I feel that while shields as written are fine for your standard personal defense shield (Ala Kyle Katarn/Jedi Knight) or starfighter combat, how would you depict the shield systems as say, on a Destroyer droid, or that the Gungans used in EP1?

I feel like a shield like that should more realistically provide soak or armor, since it completely neutralizes blaster attacks of a certain caliber. You can't break the shield no matter how skilled you are- you just need a bigger gun.

The RAW also doesn't go into situations like, what if you mount a starfighter shield on a load lifter or skiff and use it as a heavy weapons platform? Wouldn't it gain Armor in addition to defense bonuses? I mean, you wouldn't be able to snipe the guy anymore.

How would you handle this?

I personally would say that starfighter/capitalship armor values also factor in the shield values, therefore something wild like strapping a Ywing Shield generator onto a platform would grant you half the armor value of the Y-Wing, something like 2 + the Defense bonus.

I don't consider this terribly wild, because honestly at this point your talking about using tanks and airstrikes and stuff.

Strictly per RAW, shields is defense, armor is armor. Doesn't mean you can't do as you please as GM though.

You've got a few options for shields you want to make particularly indestructible against a typical blaster shot. One approach is the difficulty dice. You can give having a shot pass-through/break a shield require the player to pass a check against something like 3 reds and 2 purples. Or you can set it up with a standard difficulty (1 purple for short range, 2 for medium, etc.), and then toss in mountains of setback dice.

Another approach is just treating is to just treat it as something you've got to beat down. This can be in the form of it being high soak, and once it breaks down, it needs time to regenerate or it's otherwise just down for good. Or it can be in the form as having a sort of wound threshhold - taking significant amounts of damage to bring it down.

And then there's just the good ol' fashioned handwave approach - players attack all they want, they're not getting through until you want them to.

Opinions vary.

An argument for leaving things as they are (Defence dice) is that although Soak provides a small but dependable bonus, Defence dice can, effectively, reduce damage to zero (if yer lucky).

Opinions vary.

An argument for leaving things as they are (Defence dice) is that although Soak provides a small but dependable bonus, Defence dice can, effectively, reduce damage to zero (if yer lucky).

Good thread, I think I'll go by saying that something like starfighter shields would just grant the equivalent level of armor to anything protected on it.

Like if you had a Y-Wing shield generator and just stuck it onto a sled, the sled would now have Armor 3. A structure say, protected by a capital level or higher shield generator would have Armor 5 or more, like the planetary shield generator in Empire- it could pretty much be able to shrug off all attacks.

Otherwise, if you have a planetary shield generator or a Y-Wing, you could say, be sniped in the cockpit when clearly you should just be impervious to attacks that don't overload the shield.

Just be careful, armor vs personal scale is also touchy.

Be ready to reap what you sow.

Another these in the gm forums went over the destroyer recently too, you might want to check it out.