Handling resistance to damage types

By The Grand Falloon, in Game Masters

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I've been rummaging through some D&D monster books looking for nasty creatures to throw into a Star Wars game (Dark Sun monsters fit quite well). One thing I'm unsure how to model is resistance to certain types of damage. Let's use swarms as an example.

I figure a swarm would be basically treated as a minion group, with each "individual" actually representing dozens of nasty little creature. Rats, insects, carrion birds, whatever. I think they should be especially vulnerable to area attacks, but resistant to individual attacks. Taking out a hundred rats with a blaster or lightsaber is going to be tough, but one good blast from a flamethrower should kill most of them and send the rest scurrying away.

How would you model this? Damage reduction? Setback dice? Upgraded difficulty (things can go bad pretty quick when swarmed by bats and everyone is firing wildly into the air)? What sort of adjustments might you make with something like a crystalline spider, with resistance to Radiant damage (which I'm translating to energy weapons in general) but a weakness against Thunder (sonic or shockwaves)?

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Well in Beyond the Rim is exactly what you want. A swarm of bugs. They just get the special ability to half every damaged suffered, before applying soak, except from weapons with the burn or blast quality. Maybe this helps and could also be modeled for other types of resistence . Also I would throw at least one setback die in any dice pool as long as they are engaged with the swarm, because hundreds of Insects can be distracting.

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If a monster has a particularly larger resistance that you could easily translate into SWRP, then just call it an immunity and get it over with.

"Your flamethrower washes it in liquid fire, but the Mustafarian Lava Flea does not seem to pay it any mind."