So a little context for my question...

I have a party that’s been adventuring for a few years now and, thanks to skill levels, talents, and gear can put out a decent amount of damage in combat. As in one-shorting Nemeses with little difficulty.

So I decided to throw a challenge at them, namely a Mandalorian basilisk war droid that’s been lovingly refurbished by Dr. Aphra. But here’s where my conundrum comes in...

Based on my reading of the rules, it would appear that the difference between planetary and personal is a factor of ten. For example, one point of armor is the equivalent of ten soak. I also believe that one point of planetary damage is the equivalent of ten personal damage.

My question is this: should that same scaling be applied to hull damage? So if a vehicle has a hull damage threshold of seven, it would have to be hit by 70 points of personal-scale damage?

Yes, but technically you would round down. So 20-29 points of personal damage does only 2 points of hull damage. Or if the target had 2 armour, it would do nothing. To get through 2 Armour and do one point of Hull damage, a personal weapon would have to put out 30-39 damage. Of course, you can manage it however you want, but rounding down does add a level of toughness to vehicles hit by smaller weapons.

Personally I'm a bit flexible, and generally allow crits to happen even if no damage got through. And I'm not really a fan of the 10:1 ratio, because there are plenty of scenes where personal weapons are trained on vehicles, and they actually do something; or vehicular weapons are parried by lightsabers.

whafrog is correct, as usual.

I haven’t done it much, but making the ratio 5:1 seems a little more realistic. I’ve heard of others using that as a house rule as well. ymmv.

Also a major rules point that's often overlooked is unlike personal scale you don't have to cause Hull Trauma on a vehicle to get a crit, you only need beat the armor.

So if I have an Armor of 2 you only need to get 21 damage and sufficient Triumph/Advantage to inflict a crit. So much like the Martial Artist Spec, taking on a vehicle will often be about inflicting crits till it can't fight anymore. With a vehicle that will usually be: All weapons destroyed, Max speed reduced to 0, or Crits that inflict System Strain straining out the Vehicle.

Also when statting the thing there's no requirement for Vehicles to pack Vehicle Scale weapons. So you can give it personal scale weapons for use against people so you don't vaporize the players.

I think it's worth mentioning that FFG lists the stats for a "Damaged Basilisk" in the FaD core and it's listed as just a really big beefy character akin to a rancor and not as a vehicle.

Small correction. They would actually need to do 80 damage because vehicles (and characters) are only destroyed/killed/defeated when their trauma/wounds/strain exceeds their threshold, not when it meets it. So a vehicle with a hull threshold of 7 would need to take 8 hull trauma before being destroyed.

6 minutes ago, cvtheoman said:

I haven’t done it much, but making the ratio 5:1 seems a little more realistic. I’ve heard of others using that as a house rule as well. ymmv.

I don't like that house rule because it ends up unbalancing a lot of things since a vehicle with 2 Armor is made to be able to shrug off small arms fire, while not having heavy enough armor to deal with Planetary scale weaponry. It also makes PCs capable of tanking a shot from vehicle scale weapons like an Auto-Blaster (1 Success=20 damage, a PC with Soak 6 and a WT of 20 would take 14 damage and still be up, expending 2 Stimpacks to go down to 5 wounds).

As for Reflect, I treat it as reflecting Planetary scale damage when the weapon is Planetary scale.

Also, as an aside, I house ruled a conversion of 5:1 for exactly the reason that whafrog mentioned. At that rate, I find it becomes possible for shots to blow up a speeder bike but it's still generally pretty ineffective against more armored vehicles, so it feels much truer to the movies.

Edit: I was convinced to make the switch by this Reddit post which does an excellent job of breaking down the math.

Just now, ddbrown30 said:

Also, as an aside, I house ruled a conversion of 5:1 for exactly the reason that whafrog mentioned. At that rate, I find it becomes possible for shots to blow up a speeder bike but it's still generally pretty ineffective against more armored vehicles, so it feels much truer to the movies.

Most speeder bikes have Armor 0 and a HT in the single digits. Even at 10:1 an auto-fire attack with a rifle (or bowcaster) can usually do the job in one turn.

You only get into issues in later produced supps like the Clone War books where they start over-statting things (BARC speeder, I'm looking at you!)

I actually run a house rule that falls in between. I added a Vehicle Quality of "Light Vehicle" to represent things like Technicals and Speeders. "Light Vehicles" get the 5:1 Planetary scale conversion whilst those without the Quality get the full 10:1 - it gives me more control over when I want something to be a challenge and when I don't, and fits the flavor more. It also can be applied to things like Rancors, Rontos, Krayt Dragons, and Banthas to give them more bite, since they both were used as transports and their stomp, ram, and bite attacks have been shown to really mess with vehicles.

37 minutes ago, ddbrown30 said:

Also, as an aside, I house ruled a conversion of 5:1 for exactly the reason that whafrog mentioned.

I should say I have trouble with 5:1 as well, though your reddit post looks interesting and I'll have to dig through it more. I have used a 5:1 ratio for a single Silhouette difference, and 10:1 for more, but that's a bit clunky.

Here's the thing: the Silhouette scale is a fuzzy geometric, not arithmetic, so technically the armour and damage should be too. The old WEG system had a brilliant way to handle weapon and vehicle scaling which IIRC had to do with doubling or halving the dice pool at each difference. I just haven't found a good way to replicate that in this system.

33 minutes ago, whafrog said:

I should say I have trouble with 5:1 as well, though your reddit post looks interesting and I'll have to dig through it more. I have used a 5:1 ratio for a single Silhouette difference, and 10:1 for more, but that's a bit clunky.

Here's the thing: the Silhouette scale is a fuzzy geometric, not arithmetic, so technically the armour and damage should be too. The old WEG system had a brilliant way to handle weapon and vehicle scaling which IIRC had to do with doubling or halving the dice pool at each difference. I just haven't found a good way to replicate that in this system.

This is a problem, with Star Wars specifically. You can have a Speederbike, an Airspeeder, a Walker, a Starfighter, and Cruiser that all carry a "Heavy laser cannon" but each being quite different in terms of what kind of range and damage it's supposed to have.

This is one of my love/hates about the FFG system. I love that there's just two scales keeping it easy, and that two vehicles that would logically have roughly identical weapons usually do. A combat Airspeeder being roughly the same in numbers and loadout as a Starfighter makes perfect sense.

I hate that it's so easy to reference table 7-1 when statting vehicles, so you end up with idiotic stats like the BARC speeder that has MRAP armor and light tank cannons on it when the 74-Z has no armor and a light machine gun. with those number the BARC is so good there's literally no reason to have replaced it with the 74-Z. Now... if it had no armor (using the scale modifier for protection) and carried essentially linked blaster rifles, then it's still able to perform as to what's on-screen, justify the sidecar and weapon, while the 74-Z can still be justifiably called and Improvement... But of course then it doesn't easily match what's on Wookieepedia and table 7-1…

4 hours ago, Ghostofman said:

This is a problem, with Star Wars specifically. You can have a Speederbike, an Airspeeder, a Walker, a Starfighter, and Cruiser that all carry a "Heavy laser cannon" but each being quite different in terms of what kind of range and damage it's supposed to have.

This is one of my love/hates about the FFG system. I love that there's just two scales keeping it easy, and that two vehicles that would logically have roughly identical weapons usually do. A combat Airspeeder being roughly the same in numbers and loadout as a Starfighter makes perfect sense.

I hate that it's so easy to reference table 7-1 when statting vehicles, so you end up with idiotic stats like the BARC speeder that has MRAP armor and light tank cannons on it when the 74-Z has no armor and a light machine gun. with those number the BARC is so good there's literally no reason to have replaced it with the 74-Z. Now... if it had no armor (using the scale modifier for protection) and carried essentially linked blaster rifles, then it's still able to perform as to what's on-screen, justify the sidecar and weapon, while the 74-Z can still be justifiably called and Improvement... But of course then it doesn't easily match what's on Wookieepedia and table 7-1…

Given how little regard the Empire has for its troops, it makes perfect sense.

43 minutes ago, Tramp Graphics said:

Given how little regard the Empire has for its troops, it makes perfect sense.

There's a fine line between not caring for your troops and regularly confusing your pants for your hat.

More likely it's just doofy stat generation. You go to Wookieepedia, it says the BARC has light blaster cannons and armor, so you give it light blaster cannons and armor. If the playtesters don't catch it as inconsistent with established norms (and itself), it goes to print.

The BARC isn't the only offender, but it is one the worst. fortunately it's a pretty easy fix, as are most of the others...

Just now, Ghostofman said:

There's a fine line between not caring for your troops and regularly confusing your pants for your hat.

More likely it's just doofy stat generation. You go to Wookieepedia, it says the BARC has light blaster cannons and armor, so you give it light blaster cannons and armor. If the playtesters don't catch it as inconsistent with established norms (and itself), it goes to print.

The BARC isn't the only offender, but it is one the worst. fortunately it's a pretty easy fix, as are most of the others...

Maybe, maybe not. Look at how the Empire went from tough as nails fighters like the ARC-170 to the the cheap and fragile as heck TIE fighters.

1 hour ago, Tramp Graphics said:

Maybe, maybe not. Look at how the Empire went from tough as nails fighters like the ARC-170 to the the cheap and fragile as heck TIE fighters.

The ARC-170 and the TIE/ln fighters serve vastly different roles, and have vastly different prices. The ARC-170 also requires 3 crew.

1 minute ago, P-47 Thunderbolt said:

The ARC-170 and the TIE/ln fighters serve vastly different roles, and have vastly different prices. The ARC-170 also requires 3 crew.

Very true. But, if you notice, the Empire doesn't have any fighters which fulfill the role the ARC-170 filled. This is due to the Empire's whole mindset on big, terrifying capital ships with fighters playing only a marginal, and highly disposable , role.

52 minutes ago, Tramp Graphics said:

Very true. But, if you notice, the Empire doesn't have any fighters which fulfill the role the ARC-170 filled. This is due to the Empire's whole mindset on big, terrifying capital ships with fighters playing only a marginal, and highly disposable , role.

Yeah...

Hence dispensing with the ARC-170 in favor of the TIE.

I've used the 5:1 ratio in my games without any problems creeping in. I started using it after comparing the Autoblaster of vehicle scale to the Heavy Repeater of personal scale. They are essentially the same weapon by description. The Autoblaster has 3 damage, the Heavy Repeater has 15, 5x the ratio not 10x.

1 hour ago, Sturn said:

I've used the 5:1 ratio in my games without any problems creeping in. I started using it after comparing the Autoblaster of vehicle scale to the Heavy Repeater of personal scale. They are essentially the same weapon by description. The Autoblaster has 3 damage, the Heavy Repeater has 15, 5x the ratio not 10x.

Holy Nerf! It's a wild Sturn appearance!

LOL, glad to see you're still with us, at least a little bit.

Fair point on the Autoblaster. Never even really did a comparison before.

18 hours ago, P-47 Thunderbolt said:

Yeah...

Hence dispensing with the ARC-170 in favor of the TIE.

Exactly. And I can see the Empire using that same reasoning for scrapping the much better, more heavily armed and armored BARC speeder for the cheaper, more fragile 74-Z. They don't value their troopers. It's also why canonically, Clone trooper armor is better and more durable than storm trooper armor.

As it turns out, this whole discussion became moot last night during our game session. The players didn't go the route I thought they would, so Aphra's basilisk went unused. I'll keep it in my back pocket if I ever need it again. :)

On 11/21/2019 at 4:41 PM, Ghostofman said:

Also a major rules point that's often overlooked is unlike personal scale you don't have to cause Hull Trauma on a vehicle to get a crit, you only need beat the armor.

So if I have an Armor of 2 you only need to get 21 damage and sufficient Triumph/Advantage to inflict a crit. So much like the Martial Artist Spec, taking on a vehicle will often be about inflicting crits till it can't fight anymore. With a vehicle that will usually be: All weapons destroyed, Max speed reduced to 0, or Crits that inflict System Strain straining out the Vehicle.

Also when statting the thing there's no requirement for Vehicles to pack Vehicle Scale weapons. So you can give it personal scale weapons for use against people so you don't vaporize the players.

I think it's worth mentioning that FFG lists the stats for a "Damaged Basilisk" in the FaD core and it's listed as just a really big beefy character akin to a rancor and not as a vehicle.

This is also how it worked in real life during WWII (and to a much lesser degree today, still).

In fact, there's a relatively famous instructional picture from the russians during WWII on how to knock out a Tiger tank with all kinds of weaponry, including PTRD/PTRS weapons. It showed to aim at vision ports, optics, track links, turret ring and all kinds of "weak spots" on the tank.

Basically the idea was to simply put massive volume of fire on those areas to knock out the things that make the tank combat effective and force them to retreat.

The same idea is how I handle infantry vs vehicle combat in EotE. (although, to this date, I've been running the 10:1 rule, but I might switch to 5:1 after this thread)
The players have to whittle down the enemy vehicle with crits until it's combat ineffective.
Or dead.

On 11/22/2019 at 9:53 PM, Tramp Graphics said:

Exactly. And I can see the Empire using that same reasoning for scrapping the much better, more heavily armed and armored BARC speeder for the cheaper, more fragile 74-Z. They don't value their troopers. It's also why canonically, Clone trooper armor is better and more durable than storm trooper armor.

It's basically a matter of cost for the Empire.

They see their troops as disposable, thus they want the cheapest equipment possible (that's still effective enough to be useful, of course).

It's like how there have been many prototype vehicles developed for the US (or for most other nations, for that matter) military that were improvements over what they currently used, but the benefits were not considered enough to outweigh the cost.

Basically using the BARC speeder would have cost the empire a lot more than to switch to the 74-Z, for doing much the same job in the end. Do you really need heavy armour on a fast moving speeder bike where the pilot is exposed anyway? Not according to the Empire, at least...

On 11/21/2019 at 7:07 AM, whafrog said:

And I'm not really a fan of the 10:1 ratio, because there are plenty of scenes where personal weapons are trained on vehicles, and they actually do something; or vehicular weapons are parried by lightsabers.

Agreed. The personal vs. planetary scales reminds me of SDC and MDC from the old Palladium games... and has the same problem. It worked fine when the two scales were kept strictly separate, but fell apart when dramatically appropriate interactions between the two scales need to occur. We see plenty of that in official Star Wars media. In our last session our band of three Jedi were engaged by a dozen imperials supported by a TIE Fighter than ended up conducting strafing runs to make things interesting (and put a little fear into them). One of the Jedi ultimately did a force leap onto a rock formation as it approached on its third run and used saber-throw to take the TIE town by slashing through its stabilizer wing. It seemed dramatically apropos so let them flip a destiny point to "flip" the scale. That's a kind of wonky work around, but it worked for us.

17 hours ago, Vondy said:

The personal vs. planetary scales reminds me of SDC and MDC from the old Palladium games... and has the same problem.

Wow ... there's a blast from the past ... I went from ADnD back in the day to Robotech, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the WEG Star Wars ... that's a walk down memory lane .. I'm all weepy and nostalgic now ...

17 hours ago, Vondy said:

In our last session our band of three Jedi were engaged by a dozen imperials supported by a TIE Fighter than ended up conducting strafing runs to make things interesting (and put a little fear into them). One of the Jedi ultimately did a force leap onto a rock formation as it approached on its third run and used saber-throw to take the TIE town by slashing through its stabilizer wing. It seemed dramatically apropos so let them flip a destiny point to "flip" the scale. That's a kind of wonky work around, but it worked for us.

This is actually a brilliant way to handle epic take downs and called shots! Allow players to reduce the scale by flipping destiny points to represent targeting minor locations instead of armored sections. Very inventive work around, Vondy!