As the rules currently stand, 10 "character-scale" damage equals to one "vehicle-scale" damage and vice versa. However, there are a lot of weapon qualities that modify the damage a weapon does, including breach, pierce, and vicious. However, the problem with having only two scales, we run into the problem of having speeders be bullet proof to anything that doesn't have the breach quality.

When I look at certain weapons that are meant to do damage to vehicles - missile tubes and thermal detonators, specifically - the combination of damage and breach is enough to kill anyone in pretty much one hit. Even the heavy repeating blaster, which should be able to damage light vehicles, is only useful against character-scale threats due to the damage scaling.

I propose a scaling system that is akin to how WEG did things. In brief, when shooting at higher scale targets, you got a bonus on your attack roll, but they got the same bonus on the soak roll. If shooting at a smaller scale target, they got a bonus on their dodge roll, but you got a bonus on your damage roll. In WEG, for those who aren't familiar with it, the attack roll is divorced from the damage roll, so no bonus damage for higher attack rolls. This had a very nice side benefit of having all damage/toughness numbers in a "standard band." Most damage was between 2D-5D, no matter if it's a blaster pistol or a turbolaser battery.

The 5 main scales were: Character -> Speeder -> Walker -> Starfighter -> Capital

Tramp freighters and such were considered starfighter scale, while heavy combat speeders sometimes were walker scale.

What I propose is this:

• Similar scaling structure
• Keep all weapon damage in the 5-10 range (where most already fall), so we don't get weird outliers like 15 or 20
• Scaling system so bigger weapons hurt more against smaller targets
• Revamp the breach & pierce qualities

For example, When attacking a larget target, you need to "activate" one crit per scale difference to do normal damage, double that do an actual crit. When attacking a smaller target, you do normal damage plus an auto crit, with a +10 per additional scale larger. The breach quality does damage to larger scale targets as if it's one step higher on the scale. So a missile tube does damage to non-character scale targets as if it's a speeder-scale weapon. A proton torpedo does damage to capital ships as if it were a capital-scale weapon. Pierce ignores soak/armour as normal if attacking same or smaller scale target, half as effective against larger scale threats.

Note that the vehicle rules take care of the difficulty of shooting larger/smaller things.

So as an example, a character now has a decent chance to hurt a speeder, especially if using a blaster rifle or disruptor.

Granted, this would require another revamp of the weapons, and an overhaul of the vehicle stat blocks, but I think it's a good idea. Speeders, Y-wings, and Star Destroyers aren't the same scale of vehicle, so I don't think that they should be treated as such under the rules.

-EF

Re: Multiple scales as WEG did it…

Just, No. Please, for the love of math, no.

We don't need that level of resolution on our damage output. I understand you disagree and that's fine, but the WEG's 5 (really 6, but last one was practically never used) scales are too complex for this game.

I do think there is room for a speeder scale that scales to 5 times personal and 1/2 starship.

But, in my opinion, that's ALL that it needs. Or at least this is where it needs to start, and then get further play tested. This has been brought up before, and I DO agree that the character-on-vehicle combat is pretty screwed up at the moment.

But we certainly don't need five scales until we can justify we need more than three.

-WJL

I'm confused as to why you say "for the love of math." In my experience, you really only dealt with two, three at most, scale categories at a time. I've only dealt with character vs speeder, speeder vs character, starfighter vs capital, and capital vs starfighter. Once, maybe twice, did I have the PCs in a speeder while being shot at by both character- and walker-scale.

i agree that we need at least one more scale in between character and starship. However, having speeder scale 5x character then means its only 2x from speeder to starship. I'd be more inclined to do it the opposite: character x2 is speeder, and speeder x5 is starship. With my perposal at least the math is consistent across the board.

-EF

LethalDose said:

+1. This board really needs a Like button.

Sturn said:

My main reasons for liking the scale system are as follows:

• Very little chance a personal-scale weapon will do damage to an AT-AT
• Keeps damage and soak/armour/wounds in a manageable range
• Keeps the math simple (for me)
• No outlier damage or armour/soak for anti-vehicle

What a the reasons you're opposed?

-EF

I wouldn't be opposed to adding an additional scale between personal and starship, but I don't think it's terribly necessary. Adding 6 different scales is a horrifying proposition.

Here's my reasoning:

I'm GMing an encounter where the players are attempting to escape a skyhook with some stolen data. The PCs are engaged in a firefight with the security forces of the station, who also happen to have a walker guarding the landing platform (the player's only escape is their YT-2000 docked there). The players are pinned down on a bridge, between the walker and the security force, so naturally there are a couple of cloud cars strafing the bridge as well.

Sometime during the fight, one of the players makes a break for the ship and with some awesome rolls manages to dodge the walker and get into the YTs turret, and starts blasting things.

Dear Jesus. I have to convert between player, speeder, walker, and star fighter scale weapons in a single fight? That's like converting 12 different ways or something. No thanks.

Exalted5 said:

I personally think a mid range would be good as we go from player -> capitol ships. But perhaps some tweaks to the way silhouettes function against outgoing/incoming damage might help? Or the intermediate modifier deal that got bandied about briefly. And in the end, I'd rather have a core mechanic that was overly squared off, than a series of differential equations. I can always carve out and houserule more complexity and granularity if needed. Then the ensuing hairloss and bogus outlier situations will be my fault alone :-)

Callidon said:

If we can get a way for silhouette to factor in, I'd be all for it. I just threw out there what has worked for me and mine over the years.

I'm definitely open to suggestions. How would you work things?

-EF

EldritchFire said:

If pilot(planetary) is required x5 character scale soak and hitpoints. So a speeder with 1armor would = 5 soak. Need more armor….add more armor rating. But we get a lower-hanging fruit level of vehicular armor at the planetary scale versus a character spraying the hull with light repeating blaster fire. Tanks and walkers should be tanks and walkers. But a bank robbery scene like Heat (starwarsized) with heavy personal armaments posing trouble for local law enforcement should be doable. Currently you'd need an eweb blaster for anything north of air-taxi.

Leave anything in the pilot(space) category as-is with rules as written. Which would function as x10 character scale or double planetary.

Leave all weaponry as-is. Atmo craft are going to be limited by hardpoints on the kind of weapons they uncork on a target (either heavy personal scale or light starship).

Damage output is pretty much fine. Get hit by linked laser canons and kiss your ashes goodbye. The adjustment to soak will adjust damage output enough I think.

Anywhoodle, that's how I'll test it if I get a chance to. My buddies that have been testing with me dislike vehicle on character combat because it tends to be where a lot of games fall apart unless its a tactical tabletop war game. So, the game as-is will probably serve me just fine.

You make some good points, EF. When I said "for the love of math", it was largely intended as a joke, replacing [deity of preference] with "math". Though, truth me told, I have some players at my table who are undergrads in liberal arts and couldn't calculate a 15% tip on a $10 bill if their lives depended on it.

Anyway, that's not the point. The scale mechanisms we're looking at here are something of a spectrum. The EotE RAW are at one end of this spectrum: two scales for EVERYTHING in the game; and your 5-scale scale system is towards the other end of the spectrum: a scale for everything and everything in it's scale. Yes, you could create even more scales, but I think we can all agree we don't need that.

I am opposed to going from 2 scales to 5 scales, currently, because it's too large of a change to make at once. You haven't shown that an incremental change, e.g. moving to a 3 scale system like I have proposed, is insufficient. Based on the Week 4 patch, I think we can agree that making very large changes to systems can make a total f*cking mess. I would prefer a more empirical approach to this kind of change, which means you change a system by making small, incremental changes, and seeing if it solves the problem. If it does solve the problem and doesn't make more problems, leave it; If it doesn't, try more, and see if you're getting closer to a solution, or further away.

The problem with the current system, and again, I think we agree on this, is that it is so simple it fails to capture what the system is meant to abstract at the character-vehicle interface. On the other hand, your proposed 5-scale system does capture this, but, IMO, is too complex to use without showing that a simpler reasonable method is inadequate.
EldritchFire said:

I don't directly disagree with any of your points, except the last one. I see some outlier damage as being okay, if it means the rules are substantially less complex. The points I'm making above (except "lol LA majors" are bad at math) derive directly from the quotes at the end of my posts. Box believed that no model we build can ever represent the complexity of the systems they represent, but they don't need to do so to be of use . And Einstein has been often [mis]quoted that "things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler". I find that your proposal is not as simple as possible, and the current RAW to be simpler than needs to be.

-WJL

LethalDose said:

Ok, so we agree that 2 scales is too few.

I went with the 5 scales since that's what I'm used to, but fewer could work. As for my "no outlier damage/armour soak" bullet point, that's specifically pointed at the thermal detonator. With the pierce quality (reduce soak) and a damage of 12-15 you could do pretty well for it, I don't think it needs to be 20, though.

Personally, I think that 4 scales is idea. Personal, speeder, starfighter, and capital. Heck, it could be simplified (well, simpler in my mind, anyway) to 2 scales, "high" and "low." Personal is low to speeder, while speeder is low to starfighter. Personal-scale weapons just aren't capable of doing any lasting damage to starfighters, just like speeders aren't capable of hurting capital ships.

My main reason for wanting to bring back the sliding scale is to have benchmarks. In WEG, 2D was average. An average person had a 2D Perception, while an average starfighter had a 2D hull code. Weapons were, mostly, in the 3D-7D range, with holdout blasters and proton torpedos being the outliers (at 2D and 9D, respectively).

With easy to understand benchmarks, it's that much easier to make stuff up on the fly. Want to introduce a new/different starfighter patrol? Well, the average is X, Y, and Z, so start there and add where needed.

Maybe I'm just a D6 Grognard and am trying too hard to make EotE more like WEG.

-EF

EldritchFire said:

Oh yeah, I think we're definitely in agreement that there is not only room for improvement in how characters, vehicles, and starships interact, but that improvements need to be made.

I think EotE is a lot closer to WEG SWRPG than it is to WotC's version as it stands. And this is a good thing. I'll go out and say that I didn't care for WEG's 2nd ed SWRPG's mechanism(s) for resolving differences of scale (either the die cap OR the bonus dice), but I don't recall having any better ideas for it.

I don't know that we need capital vs starfighter scale differentiation for one major reason: We can give startfighter based weapons, like torpedoes and missiles, the appropriate levels of breach to represent that they're "hull busters". I don't think that solution works well at the interface between characters and vehicles.

Anyone, take-home point: Further moving EotE toward the WEG's should only be done for one reason:

Improving the EotE engine.

Converging on WEG's system for its own sake just can't be justified.

-WJL

I've been thinking a lot about this in the past few days, and I still can't come up with any other ideas. What about the rest of you, any other thoughts/input?

-EF

I think three scales would suffice. Personal, vehicles and starships - x1; x5; x10. Perhaps vehicle should only be x2, but at the moment I can't really check me book - at work.

I like either:

• 1:2:10, or
• 1:5:10

I prefer the latter, I could tolerate the former. For simplicity, I'd say breach still ignores one point of vehicle OR starship armor.

Also remember that you can use advantages and triumphs to find weak points on vehicles. If a smuggler is just firing at an AT-PT (armor 3, effectively soak 15, given the latter example) with a heavy pistol (I think dmg 8 now, doesn't matter here), he's probably not going to be very effective. Nor should he be, since the AT-PT is designed to be an anti-personnel weapon platrom. However, if he notices a weak point (e.g. exposed joint), he can do a lot more damage to it. DM should allow substantial armor reductions in these cases, and maybe add a setback die to hit the location, or require an aim maneuver used in a way similar to striking a held item.

-WJL

LethalDose said:

I have been wondering about that. In the vehicle section this version of the aiming manoeuver specifically causes a type of critical hit - if it hits. The personal combat section alludes to the same notion, but with no examples of proper suggestions. I was looking over the crit table for some inspiration the other day, but found nothing that fit the bill… you got some suggestions?

Back on track: about the three scales, I'm leaning towards 1-5-10 too, the other seems too weak when it all comes down to it.

LethalDose said:

I think that 1:5:10 would work well.

However, I see it breaking down with "normal" speeders. I'm talking about the equivalent of cars and motorcycles. Would they just have no armour and low hull trauma? Or would characters just use the double setback dice targeting systems?

-EF

EldritchFire said:

First and foremost, it doesn't have to be perfect. But it MUST be both simultaneously reasonable and simple. There's no reason to start adding set-back dice, or doing ANYTHING other than just tweaking how many wound points their hull converts to.

Second, I don't understand what the problem is. I think we can agree that an X-34 Landspeeder (provided in the beta book) is a good example of a "normal" speeder. As written, it has 4 hull integrity and 0 armor. This translates to 40 wound in the RAW, and 20 under the proposed change. This would take a few solid shots from a heavy blaster pistol or a good spray from a heavy rifle/Light repeater to reduce Hull to 0 (remember, thats not necessarily "destroyed").

Compared to real-world; Lets say a Honda civic as a the speeder, a .45 magnum as the HBP, and a Kalashnikov as a heavy rifle, 'cause who doesn't love the AK. The civic could definitely be inopperable after several solid .45 hits or a spray or two of 7.62mm rounds from the AK.

Is it perfect. No. But its definitely good enough.

-WJL

Jegergryte said:

I agree that if you're going to change it, putting Planetary Vehicles at x5 is the best option.

LethalDose gave a pretty good real-world example of a civilian vehicle comparable to your every-day landspeeder and how it'd far against a high-caliber sidearm and a military-grade rifle if using a planetary vehicle's Hull Rating at the x5 multiplier rather than the current x10 that all vehicles use.

It'd also help to make a vehicle's base weaponry a bit less of an insta-kill against the PCs; one hit from an AT-PT's lasers means a one fragged PC if using the optional +50 bonus to the critical hit roll, as the PC would be facing 40 damage on a standard success, and even without that they're pretty much done for given how slow recovery can be without a dunk in a bacta tank or a really freaking awesome medic on hand. If using a x5 multiplier, that damage drops to a base of 20; still pretty nasty, but a bit easier to recover from.

The Cloud Car's lasers would need a bit of beefing up though, since they only have Damage 2; perhaps boost them to Damage 4 if putting all planetary vehicles at the x5 multiplier.

Donovan Morningfire said:

Yeah, that's a good example of a modification that would need made. Hell, you could just say the Cloud Car's weapon was actually starship scale, too. (it seemed to get Han's attention, despite however much armor the Falcon had)

There are a lot tweaks that would need to happen to make it all work appropriately, Including a listing of vehicle scale weapons, or at least starship weapons that have vehicle scale equivalents. But everything else still works well, especially since vehicular (Planetary?) range bands and speeds are already described differently for craft operating in atmosphere or outer space.

Basically, the increase in mechanical complexity provides benefits that out-weigh the expense of a more complex system.

-WJL

LethalDose said:

It's really not that much of an increase in mechanical complexity, unless basic multiplication is beyond the GM, a state of affairs I find to be highly unlikely given the general profile of the folks that wind up behind the GM's screen.

Craft is Planetary scale and it's shooting at the PCs or the PCs are shooting at it? Multiply the damage by five, divide the PC's damage results by five (rounding down). Just about every GM I've encountered (and that's a very, very, very large number) wouldn't have much trouble handling that on the fly, and those few who I've meet for whom math just isn't their strong point have made cheat cards to help them track those sorts of things.

Donovan Morningfire said:

Yeah, that's my point, it's small. But it isn't zero. Even if the comparison is obvious, the comparison still should be stated to maintain rigor.

My post you quoted was meant to call back to an earlier state of the this thread where someone, I think EF, proposed a 5-scale system akin to WEG's, sans Death Star scale. I was not in favor of this because the complexity of those systems did not outweigh the benefits.

RE: the math behind it, I agree that most GMs wouldn't have trouble with it. I can tell you I have players who probably would, especially going from speeder to starship scale. That point aside, there are other complexities to the system that are non-mathematical, e.g. the need for either a separate table of modifications for vehicles. Issues like this do increase the complexity of a system, and must be considered in the cost of implementing the change.

-WJL

Donovan Morningfire said:

Actually, you would multiply/divide by 2, not 5. With the 1:5:10 idea, 10 is twice 5, not 5 times, and 5 is half 10, not 1/5.

-EF

LethalDose, yeah that was me suggesting a 5 scale like in WEG D6. And a 3-scale is ok, but I still don't feel that a TIE should be on the same scale as an ImpStar, so I think a 4-scale would be ideal: Character, Speeder, Starfighter, Capital. That way, you should only have to worry about, at most, 2 scales at a time.

Usually character/speeder and starfighter/capital, with the odd speeder/starfighter thrown in there. Sure, it looks like 4 different scales, but like I just showed, it's only 2! Su rules for shooting at larger/smaller things is all that is needed.

-EF