If you're looking for a "by the rules" standpoint, the other option is simple narrative device. For Poe's adventure a development was having his ship get messed up.

2 minutes ago, Mark Caliber said:

To confirm, an F-16 will go down in with a stiff breeze. The Falcon wasn't armored well enough to resist damage and was designed to evade all incoming fire.

The F-14s & F-15s however, was designed to take a couple of hits and keep flying (and have proven themselves capable of such).

I concede that I probably should have picked a different fighter than the F-16,. Yet, you can chew a grounded F-14 or F-15 up pretty well by firing at its ducts, engine ports, and landing gear with an 7.62mm infantry rifle, let alone a heavier squad weapon. And I would argue the X-Wing is fairly analogous to either of those "strike fighters." An A-10 on the other hand... that is a flying tank. But, fire into the front or back of its engines and you will do serious damage. The problem with aerospace fighters (and their spaceborne theoretical equivalents) is that they have weak points inherent in their designs that tanks do not. They rely on speed, distance, and angle of attack to make targeting those areas difficult or (preferably) impossible.

1 hour ago, Vondy said:

The rules system emulates the movie, not the other way around.

Thanks for clearing that up!

1 hour ago, themensch said:

Thanks for clearing that up!

So going on the assumption that you're not just being sarcastic for the sake of being sarcastic...

Vondy does bring up a valid point, in that a number of folks that are generally new to this system or to RPGs in general might expect to be able to 'faithfully' replicate in their RPG sessions everything they see in the films.

As mentioned earlier in the thread, an X-Wing (Rebellion Era at least) has a pretty high Armor rating, but I suspect that's more to try and allay the "rocket tag" aspect of starship combat, giving snubfighters that the PCs are most likely going to be flying at least some measure of survivability, and simply because up to the point in time when the AoR corebook was published, we'd never seen anyone in the films try to shoot down an X-Wing with personal-scale weapons, the writers weren't concerned with "so how does a PC with a blaster rifle manage to disable an X-Wing?" Heck, closest we'd seen of someone using personal scale blasters against a starship was Leia and Chewie firing at Slave 1 as it departed Bespin, with their attacks being utterly futile. We do however see personal weapons working against speeder bikes, which probably informed the bikes having Armor 0. Leia just needed a Triumph on her roll to take out a minion-operated bike, and Luke's lightsaber was had enough mods on it to make it easy for him to score a crit on a successful attack, again sufficient to take out a minion-operated bike albeit with a far more gruesome description than Leia's player used.

The other part of the issue (such as it is) is that that many folks believe that the 'faithfully' part of 'faithfully replicate' means that such an event has to happen every single time the dice are rolled, which in turn often leads to stat blocks of iconic characters being horrifically bloated in terms of characteristics/ability scores and skill ratings; the d20 version was lousy with this when it came to fan write-ups, and d6 wasn't much better with even official ANH!Luke having better ratings than a starting PC could ever hope for. And it's a trap that a great many veteran players and GMs fall into. I've lost track of the number of D&D/d20 Conan builds I've seen that turn the glowering Cimmarian into a borderline superhero with ability scores through the roof and more special abilities than you can shake a sword at. When the reality is that the mechanics only need to allow for the situation to occur, and that things can easily be chalked up to the iconic in question either getting a really good roll (or as one of my best friends puts it, are using movie hero dice) or a really bad roll to account for how they were able to pull something off.

Classic example of this is people bending over backwards to figure within the context of the RPG (be it WEG, WotC, or FFG) how Luke, a largely untrained farm boy who'd never sat in a fighter cockpit before, was able to successfully bullseye the Death Star's thermal exhaust port when more experienced pilots failed, and do so every single time he attacked, while never really considering that he simply got a really good roll on his attack check, and thus doesn't need god-tier stats to pull off that scene.

50 minutes ago, Vondy said:

I concede that I probably should have picked a different fighter than the F-16,. Yet, you can chew a grounded F-14 or F-15 up pretty well by firing at its ducts, engine ports, and landing gear with an 7.62mm infantry rifle, let alone a heavier squad weapon. And I would argue the X-Wing is fairly analogous to either of those "strike fighters." An A-10 on the other hand... that is a flying tank. But, fire into the front or back of its engines and you will do serious damage. The problem with aerospace fighters (and their spaceborne theoretical equivalents) is that they have weak points inherent in their designs that tanks do not. They rely on speed, distance, and angle of attack to make targeting those areas difficult or (preferably) impossible.

This is one topic I thought WEG had an interesting idea on. Craft with Shields got two benefits: An active defense similar to what FFG has, and a separate passive effect that was factored into the hull strength. So you actually could get a situation like you see in TPM, Rebels, and TFA. A fighter on the ground with it's shields down was noticeably more vulnerable to damage than one with it's shields up.

You could do a similar thing here if you wanted by doing something like counting the armor as 2 less when the vehicle isn't powered up. That would make a parked Starfighter as vulnerable to small arms as a comparable airspeeder or landspeeder, but still make them immune to small arms when in more intentional combat conditions.

20 minutes ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

The other part of the issue (such as it is) is that that many folks believe that the 'faithfully' part of 'faithfully replicate' means that such an event has to happen every single time the dice are rolled, which in turn often leads to stat blocks of iconic characters being horrifically bloated in terms of characteristics/ability scores and skill ratings; the d20 version was lousy with this when it came to fan write-ups, and d6 wasn't much better with even official ANH!Luke having better ratings than a starting PC could ever hope for. And it's a trap that a great many veteran players and GMs fall into. I've lost track of the number of D&D/d20 Conan builds I've seen that turn the glowering Cimmarian into a borderline superhero with ability scores through the roof and more special abilities than you can shake a sword at. When the reality is that the mechanics only need to allow for the situation to occur, and that things can easily be chalked up to the iconic in question either getting a really good roll (or as one of my best friends puts it, are using movie hero dice) or a really bad roll to account for how they were able to pull something off.

Classic example of this is people bending over backwards to figure within the context of the RPG (be it WEG, WotC, or FFG) how Luke, a largely untrained farm boy who'd never sat in a fighter cockpit before, was able to successfully bullseye the Death Star's thermal exhaust port when more experienced pilots failed, and do so every single time he attacked, while never really considering that he simply got a really good roll on his attack check, and thus doesn't need god-tier stats to pull off that scene.

AMEN!

4 hours ago, Vondy said:

The rules system emulates the movie, not the other way around. So, if the rules don't line up to what we see on screen its the rules that are wrong, not the movie.

You're right that the movies don't consult the game rules, but I disagree that this makes the rules "wrong" as I don't view the stuff on screen (big live action or small animated) to be the "literal truth" for my in-game universes. In-game, I prefer things to stay internally consistent while only being loosely based upon the screen, but this isn't the main point of this thread.

I've noticed several instances in star wars movies and tv where ships on the ground are easy pickings. The Consular ship in TPM, it only takes a few shots to take that out, Poe's X-Wing, Ezra's A-wing was taken out with a blaster rifle fired by a Tuskan Raider.

1 hour ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

Classic example of this is people bending over backwards to figure within the context of the RPG (be it WEG, WotC, or FFG) how Luke, a largely untrained farm boy who'd never sat in a fighter cockpit before, was able to successfully bullseye the Death Star's thermal exhaust port when more experienced pilots failed, and do so every single time he attacked, while never really considering that he simply got a really good roll on his attack check, and thus doesn't need god-tier stats to pull off that scene. 

I suggest Luke spent his rescue the princess mission xp on purchasing the intuitive strike talent. Also he owned a Incom T-16 Skyhopper which is supposed to have a similar cockpit layout to the X-Wing, and he was good at bulls-eying wampas in his T-16.

33 minutes ago, Eoen said:

I've noticed several instances in star wars movies and tv where ships on the ground are easy pickings. The Consular ship in TPM, it only takes a few shots to take that out, Poe's X-Wing, Ezra's A-wing was taken out with a blaster rifle fired by a Tuskan Raider.

Well, if you go by Rebels then ships die really, really easily even in flight (excepting the Ghost and Phantom ).

2 hours ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

So going on the assumption that you're not just being sarcastic for the sake of being sarcastic...

You're entitled to your opinion

I also insist people put garbage in garbage cans, I can't stress that enough.

15 minutes ago, HappyDaze said:

Well, if you go by Rebels then ships die really, really easily even in flight (excepting the Ghost and Phantom ).

Fighters die easy in every Star Wars property. Capital ships are pretty disposable in rebels for sure, which is weird since the specters try not to kill super often but there are thousands of people on a star destroyer. Poor Titus Brom, Ezra sure ruined his career.

2 hours ago, HappyDaze said:

Well, if you go by Rebels then ships die really, really easily even in flight (excepting the Ghost and Phantom ).

Good thing fighters in the actual films are so robust. I'm super excited about the buddy comedy "Bigg-Porkins: A Star Wars Story" where we follow Biggs and Porkins adventures in between ANH and ESB.

1 hour ago, Ghostofman said:

Good thing fighters in the actual films are so robust. I'm super excited about the buddy comedy "Bigg-Porkins: A Star Wars Story" where we follow Biggs and Porkins adventures in between ANH and ESB.

I'm referring to the significant damage that small ships seem to be able to do to larger (sometimes much larger) vessels. Rebels makes the Imperial Gozanti look like it's made of glass, and the Rebel corvettes are little better. Even the Imperial light cruisers don't look that tough nor are Star Destroyers deserving of their fearsome reputations.

3 minutes ago, HappyDaze said:

I'm referring to the significant damage that small ships seem to be able to do to larger (sometimes much larger) vessels. Rebels makes the Imperial Gozanti look like it's made of glass, and the Rebel corvettes are little better. Even the Imperial light cruisers don't look that tough nor are Star Destroyers deserving of their fearsome reputations.

It’s not that the ships aren’t tough it’s that weapons in star wars are really powerful. This has real world analogues such as the HMS Sheffield being sunk by one missile.

2 minutes ago, Eoen said:

It’s not that the ships aren’t tough it’s that weapons in star wars are really powerful. This has real world analogues such as the HMS Sheffield being sunk by one missile.

I disagree. There are just as many times where hits against "hero ships" do comparatively little, so in my eyes, it's more about plot armor than anything.

On 7/22/2018 at 9:03 AM, Donovan Morningfire said:

The script writers don't give a flying toss about RPG rules,

If JJ my GM, I would have left the gaming group ages and ages ago.

"Seriously man, enough with this Mystery crap. Can we just get on with the game?"

12 hours ago, Vondy said:

Oh, exiting! An X-Wing has "Armor 3"? You saw that in the movie somewhere? This is a giant contextonomy. The screen writers don't consult game books to check stats before writing nor are rules even remotely relevant to evaluating what we see on screen. The rules system emulates the movie, not the other way around. So, if the rules don't line up to what we see on screen its the rules that are wrong, not the movie. In this case I would suggest the issue is a lack of granularity in the system. Its simplified and uses a small range of integers to cover a lot of ground. So, no, an X-Wing is not closer to an infantry fighting vehicle because, on screen, we clearly see its not. It gets shot up just as easy as a modern fighter jet sitting on the tarmac would, which is probably what the writers had in mind. "Hey, Frankie, What is a space fighter analogous too?" "Gosh, Billy, an aerospace fighter!" Armor 3? Bah!

So....one things the Devs have said is that armor is partially shielding. So if the ship is on the ground and shields are off...i would drop the armor by one. And a heavy repeating blaster has a base of 15 dam. Add a couple boost for the xwing being stationary. They are minions and there wer 3 of them so upgrade twice. The ship is 2 silhouette bigger so difficulty is decreased once. They were at short range....

A crit is fairly likely. Doing a bunch of damage beyond 20 damage is likely.

1 hour ago, Daeglan said:

So....one things the Devs have said is that armor is partially shielding.

Source?

In the book we have the critical hits that cause total shield failure, and it does absolutely nothing to the Armor rating with the exception of those that have Defense 0 (typically assumed to be those craft without shields at all).

4 hours ago, HappyDaze said:

I disagree. There are just as many times where hits against "hero ships" do comparatively little, so in my eyes, it's more about plot armor than anything.

So HMS Glamorgan must have been a hero ship.

Seriously tho, I agree. Rebels is a 23 minute show made for little kids. They dont have the time to waste on pounding ships apart, and showing them crippled and holed by multiple attacks, and the good guys only lose due to plot.

1 hour ago, HappyDaze said:

Source?

In the book we have the critical hits that cause total shield failure, and it does absolutely nothing to the Armor rating with the exception of those that have Defense 0 (typically assumed to be those craft without shields at all).

Jason marker episode of order 66

24 minutes ago, Daeglan said:

Jason marker episode of order 66

So nothing official then.

I love these questions, you get every conceivable answer under the sun!

My short answer is:

They don’t

My long answer is:

They really don’t

My really long answer is:

The vehicle scale to personal scale interface of this system is unfortunately broken. The damage a blaster pistol does to a swoop bike is calculated the same as damage to a Star Destroyer, which honestly is ridiculous. This comes about from the fact that all vehicles are fixed to the x10 multiplier. Why should shooting a Swoop do 1/10th the damage as shooting a ronto of the same size?

23 minutes ago, HappyDaze said:

So nothing official then.

Jason marker is a dev and the guy who designs the ships. It dont get any more official. When he says armor is a combo of sheilds and hull he means that is how he does the official ships.

So lemme see if I have this right, the sci fi movie with the guy in the gorilla suit carrying a crossbow isn't realistic.....? Have I nailed the pertinent details??..... ?