Hi Guys,

I've just finished GM'ing an EotE game and one issue that kept popping up was my players trying to use their turrets on their light freighter to shoot people walking around on the ground. Note, my players would try to use this tactic while either having their ship landed or docked and/or while hovering above a potential character-scale shootout. Has any other GM encountered this? Is this legal? If so, what would be the modifiers of firing a starship-scale weapon at a character on the ground? How would we calculate damage (or is the victim outright pulverized)? Thanks is advance!

Ship weapons are x 10 damage personal scale. Whether they can or should will be more of a narrative issue, certainly no rule preventing it.

It's legal. Difficulty is based on Silhouette regardless of range (even Close planetary > Extreme personal). Damage is 10:1, and critical hits are modified by +50 (at the GM's discretion). Yes, vehicle support will totally dominate a battle. It's even worse when its mounted on a light (Silhouette 2) vehicle, like the AT-PT.

The first weapon I ever fired playing this game was a vehicle-scale gun at a group of enemies. Made such a large explosion that it cracked the landing platform and the ship slid off 2 rounds later.

Killed all the minions, though.

Ok, please let me know if I have this straight.

Say I'm going to fire a starship-scale laser turret on my light freighter at a badguy standing on the ground.

Is starship-scale the same as vehicle-scale?

So there are only two scales; character and vehicle?

The badguy is well within close range on the starship-scale, so base difficulty is two purple difficulty dice.

The badguy through armor and/or cover gets two setback dice worth of protection.

I roll my gunnery skill and add the two purple dice and two setback dice to my pool.

No other modifiers for scale difference here?

Let's say I hit for seven damage normally. So this does 70 damage to the badguy on the ground.

This causes a critical, and the badguy rolls on the critical table +50.

Is this correct?

Mostly correct. The base difficulty is based on Sil, not range. So the difficulty to hit a Sil 1 person from a Sil 4 light freighter is Daunting, or four purple.

Also the +50 crit is a GM discretion thing.

Ah... thanks for pointing that out!

Yeah, but if you’ve got a pilot/gunner with 4 or 5 Agility, especially if they have lots of ranks in Gunnery, then they will wipe the floor of any personal-scale targets.

In our first major combat using our YT-2400 against ground targets, our pilot rolled decently well and got something like seven or eight net successes, thus resulting in 140 points of personal-scale damage. There wasn’t much left of the ground targets after that.

And we repeated that same kind of experience on multiple occasions thereafter. That time we splattered Mama Lylek guts all over the Ryloth country-side. That time we blew multiple holes in the side of a mountain that was a part of a safe retreat for a Shell Hutt that we had been hired to kill.

That kind of thing is hard for a GM to counter. In our case, that game ended shortly after we killed the Shell Hutt, and we opened a new F&D Beta game instead.

Having seen the kind of mass devastation and destruction that can occur from the player side, I can tell you that I would never want to allow that kind of thing if I was on the other side. Make sure to keep the ship busy or otherwise out of the picture, when it comes to shooting at ground targets.

Otherwise, it’s a lot like letting the players throw hand grenades into barrels of fish.

I think it's important to assign planetary-scale targets like buildings and even some pieces of terrain HTT and Armor values. In a galaxy where vehicle-mounted weapons are common, don't be surprised if most of your storefronts and other buildings have Armor ratings.

Wow... I feel this really increases the lethality of the game. I mean, if I'm understanding this correctly, a light blaster cannon (or whatever vehicle / planetary weapon) on a silhouette 2 vehicle only needs to roll two purple difficulty dice to hit a person standing on the ground (if that person has no black setback dice for armor or cover). And if it hits, the damage is multiplied by x10 and criticals are +50 (which I would impose). Jeez...

When my players get wind of this, they'll do this all the time.

Plus, as a GM, it's hard to simply just do this back at them since it pretty much outright kills them.

Wow... I feel this really increases the lethality of the game. I mean, if I'm understanding this correctly, a light blaster cannon (or whatever vehicle / planetary weapon) on a silhouette 2 vehicle only needs to roll two purple difficulty dice to hit a person standing on the ground (if that person has no black setback dice for armor or cover). And if it hits, the damage is multiplied by x10 and criticals are +50 (which I would impose). Jeez…

I don’t think that Blaster Cannons can be mounted on a Sil 2 vehicle, but an Autoblaster sure can. It does only three points of vehicle/ship scale damage, but at 10x that becomes 30 points of personal-scale damage. And each extra success on that Gunnery roll adds 10 more points to the amount of personal-scale damage being done.

Speeders with vehicle/ship scale weapons are seriously deadly.

When my players get wind of this, they'll do this all the time.

Plus, as a GM, it's hard to simply just do this back at them since it pretty much outright kills them.

That’s why you have to keep the tied up elsewhere. Otherwise, the game gets horribly imbalanced.

Some people have solved this issue by house ruling that Vehicle-scale damage is only a 5x multiplier, so anything that can be mounted on a Sil 2 vehicle can’t do full ship-scale 10x damage.

But that’s only a house rule, and there are plenty of Sil 3 speeders that could still seriously mess up the equation.

Don't forget that unless your players are holding the ship in hover over the target (which means you need to have some enemies with rocket tubes show up), they'll have to aim their strafing run, which is a great chance to add Setback die for firing from a moving platform and use Dark Side Points to upgrade the difficulty so they risk a Despair result and plaster their fellow PCs or allies, which could make them rethink the move.

Other ways to discourage or balance the effect is 1) obviously, the response from authorities. Bounty hunting is fine, but orbital strikes are generally something only the Empire gets to do, so bringing a ship to a gunfight will draw heat and heavy bounties 2) the delays, make the PCs dock the ship, and if they want to go get it for a fight, make them either disengage (giving the enemy a chance to recover and regroup) or send some of the PCs back to get it, leaving the others to fight on, now with fewer numbers, for a handful of rounds while the players race back to the spaceport, power up the ship, and fly back to the battle.

I think perhaps the best solution to "big gun proliferation" is to give something appropriately big to shoot at. Your PCs may decide to shoot at the poor sod next to the Hind gunship with the 20mm cannon, but then the Hind gunship responds in kind

Don't forget that unless your players are holding the ship in hover over the target (which means you need to have some enemies with rocket tubes show up)

A related issue is how utterly ineffective man-portable anti-vehicular weapons are in the FFG systems. A missile tube is unable to harm anything more robust than a speeder.

I don’t think that Blaster Cannons can be mounted on a Sil 2 vehicle, but an Autoblaster sure can. It does only three points of vehicle/ship scale damage, but at 10x that becomes 30 points of personal-scale damage. And each extra success on that Gunnery roll adds 10 more points to the amount of personal-scale damage being done.

Light Blaster Cannons (Damage 4) are often found on Sil 2 vehicles. They are commonly twinned with Linked 1 too.

BTW, Force-users betting on using Reflect with their lightsabers to survive shots from auto-blasters and light blaster cannons are totally out of luck. Because this talent interacts with the damage done, even with Reflect 10 won't keep you on your feet on a minimal hit unless your WT > 20.

There's a reason the AT-ST is such a powerful and dangerous piece of equipment. Historically, having armor, air support and artillery in support of infantry is a huge force multiplier. I see no reason why a combined arms order of battle wouldn't be common in the Empire. It's an excellent way to give a clock to the PCs: "You hear the unmistakable clank-THUD of an armored walker approaching your position." Give the PCs some soft targets to protect and some hardened targets they can use to fight back (turrets and the like). The solution cuts both ways, if the PCs are using vehicle-scale weaponry against personal-scale targets, have a fire team bring in a crew-served laser cannon. Large cannons with one armored face have been standard on the battlefield for decades and have been used to good effect against even heavily armored vehicles.

I feel there wouldn't be many Situations the local populace would want a ship blasting around the place.

I probably would allow this sometimes if the situation is correct why not.

But I feel most of the time If they are searching for a particular person its usually because they need information.

If its a bounty, I think there body will be a bit too obliterated to proove its identity.

Just always have to keep in mind, every decision has consequences "every decision"

Start shooting your ship-mounted weapons while in atmosphere or even while landed, and you'll get unwanted attention from Imperial (or local) authorities right quick.

And don't think that you're safe because you're doing this on some hutt-controled planet either, because they still don't like random spacers firing heavy ordinance in their town.

So, I'd say that immediately when you start firing a ship-based weapon, you should start a countdown signifying how long it takes for the local authorities to show up (secretly, of course. And you can make it random since there might be a patrol nearby.)

The response time should be even shorter if it's on the ground while landed, since the blasts and impact explosions will be heard all over the local area.

And trust me, the authorities won't care if you were acting in self defense or not, they'll go in guns blazing.
And they'll surely bring something heavy since they know it's vehicle/ship fire.

That's how I would discourage my players from using it anyway.

It'd be fine to use in a pinch, but you'd have to get the heck out of there after using it.
And you'll probably be getting a hefty fine or warrant for your arrest unless you've been using a forged ship-id.
It's not like they won't figure out who was docked at the landing bay that got half blown up.
And if you're in the air, there's almost always someone tracking you someway (for traffic purposes, of course).

That sounds rather punitive to me. Many parts of the galaxy are wild west in feel, and guns blazing isn't always just for sidearms. Every situation is different, sometimes is the players might find themselves in a full-on war zone where such fire support might be the key, so setting up that it's always wrongbadfun isn't something I'd encourage.

As the level of civilization increases, the "sanctioned" level of response goes down. In really civilized environments, one gets in trouble for simply insulting someone else. In really uncivilized environments, one could be expected to kill an entire bloodline in a dispute over a bagel.

Most of the vehicular homicide issues can be fixed with simple encounter design.

If the players are set to strafe the Hutts palace, then the palace will have a retractable double heavy laser cannon on the roof an be supported by a half dozen Sil 2 transportable quadlaser emplacements.

Not so fun when you come swooping to see these jerks grinning back.

Did you mean http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/AG-2G_quad_laser_cannon or http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Quad_turbolaser_cannon ?

What about http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/V-150_anti-orbital_ion_cannon ? Wouldn’t that, or some of it’s smaller brothers, also ruin your day?

That sounds rather punitive to me. Many parts of the galaxy are wild west in feel, and guns blazing isn't always just for sidearms. Every situation is different, sometimes is the players might find themselves in a full-on war zone where such fire support might be the key, so setting up that it's always wrongbadfun isn't something I'd encourage.

Well sure, if you're in a full-on warzone, it won't matter what you fire.

I'm talking about systems with some sort of rule-of-law in place (be that imperial, local or criminal).

Either way, those rulers are usually not ok with people blasting gigantic cannons at people.

As for the "wrongbadfun" comment, the point was how to discourage players from using this all the time since it's pretty overpowered.

If you want your players to blast everyone and everything with ship-cannons, then feel free to do so. It's your game.

I was just trying to give a reasonable explanation as to why they might not want to.

Most of the vehicular homicide issues can be fixed with simple encounter design.

Yup. If they want to use vehicle weapons, turn the encounter(s) into vehicular combat. From my experience, that is actually harder on the PCs. And getting your shiny, expensive vehicle shot out from under you is not nice, either.