Star Wars D6 Damage

[Whill]

The web pages below update and expand some of the game rules in The Star Wars Roleplaying Game: Second Edition, Revised and Expanded published by West End Games (hereinafter R&E), which is required to use these rules. Please also note that, unless specifically referring to ships with interstellar hyperdrives or R&E rules, the more general terms spaceship or ship are used here in place of starship to be correctly inclusive of spaceships without interstellar capabilities. Unless otherwise specified, all uses of the term gunner include pilots who may have access to firing weapons.


General

. . • Object Damage
. . • Repairs and Damage Control
. . • Computer Damage and Repair
. . • Non-Vehicular Weapon Damage and Repair
. . • Armor/Powersuit Damage and Repair
. . • Cover and Protection
. . • Blasters Underwater
. . • Game Option: Skill Damage Bonus

Characters and Creatures

. . • Character/Creature Damage
. . . . . o Strength Damage
. . . . . o Brawling Damage Options
. . . . . o Damage Resistance
. . • Character/Creature Injuries and Stun Effects
. . . . . o Interpretive Hit Location
. . • Character/Creature Healing and Medicine
. . • Droid/Shard-Droid Damage
. . • Droid/Shard-Droid Repair
. . • Shard Damage and Healing
. . • Mareen/Copaxi Exoskeleton Damage
. . • Copaxi Exoskeleton Repair/Creation

Spaceships and other Vehicles

. . • Collision Damage, Passenger Damage, and Falling Damage
. . • Vehicle Damage
. . . . . o Crash-Landing
. . • Vehicle Repair
. . • Shields and Tractor Beams
. . . . . o Speed Chart
. . • Spaceship Damage
. . . . . o Spaceship Systems Targeting
. . • Spaceships Underwater
. . • Spaceship Repair


EDIT: The above has been revised to current version.

Scroll down for initial release discussion.

Jump ahead to discussion of the first major revision (Oct 2021).
Jump ahead to discussion of the second revision (Apr 2022).
Jump ahead to the addition of the Mareen/Copaxi Exoskeleton sections and minor revisions (Nov 2022).
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Star Wars D6 Damage

[CRMcNeill]

Interesting. All the thread necros and questions from the last month or so suddenly add up.
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"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

[Whill]

Yep. This is what I've been working on for a while since I had a lot of time off work. You were a lot of the inspiration for this. Instead of posting forum posts or making a PDF, I made three web pages for my comprehensive damage overhaul with tweaks with new mechanics. The website will be easier and less confusing to update if needed. This system includes damage and repairs, wounds and healing. One key thing to note is that R&E only gave us damage accumulation rules for characters, vehicles, and spaceships. Not even droids! Here are some select commentaries...



This damage system incorporates, updates, and replaces my old Damage/Wound & Healing modifications. In my new damage chart (for everything), every result difference increment is a range of 4 die roll results, which now makes this system only slightly more damaging than RAW. (A difference of 8 is incapacitated/heavy damage instead of wounded/light damage, and a difference of 12 is mortally wounded/severe damage instead of incapacitated/heavy.) One of my prior complaints was the seemingly arbitrary level ranges that varied from 3 to 5 each. Even my first revision based on die code averages still had varying level ranges (3 or 4 due to rounding), so making it 4 results each appealed to me and lined it up with RAW, so 16+ is still killed/destroyed. I did have to move 0 down to line it all up. Outside of damage, I am still committed to my 3.5/7 difficulty system, which shows through here in all the 3 and 7 modifiers.

Characters/Creatures

I've done away with my prior harsh arithmetical wound/damage accumulation, so we are back to RAW accumulation, with just a few little tweaks. And as mentioned elsewhere, I did away with the last vestiges of 1e damage (stunned in any part of 'soak'), and instead just addressed my issue of soaking blaster bolts with a simple optional rule of minimum blaster damage. The character/creature wound effects and everything else is nearly identical to what I already had in that thread, but I did add an incremental loss of speed levels to wound statuses.

Repair Times Concept

RAW's system of only taking 15 minutes for any repair no matter how difficult, but only needing more time if the first roll fails wasn't working for me. More severe damage should be harder and take more time both. I also didn't care for how different tech has different time increments. So I decided to tie the repair time to the difficulty. And repair times quadruple at ever level, so a lot of the RAW times are a part of the system. The exponentially increasing times makes more sense to me with the Damage Control system (see below). But after the initial repair roll for whatever time that repair takes, then if you fail you can keep trying, going back to 15 minutes additional minutes of time and up the ladder of repair times for additional rolls until the repair is successful.

Damage Control

This is my fast and dirty system for fast and dirty improper jury-rigged 'repairs' of any tech, just to get something working temporally at one less level of damage, at risk of it failing every time it is used. The item/system isn't actually repaired, and if the jury-rig fails it goes back to the functionality of its true damage status (with no further option to jury-rig again unless it is damaged further). And there is a 1/36 chance of the jury-rig blowing up every time it is used, causing a worse damage than before. I like it. With Damage Control and Power Control, tech characters have a lot to do during space combat, but you can also use this system to pawn some faulty droid off on someone. This system will likely get tweaked as I put it into use, but I've got a good basis for starting out.

Droids/Shards

This is one thing I'm really proud of because RAW never even bothered with giving us any damage accumulation rules, even in the Droids book WEG published (which focused on programming and building droids). Except for the dimmest of labor droids, droids are characters, so my droid damage system mimics the living character system a lot, making it a bit more crunchy than some GMs would want to bother with droids. But like living characters, there are rules for important droid characters and mook droids, which skip two damage statuses (except for when partially repairing a droid back up the scale from a worse damage, just like my partially healed living mook characters).

And I included Shards/Droid symbionts because why not? I decided Shards are unique in that they follow the living character wound track for their natural state (with only 1D damage resistance), but stun damage has no effect on them, like the droid bodies they inhabit. So I thought that ion damage should be stun for Shards like it is for droids. I only had to specify Shard differences to their droid bodies for a few things.

R&E verbiage about droid repairs talk about breaking droid repairs up into smaller, easier tasks but doesn't give rules for it, so I gave droids another repair option that no other tech has. It is a little like Damage Control, but instead of very fast, risky, not-really repairs to partial functionality, this is taking the normal repair time to repair the droid at a one level lower difficulties, but only improving the droid by one damage level at a time. This can be done for every level, so it takes a lot longer but it gives characters easier rolls to make. However, I lowered the base repair times to double (instead of quadruple) each level — Droids have more "wound" status levels than other tech, so it balances out.

I added that droids have a limited self-repair option for light damage only with rules for that, in honor of that little known lore about droids from the original film's novelization ghost written by Alan Dean Foster. After Threepio's arm was set in place in Kenobi's desert home, his internal system self-repaired the connections.

Droid characters are largely humorous, so I threw in the suggestion that wild die 1s on damage resistance rolls get some additional damage thrown in, possibly very minor. I was thinking stuff like, the droid glitches and ends every sentence with the words "womp rat" until repaired, or even a body part falls off. Since they aren't biological, traumatic things for humans are largely funny for artificial life forms. They can be fixed. Something for creative GMs and players to add to the game's entertainment.
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Star Wars D6 Damage

[Whill]

Vehicles (and spaceships)

I renamed "Lost Moves" to what they actually are in the R&E edition of the game: Lost Speed Levels. "Lost Moves" is a vestige of Blue Vader 2e where instead of speeds, everything moved a number of "moves" which meant what multiple of the character or vehicle’s move stat. You could move a "half-speed movement" or up to 4 "moves" per round (which equaled what we now call "All-Out"). But you had to roll for each move action, which meant you rolled up to four times each round just for movement alone! Blue Vader was my college years and I remember hating that particular crunch. Bill Smith wasn’t satisfied with movement rules in Blue Vader, so they were changed for R&E where we have exponential speed levels and only one movement roll per round depending on the "speed." With this change, in R&E we lost the gradient of 3 times the base move (see below), but the overall system movement system in R&E is still an improvement. However, in R&E they only updated the descriptions on the Lost Moves chart in R&E without updating the out-of-date mechanic name. Since 1996, we no longer lose "moves" and that terminology is more confusing now, so I changed it. We lose Speed Levels.

In Blue Vader 2e, we had four moves plus "half-speed movement" which we now call "Cautious" and counts as our first speed level. Although the rules presented for it in Blue Vader were not quite complete, back then we technically had five speeds levels, not four. It is very easy in the RAW damage system to lose speed levels, because ships don't tend to have very many Maneuverability dice and when they are gone, that damage result says to lose Speed Levels. And R&E took a Speed Level away, making the issue worse. So I added the "3 Moves" gradient back to my system, but only for damage — the first Lost Speed Level reduces All-Out to x3, thus giving ships an extra step before your drive is disabled or destroyed. Then the rest of the lost speed levels lose a whole level like in both second editions.

For vehicles and spaceships both, I eliminated a lot of duplicate damage results and tweaked the descriptions to make things more appropriate to their level. I didn’t like any results that automatically destroyed anything before damage accumulated to that. I extrapolated a crash-land system for a few damage results that seem to not want to make the damage so deadly, and also applied it to spaceships where applicable. I tweaked the vehicle and starship 'stun' option and Ion Cannon rules.

Vehicles

Not much more to say. I kept the RAW accumulation and added a few results to lightly damaged so there would be six different possible results instead of only three because that will be the one rolled the most since vehicles can take unlimited light damages without progressing to heavily damaged. I tried to keep it as general as possible since different vehicle types have different systems. (Although most vehicles in the galaxy would not have weapons, there is a much greater chance of PCs being involved with vehicles that do.)

Shields and Tractor Beams

I just wanted to try some new things without veering too far from RAW. These will likely be further tweaked over time.

Spaceships

The stupidest thing about the RAW starship damage chart has been fixed in mine. The whole purpose of having a backup hyperdrive is in case the primary hyperdrive is offline. On the RAW damage chart, there are no possible outcomes where one hyperdrive is offline while the other still works. They are either both fine, or they both go down together. That makes little sense. Although it is true that they both go offline, they have to get repaired individually. However, in RAW it is the same difficulty to repair and time taken for "a damaged hyperdrive." Which means, of course you will always repair the main hyperdrive before the backup, so the backup hyperdrive will still never be needed—there is really no point in even having one according to RAW. With my system, either hyperdrive can go out independently. If one goes down, you still have the other. That’s what redundancy is. Of course, if you are extremely unlucky, there is still a chance both could go down (in separate attacks). So I made the backup hyperdrive go offline with heavy damage which will be the moderate difficulty and one hour to repair, while the primary hyperdrive being disabled is severe damage so a higher difficulty and the longer time taken to fix. So even in the unlikely event that they both get disabled, you might need to repair the backup first. So the three RAW hyperspace-related damages on my chart are now one for each of the three hyperspace-related technologies on the ship: navicomputer (light), backup hyperdrive (heavy) and main hyperdrive (severe).

I'm really proud of my spaceship damage chart. I wanted to add a lot of other systems to the chart to reflect all the technologies that can have problems on a spaceship, but I didn’t want to veer too far away from the classic starship system damages that we’ve had for 33 years now. How I accomplished that was by replacing one of the two weapons-related light damages with a result that requires you to roll 2D, thus giving 11 more possible ways to damage your ship, some of which include different effects for first and second damage to the system. It is set up so none of these systems can be damaged more than one twice, but all the classic light damaged systems (such as a weapon, shields, maneuverability, speed) are all in the main 1D roll for light damage and heavy damage, with some of the effects tweaked a little. The extra weapons damage in the RAW's chart heavy damage was replaced with sensor damage (there is also a light version of sensor damage in the 'Roll 2D' result of light damage).

Damage accumulation was tweaked a little for spaceships. I kept a severely damaged ship getting any further damage of any level (even light) destroying the ship. I altered RAW's heavy damage where any light damage automatically sends it to severely damaged status—instead I made it so there is a 1-in-6 chance of every subsequent light damage sending a heavily damaged ship to severe damage. That is admittedly less harsh than RAW. Heavy damage with a second heavy damage still sends it to severe damage. I did add that if a ship has 2 light damages or more and nothing worse, there is a 1-in-6 change of any subsequent light damage sending the ship to heavy damage, which is more harsh than RAW. (To keep crunch at a minimum I tied these light and heavy 'if-thens' to the one 'Roll 2D' result of light damage.) All these all things pretty much balance out.

In severe damage, overloaded generator was clarified because RAW doesn’t explain what happens after you stop the main power generator overload. It wouldn’t be severe if you stop the overload with an Easy roll and then everything is fine, so in my version the main power generator is severely damaged so once it is shut down, it can’t be turned back on before being repaired (for fear of another overload that would destroy ship), but now that means the ship has no power with nothing but maybe emergency power (to me this is more "dead in space" than the sublight drive being disabled, which I still have on my chart too). Also, destroyed was removed from severe damage and structural damage was moved down to be a possible result of destroyed. These changes freed up two severe damage slots, which were filled in with shields disabled and a hull breach. Destroyed has an optional 1D roll with four possible results.
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Star Wars D6 Damage

[CRMcNeill]

Much to grok. I'll take some time to digest and respond when I think I've got a handle on it.
_________________
"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

[DougRed4]

Very intriguing, Whill. It looks like a lot of work and care went into this!

If you had to make a quick summary, what specifically are the issues you have with 2E R&E as far as damage?
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Currently Running: Villains & Vigilantes (a 32-year-old campaign with multiple groups) and D6 Star Wars; mostly on hiatus are Adventures in Middle-earth and Delta Green

[Whill]

[DougRed4]

Thanks, Whill. That's a whole lot of issues, and I hadn't realized that so many of those were concerns.
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Currently Running: Villains & Vigilantes (a 32-year-old campaign with multiple groups) and D6 Star Wars; mostly on hiatus are Adventures in Middle-earth and Delta Green

[EwebUser97]

I've been unsatisfied with space combat and the RAW systems damage tables for a long while now so I'm really pleased to have stumbled upon your updated house rules Whill. I've read/skimmed over everything linked in the OP but am a bit confused with the "Damage Resistance" table/mechanism found in the "Characters and Creatures" section. Under "Damage Resistant" it states that when rolling to resist damage, a character will roll either their Strength attribute dice code or "Alternate Strength Damage" dice code from the table (looks like Stamina/2 roughly), whichever is higher. This reads to me that a character will almost always roll Strength to resist damage.


RAW example: I have a character with Strength 3D, Stamina 4D. That Stamina 4D comes out to be 2D on the "Alternate Strength Damage" Table. My strength is higher so I roll that to resist damage.


I would have to improve my Stamina skill all the way to 6D just to gain parity with my base Strength attribute. Am I interpreting this all correctly?

[Whill]

[DougRed4]

FWIW, Dodge is the main skill I encourage new players to focus on with this game.

It's really important to avoid getting hit in the first place.
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Currently Running: Villains & Vigilantes (a 32-year-old campaign with multiple groups) and D6 Star Wars; mostly on hiatus are Adventures in Middle-earth and Delta Green

[Whill]

[garhkal]

[Whill]

[pakman]

I really like the content of this thread - especially considering I am in a "house rule overhaul" of my game, as getting ready to start another campaign.

I like the normalization across damage types, and the addressing of the glaringly obvious gaps around starship system damage.

One question I have been pondering however is this;

Melee weapon strength damage.

I am still not abundantly clear on what the problem/gap is this change is to address.

Is it that melee "seems" too powerful compared to blasters?
Or that it gets out of control because wookies are broken?
(the wookie thing is another completely different problem....).

I mean, if the average person has 2D STR, then they do 1D damage - with most weapons only adding a few pips or a die - how are knife wounds (or swords) ever fatal? Are you counting on the defender rolling 1s and the attacker getting lucky with multiple 6's on the wild die?

this does not even account for the fact that two tough opponents with melee weapons (each say with 4D STR) are going to have to beat the odds even more (more dice equals higher averages on the defense roll).

Now, granted - other mechanics can come into play here - like if a character takes ALL of their actions on their initiative - then yes, melee can seem very powerful (I can draw my weapon, run up to you, swing and do damage).
As opposed to an action segment system (1st edition, if I recall) where the melee attacker gets shot before they can close.

So, can I ask - do we really need to reduce Melee damage?
If so, why?
* Because other D6 did it.
* Because wookies are OP
* Because it "feels" like blasters should be better?

(note: not trying to be rude or critical here - just want a better understanding - overall I think the work in this thread the vast majority can be tied to an issue with the current rules - I just want to understand this one).

Also, in my game we are using the actions segments - so maybe the problem is not as crtical.
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