So, star wars has a bit of an ongoing love affair with multiple barreled vehicle weapons, particularly on starships, and for the most parts, the Linked rule handles this quite well. But honestly, beyond linked 3, it's starting to get a bit pointless, so I'm looking to get input on how to stat ships that take this a step further.

What got me started on this was the Theta class shuttle with it's twin, front mounted quad cannons. You could go the path that FFG went with the Lambda shuttles four twin barreled guns and split them into separate weapon systems (which is frankly kind of weird, since they seem rather fixed forward), or try to keep them as they seemed to be intended, as fixed forward guns, presumably operated by the pilot. With the current rules philosophy, this would make them a Linked 7 weapon... which is pretty much pointless unless you're ludicrously skilled. There has to be a better way to represent the torrent of fire double quad cannons should be able to put out. Ill throw out these ideas for you to kick around:

1. Counts as a single quad gun, but with Accurate +1 (so many laser bolts that you're more likely to hit)

2. Counts as a single quad gun, but with Damage +1 (souped up laser cannons that suffer from slow-fire 1, but overcomes this issue by firing half barrels at a time)

3. Counts as a single quad gun, but can cause additional hits (once again, more blaster bolts, more hits)
3a: Linked activates on a single advantage (probably broken for the same reason as jury rigged autofire, even when limited to three hits)
3b: Linked 3 as usual, but 1 triumph can be spent on doubling the amount of extra hits (2 advantage, 1 triumph gets you one extra hit doubled to two. 4 advantage, 1 triumph two extra hits doubled to four. 1 triumph, 0 advantages would net you zero extra hits from advantages, so doubling them is pointless. Triumph can still be spent to activate linked as usual, mening this will only make a difference if you roll at least 1T 4A, 2T 2A or 3T)

4. Make it a Linked 7 weapon, but Triumphs can activate Linked twice.

Thoughts on this?

I'd probably go with something like 1 or 2.

Take the base weapon, add a bonus or additional quality, count the whole wad as a single unified weapon system.

On Star Destroyers etc., the advice for multiple weapons is to treat them like minion groups; if you have 5 turbolasers, the gunners fire one shot with skill rating 4. So I think it depends on how you're running the ship. If it's run by NPCs, then I'd use the rules for minion gunners and just make one attack upgraded once.

If it's being run by PCs... technically, each weapon would have to be fired as a separate action. I'd probably just add a boost die for the second weapon though, approximating it as one weapon assisting the other on the attack check. If this isn't satisfying, then maybe give an upgrade instead.

1 hour ago, Talkie Toaster said:

On Star Destroyers etc., the advice for multiple weapons is to treat them like minion groups; if you have 5 turbolasers, the gunners fire one shot with skill rating 4. So I think it depends on how you're running the ship. If it's run by NPCs, then I'd use the rules for minion gunners and just make one attack upgraded once.

If it's being run by PCs... technically, each weapon would have to be fired as a separate action. I'd probably just add a boost die for the second weapon though, approximating it as one weapon assisting the other on the attack check. If this isn't satisfying, then maybe give an upgrade instead.

The OP is talking about weapon systems with a single gunner operating many Linked guns. This is not the same as batteries of weapons on a capital ship.

If it were me I'd just grab the stats for the original multi-barrel shipboard weapon: the AutoBlaster.

The B-Wing mounts one.

On 9/21/2018 at 4:37 PM, Mark Caliber said:

If it were me I'd just grab the stats for the original multi-barrel shipboard weapon: the AutoBlaster.

The B-Wing mounts one.

Going from a high linked number to autofire makes it worse. You would assume that more firepower would make a weapon system more destructive, not less.

I had another thought regarding high linked numbers. In vehicle combat, difficulties can drop pretty low against large targets, meaning that high linked numbers would be useful against bigger targets, which makes some kind of sense as a high rate of fire against something too big to miss would indeed rack up a lot of hits. Then again, it's kind of weird that a large number of small guns would be more useful for dealing with large targets than a single big one, kind of like using ten machine guns to take out at tank rather than a single anti-tank cannon (of course, a large target with high armor rectifies this). It would be damned useful against large silhouette, low armor targets though... so civilian cruise liners? Crowds? I'm not sure it's what ships like the Theta shuttle or the original Z-95 (a set of twin triple blaster cannons) were designed to deal with.

I like the idea of simply adding a boost die. It's functionally more or less the same as accuracy +1... and then it got me started thinking on firing salvoes with mixed guns (anyone who has played the old x-wing series of games has done this with the y-wings laser and ion cannons). Right now I'd probably use the rules for dual wielding, although I'm a little hard pressed to justify why it would be harder to score a hit at all using more guns when recoil and lining up two separate sets of sights isn't really an issue on a starfighter, but then again, that goes for autofire as well. I guess game balance needs to take the front seat and you bend the narrative to fit it.

I guess I'm not clear on what the original problem is...

First, I'd want to ask if there's some resource that says there's only one gunner on a Theta-class shuttle, because the resource you linked lists "at least two pilots" and nothing specifically about gunners, but then I'd also say it doesn't matter, because a ship should have as many crew as the story needs it to have. Therefore, there's no reason to link the weapons, just have them fire separately. Same with the lambda's weapons: You can give all the control to one gunner, spread out the 4-5 weapon systems across pilot, co-pilot, and gunner positions, or just ignore the "One gunner" and use as many as you need/think are appropriate.

If the issue is "thematic", then maybe there's a Star Wars reason that slapping more weapons into a system just doesn't help. Coordinating fire for so many weapons is difficult, aiming them together doesn't work well, pick your flavor. This was definitely an issue modern/WWII weapon platform design: Most naval turrets mount 2 or 3 barrels, 4 were rare, AA batteries typically had 3-4 small caliber barrels, and only a few fighters had more than four forward-firing weapons (I think most P-47s had 8 Browning .50-cals, and that was kinda bonkers) .

The point here is there's all kinds of made-up reasons that linking weapons beyond 3 doesn't really do much.

Mechanically, I think it's fine to 'soft' cap the benefits of linked around 4 hits (I'm assuming your statement of " beyond linked 3, it's starting to get a bit pointless" because generating 8+ adv uncommon). Honestly, the diminishing returns on adding more weapons to a linked system seems intentional to avoid players just slapping more and more weapons on a ship, which is boring, monotonic optimization.

Finally, what needs that much concentrated firepower? In a real dogfight, what target is reasonably expected to survive direct 4 hits from lasers/blasters? You're talking about large targets in your response, but you don't need to roll every bit of damage to destroy something like that. Realistically, that combat scene will likely end up in one of the following scenarios:

• You'll clear the target's escort and then it's no longer cinematic to shoot at it till it dies, so the game would like be better served by the GM saying "you shoot it 'til it dies," OR
• You'll clear the target's escort and then destroy the vessel with called shots on critical areas, OR
• You'll ignore the escort (or there is no escort) and you need more firepower to kill it quickly (Torpedoes, bombs, or fire from an equivalent sized ship).

Remember, most ships of Sil >= 4 will be disabled *long* before they're destroyed outright, and the latter is achieved via escalating critical hits and not a pile of raw damage. This is actually what makes auto-fire so devastating: multiple hits allow multiple critical hits. If your goal is blow $#!t out of the sky, you really should be funneling excess adv into crits, not raw damage via linked or auto-fire. You will do less overall damage to the target, but the cumulative +10/Critical will start adding up and you'll be getting component hits and severe (127+) crits quicker, instead of relying on just saturating the hull trauma and racking up crits afterward.

tl;dr: I don't think there's a problem, the system works thematically and mechanically. Use your extra adv for inflicting critical damage instead worrying about linked X.

Edit : minor edits, clarified crit advantage.

35 minutes ago, OrbitalVagabond said:

Remember, most ships of Sil >= 4 will be disabled *long* before they're destroyed outright

That might be the case if the attackers are only using light weaponry, but many capital ships (for these purposes, anything with Sil 5+), can mount turbolasers where the Damage is often more important than the critical hits. Let's look at a pair of Nebulon-B frigates shooting it out. It can bring 12 Medium Turbolasers to bear in a nose-to-nose engagement. When firing against Armor 6, a hit will do a minimum of 8 damage. If 9 of 12 (75%) hit, a single salvo can take the other ship out of the fight. Then you can inflict your critical hits at you leisure until the hulk explodes.

A squadron of fighters attacking the same Nebulon-B can take it out of the fight with just 8 proton torpedo hits. Activating Linked lets 4 fighters do this in a single pass. That's again worth more than doing a few critical hits.

12 minutes ago, HappyDaze said:

That might be the case if the attackers are only using light weaponry, but many capital ships (for these purposes, anything with Sil 5+), can mount turbolasers where the Damage is often more important than the critical hits. Let's look at a pair of Nebulon-B frigates shooting it out. It can bring 12 Medium Turbolasers to bear in a nose-to-nose engagement. When firing against Armor 6, a hit will do a minimum of 8 damage. If 9 of 12 (75%) hit, a single salvo can take the other ship out of the fight. Then you can inflict your critical hits at you leisure until the hulk explodes. 

A squadron of fighters attacking the same Nebulon-B can take it out of the fight with just 8 proton torpedo hits. Activating Linked lets 4 fighters do this in a single pass. That's again worth more than doing a few critical hits.

Right, which is why I said "Use bigger guns" *directly* before where you quote me. Its literally the previous line.

And the point of this entire thread is why linking more weapon systems beyond 3-4 doesn't give more bonuses. So yeah, we're talking about about a bunch of (comparatively) light weaponry.

On 9/26/2018 at 4:10 AM, OrbitalVagabond said:

I guess I'm not clear on what the original problem is...

First, I'd want to ask if there's some resource that says there's only one gunner on a Theta-class shuttle, because the resource you linked lists "at least two pilots" and nothing specifically about gunners, but then I'd also say it doesn't matter, because a ship should have as many crew as the story needs it to have. Therefore, there's no reason to link the weapons, just have them fire separately. Same with the lambda's weapons: You can give all the control to one gunner, spread out the 4-5 weapon systems across pilot, co-pilot, and gunner positions, or just ignore the "One gunner" and use as many as you need/think are appropriate.

Well, it bothers me when obviously fixed forward weapons are fired by multiple people, or even anyone else than whoever is in charge of pointing the ship in various directions (a position commonly known as "pilot"). Personally, I'd re-jig the stats for the Lambda on this point.

You could say that the Theta-class simply turned out to be an inefficient design, and that it's twin quads were rarely worth it (and thus simply making them Linked 7), but that's, well, boring.

If draw parallells to our own history of air-to-air gunnery (apt, since star wars small ship space combat is more akin to WW2 air combat than anything else) we do see some clear parallells. WW2 started out with planes armed with mostly rifle caliber machineguns, and while some were fairly quick to incorporate larger machineguns and autocannons, others simply increased the number of small MGs until you had odd ducks like the Hurricane variants armed with no less than 12(!) .303 machineguns. While this indeed turned out to be inefficient compared to 20mm cannons, having 12 guns was still a huge upgrade from having 8. Conversely, while some designs flirted with larger cannons for air-to-air use like 40mm or 57mm, the sweet spot for air-to-air guns has stayed in the 20-30mm range. Attempts on increasing firepower has largely focused on increasing volume of fire, at first by increasing the number of guns and later radically improving the rate of fire of them. Incidentally, the six barreled Vulcan cannon has about 4-6 times the rate of fire of the single barrel 20mm cannons it replaced, essentially meaning it was simply an efficient way of grouping six cannons together (if you know the principles of how a gatling cannon works, you're probably seeing what I'm getting at here. If you don't, look it up or just take my word for it).

So, what does that have to do with Star Wars, or more precisely, our beloved Star Wars RPG?

On 9/26/2018 at 4:10 AM, OrbitalVagabond said:

If the issue is "thematic", then maybe there's a Star Wars reason that slapping more weapons into a system just doesn't help. Coordinating fire for so many weapons is difficult, aiming them together doesn't work well, pick your flavor. This was definitely an issue modern/WWII weapon platform design: Most naval turrets mount 2 or 3 barrels, 4 were rare, AA batteries typically had 3-4 small caliber barrels, and only a few fighters had more than four forward-firing weapons (I think most P-47s had 8 Browning .50-cals, and that was kinda bonkers) .

The point here is there's all kinds of made-up reasons that linking weapons beyond 3 doesn't really do much.

You could very well argue that a bucket load of weak guns are inferior to a few stronger guns (say 12 .303's/light blaster cannons vs 4 20mm's/light laser cannons) and I'd agree with you. But I don't like the idea that there's a cut off point where more guns stop being useful. The hurricane 12 gun-armament was a clear upgrade from the earlier 8, as it resulted in a lot more hits on target. The issue was that as the planes became more rugged, hits from .303s became increasingly less efficient. But virtually noone ever said "I am just scoring too many hits on my target". By all means, have diminishing returns, but the Linked rule effectively gives you zero bonuses to actually score a hit in the first place.

That said, it's pretty hard to simulate the "death of a thouasand cuts"-effect multiple small guns would have in this system.

I'm not sure I made my point here, but my train of thought has left the station, so I'll leave you guys to make sense of my ramblings.

21 hours ago, penpenpen said:

That said, it's pre  tty hard to simulate the "death of a thouasand cuts"-effect multiple  small guns would have in th  is system.    

  I'm not sure I made my point here, but my train of thought has left the station, so I'll leave you guys to make sense of my ramblings.   

Well I think we're getting closer to the issue. I hope you stay and discuss.

21 hours ago, penpenpen said:

Well, it bothers me when obviously fixed forward weapons are fired by multiple people, or even anyone else than whoever is in charge of pointing the ship in various directions (a position commonly known as "pilot").

Two points here. First, forward firing guns aren't always 'fixed'. They can can pivot and swivel to allow gunners to hit targets in front of the vessel, even if they're aren't *directly* in front of the vessel. Remember sil 4 vessels like these shuttles are more comparable to multi-crew bombers more than fighters. Imagine if a B-17 had two forward turrets operated by different gunners.

Second, by allowing multiple crew members to fire these weapons independently, by different crew members actually does increase the probability of scoring a hit. In the case of 1- or 2-man sil 3 snub fighters, which would be more analogous to fighters, you are absolutely correct that adding more guns doesn't improve the *probability* of scoring a hit, they only improve the overall damage output, and then only to a practical point. So, to rebutt your statement:

22 hours ago, penpenpen said:

I don't like the idea that  there's a cut off point where more g  uns stop being  usefu  l.

I can really only invoke concepts like game balance and efficiency. I could argue that the guns on fighters were calibrated to fire at a fixed point ahead of the aircraft, but we both know that. The increased This is just a point where the system doesn't perfectly model the impact of more guns. I could see an augment for allowing some 'scatter fire' or 'spray and pray' option that improves the probability of a hit, but that would need to come at some other cost to offset the bonus because, alas, game balance. As far as aircraft engineers and combat pilots are concerned, I'm pretty sure your statement is accurate:

22 hours ago, penpenpen said:

virtually noone ever said "I am just scoring too many hits on my target"  

But I can guarantee that game designers have absolutely said this. And you may think the attributing issues with the Theta to 'inefficient design' is boring, but I think a play style where adding more guns is an optimal strategy is more boring.

As far as "death by a thousand cuts" goes, that's not really how the system works, but that's by design not oversight. Reducing a character to 0 Wound doesn't kill them, and reducing a vessel to 0 Hull doesn't destroy it. Those outcomes require critical damage/injuries. And as I pointed out in the previous response, you're probably better off spending advantage on scoring criticals to disable a ship, and then score more criticals when it's shields are down.

Again, the solution isn't more damage via more hits, it's about maximizing crits. Just using raw damage to bash down a target you're trying to destroy is, by design, an ineffective approach, especially when the target's sil exceeds the attacker. You're going to have to hit a bunch of crits to destroy a target anyway, but it'll probably be more efficient to

Additionally, there are listed ways of using advantage and triumph to facilitate more crits. Specifically component damage options. These may be better options if you're attacking with weapons with high crit ratings.

1 hour ago, OrbitalVagabond said:

Well I think we're getting closer to the issue. I hope you stay and discuss.

Gladly. I just tend to zone out from time to time. It's this condition I have that makes me really tired when I haven't slept in the last 15-20 hours. It's weird, I know, but bear with me.

1 hour ago, OrbitalVagabond said:

Two points here.  First, forward firing guns aren't always 'fixed'.

I'll stop you there. This about guns that are fixed forward.

This is the Lambda Shuttle.

Clearly, the wing mounted guns are able to rotate in at least one axis. I'm fine with them having a separate gunner, maybe even a gunner each.

The blaster cannons in the wing roots, though? They're clearly fixed forward. It's even more clear if you look at a cross-section.

Having them fired by separate gunners makes no sense, but it's no biggie, since making them a single Linked 3 weapon system works fine.

Now we have the ship in question, the Theta class shuttle.

It's got a pair of forward mounted quad cannons, one on each side of the cockpit. And those do not look like flexible mounts to me.

Of course, you could argue that in fact that they are, in fact, extendable turret mounts or something, but that's beside the point. I want to be able to represent ships that fire a whole heap of guns together. I want to be able to represent something like Hurricane Mk IIB with twelve machineguns. Or some thing like the Theta's eight barrels of doom.

1 hour ago, OrbitalVagabond said:

But I can guarantee that game designers have absolutely said this. And you may think the attributing issues with the Theta to 'inefficient design' is boring, but I think a play style where adding more guns is an optimal strategy is more boring. 

I'm not looking to break game balance, nor making more guns an "optimal strategy". The point of my parallell with WW2 was that while it's better to have a few better guns, in a pinch you cram in more small guns.

1 hour ago, OrbitalVagabond said:

Again, the solution isn't more damage via more hits, it's about maximizing crits. Just using raw damage to bash down a target you're trying to destroy is, by design, an ineffective approach, especially when the target's sil exceeds the attacker.

Putting this in game terms... let's say that my spaceship can't mount any guns larger than light blaster cannons, so I mount a few of those. My damage output is pretty bad, and I have a hard time scoring crits, but at least I can score a lot of hits. The Linked Quality works as intended.

The problem is, as I mentioned in my original post, that beyond a certain point (I'd say 3-4) a higher Linked rating becomes nearly pointless as it merely allows you to spend more advantages than you're ever likely to get. So, beyond that point, maybe a a weapon system could get another type of balanced bonus for the sheer volume of fire thrown out.

This kind of goes for linked autofire weapons as well, as those two qualities kind of step on each others toes, so to speak.

But yes, this bonus should be small enough that the same number of weapons spread out over several gunners should be more effective, whenever that's a feasible option.

I think you're underestimating the difficulty of scoring criticals. As far as I can tell, there are no starships that can't mount guns larger than light blaster cannons. Light blaster cannons can be fit to Sil 2 vehicles, and I don't see any starships smaller than Sil 3. At Sil 3 you can mount heavy blasters (dmg 5, crit 4) and light (dmg 5, crit 3) and medium laser cannons (dmg 6, crit 3). Even modest armor will block most of that damage anyway, so more hits for 2 adv each just aren't economical ways to spend advantage, but crits for 3 adv each are much more effective and only require a single point of damage to get through. Even with blasters, if your goal is to destroy a target, you're better off forgoing 2 extra hits and getting a crit instead. Those cumulative +10 modifiers add up.

So, for starships, you're never restricted to light blasters, and for snub fighters, if you want to destroy bigger targets, fit cannon, not heavy blasters.

When you move up to Sil 4, the big new toy is the quad laser cannon. Did you see the quad already gets the Accurate 1 quality, presumably representing the volume of fire you're describing?

Also consider the purpose of the mounted weapons. The Lamba shuttle's twin light blasters likely aren't intended to be used against other starships, it's more likely they're used to clear or defend the landing zone from light surface resistance and provide support to dis/embarking troops.

As far as interpreting the cut-aways... that's never going to be a compelling argument for me. IMO, what does or doesn't get included in an artist's interpretation of the un-rendered interior of a miniature movie prop is so many degrees separated from the over-simplified stats for a role-playing game that I don't see how one has any meaningful influence over the other. Its just irrelevant. And after playing I think 6 different versions of Star Wars RPGs from 3 different publishers with wildly different stat blocks, crew complements, armaments and even sizes for the *same ship*, added to about 30 years of ancillary EU products... You stop caring about that kind of minutiae.

If those images mean something or are important to you, that's great. Sincerely, I mean that, it's fantastic you're that passionate about it. But for issues of practicality for working withing the confines of a dice-driven game, I'd encourage you to take that artwork with a grain of salt and not sweat those details.

As far as a house rule goes for modeling large numbers of fixed forward-firing weapons, if you feel the game lacking despite the above suggestions for alternate strategies for spending adv, that's your call. Cribbing from what they did with quad would be reasonable. I'd suggest something along the lines of giving the option of adding a level of accuracy for each 2 weapons added beyond the 4th instead of a higher linked value, e.g. accuracy 1 and linked 3 for 6 cannon, accuracy 2 + linked 3 for 8 (for the life of me I can't think of any snubfighters in this IP that have 8 linked weapons, or would even have the hardpoints to add them). Anyway, I tend to go low when balancing house-rules to avoid abuse, and I'm always surprised how clever players can when they're trying to be a PITA. Also, don't underestimate the numerical value of adding a boost die, it's actually way better than upgrading an ability die to a proficiency die, and multiple boost dice add up fast.