Parry blaster bolts

By Vipersfang00000, in Game Masters

What talent would do this? Would Parry be sufficient?

Reflect

Yep.

Parry is the act of keeping an opponents melee weapon from hitting you by interposing YOUR melee weapon between you and the attacking melee weapon.

@kaosoe and @Mark Caliber are correct here. Parry is for turning Brawl, melee, and lightsaber attacks. Reflect deflects blaster bolts and other ranged attacks.

Question for the hive mind on this.

Can reflect be used on blasters set to stun?

Cannot recall if they ever show a Jedi using reflect against the blue rings of sleepy time in the Clone Wars or Rebels cartoons.

11 minutes ago, Malvicious said:

Question for the hive mind on this.

Can reflect be used on blasters set to stun?

Cannot recall if they ever show a Jedi using reflect against the blue rings of sleepy time in the Clone Wars or Rebels cartoons.

Ahsoka did it in the old last season of the clone wars

Thats what I thought and have been running it that way. Thank you.

Mechanically, it does not say you cannot.

12 hours ago, EliasWindrider said:

Ahsoka did it in the old last season of the clone wars

The first last season, before the last last season, soon to be the last last last season.

7 hours ago, kaosoe said:

Mechanically, it does not say you cannot.

While I understand this I very much dislike the "it doesn't say I can't" rules mentality in games I run or play in. I prefer the rules say I can play type and also "the rule of cool." If a player comes up with something actually cool then I roll with it and adjust as long as it isn't meta or power gaming.

13 hours ago, Malvicious said:

While I understand this I very much dislike the "it doesn't say I can't" rules mentality in games I run or play in. I prefer the rules say I can play type and also "the rule of cool." If a player comes up with something actually cool then I roll with it and adjust as long as it isn't meta or power gaming.

The talent itself is written so that it's at the GM's discretion, as is the case with a number of things in this system.

You may not care for this "loosey goosey" approach to the rules, but FFG would rather give GMs the leeway to interpret things to their own personal tastes rather than straightjacket them with a bunch of inflexible rules that tries (and often fails) to cover ever conceivable scenario, much like D&D 3.X does.

14 hours ago, Malvicious said:

While I understand this I very much dislike the "it doesn't say I can't" rules mentality in games I run or play in. I prefer the rules say I can play type and also "the rule of cool." If a player comes up with something actually cool then I roll with it and adjust as long as it isn't meta or power gaming.

I'm not sure where this is coming from. The rules explicitly allow this. The talent say, " When the character suffers a hit from a Ranged (Light), Ranged (Heavy), or Gunnery combat check… " you can reduce the damage. A blaster set on stun is still a Ranged (L/H) combat check, so it fits within the guidelines.

Nothing in the Stun setting description that says it can't be reflected. As far as I can recall, the only "evidence" we have of parry not working is from Tim Zhan's Heir to the Empire trilogy. I can't think of anything else that says "you can't parry stun bolts". And, as @EliasWindrider mentioned above, we do see Ahsoka doing it in what is considered canon now-a-days.

So rule-of-cool says you can. Rules-as-written says you can. Hêll, even Lucas Film/Disney says you can. The rules don't say you can't because you can .

17 hours ago, Malvicious said:

While I understand this I very much dislike the "it doesn't say I can't" rules mentality in games I run or play in. I prefer the rules say I can play type and also "the rule of cool." If a player comes up with something actually cool then I roll with it and adjust as long as it isn't meta or power gaming.

I agree with the rule of cool. Plus, properly implemented, it lets you simulate things from the movies and TV Shows. For instance, in Rebels, more than once it showed Kanan and Ezra deflecting TIE fighter shots with lightsabers. In the RPG, you would need 8 ranks of reflect in order to stop a single point of damage. So I ruled that for reflect, spend a light side point, and reflect applies to vehicle damage for that round.

50 minutes ago, Edgookin said:

I agree with the rule of cool. Plus, properly implemented, it lets you simulate things from the movies and TV Shows. For instance, in Rebels, more than once it showed Kanan and Ezra deflecting TIE fighter shots with lightsabers. In the RPG, you would need 8 ranks of reflect in order to stop a single point of damage. So I ruled that for reflect, spend a light side point, and reflect applies to vehicle damage for that round.

Being "vague" as it were also leaves FFG for when the franchise does something completely largely unexpected, and thus not requiring them to scramble to update rules to cover whatever entirely unexpected new element crops up.

An old example of the lack of flexibility causing an issue was back when Attack of the Clones was released, WotC had (at Lucasfilm's behest) published a new core rulebook for their d20 version of Star Wars RPG, with JD Wiker and crew taking the opportunity to update the rules while they were at it. However, even though they got a very early "rough draft" screening of the film, one thing that caught them (and audiences) unawares was the moment was able to block and then reflect Dooku's Force lightning with his bare hands. As things were written, neither of the Jedi classes (or Jedi Master prestige class) could let a PC replicate such a feat. This required WotC to have to publish an update/errata that allowed PCs to use the Jedi class feature to deflect/reflect ranged attacks (especially Force lightning) bare-handed.

With FFG not being to strict on what is and isn't viable, the rules are able to accommodate situations like you noted, of Ezra and Kanan using their lightsabers to deflect vehicle-scale weaponry, which in terms of damage output would take them out with a single shot. Personally, I treat those situations as the TIEs shooting at the Ghost, but with Kanan and/or Ezra providing the Ghost with additional defense, but either of the two choices is viable.

3 hours ago, Edgookin said:

I agree with the rule of cool. Plus, properly implemented, it lets you simulate things from the movies and TV Shows. For instance, in Rebels, more than once it showed Kanan and Ezra deflecting TIE fighter shots with lightsabers. In the RPG, you would need 8 ranks of reflect in order to stop a single point of damage. So I ruled that for reflect, spend a light side point, and reflect applies to vehicle damage for that round.

We also house rules it. In ours, reflect reduces the vehicular damage before you multiply by 10.

Still a bad day if you don't reflect it all. Lol.

13 hours ago, Edgookin said:

So I ruled that for reflect, spend a light side point, and reflect applies to vehicle damage for that round.

Okay that is a pretty great house rule. It actually makes me want to use vehicles against my players for once instead of going "this one tank is going to TPK them".

9 hours ago, Jareth Valar said:

We also house rules it. In ours, reflect reduces the vehicular damage before you multiply by 10.

Still a bad day if you don't reflect it all. Lol.

So how does that work exactly? Say a TIE Fighter hits you, base damage of 6+1 success for 7 damage *10=70 wounds.

For your houserule, is it that you apply reflect's reduction before the *10? So if you had 4 ranks of reflect and can reduce damage by 6, that would bring it down to 1 *10=10 wounds?

5 hours ago, GroggyGolem said:

So how does that work exactly? Say a TIE Fighter hits you, base damage of 6+1 success for 7 damage *10=70 wounds.

For your houserule, is it that you apply reflect's reduction before the *10? So if you had 4 ranks of reflect and can reduce damage by 6, that would bring it down to 1 *10=10 wounds?

Bingo.

Hope they don't get the advantage to link. 😉

We feel this very easily represents what's been seen in canon so far (Rebels and Clone Wars), makes things more survivable yet vehicles still are a threat. Our "Jedi" would sill run from a vehicle, though she might be able to protect the group from a pass or two...maybe, but not for long.

One thing to keep in mind regarding deflecting Stun bolts is that in the Clone Wars, when Ahsoka is deflecting them, they dissipate on impact, which would mean that you can't use Improved Reflect.

4 hours ago, P-47 Thunderbolt said:

One thing to keep in mind regarding deflecting Stun bolts is that in the Clone Wars, when Ahsoka is deflecting them, they dissipate on impact, which would mean that you can't use Improved Reflect.

I see where that could be taken from that but really, why not? Perhaps she didn't have the improved version yet. Or, more likely, the shooter didn't roll 3 threat or a despair.

1 hour ago, Jareth Valar said:

I see where that could be taken from that but really, why not? Perhaps she didn't have the improved version yet. Or, more likely, the shooter didn't roll 3 threat or a despair.

Aside from the obvious answer of: "yeah, I'm pretty sure she would have had Improved Reflect (see the Zygerria episode where she takes out a sniper droideka)," they don't deflect at all, they just dissipate. Every other time we see her, or anyone else, deflect an actual blaster bolt it, well, deflects. It doesn't dissipate, it deflects into the ground, or the air, or back at someone.

4 hours ago, P-47 Thunderbolt said:

Aside from the obvious answer of: "yeah, I'm pretty sure she would have had Improved Reflect (see the Zygerria episode where she takes out a sniper droideka)," they don't deflect at all, they just dissipate. Every other time we see her, or anyone else, deflect an actual blaster bolt it, well, deflects. It doesn't dissipate, it deflects into the ground, or the air, or back at someone.

That begs the question are stun bolts a particle or a wave?

7 hours ago, Eoen said:

That begs the question are stun bolts a particle or a wave?

Both :P

14 hours ago, Jareth Valar said:

I see where that could be taken from that but really, why not? Perhaps she didn't have the improved version yet. Or, more likely, the shooter didn't roll 3 threat or a despair.

The text of Improved Reflect also says that what can and can't be deflected back is up to the GM, with only blaster bolts directly being called out "these can be deflected back."

Granted, it's probably more of a CYA so that any weird ranged attack types we might see in later media that either do or don't get deflected back doesn't send FFG scrambling to do an update to the next, thus avoiding the issue that WotC had with their Revised Core Rules version of d20 Star Wars RPG where the rules had no means of covering Yoda's nifty little trick of stopping and then reflecting Dooku's Force lightning with his bare hands. Or if in a later bit of Star Wars media we see a Jedi (or Sith) actively deflecting back stun bolts from a blaster, at which point it could just easily be chalked up to Ahsoka not having that particular talent (don't recall if it's in her stat blocks in either Dawn of Rebellion or Collapse of the Republic, and am away from my books so I can't go check).

As for Ahsoka not using Improved Reflect with the Stun Bolts. I can see two reasons:

A) Stun Setting is almost always limited to Short range. They wouldn't have the range to reach her attackers even if she wanted to Reflect them.

B) These were Clone Troopers who were attacking Ahsoka. She wouldn't have risked injuring them, even accidentally.