Just wondered how grenades are treated against a group of minions?

Is it just a single damage against the group Hit Point total?

I would do it as follows,

Roll to see if it is successful and how much damage it does then,

If the roll shows the blast is triggered, do the blast damage x number of living minions as damage to the minion group.

ugavine said:

It'd be both, provided the mintion group are in the Engaged Range band in relation to one another.

This actually brings up one of the odder aspects of minion groups, is that they don't have to be clumped altogether, and could in fact be spread out enough to be several meters apart. In those instances, where none of the minions in a group are Engaged with one another, the grenade's damage would spill over the same it would for a blaster shot, but you'd get nothing from activating the Blast quality.

If they were engaged (such as a tightly-packed group of stormtroopers), then you would not only get the spill-over from the original attack, but could trigger the Blast quality as well and great increase the odds of taking out the entire minion group in a single attack.

Granted, this taking into account primarily the Beta rules, so this might change quite a bit between now and when we get our hands on the actual EotE corebook.

What does it mean to "trigger a blast" , is that just saying that the player Succeeded on the roll (ie, had 1 or more Success after cancelling out) ? My group ran into the same issue, and we had no idea how to rule it after reading the rule book…

On the fly, I just took total damage off the Stormtrooper Minion Group. However, this didnt seem right.

Straygeologist said:

While my group experienced the same issue, unsure what "Blast 8" really meant.

What we did was the following:

Determine success and advantages.

Successful? Yes

Advantages? Yes 1+

Original target takes full damage.

Each target within band 1 (engaged; within 1 meter) takes full damage -1.

Each target within band 2 (nearby only; within 2 meters) takes full damage -2.

This handled the blast/splash damage fairly well.

deeahchur said:

If you have the 2 advantage, and use them to activate it, it does 8 points to everyone who is in engaged range to the targeted person. For inion groups, since they move and fight together, that would hit the whole group.

Thanks aramis, When reviewing the Beta rule book, we had missed that blurb about needing 2 Adv to activate weapon qualities such as Blast or AutoFire. I look forward to seeing how this plays out when my group dives into The Long Arm of the Hutt!

What about stun grenades?

I had one player using Vex and he wanted to throw a stun grenade at a group of stormtroopers. As they don't have strain and it says 'Suffers wounds instead' I thought that was unrealistic - how would a stun grenade potentially maim or kill stormtroopers in full armor?

Instead I had them lose a round as I wanted to keep combat moving on the fly - in future I might have just given the stormtroops setbacks/increased difficulty to attack or reduced the difficulty to hit them (or both), but the idea of 'stunning' them seemed to work for our group.

Blue Dog said:

In this example, while the stormtropers would have suffered wound damage, you as the GM can easily describe it as the stormies being knocked unconscious and thus incapacitated as a result… just as if a PC's Strain Threshold had been exceeded.

Exceeding the target's Wound Threshold doesn't always have to mean you've reduced the target to a blood-riddled goresack. But at the same time, minions are meant to be taken out very quickly, much like you'd see the lead in a Hong Kong action movie tearing through the Big Bad's legion of minions like they were peanuts, thus why an Strain damage just converts to Wound damage for minions, as well as Henchmen. Those guys aren't meant to be a huge threat to the PCs.