So I'm working on a prison break adventure for my PCs, having them escape from the Imperial Orbital Prison above Bakura and thought that it would be interesting to put some auto turrets along the corridors leading to the rings of the station from its axis. I figured that three along the hallway would be interesting and run them as a sort of Minion group at the same time.

I want to make the turrets out of the Heavy Repeating Blasters and make the entrance to the hallway at long range. The PCs will likely have to take cover at the doors and try to shoot the turrets from cover.

HEAVY REPEATING AUTO BLASTER TURRETS

RANGE Long

DAMAGE 15

CRIT 2

QUALITIES Auto-Fire, Pierce 2, Vicious 1

The turret Minion group would have 12 overall hit points (using the repairing gear scale on p. 159).

What I'm having difficulty with right now is coming up with a dice pool for the turret that's not imbalanced. I figured that it would have an Agility of 1 from a Basic Droid brain thrown in and Range (Heavy) as a listed skill. This would make the dice pool for the three turrets attacking one PC:

1 Ability

1 Proficiency

4 Difficulty (Long range + Auto-Fire)

1 Setback (due to Ranged Defense 1 from PC taking cover)

This pool would adjust with the loss of one turret:

1 Proficiency

4 Difficulty

1 Setback

until there was just one turret remaining:

1 Ability

4 Difficulty

1 Setback

The only problem with this would be accounting for the many threats that will likely build up against the turret. I'm thinking that they might overheat some and be required to cool down for a round, but I don't want to make it too easy for the PCs, or really I don't want the turrets to damage/disrupt their own actions more than the PCs do.

Another thought I had was to use the threats as -1 to modify the damage applied by the turrets' successful attacks. So if the turret successfully hits one of the PCs, the damage that these beasts do could be mitigated some, as if it they only grazed the PC and didn't score a direct hit.

So that's what I've got now but any additional thoughts for handling this would be appreciated.

HEAVY REPEATING AUTO BLASTER TURRETS

When I first read this, I thought you were talking about the Auto Blaster weapons that are mounted on vehicles and starships, which do 10x damage on personal-scale targets -- like PCs.

And I was thinking that something which does 30 points of damage per shot (3 damage on the vehicle/ship scale) would be pretty deadly and a very strong deterrent. Definitely the sort of thing that I felt would be used at a maximum security orbital prison facility.

Then I saw that you were talking about "mere" HRBs as the actual weapons.

Then I thought about the fact that if it was a prison, they'd probably want to be doing stun damage only and not killing damage, so that they could make sure to try to capture alive any prisoners who try to escape, after which they could "interrogate" them, put them back in their cells, etc....

The way you have statted the turrets and set up the encounter makes it almost pointless. The turrets are practically guaranteed not to hit anything, and will as you said be generating a lot of threat. At the very least you should substantially reduce the range to something more manageable.

I like bradknowles suggestion of having the turrets do stun damage. It makes sense in context, and the PCs would have to be at short range, meaning there would only be one difficulty die.

HEAVY REPEATING AUTO BLASTER TURRETS

When I first read this, I thought you were talking about the Auto Blaster weapons that are mounted on vehicles and starships, which do 10x damage on personal-scale targets -- like PCs.

And I was thinking that something which does 30 points of damage per shot (3 damage on the vehicle/ship scale) would be pretty deadly and a very strong deterrent. Definitely the sort of thing that I felt would be used at a maximum security orbital prison facility.

Then I saw that you were talking about "mere" HRBs as the actual weapons.

My first idea was to have the Auto Blaster as the turrets. Looking at the damage though reminded me of what they would really be doing narratively. I went with personal scale as I thought shooting off an Auto Blaster inside the prison would really be bad for both sides.

In regards to how I statted the turrets, they are occur as the 3rd encounter at the start of a campaign adventure. I want them to be somewhat formidable and threatening for when the turrets hit, but I don't want to kill anyone this early, so I thought it was best to lower the odds. The PCs will have added difficulty shooting back at the turrets as they are at long range and may have to move up anyway to better attack the turrets themselves.

I also figured that the PCs must get one Triumph or two Advantage to hit a turret and cause critical damage (roll d 100) to interpret if it damages more than just one level of damage.

I'm going to see about redoing them with Stun setting like you suggest and have them switch back after a turret or two is destroyed...

My crew is infiltrating a fortified position to collect a 8k credit bounty on a Chiss Crimelord. When they enter the lower regions, they will have to deal with a set of AP (Anti-Personnel) Blaster Turrets set up across the room from them (Medium Range). They will be playing through it tonight. I stated them as follows

Minion AP Blaster Turrets

Agility: 2

Wounds: 4

Plated Armor - soak: 3, Def: 1

Weapons are 2 blaster rifles with linked-2

Though it wont be used this time, I added a rank of Barrage for possible future uses at long or extreme range if they work out good tonight.

Funny. I just needed a turret tonight. I used the hit and soak/wounds profile from an assassin droid and put that behind a light repeating blaster.

Brutal. And awesome.

1 green 2 yellow is the bench mark "droid does this" for everything else unless theres a reason to do otherwise (why throw more money at turrets?) i'd stick to that.