We might be seeing more scales and information rolled out with Age of Rebellion. For the purposes of EotE, in theory , we don't need to simulate a lot of big capital ship combat (that was explicitly one of the things they said at the announcement of the EotE at GenCon) and maybe it's omitted here for simplicity. The same could be true of the vehicle scale, too. For EotE, we need to be dirty scoundrels and unscrupulous bounty hunters or daring scouts on the outer rim. I'm not saying these issues shouldn't be considered and discussed and balanced and published, but its really not the main focus of this game. For the most part, things work fine for what we need.

-WJL

I'm onboard with the 1:5:10 proposal. There would need to be substantial tweaks to the vehicle scale, but I think it makes sense… It could also be used as a clean way to associate piloting skills with vehicles.

I'd like to take a step back and look at the original problem for the moment. ;-)

Regardless of "the best way" - the core question of "why do the scale thing at all" seems to be in order to prevent character-scale weapons from doing damage to a vehicle.

IIRC… 1 point of vehicle soak is equal to 10 points of character soak. (Please, correct me if I've got this wrong…) :-)

So how could a personal scale weapon damage a large vehicle anyway? A vehicle with 5 points of Soak has to take 50 points of damage from a character-scale weapon before any of it is applied to its hull integrity. The only character scale weapon that could overcome this would be those with Breach (which are designed to go after ships, or can do so by their very nature, such as a lightsaber).

What am I missing here? (There's got to be something…)

GM Chris said:

Probably more of a case of folks wanting to be able to damage and/or take out planetary vehicles such as landspeeders or speeder bikes with personal weapons (hey, we see Leia take out a speeder bike with a light blaster pistol in RotJ) or smaller milspec vehicles with matching military weaponry such as heavy repeating blaster.

Currently, most personal-scale weapons can't do jack to a vehicle with so much as a single point of armor, and even those without armor would need several shots from even a rifle-type weapon to be taken out. And it is a fairly common action movie trope to be able to take out smaller vehicles with personal weapons (after several shots), so you can't necessarily blame folks for wanting to be able to replicate that sort of thing.

Aha. So the problem isn't "we don't want character scale weapons to damage vehicles" - but rather - "we want character scale weapons to damage SOME vehicles, but not others".

Got it.

Let me think on this…

Having played extensively at Star Wars D6 in my younger years I really think we need more than 2 scales. I also think the 1-5-10 approach would probably be the best compromise.

@GM Chris: with the 1:5:10 proposal, it would only take 5 damage to deal 1 point of damage the proposed vehicle scale, not 50. Just divide character scale damage by 5, or multiply starfighter scale damage by 2, to determine vehicle scale damage. Not nitpicking, just clarifying!

Edit: I might have misread your post; but regardless - a starfighter with 5 armor requires 60 points of character scale damage to take a point of hull trauma (50 to overcome the armor, another 10 to damage the hull because we always round down). The proposed vehicle scale with 5 armor would require 30 character scale damage to take a point of hull trauma (25 to overcome armor, 5 to damage the hull).

But, a vehicle with 5 armor is pretty darn hefty… I think the real value of the vehicle scale comes in at low-to-mid (0-3) armored vehicles, so a good heavy blaster shot can really dole out some pain, and a thermal detonator could slag it.

Exalted5 said:

I gotcha.

I just… I don't know. It sounds needlessly complicated. Like something that would slow down the cinematic nature of the combat. [shrug] There's GOT to be a better way!

Still thinking on it…

GM Chris said:

What if it were simply that characters can't hurt vehicles? If they want to, they have to use the Aim to Cause Component Hit rule? You can't do enough damage with a personal weapon to cause general damage, but a blaster bolt in the right spot can still hamper the vehicle?

With this ruling, Leia could have spent a Triumph on her roll to destroy the speeder bike.

Just Thinking out loud.

-EF

Not a bad idea at all. I still think I'll go for a scaling system as a potential HR if nothing has been changed in the final product - so I can play-test it next session if a situation comes up that warrants it. I do not find it more complicated than multiplying by 10, but I understand that people differ in these matters.