Can you crit with the stun setting? If so you could roll a kill on the crit chart. Maybe the stun setting should not allow any crits. Seems more "realistic."

Also, does anybody know the ranges of stun in the Star Wars galaxy. I always thought they were very short but I just got that from Saga. Maybe the max range on a typical weapon set on stun should be close?

usgrandprix said:

It is possible to crit with a stun setting, but pretty unlikely. Stun weapons (and weapons on stun setting) deal strain damage, instead of wound damage. When you exceed the strain threshold, by the RAW, you're unconicous, but don't suffer a critical injury.

The other way you can activate a critical hit is by rolling [Adv] equal to the weapon's CR, and then choosing to spend those [Adv] to activate the CR weapon property.

So, there's really no way to activate a Critical Hit by accident, only by choice. It seems unlikely that a player OR a GM would opt to use those crits if the character was using a stun weapon.

Even then, the first 80 points (Difficulty 1-2) of critical rolls are pretty mild and Its not till a character has a +40 to a crit roll that death becomes an issue. At that point, maybe even the strain from the stun shot should be enough to kill him, cause by the time you have a +40 on a crit roll… you're in a LOT of trouble…

usgrandprix said:

I don't think this is covered in the text. No problem in house-ruleing whatever you think is appropriate. Yes this was in Saga Ed. I just scanned WEG's 2nd Ed Rev & Exp Corebook, and didn't see it mentioned.

-WJL

usgrandprix said:

Fluff-wise, stun damage overcomes the target's nervous system, causing their body to shut-down. Crits can come of too much "strain" on the target's body. Too much strain/stress and the body shuts down…and doesn't restart again.

As for range, it's the range of the weapon being fired. Saga had stun be close range only because the only time we see a stun shot is in ANH, where Leia is stunned. If you think about it, though, pretty much any confrontation inside a ships corridors is going to be close range, so there really wasn't a way to show a long-distance stun blast. One example, a pattern is not.

-EF

EDIT: Ninja'd!

EldritchFire said:

I'd actually prefer if only very special energy weapons have a stun setting at all. There's not really anything but that one example that blasters have stun settings at all because, as you say, one example is not a pattern.

HappyDaze said:

Would the "stun blaster" be specifically for boarding operations, then? Because the stun blast was shot by a Stormtrooper who are normally equipped with Soro-Suub (sp?) Stormtrooper-One blaster rifle.

-EF

EldritchFire said:

It may have been specifically given to a few of them since they knew they were boarding a diplomatic courier and the goal was to take prisoners (OK, to get plans, but likely obtaining them through taking prisoners). There are times such reduced lethality weapons are used, but I don't think that they should be the standard for most/all blasters.

EldritchFire said:

Except we clearly hear the stormies saying "There's one. Set for stun." It doesn't take much to extend the idea of non-lethal settings on other blaster weapons, if we're just going by the films. Otherwise, there's hundreds of examples of stun weapons and weapons being set to stun in the EU, fiction and comics.

As for the original question, I suppose that stun weapons can kill, though I have to think if you're still being shot at when you have 5+ critical wounds and are capable of being killed outright by a blaster pistol set on stun, the bad guys aren't there to capture you.

As for range - Saga Edition had it limited to a very short range, but I don't think that's necessary in this system. The range is just going to be limited to that of the weapon you've got. And I'm okay with that. Doing anything else really adds an unnecessary wrinkle to the game.

If you really wanted to get down to the nitty gritty, you could simply say that stun weapons only work when you're within Short range of the target, but as I said, I don't feel that it's particularly warranted or needed given how stunning works in this game as compared to how it worked in Saga Edition compared to how other weapons work.

Cyril said:

He could just as reasonably have been giving his fellow trooper the heads-up that he was about to stun someone, or that he was prepared to restrain a stunned target.

Of course, dialogue in the SW movies is notoriously terrible, and it wouldn't be the first time that something mentioned once was pretty much ignored afterward (Midiclorians [sp?]).

THAT WORD HAS NO PLACE HERE!!!!!1111ONEONEONE

Yeah, I don't see it as a big issue that a stun shot *could* kill someone, if you roll and choose to spend advantage on a crit. After all, even tasers in the real world do kill occasionally. By the rules the stun setting certainly isn't as lethal as the non-stun setting, and that's good enough for me.

In terms of range, I thought I did read something under the stun setting rules about reducing the range, but I don't have the book handy to check, and may just be mis-remembering.

gribble said:

Checked, didn't see anything on page 107. It just says stun weapons are affected by soak.

As an aside, Saga ed. made such a mess out of the range rules I'd recommend not bothering to adapt any of those rules into the new system.

-WJL

LethalDose said:

What, you don't think 30 meters is point blank?

usgrandprix said:

For starfighters, sure. For hand-held weaponry, certainly not. For capital ship guns, it's probably too short to even be considered.

Yeah I was kidding. I think point blank for a pistol in Saga was like 30 meters. Never made sense to me.

usgrandprix said:

It was due more to a reaction to complaints from the OCR/RCR crowd that point blank range in those games was only 6 meters. Pistol range was 20 meters, and rifles were 30 meters, while heavy weapons were 50 meters for point blank range if memory serves. Thrown weapons were still 6 meters though.

As for stun weapons, I think it was OCR that introduced the notion of reduced range, mostly as a means to try and limit over-reliance on stun weapons as the rules for them were pretty **** broken; it was laughably easy to reduce even the most fearsome BBEG into a pinata. Saga Edition wavered between extremely effect (at least with pistols and rifles against low to mid-level characters) to laughable (most stun-based melee weapons or attacking a high-level character).

I think in the real world they use the term “less-than-lethal” as one can short out a pacemaker or cause someone to fall and crush their skull in (I am sure we can all think of some examples for a crit). Stunning someone could kill them.