Lightsaber Base Damage

[DougRed4]

One of my players is convinced that the base damage done by lightsabers (5D) is much too low for such a weapon. Sure with Jedi there's ways to add much more damage (for instance, with Lightsaber Combat), but his opinion is that characters like General Grievous should be able to do a lot more with each hit, since he was supposed to be able to fight (and kill) numerous Jedi all at once.

I'm considering a wholesale reworking of the way lightsaber combat and battles are done, and I've already put a lot of thought and effort into it (and am coming up with some good ideas; more on that later). But before I go any further I'd like to hear what others think on the base damage done by a lightsaber. Should it really only do what a Heavy Blaster Pistol does? Or should it be perhaps a bit more 6D? 7D?

[Darth Ginzain]

You're subject title was well choosen. Lightsaber BASE damage. There are several papers written about how to modify lightsaber damage. I prefer the one written using the Knights of the Old Republic crystals. Adds a little more flavour to say what type of crystal or crystals you have in your saber. Also don't forget you can still modify the base damage using the equipment modification rules.

[CRMcNeill]

Well, among my many house rules, I've done away with the Control bonus to lightsaber and simply made the lightsaber a Str+5D weapon with no maximum limit.
_________________
"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.

The CRMcNeill Stat/Rule Index

[vanir]

I've been toying with the idea of allowing the lightsabre to be used as either Str+(base damage) weapon which varies by crystals and modifications of the individual example, or pooled with Control dice instead, using LSC, at player choice.
Obviously Jedi PCs will pick whichever is higher, whilst non-Jedi who can use a lightsabre (eg. Tapani Saber Rakes), get their strength boost to normal melee damage with it.
Let's face it, if you weren't a Jedi you'd naturally use it like a physical sword, putting physical strength behind the hilt swings.

I wouldn't allow Lightsabre Forms to be used in this way (ie. forms specialisation or special manoeuvres of any forms), just general Lightsabre skill (Form I without specialisation to gain special manoeuvres if using Lightsabre Forms in the game, which is just general Lightsabre skill in effect). I may let skill pool with Sense dice if LSC is up though, keeping damage style Player choice.

Jedi who pick the Str+(base damage) option however may risk giving in to aggression and gaining a DSP. Non-Jedi would not have this issue.

[DougRed4]

I took a look at what WotC's d20 system did, and it looks similar to d6 amounts. Lightsabers do 2d8 damage, while blasters do 2d6 and heavy blaster pistols do 3d6. Vibro axes do 2d10.

But one thing they spell out in the d20 rulebook is that lightsabers ignore the hardness of armor and everything else.

For d6, I'm wondering if the damage should be kept the same, but perhaps armor doesn't work as effectively. It could be halved, or offer 1d6 less protection against lightsabers, for instance.

[garhkal]

[Naaman]

Im not really convinced that a lightsaber"s base damage should be more than a blaster rifle. 5D damage is dangerous enough when being shot at... When the average target will have a strength in the 2D range, 5D damage is devastating.

Being shot with a rifle, getting crushed by a wookiee, getting slashed with a lightsaber... all just about equally scary, no?

I would also tend to take it a step further and say that ONLY a Jedi can make full use of a lightsaber, since ONLY the Jedi actually use them (and they build them as personal weapons, not mass produced, for-profit in an assembly line).

I also think that Grievous was only dangerous due to a decent lightsaber skill, and being multi-dextrous. Obi-Wan handed him his rear end in their duel as far as the lightsber portion was concerned. Other "non-heroic" Jedi may have been beaten by Grievous, but Grievous was, after all, a major villain. In any case, (no offense) I think that Grievous is a poor example of a non-Jedi being "proficient" enough with a lightsber to justify changing the damage rules.

The way that I am thinking about running my lightsaber damage is that a character cannot add more control dice to his damage than he has in his lightsaber skill (or, lightsaber skill over and above dexterity). This will represent his ability to use the Force in proportion to his familiarity and mastery of the weapon, rather than some random Force user of some other tradition picking up a lightsaber and instantly mastering it simply by virtue of the fact that they have a high sense or control skill.

Anyway, I tend to try to protect the uniqueness and mystique of the lightsaber with all of my house rules regarding it.

[CRMcNeill]

[cheshire]

I don't think it's unwise to re-evaluate the lightsaber. On the surface it might seem a bit low when you see people like Qui-Gon cutting through blast doors with ease. I haven't found a need to re-do it, as I've not run a Jedi game recently, but I've toyed with the idea.

Perhaps something in line with letting the lightsaber ignore armor bonuses. However it's fairly clear that Luke got a glancing shot on Vader without any real damage. Something stopped the shot.

Though I've thought about the idea of letting someone stack damage if they remained in consistent contact with an inanimate object. For reach round you stay in contact with the door/object, you get to add an additional +1D to your damage. So, If you simply try to stick the lightsaber into the door, it's 5D. Keep it in and moving, it's 6D, next round it's 7D. Eventually you'll get through, but you're not going to do so immediately. At the same time it's going to be considerably more difficult to try the same trick to a manned AT-ST.
_________________
__________________________________
Before we take any of this too seriously, just remember that in the middle episode a little rubber puppet moves a spaceship with his mind.

[vanir]

I think Naaman and Cheshire came up with some terrific points. My main reasoning why Lightsabres should even be so high damaging was for the Qui Gon scene cutting through a blast door. Long before the Prequels were made we rolled that result in SWRPG2E against a scaling dice cap on board a starship, the PCs were trying to get at some NPCs hiding behind a blast door and were wounding it each round despite the die cap (I often raised the scale of blast/bulkhead doors to local hull scale) because they had so much damage dice. So each round the door fell apart more until they could get through. At the time we thought it might have been metagaming but was pure RAW, then we saw that scene in TPM and were just completely blown away. Lightsabres really do that in the hands of a Jedi.

Okay but some of the proposals we're discussing here are coming from our individual interpretations of SWU, like the way different EU authors see the SWU totally differently. Clearly there is room for different interpretations to seem clearly inferred in SWU yet clash, because it happens even between EU.

I myself see the lightsabre as a weapon the Jedi adopted, reconstructed and easily surpassed the skill of any other kind of user through the Force.
Non-Force users used to construct lightsabres according to some EU and this was the inferrence I assumed as a youngster when Ben Kenobi described it as an "elegant weapon of another time", when he said "this is the weapon of a Jedi" at the time I assumed it was a classical SWU weapon of earlier times (the "laser sword" you see in some other scifi of the period) and Jedi who had self disciplined philosophies rather than gunslinging philosophies preferred it to blasters. And there is some Star Wars concept art with regular Stormtroopers carrying lightsabres as the standard weapon of these armoured elite troops.

Then there is WEG canon (low in the scale of canon admitedly) where Tapani sabre rakes used non-Force constructed lightsabres they refer to as lightfoils, to differentiate from the Force-based WEG Jedi lightsabre, with reduced damage but uses the lightsabre skill to wield. And the sourcebook describes earlier times where lightfoils were equivalent in all respects to a Jedi lightsabre, but were constructed by non-Force users.

One may argue the Jedi lightsabre is constructed using Force imbued crystals. But then Sith construct their red lightsabres using artificially synthesised focus crystals according to TotJ Companion. Presumably lightfoils, the non-Force based lightsabre equivalent would be constructed using industrially synthesised focus crystals, when this process was commonplace these were as powerful as the Jedi weapon.
And in other scifi characters run around with lasguns and laser swords just fine absent of any metaphysical duelling powers like the Force. Why can't someone do that? And Tapani sabre rakes for one, do.

Some EU also says that some Jedi groups didn't use lightsabres but other weapons, and they learned to enhance their use through the Force in a similar way to lightsabre combat. Metal swords, albeit tempered using the Force and even blasters, is there an argument Jedi can use Force based focus crystals in a blaster? What effect would this have?

I quite like Naaman's suggestion of limiting lightsabre damage and Control dice pooling to the number of dice in lightsabre skill. That makes a lot of sense to me for the reasons he stated.
I do also recognise that using expanded construction canon, lightsabre base damage ranging from 3D+2 to 7D+1 (pontite with max hilt modification), or lightfoil base damage ranging from 3D to 5D are as good as regular blaster weapons when doing damage as "a laser sword" without further enhancement or combat rules modification.

Hence I was undecided in the first place about adding Str damage for non-Jedi (or the option for Jedi). RAW as written may not really be flawed in any way wrt lightsabres.

[DougRed4]

Good point on the way it was used on the blast door, Cheshire, though I suppose just continually doing 5D+ damage every round for a few rounds would melt that door away as well.

Your point about Vader taking a hit with his armor has been one I've been considering as well. There are times when the lightsaber just seems to lop off a limb (Ponda Baba, the wampa), and others where it hits and doesn't seem to just slice through everything (Luke on the sail barge), so we're left with some variety of effects.

[garhkal]

[cheshire]

And definitely make sure you don't fumble that lightsaber roll by 5 or more. You've just toasted yourself.
_________________
__________________________________
Before we take any of this too seriously, just remember that in the middle episode a little rubber puppet moves a spaceship with his mind.

[garhkal]

Its a 10 or less..
_________________
Confucious sayeth, don't wash cat while drunk!

[DougRed4]

Yeah, I'm not keen on characters being so easily able to lop their own limbs off. That's why I'm going with the following:

When attacking with a lightsaber, a character who rolls a 1 on the Wild Die (or who fails the lightsaber roll by 10 or more points) loses his grip on the weapon. The weapon then lands 1D meters away in a random direction determined by the Grenade Deviation Diagram (p. 92), with the Direction of Throw being the angle that the character swung with his attack. A character only injures himself when failing the lightsaber roll by 20 or more points.