So in my most recent game I had my PCs flying an airspeeder away from a heist being chased by 3 swoop bikes. The swoops had 0 armor but they were planetary scale. The question came up is what happens if the attack succeeds and gets enough Advantage to score a critical hit but didn't do 10 or more points of damage (i.e. penetrated armor as required for a Verhicle Critical Hit but didn't actually deal damage. Can you deal a critical hit to a vehicle with a successful check that does not deal damage. There doesn't appear to be anything in the rules against this but maybe I'm missing something.

Wraith428

I would totally allow for a Critical Hit-like result from a personal scale weapon on an unarmored vehicle, possibly with a time limit (like 2 rounds instead of for the encounter/until it gets repaired) and just don't treat it as a Crit for purposes of future Critical Hit rolls.

I was under the impression that you have to score 1 point of damage through soak/armor to apply a crit.

That's how I'd handle it in either case.

From what I can see, as long as you score at least one Success in addition to any Advantage or Triumph the Crit will still activate independant of ant hull trauma that may or may not be applied. So it's possible to fire at a vehicle with small arms, not reduce it's Hull, but Crit it enough to take it out of action.

So when Boba flies away with your buddy ;frozen in his cargo hold firing at the Slave-I with your blaster rifle might actually be more then just dramatic. You might Crit...

Scratch that. You gotta get past soak and/or armor. Pg. 206 Table 6-2, and Pg 236 Table 7-5.

lame..

I was under the impression that you have to score 1 point of damage through soak/armor to apply a crit.

That's how I'd handle it in either case.

I know weapon qualities (except for a few specific ones) just need to the combat check to succeed in order to trigger. I am AFB so I can't confirm that crits have to deal a form of damage in order to apply.

The errata for the AoR beta has it that you only need to successfully hit to activate qualities unless otherwise stated. With criticals you must be successful and deal damage exceeding soak (or armour).

The errata for the AoR beta has it that you only need to successfully hit to activate qualities unless otherwise stated. With criticals you must be successful and deal damage exceeding soak (or armour).

Ah. Well there you have it.

The errata for the AoR beta has it that you only need to successfully hit to activate qualities unless otherwise stated. With criticals you must be successful and deal damage exceeding soak (or armour).

So when I look at the BETA errata I don't see anything about criticals (but I could be blind.) I see the change to weapon qualities needing a successful check. Also in AoR p.174 I see "Remember, an attack's damage also has to excede a target's armor to deal a Critical Hit, which is important when firing small arms at something using armor instead of soak."

So then if a character is shooting a personal scale weapon at a vehicle with 0 armor and gets a success dealing 8 damage with a cricial hit... do they get the critical hit.

Technically the attack is successful and overcomes the vehicle's armor (scored 0.8 damage against an armor of 0.0). If the vehicle was armor 1 I understand the rules say no. But with armor 0 the attack has overcome the armor. No where do I see in the rules that you have to deal damage.

I know this is a minor circumstance that won't come up that often but I'm curious about the intent.

Thanks,

Wraith428

The errata for the AoR beta has it that you only need to successfully hit to activate qualities unless otherwise stated. With criticals you must be successful and deal damage exceeding soak (or armour).

So when I look at the BETA errata I don't see anything about criticals (but I could be blind.) I see the change to weapon qualities needing a successful check. Also in AoR p.174 I see "Remember, an attack's damage also has to excede a target's armor to deal a Critical Hit, which is important when firing small arms at something using armor instead of soak."

So then if a character is shooting a personal scale weapon at a vehicle with 0 armor and gets a success dealing 8 damage with a cricial hit... do they get the critical hit.

Technically the attack is successful and overcomes the vehicle's armor (scored 0.8 damage against an armor of 0.0). If the vehicle was armor 1 I understand the rules say no. But with armor 0 the attack has overcome the armor. No where do I see in the rules that you have to deal damage.

I know this is a minor circumstance that won't come up that often but I'm curious about the intent.

Thanks,

Wraith428

You can't do fractional damage, so 0.8 is 0, so no damage got through, so can't activate a Critical.

You can't do fractional damage, so 0.8 is 0, so no damage got through, so can't activate a Critical.

I think I'll side with wraith on this one. It says you gotta beat the soak, not that you gotta inflict HT. Otherwise it would say something like "a hit that inflicts hull trauma"

Technically the attack is successful and overcomes the vehicle's armor (scored 0.8 damage against an armor of 0.0). If the vehicle was armor 1 I understand the rules say no. But with armor 0 the attack has overcome the armor. No where do I see in the rules that you have to deal damage.

So are you only counting this for the purpose of the critical hit? Or are you going to keep track of this incremental damage? If the next hit only does 0.6 damage, is the total now 1.4 and the vehicle has taken one point of hull trauma? Personally, unless you actually inflict damage (hull trauma), for me fractional damage does not count because you actually haven't done any damage to exceed the armour.

For what it´s worth every soaked critical becomes an unsoakable normal wound... In the elderly WFRP3.

Anyone have page numbers that explain character vs vehicle scale better?

Better how? Does it say that there is incremental damage? No. Can you count incremental damage? Completely up to you. Personal and vehicle scale weapons and armour work on a Factor 10 scale. Personal weapons must do at least 10 points of damage to inflict one point of hull trauma. Anything less does no damage unless you choose to run things that way.

Starships, Vehicles, and Scale sidebar page 224.

What would a grenade do to a land speeder if you threw it into the cockpit?

1 success = 9 wounds.

So unless you rolled 2 advantages to trigger Blast (6) or the GM decided to auto-trigger the Blast quality because the interior of the speeder cannot evade the blast, the speeder suffers no damage. Kinda silly. Even with Blast, the speeder suffers only 1 damage, so... you're going to need 4 grenades to blow up a speeder. I'm not looking for verisimilitude, but that 1) doesn't ring true and 2) isn't very cinematic.

Tangent on grenades...

A character could hold a frag grenade, have it go off in their hand, and RAW on 1 success suffer 9 wounds (less soak), so... ±5 wounds. It hurt, sure, but it didn't take your hand off. There are no other game mechanics attributed to the frag grenade that make you roll for crits or lose limbs. It might be more of a problem with the frag grenade damage in and of itself than the vehicle scale thing, but the must do 10 damage first doesn't help with the one weapon you'd think would be very effective against a vehicle.

I plan to solve these issues by keeping it narrative. If a player scores a triumph or critical on a vehicle (almost regardless of the weapon), he's going to hit the gas tank, the stabiliser armature, the oil valve, the brake line, a magnetic hyper coil compensator, what-have-you... which may or may not take the vehicle out of the scene, but regardless will have a dramatic visual impact as a result of their lucky hit.

We've all seen it time and time again in movies, heroes blowing up vehicles with all manner of weapons, so it only makes sense then that it "should" somehow be possible, as we're recreating cinematic action for the mind's eye, without having to pull out a missile launcher to do so. Blowing up vehicles is fun! That should be reason enough.

With a grenade, the vehicle's going to lurch off-course, catch fire, bleed fuel, full the cockpit with smoke, become harder to pilot, blow up to smithereens, eject a passenger or do something equally spectacular. (Unless of course the vehicle has armour and is designed to deflect grenades and the like). I'll most likely house rule an increase to their damage or give them breach.

I also might separate planetary scale vehicles into 2 types. Big space ships that leave the planet can have the 10 to 1 scale (stormtrooper blaster fire ricocheting harmlessly off the millennium as it leaves tatooine), but smaller planet-bound vehicles should perhaps have a 5 to 1 scale (stormtrooper blaster fire that destroyed the tracks of a jawa sand crawler) to represent the danger of small arms fire.

Sand People were shooting a modded slug thrower rifle to destroy pod racers in a single shot. The single bullet didn't blow up the pod racer, but it definitely hit something important which sent the racer careening into the ground at a very fast speed, effectively destroying it.

I plan to solve these issues by keeping it narrative. If a player scores a triumph or critical on a vehicle (almost regardless of the weapon), he's going to hit the gas tank, the stabiliser armature, the oil valve, the brake line, a magnetic hyper coil compensator, what-have-you... which may or may not take the vehicle out of the scene, but regardless will have a dramatic visual impact as a result of their lucky hit.

We've all seen it time and time again in movies, heroes blowing up vehicles with all manner of weapons, so it only makes sense then that it "should" somehow be possible, as we're recreating cinematic action for the mind's eye, without having to pull out a missile launcher to do so. Blowing up vehicles is fun! That should be reason enough.

Sounds like a perfect use of a Triumph. Although I wouldn't let them trigger it by using advantages. Triumph only. Especially if it normally wouldn't do enough damage to normally trigger a crit.

Maybe deal with vehicles like landspeeders and swoopbikes on the personal scale. Convert their hull trauma threshold to personal scale. So the landspeeder's HTT of 4 becomes 40 or the swoopbike's at 2 becomes 20. Then you can whittle them down using personal weapons. And if they are considered personal scale, crits can also be activated.

Someone can toss a grenade into a landspeeder to directly damage the occupants. Using the second aim option to get it in there, then treating it as an enclosed room.