot at by puny humans? Could work. Seems a bit fiddly when the now slightly damaged vehicle gets shot by another vehicle, though.

EDIT: I reworded my first sentance as when I read mouthymerc's quote it "sounded" weird in my head.

There's my OCD for the day*.

* Or not. Just edited my edit. :unsure:

Edited by Col. Orange

So multiply a vehicle's stat block by 10 (Soak = Armour x10; WT = Hull x10) while it's being shot at by puny humans?

This is all I would do. With the addendum that it must be a vehicle with a silhouette of 3 or less. 4 or larger and they are treated as vehicles as per normal.

With the addendum that it must be a vehicle with a silhouette of 3 or less. 4 or larger and they are treated as vehicles as per normal.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Nobody's taking out a Wayfarer with a blaster pistol, Deadly Accuracy or not.

My main issue with the planetary vs. personal scale mostly runs in the opposite direction. Vehicle weapons do enormous damage while still being able to hit characters on foot relatively easy. A single added difficulty die for every two Silhouette difference doesn't seem like enough.

I was going to rule (for an as yet untested upcoming encounter) that any personal scale damage which exceeds the Armor of a vehicle deals at least 1 Hull, if it can crit it down it can deal damage. I find it hard to believe all of the missile launchers I've seen fired at Vehicles in Clone Wars were all criticals so I'm inclined to round up since there are a finite number of missiles available.

So you are multiplying a vehicle's stat block by 10 (Soak = Armour x10; WT = Hull x10) while it's being shot at by puny humans? Could work. Seems a bit fiddly when the now slightly damaged vehicle gets shot by another vehicle, though.

Not quite. I'm still dividing personal scale by 10, I'm just perfectly comfortable with using decimals. A blaster rifle with a good roll and some talents backing it up might do 16 personal scale damage. Against a vehicle, this becomes 1.6. If the vehicle has Armor 1, it now has 0.6 Hull Trauma. A second shot with everything remaining the same has an end result of the vehicle having 1.2 Hull Trauma. By the RAW, neither of these shots would have inflicted any Hull Trauma - my house rule just lets the partial damage from multiple shots accumulate. In both cases, the vehicle would be totally unharmed if it had Armor 2+.