Cyril said:

I understand the rules for using Minions as groups but a Minion Group of 4 Minions without a skill, such as Ranged (Light), would not be any significant threat to a group of PCs as they would have no skill dice in thier dice pool. Whereas a Minion Group of 4 Minions with a relevent skill would have the opportunity to include 3 skill dice in thier pool, thus becoming a significant threat.

The only benefit of having a group of unskilled Minions is that they would have a higher level of wounds but they could only target one PC each round, so they may as well attack as individuals?

:edit:

I had a reading comprehension fail :-). As you were Lupex.

So here's a wonderment: If you use a grenade on a group of minions… does that deal damage to "each" Minion in range of the blast, or does it deal damage to the "group" as a single entity.

My gut reaction is to deal damage to each minion, effectively making AoE minion sweepers, as this fits the idea I have for what a grenade should do to a group of thugs, but I can understand the RAW view as well, since the abstraction of a "group" as a single enemy is done for balance and narrative.

Has anyone else encountered this?

Majesticmoose said:

I haven't encountered the situation, but I'd say you were right. Reading the blast description, when activated, it deals blast damage to all characters in range (friend or foe). While the minion group, aka "goon squad", operates as an "entity" they are still individual characters.

The sticking point here is that it never states that minions are required to be in an engagement to form a goon squad to begin with, nor must they remain in an engagement to maintain the good squad bonuses. I think this is something we take for granted. They could all be spread out over a short (nee close) range area, and acting together, but not susceptible to the blast effect, which hits each other character engaged with the original target. To use the minions group attack, all the minions should be at the same range to the target, but that's possible to do and not be engaged in the RAW.

-WJL

Majesticmoose said:

Haven't encountered, but I'd be inclined to make a GM ruling and simply let the minion "entity" be taken out if the damage from the Blast quality would be enough to take down a single minion of that type. It might be a bit powerful, but given these are minions whose sole purpose is to provide a minor threat to the PCs, to say nothing of needing 2 Advantage to trigger that Blast quality, I'm okay with that.

So then how does wound allocation work? Let's say a player hits a group of 4 Stormtroopers (5 soak/5 wounds each) for 20 damage (big gun, point blank, lots of successes).

Does he kill two Stormtroopers, or just one? Does damage get capped at the max wounds of a single entity within the group, or spill over? I can't find this clearly articulated in the rules.

Exalted5 said:

In this case, he'd take out three Stormtroopers, as the damage spills over.

The first five points of that 20 damage would be absorbed by the stormie's Soak Value. Then the remaining fifteen would be applied against the minion group's combined Wound Threshold of 20. As every five points of damage takes out a stormtrooper, the PC is doing enough damage to wipe out three of them, leaving a single trooper standing.

That's the 'downside' to minion groups, is that they are easier for heroes to take out due to the damage spill over.

Donovan Morningfire said:

Donovan is correct by my count. To further take this example, if there are 6 battle droids (trade federation soak3/wounds 4) minions outside a crashed republic fighter and a PC leaps out with a huge vibro sword and strikes succesfully for 16 points and a critical hit, then 4 droids would have been torn to pieces, mimicing high adventure combat without compliocating the game with "multiple attacks" that bog down so many games.

Like donovan said, minions should be minor threats, and IMO should help make the heros feel powerful in the game.

I'm planning my second session and I created an NPC stat-block in table-form, to be inserted into a .odt doc (or whatever). How might I share it here?

Greedo is Good said:

I think posters usually post the document to google docs or dropbox and then post a link.

On Minions - I never had an issue with the PCs making one attack against all minions, but the reverse was a bit confusing to me - as a GM when my Tusken snipers made one collective attack as a group, I was a little unsure about how to build my die pool --- I boosted the attack dice by upgrading a proficiency die for each additional group member beyond the first, calculated range as difficulty --- but some of my players were prone, others had cover, yet others had suffered conditions that should give my Tuskens a boost die on their attack…

So with each PC as an individual target requiring varied, unique dice pool modifications - I was unsure what to do. Certainly we could adjudicate that any boost and setback dice could cancel each other out, but it still seems odd and unbalanced to calculate - am I missing something? I'm all for the elegance of speeding up play, giving the PCs some fodder to toy with, etc. Nobody likes watching their GM roll for a group of four NPCs. (In other games I sometimes let players roll just to keep em busy and engaged.)

Am i missing something on how to handle minion groups? Also I thought Minions/Henchmen don't get skills, but they seem to have skill ratings. Apologies if this has been covered or if I'm way off base.

Literal_DM said:

The thing with Minions is they only get those skills if they're acting as a unified group, treating them as a single entity that is allowed one maneuver and one action each round with a Wound Threshold equal to the combined total of each individual minion.

So for your Tusken Snipers, they only get to use their listed skill ranks in if you put at least two of them into a minion group. and they'd only get to attack one of your PCs on their turn, and whatever status effect (prone, cover, etc) is on the targeted PC would apply, while the status effects on the non-targeted PCs are ignored for that minion group.

Now, if the Tusken Snipers are attacking as individuals, they can each target a separate PC, but don't get the benefit of their skills.

It's kinda hard to explain, but hopefully the above helps clarify things at least a little.

Had a thought about minions and how they suffer damage earlier today.

Per the rules regarding minions, a critical hit automatically takes out a Minion. And if it's a group of minions, you drop one minion automatically (making high damage, low Crit Rating weapons like lightsabers, vibroswords, and distruptor weapons pretty nasty)

Now what I got to wondering is that would a group of Minions still be considered a "single target" for purposes of triggering multiple critical hits?

My gut instinct is to say no, as Minion Groups are considered to operate as a single entity, but I could easily see arguments being made that as said group is composed of multiple individuals, you should be allowed to activate multiple critical hits against them.

Maybe something to address in the section about putting Minions in groups, one way or the other.

Although if it turns out you can score multiple critical hits against a Minion group, then the afore-mentioned weapons, or even a weapon that's been Jury-Rigged to reduce a standard Crit Rating of 3 down to a 2, just got a whole lot more potent against Minion groups.

Donovan Morningfire said:

Well, I don't think there disagreement on the fact that you can activate autofire (without walking fire) to hit all the minions, so i don't see why there would be a problem for multiple critical hits either. Did that make sense?

-WJL

LethalDose said:

At least for Autofire, it makes sense that you could mow down multiple Minions in one go, since in terms of how the mechanics operate, Autofire allows you to hit a single target multiple times, with the damage to a Minion group being abstracted.

A Critical Hit just means you drop said minion outright, and has the caveat that if activated multiple times against a single opponent, you just add +10 to the Critical Hit roll for each additional Crit activation (something I'd missed on the initial read-thru). Like I said, I'm extremey hesitant about allowing it, as bumps weapons like the lightsaber into perhpap being too effective at goon sweeping, seeing as how a base hit already guarentees two dead minions, and two or three Advantage on the roll means a dead minion group. Admittedly, such a thing would fall into the realm of Rule of Cool, but in terms of game mechanics it might be a thorny issue for some GMs.

Donovan Morningfire said:

Okay, maybe I misinterpreted your original concern. Remember any successful attack may only trigger one critical hit (Critical rating, pg 108). So even though the lightsaber has a crazy CR 1, unless you somehow score multiple hits with one attack (I don’t think this is currently possible with a melee weapon), then even if you rolled 8 advantage on a successful strike, only one of those advantages could be spent to activate a critical strike, leaving 7 more for whatever. The character could use all of those advantages to really crank up that one critical hit (Giving it a +70 on the crit roll), but its still a single critical strike, and it doesn’t matter what the modifier on the roll is; one crit drops one minion.

With auto-fire, a single attack can cause multiple hits, but again, each hit can only cause a single critical strike (pg 105). I would not say a single attack against a group of minions counts as multiple hits automatically simply because there are multiple NPCs that may get hit. For example, lets say a character attacks a goon squad with a heavy blaster rifle (dmg 10, CR 3) on full auto and rolls a hit with 7 advantages. He then spends his advantages as follows:

• 3 Adv to activate a critical hit (drops a minion, no more crits can be triggered without more hits)
• 1 Adv to activate an additional hit from auto-fire (adds 10 damage to attack)
• 3 Adv to activate another critical hit (drops a minion)

If the weapon had be jury-rigged as you described (CR 2), the adv on the roll would be spent as follows:

• 2 Adv to activate a crit (drops a minion, no more crits can be triggered without more hits)
• 1 Adv to activate an additional hit from auto-shot (adds 10 damage to attack)
• 2 Adv to activate another crit (minion down)
• 1 Adv to activate another hit (+10 damage to attack)
• 1 Adv to… do whatever, there aren’t enough left to activate a crit.

Both times, all those advantages only drop an additional 2 minions. If a minions wounds + Soak < weapon damage, it’s probably more economical to activate additional auto-fire hits, because the damage from the additional hit will almost certainly drop one minion, and may get more. The math above doesn’t even account for the difference in cost between additional auto-fire hits and CR. The roll in the example above could have generated the results above :20 damage + 2 crits (base), or 30 damage + 2 crits + 1 adv (jury-rigged weapon), OR they could have generated just a raw 80 damage to the group.

It’s actually not very clear if you can spend adv/triumph to activate CR on an attack that causes wounds to exceed the targets wound threshold. I think you can do this (crits come from different mechanisms, and I think adv should be spent prior to the player knowing the outcome of the roll), but I’m concerned about it violating the “one hit, one crit” rule. This doesn’t really matter for minions, though, since they don’t track wounds against a normal threshold.

-WJL

PS This forum software is starting to get under my skin, Its deleting entire swaths of my text when I hit backspace once. Its occurring on multiple platforms, may have to try firefox instead of chrome.

LethalDose said:

It is slightly better if you stick in a rogue character at the end of what you are typing so you are not pressing backspace at the actual end of the text, but yes, it is getting unusable. h

Good advice. and

AluminiumWolf said:

lol h.

LethalDose said:

For those who GM from word processing documents, here's an NPC stat-block that worked well for my second session. The cells expand as necessary and there's room for lots of skills, or talents or abilities or any combination thereof. It can be copied and pasted right into the text of an outline or whatever one uses.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1ePVf9x50N_WFNwSXFJUjNWdVU/edit

Greedo is Good said:

3WhiteFox3 said:

I think it's now set for anyone to grab it.

So I'm preparing for my next game, and was going to use the spaceport security officer (p.200), he has the ability - SQUAD BONUS but it's not described, anyone know what it does. Like-wise the sector ranger (p.203) has BRUTAL 1 listed and no rules listed for it's use.

Also as a side note the spaceport security officer is listed as having padded armor (+2 soak) but his soak / defense is listed as 4/1 with a brawn of 3 it looks like he should be wearing armored clothing (+1 / +1).

I'm a bit confused about minions who operate in groups. I ran a test combat last night in which I threw a couple of groups of stormtrooper minions against a party of PCs. I used miniatures on my table to represents positions and distances. For my two squads of stormies, I had three minions in each, moving around in formation at short range from each other so as not to be obvious grenade fodder.

One of the PCs ran up to one of the stormtroopers, engaged it and attacked it with a force pike. The resulting damage was sufficient to knock out two stormtrooper minions, but the PC was only engaged with one of them. By rule, attacks against a group of minions target the entire group at once, but I wasn't sure how to handle it if the attacker was only engaged with one of the stormtroopers.

The rules seem to be written with the assumption that the PCs are making ranged attacks against the minion group, as there is no mention of how to handle melee attacks and engagements against groups of minions that are spread out.

What do you guys think?

Also, the Sector Ranger has a special ability called "Brutal 1", but there is no explanation give for what that is.