Hi

Any of you used starship as minions in your adventures so far?

When forming starship minion groups, do you :
A) Combine full hull trauma for each ship in the group together, or
B) Use roughly half the normal trauma per ship in the minion group?

As an example, would a minion group of 4 Tie Fighters (Hull Trauma 6) have a :
A) A total of 24 hull trauma for the group, with 1 Tie fighter exploding every 6 points of damage, or
B) A total of about 12 hull trauma for the group, with 1 Tie fighter exploding every 3 points of damage ?

The text on p.10 of the Beta Update doesn't seem to cover Hull Trauma. The rest looks fine.

Thanks for any imput.

Aazlain said:

I guess I'm not clear on why you would reduce Hull for the group to start with. This isn't done with normal minion groups, why should it be applied here?

-WJL

Did I get that wrong? Or maybe there was an Errata? Then again, I migth have been unclear in my question.

I'll pick a few exemples from the Beta book:

p. 197, Aqualish Thug [Minion], Brawn 3, Wound Threshold 6 . (As opposed to 13ish)
p. 198, Pirate Crew [Minion], Brawn 2, Wound Threshold 4 . (As opposed to 12ish)
p. 199, Street Tough [Minion], Brawn 3, Wound Threshold 5 . (As opposed to 13ish)
p. 200, Spaceport Security Detail [Minion], Brawn 2, Wound Threshold 4 . (As opposed to 12ish)

…

Ok, I think I see where the confusion is. NPC's stats don't follow character creation rules. Nemeses sorta do, but henchmen and minions certainly don't. The wound thresholds for NPCs should be whatever they need to be for the purpose they need to serve. This is basically true for every other stat in an NPC block as well.

This may be a break from what a lot of players & GM's may be used to. That statement is making the blanket assumption that "a lot of players & GMs" previously played WotC games where designers applied full blown character creation rules to every entity in their game universe, from the lowliest kobold/jawa minion to PCs to campaign nemeses. That practice makes a lot of sense in some ways (consistency of rules), and is completely nonsensical in others (NPCs serve a variety of different roles, which are all exclusive to the roles of the PC).

Whoever made the design call on this part of EotE probably thought the latter explanation was more relevant than the former.

The "issue" that it leads to is that without some play experience, it may be a bit hard for some GMs (especially new ones) to appropriately balance encounters until they get some experience running the game under their belts. Notice also, that we don't have any inidicators (Challenge level, difficulty ratings, whatever) to benchmark encounter difficulties. It's on the GM to determine the numbers and quality of the opponents in their encounters.

Probably wordier than it needed to be, but does that help clear things up?

-WJL

Thanks for the input LethalDose.

I'd still like to keep the topic open if anybody else is interested to share his views or experiences on the subject.

I'm planning on using "Minion" groups of starships a lot in the coming weeks so I'd benefit from nailing a good enough balance without having to do too much trial and error.

The beginner game does a good job of handling groups of minion starships.

1: The hull trama for each minion star ship doesn't change from the normal amount listed in the rulebook.
2. Treat it as a minion group for all other purposes.

The example in the beginner game is 2 minion groups of 2 tie fighters, so 4 tie fighters total in the encounter. Each minion group has a single set of actions like normal for a minion group and their skills function like other minion groups. The more minions in the group the better their skills the more you kill off in combat the weaker the group gets.

Hope that provides some clarification. If you still have questions I'll take a look through my adventure book later.

LethalDose said:

Normal Minions have half or less the Wound Threshold of non-minions of the same species.

Humans are normally WT=10+Brawn, Human minions are typically WT=5.

aramis said:

Given how much damage the average starship weapon can crank out (espeically if it has the Linked quality, which many of them do), the extra Hull Threshold compared to a normal minion's reduced Wound Threshold isn't going to be much of an issue. In most cases, a single blast from a freighter's laser cannons is going to be enough to take a TIE fighter, and being able to trigger multiple hits courtesy of LInked tends to make short work of TIE minion groups.

As for the trouble Luke and Han were having, I'd chalk that up to the TIEs being run as Henchman/Rivals rather than Minions

Thanks for all the input everyone.

Donovan Morningfire said:

A TIE/ln has 2 armor and WT 8… So it take a 10 point single hit, or two 6 point hits, or three hits of 5 pts, or 4 hits of 4pts…

The average gunner in my two games is throwing 2y+1g vs 3p… for an expected average of 1.97 S on a hit . call it two. Which means it takes 2 hits to kill. Hit chance is 341344/589824=57.87%

Luke and Han having trouble is because they are shooting at ties (which are faster), and they need to hit twice, but the average hit's Advantage is -0.292 or so…. If they get lucky, they tag it. Luke likely is rolling 1y+4g which is about 54.91%

But they don't get much advantage. So the linked seldom matters.