DoR Death Star 1 Tractor Beams

By Andreievitch, in Star Wars: Edge of the Empire RPG

I am looking at the DS-1's stats in Dawn or Republic and I don't get the tractor beam stats.

  • The range is only Short - it seems to me that in ANH the Millennium Falcon was well out of Short range when it was trapped
  • Tractor (6) - How can the Tractor Quality be 6 when the max diff is 5? Is that because some Pilot talents drop the diff

Considering this is the view from the Falcon's cockpit the very moment after the tractor locks on, and given how small DS-1 is in the view, I'd say the tractor beams are at least long range. Am I missing something?

DS1.JPG

Short range planetary skale.

Realistically, the DS1's stats are irrelevant as it's unplayably complicated to use. I doubt they put that much thought into them.

3 hours ago, Andreievitch said:
  • Tractor (6) - How can the Tractor Quality be 6 when the max diff is 5? Is that because some Pilot talents drop the diff

when I houseruled Tractor Beams, I interpreted it as additional difficulty upgrades the difficulty, but I think that was in-and-of-itself a mini-houserule. I think it was probably intended to be Impossible difficulty. I prefer the idea of Formidable with an Upgrade though. It might serve to make the players go "Ooo, this could turn out really badly (Despair) and we aren't even likely to succeed, let's not risk putting too much stress on the ship..."

10 hours ago, Daeglan said:

Short range planetary skale.

I don't buy that. If a ship was that far away it would barely be seen. In fact, if a player targeted a turret on the surface, you could not possibly call that close range.

I will house rule it instead and make them long, with a diminished Tractor rating for each added range band.

On 1/30/2020 at 3:57 PM, Andreievitch said:

I don't buy that. If a ship was that far away it would barely be seen. In fact, if a player targeted a turret on the surface, you could not possibly call that close range.

I will house rule it instead and make them long, with a diminished Tractor rating for each added range band.

Deag is right about ranges though, in space range banding is stupid huge. So that distance is probably medium-short.

Though realistically speaking as far as actually running a game toaster is on the money. Deathstars are narrative features more that functional vehicles.

We played an escape for Jedha on the weekend for my Rebel AoR game. The players were on Jedha as the DS-1 turned up and had to escape the debris from the destruction of Jedha city to get to atmosphere. Once they cleared the atmosphere the DS-1 tried to lock onto them with the tractor beam, which it managed to (of course). I called it Long range.

I use the films as cannon and never once does any ship fire at another without being able to see them. Instead of the Silhouette/Gunner computers rule I use range bands, similar to Genesys.

Instead of using the Tractor 6 as a difficulty, I set it up as a dice pool. The players needed 12 successes to escape the tractor beam (2 x the Tractor 6 rating). 1st round they tried to jam the DS-1 computers. I added adversary dice to the roll and set diff as 3 red, 1 purple. There players are all 200+xp so, with the Destiny Point spent, their roll was 4 yellow. there were some setback and boosts too. The Pilot also tried to use the ship's engines to break free, another though roll but more successes.

Next round they were pulled into Medium range so the 2 gunners decided to target the specific tractor beam that they were locked on to. Successful sensors role worked out where it was, a couple of great shots (using Destiny again) took out the tractor beam, awesome astrogation role to jump to hyperspace, 12 successes made! Freedom!

This was the last game in this "series" for the campaign, so I decided that it could have gone either way. If they were captured then the next game would have started in a cell block on DS-1. As they are free, next game starts on Yavi-4...Scarif is coming...

On 1/30/2020 at 6:29 AM, Andreievitch said:

Am I missing something?

Cinematic game means the rules only matter when the GM wants them to. If this was a game session, the GM just shrugs and (maybe) flips the PCs a Destiny as the plot train steams on.

1 minute ago, HappyDaze said:

Cinematic game means the rules only matter when the GM wants them to. If this was a game session, the GM just shrugs and (maybe) flips the PCs a Destiny as the plot train steams on.

i totally agree! Which is exactly why I played it out as above :)