You can spend a triumph against minions to inflict a critical injury. My question is...

If each minion has a wound threshold of 5, and there were 3 minions (so a total of 15 group wound threshold)... and they were attacked and received 8 damage (after soak) and a critical injury from a triumph... how many wounds are left to the group? 5 or 2?

It comes down to what is used first, the crit or the damage? Because if the crit comes first, that takes the group's wounds LEFT to 10 (because a crit to a minion is instant death), then the 8 damage is applied leaving that group with 2 wounds left.

If the 8 damage is applied first, that brings the group's wounds left to 7, and then the crit applies to the minion with 2 wounds left, resulting in 5 wounds left to the group.

I apply damage first, crits after.

I could see it going either way, depending on what was most advantageous to the player group. It is a Triumph, after all, so it should yield the best result for their efforts.

The books seem to imply that Crits are resolved after Wounds. Crits can't be applied unless the attack wounds, the books list's crit results after wound results, some Crits generate additional wounds....

That said the book DOESN'T specify which Minion in a group has to be removed due to a crit, just that one is.

If each minion has a wound threshold of 5, and there were 3 minions (so a total of 15 group wound threshold)... and they were attacked and received 8 damage (after soak) and a critical injury from a triumph... how many wounds are left to the group? 5 or 2?

Technically, it's 6 or 2 since you have to exceed the threshold. So the minion thresholds are 6, 11, and 16.

Personally I go with 2 remaining. The damage is applied, leaving 8. A crit nails a minion no matter how many wounds they have, so I count a crit as causing max damage. In this case, 6 are required to take out a minion, so 8 + 6 = 14, so 2 Wounds are required to drop the remaining.

Non-technically...I find figuring out the Wound Threshold too fiddly for minions, so I just drop them AT the threshold: if they have WT of 5, they go down every 5, and a crit does 5. That way I don't have to translate one number to another in the middle of combat. They go down a bit easier, but I can always add more minions, or simply change the starting WT to suit the need.

I do the same thing as Whafrog concerning the division of damage with one exception. I'll apply the crit to either a wounded or full minion depending on the flow of battle, if the PC's are blowing through it or struggling etc. Just gives me some flexibility when runs are done within time constraints.

Yeah, I have a critical result remove a "healthy" minion from the group, determined after damage is first applied and minions defeated thru wound damage are removed (if needs be). After all, it's a critical, and for most weapons that's either a Triumph or multiple Advantage, something that's a lot rarer for lower-end PCs with only one or two ranks in a combat skill, especially if they've only got a 2 in the governing characteristic.

Plus, it helps speed up combats so that the PCs can get back to the story, which for the folks I game with is the main reason we've gathered to spend a few hours playing Star Wars.

For starters, there is no such thing as a wounded or healthy minion when it is part of a group. All members are part of a single entity. Very similar to if not an exact replica of Squad/Swarm rules in d20 games.

Secondly, damage is pretty clearly before critical. Criticals require that damage has been dealt in excess of soak value. So, Reduce, Deal, Crit Injury. The damage causes the injury, not the other way around.

Lastly, FFGSW is pretty clear what happens when dealing criticals to a group of minions pages 410 AoR and 309 EoTE are your friends, "If a group of minions suffers a Critical Injury, it suffers one minion's worth of wounds (so that one of the minions in the group is incapacitated)." That is not saying just enough wounds to incapacitate one minion, that is an amount of wounds equal to one whole minion's defeat.

Using examples...

Your 1st Example:

• The order is wrong, but the damage is correct.

Your 2nd Example:

• The order is correct, but the damage is wrong.

My Example:

• Step 1: Jason decides to attack the group of storm troopers with his Heavy Blaster Rifle and show them why he's the best shot in the outer rim.
• Step 2: I inform Jason that the attack is going to be an Average difficulty and that the heavy rain is giving him 1 setback die. He grabs 3 proficiency dice, 2 ability dice, and 2 difficulty dice. He informs me that he had braced so he doesn't grab the setback die from the rain.
• Step 3: Jason rolls
  Yellow = [Triumph] [success] [blank]
  Green = [success] [success]
  Purple = [Double Failure] [blank]
  That's 2 net successes for 12 damage. This damage is greater than the soak of 4 (Piercing quality reduced soak by 1).
• Step 4: Since damage was not fully absorbed by the soak, Jason decides to use the triumph to deal a critical injury. Using the minion rules on page 390 EoTE:CR, this causes another 6 damage bringing the total wounds up to 18.
• Step 5: The Stormtroopers' soak reduce's the damage by 4 for a total of 14 damage dealt. Because that is past both the first and second thresholds of 5 and 10 respectively, two troopers drop.

Anyways, even if you decide to resolve critical first, it's always going to deal the same amount of damage in the end as the critical injury is always equal to one minion's worth of wounds (threshold+1). In the end, 12-4+6 and 6+12-4 both equal 14.

Thank you for the clarification OfficerZan.

Out of curiosity, if you had a squad of ST with one Rocket Launcher in the mix and you had a player specifically want to target that ST. Would you allow it? Would you say no since the squad is really one entity?

For simplicity lets assume your above example as written is the events that transpire just the target is different.

Thanks in advance, I'm finding this whole conversation pretty helpful.

I wouldn't have only one minion within a minion group have different equipment. It's never explicitly stated, but the assumption is, that minions have similar equipment since their dice pool is built using the same skill (as a group), so logically, the group is firing with the same weapon.

In the example above, the stormtrooper carrying the rocket launcher would be a separate NPC. Since I wouldn't make him part of the minion group, he would probably be a storm trooper commander so he will be able to benefit from skill ranks.

I would describe the stormtrooper commander and the NPC group as being grouped up narratively, but not part of the same minion group.

Out of curiosity, if you had a squad of ST with one Rocket Launcher in the mix and you had a player specifically want to target that ST. Would you allow it? Would you say no since the squad is really one entity?

You wouldn't group mismatched minions at all. Minions in a group are supposed to be statistically identical so they can act as a group. If you give one a rocket launcher, or a light repeating blaster, or whatever, he no longer works properly within the grouping rules.

Stop thinking of grouped minions as individuals, they really mechanically aren't. The group is for all intents and purposes a single character with special rules. Keep them identical, and engaged to each other, and while you describe them as different guys in the narrative, when you think about how they function within the system and rules always just have one guy in mind.

If you need a situation like a squad of troopers with one armed with a support weapon, there's a few options. The book (pg. 420) actually says that light repeater armed troopers usually work solo, or in pairs. So there's option one: The "complete" squad is composed of a group or two of regular troopers and a single or grouped pair of repeater armed troopers. The issue here is the possibility of looting the weapons. Option 2 is to make a Rival level character, like a "Veteran Stormtrooper" and have him use the support weapon. This might be the better option if you only want a single character to have a weapon like that.

Here's the stats I tossed together for just such a situation:

Veteran Trooper (Rival)

3,3,2,2,3,1

Soak5

WT13

Athletics 1, Discipline 2, Gunnery 1, Melee 1, Ranged Heavy 2

Equipment: Standard Stormtrooper Armor and Field gear (see book stats)

Vibroblade

Blaster Rifle or Repeating blaster or other Special Weapon as mission/encounter requires (Heavy repeater, flamethrower, grenade launcher, sniper rifle, ect.)

See, he's better then the normal trooper, doesn't have the "leadership talents" of a Sgt, and provides that extra oomph of a special weapon without complicating things.

I agree with the others that you shouldn't group them at all. That being said, you could fluff it as a shared weapon. The minion group is still limited to one attack so it would really diminish the power of having that rocker launcher be part of the group.

I have done it before for a group firing an E-WEB instead of describing it as a bunch of troopers with e-webs it was one e-web squad behind cover. Gunner goes down, his mate takes over.

In your scenario the player should know that it is a group of minions and that he can't specifically target any of them. Though, sometimes everyone gets lost in the narrative and forgets about mechanics and that's what can make these games great! Just like the Wizard of the party forgetting sleep spells don't affect Elves in D&D! It can cause much needed suspense as the party celebrates shooting the guy with the launcher only to have his buddy scramble to pick it up to fire himself.

As the person telling the story, it's the GM's job to immerse the players and you should have just as much fun with it as the players. Want to give a minion group a shared weapon? Go for it. Just be ready to roll with the punches because player's never like to let plots push themselves!

The 'weapons team' set up can also cause an interesting Triumph dilemma, where they now have to choose between killing a minion from the team or damaging the weapon.

Thanks OfficerZan and Quicksilver.

You captured the spirit of my question perfectly. I've used the team/squad with E-Web setup before and the same with the rocket launcher (somewhat house ruled) to allow for loaders, fire teams etc.

I play with some military folk so the idea of a squad with heavy weapons (or squads without some sort of support weapons) has never and likely will never be received well so I always look to balance it out with conventional tactics (in an unconventional setting ).

I do like the triumph idea though, big fan on taking out a weapon or disrupting the firing of it in some way.

It's specifically stated that a crit deals WT worth of wounds, thus removing a minion. It contradicts the rule about needing to exceed the threshold to remove the minion, for some reason (and our group seems to go with WT worth = dead minion), but it is clear on the fact that it auto kills anyhow.

Interestingly, though, it might appear that the intent is equal to Wound Threshold in order to kill a minion. Or, at the very least, if it's 1 more, that doesn't mean that all minions in a group basically have +1 WT, but the group as a whole does:

Three Stormtroopers have WT 5 each. If going as written, damage would go like this:
At 6 Wounds, a Trooper dies, and the second trooper has taken 1 damage.

At 11 Wounds, a Trooper dies, and the third trooper has taken 1 damage.
At 16 Wounds, a Trooper dies, only one above the Threshold.

(What this tells us is that anyone at exactly their wound threshold is alive and kicking.)

I'd probably be a little cautious about special weapons in too large minion groups - at least at lower levels of play - as it could quickly get out of hand (minions go down easy, sure, but they also tend to pack a larger punch than you'd think while they're alive - and that's with simple blaster pistols or rifles).

It's specifically stated that a crit deals WT worth of wounds, thus removing a minion. It contradicts the rule about needing to exceed the threshold to remove the minion, for some reason (and our group seems to go with WT worth = dead minion), but it is clear on the fact that it auto kills anyhow.

Interestingly, though, it might appear that the intent is equal to Wound Threshold in order to kill a minion. Or, at the very least, if it's 1 more, that doesn't mean that all minions in a group basically have +1 WT, but the group as a whole does:

Well, you can't crit unless you deal at least 1 point of Wounds after Soak, so even though you need that 1 extra Wound to kill the first minion of a group, it doesn't contradict since a minion with a Wound Threshhold of 5 would be taking 1 wound from the damage + 5 wounds from the crit.

Good point. Wasn't thinking that far, haha.