I find that the minion section in the core rule book (p.389) is woefully lacking in detail when it comes to their attacks against the PCs. I've been searching for a while to get clarification but every discussion seems to be about building dice pools for minion groups. I understand this part, but my question, is about calculating minion damage *after* a successful hit by the minion group.

Scenario: I've got a minion group of 3 'whatevers'. They have agility 3 and ranged(light) skill.

So the whole group has a dice pool of GYY when shooting their ranged light weapons.

Check.

Now. Say the light blasters they are each carrying do 6 damage...

So based on the above scenario:

1) Does a successful hit by this minion group = 6dmg X 3 = 18 damage? or is it just 6dmg. Or something different like 6dmg +1 dmg for each additional minion beyond the first?

2) Does this attack target a single PC? or can the GM say that they all fire at different PCs, split the fire between a few (2 at 1 PC, 1 at another)

Is there a published errata or something that clarifies this?

1) 6 plus number of successes damage.

2) Each group makes a single attack, but you can split into multiple groups if you want. So ou cold have 1 attack one PC with GGG and 2 attack the other with GGY. Or each minion could attack individually with GGG if you don't want to group them.

Think of a minion group as a single battlefield 'entity' that acts as a single character.

They get more dice as there are more minions in the group, but still, they're acting as if they were a single 'unit' (so, in your example above, that GYY dice pool is the roll made to attack a single character). They can split up and attack different targets, but at that point, they've split up, so they're not getting the benefits of the combined dice pool.

Also note that minion soak is applied only once per attack. So lets say your group of three minions has five wounds apiece and a soak of 2. An attack that deals 10 damage is reduced to 8, which kills one minion and deals 3 to the next minion in the pool. This is meant to just make the math fast and easy (they're just minions, after all).

And yes, this does mean that, in the example above, an attack that dealt 12 damage would kill two minions in the group. After all, a single attack roll doesn't necessarily mean a single pull of the trigger.

Don't think of minions as being so "technical".

An attack from minions is 1 attack versus 1 target. however, narratively speaking, you could say the whole group is shooting at your whole party, but on a successful hit, one of your party members is hit from a single weapon's amount of damage (plus successes)

So, the bigger the minion group doesnt do more damage, but their odds of hitting something increase with more yellow dice.

In reverse, PCs don't target single minion members...they're simply firing blaster vollies to the group and will hit one of them on a success. If damage is more than 5, then that blaster volley happened to hit two minion members.

Excellent responses - thank you! I still think FFG should have made this all clearer. The beginner box does a slightly better job than the core rule book which almost treats it like an afterthought.