First, a little background..

PCs have been captured and are on a star destroyer now. I'm going to have them escape and meet up with the one PC (who didn't get captured) in the hangar bay waiting for them with their ship. But there will be a fight with stormtroopers but I want a big bad and I was thinking an AT-ST. It will be piloted by an officer they ran into before and "mistreated" them so they probably want to kill this guy. But, as I'm now aware, and AT-ST will most likely shred everyone apart. No weapon is going to touch this thing except the starship weapons but I want to give them multiple ways to bring this down. Any ideas?

You could do the Halo thing and make sure there's a weapon cache nearby/on the way with appropriate guns. Some rocket launchers, maybe? Or else the AT-ST could be some sort of cargo loader that's been retrofitted with personal-scale weapons. I think there's one or two examples in Far Horizons.

• Maybe there is a TIE fighter being serviced in the same bay whose weapons can be "liberated" for the cause.

I can't help but think of an example the D&D4e (boo hiss) DM guide had of an encounter where the entire point was the giant killer automaton couldn't be defeated in combat. Sounds like a very similar setup.

It's in the hanger. Use the environment to create the materials for the takedown. Just to remind you it's only a single advantage to "Notice a single important thing" the entire point being that you can allow the Players to also generate ideas in addition to what you had in mind.

Stacks of crates.

A spool of heavy cable

TIE Fighter Racks and catwalks on the cieling

Lift pits

A partly disassembled TIE boarding shuttle being repaired

A damaged refueling port in the floor

A load lifter so simplistically programmed it'll take orders from literally ANYONE.

Spare TIE solar panels

A bundle of spare piping

50 Barrels of ultra-lube

A space tug

A giant statue of Palpatine being taken to some world for some propaganda reason

50 barrels of Ultra-lok industrial adheasive

A plumbing team repairing a leak in the waste system.

50 barrels of Ultra-blue hyperpaint.

Lots of possibilities providing lots of possible solutions...

Everything Snickett said was the kind of stuff I was about to post.

If you're up against an AT-ST-type enemy, the challenge doesn't have to be specifically firepower. Slice into a loading crane and use it to knock the thing over. Open a torpedo loading bay so it rolls on them like the logs in ROTJ.

Give them a variety of options which don't require just shooting it with their guns, it should be a lot of fun!

Awesome guys. Thanks. Lots of good stuff.

Also, as a backup plan in case the players decide to go with attack pattern Derp, give the AT-ST a pintle mounted light repeating blaster (see below). Have your officer use that (at least at first) so any hits to the players will still be manageable with stimpacks. After the players get the message you can have the officer button up and switch to the ear weapons. If you want to bust out the chin guns that's up to you, but if not an easy explanation is the power of the weapons means a miss might breach the hull...

Image: an AT-ST walker showing a Snowtrooper sitting in the hatch next to a mounted manually operated repeating blaster.

Good call, as my PCs seem to have mastered "Attack Plan Derp" this is something that might work well. Thanks. Cool picture too, I use a lot of art I find on Google Images, some people are really talented.

Traditionally you could have them employ a droid popper to temporarily disable it so it can't track them without exposing whoever's using it to enemy fire, use a stolen communicator to trick him into firing on his own troops and making them believe the PCs are the ones piloting the AT-ST...

Lead it over the opening for the TIEs to fly out and drop it out into space?

What was your Free PC doing all this time?

And if they don't say disabling the AT-ST maybe they were doing something else like arming their shuttles weapon systems...

We have been doing a PbP since then to just fill in the story. The Free PC has been healing up and will be rescuing them along with the help of a Rebel fleet. Major space stuff will be going on the same time the other pcs are escaping.

They might need a nudge to realize they actually can fight it since, whilst I am used to using the environment against foes in a game, it's not standard for many groups who just think in terms of attack rolls. So if they don't pick up on this you might get one of two scenarios - full frontal attack by the Stupid Squad, or they just run away.

To head off both of these, I would try and set up some condition that prevents them just running away - their ship needs prepping for launch such as unhooking the fuelling cables which would take an extended action or all sorts of other things. Have the AT-ST stomping around all over the place in the hangar which has lots of open spaces around their ship, but lots of other places they can hide around, underneath or above. So there are packing crates stacked up, a crane, underfloor pipespace that they can lift the grill out of and scurry through - think Newt at the end of Aliens. In fact, the end of Aliens is pretty much what you want to go for. Maybe not the loader that Ripley pilots (or maybe you want to, but be aware that the players will try to steal it and use it in every combat ever again), but that general scenario of something well-armoured and with huge amounts of force stomping around where they need to get to.

The more I think about this idea, the more I like it. Give them lots of stuff to play with and if they ask for something, consider giving it to them. E.g. "Can I fit through a drop-ship's fuelling tube?" "Sure, what are you thinking...?"

You might also want to get a few sound-effects of an AT-ST or similar machine. Again, I'm thinking the mechanical whine from Aliens as Ripley whirs around the loader's servos. Perfect for an AT-ST. If you can find some giant metallic footfalls, all the better.

Btw - awesome posts Snickett and Ghostofman. That's exactly the sort of environmental fun that the OP should be looking at.

Found the clip - if you can, rip the first 22 seconds of this clip's sound track and play it on some big speakers when it enters.

:D