Jedi Counseling 101

Saga Edition's New Damage System and More

By Gary M. Sarli

Welcome to the 101st installment of "Jedi Counseling," our regular column in which we answer your rules questions about the Star Wars Miniatures Game and the Star Wars Roleplaying Game. If you have a question, send it in through the link at the end of this column, and check back here for the official answer.

Star Wars Roleplaying Game Saga Edition

In the last column, we walked through a preview of the new Saga Edition core rulebook that will relaunch the Star Wars Roleplaying Game line in May. Over the next few installments of "Jedi Counseling," we'll go through some of the major topics in the new rules to give you a better idea of what to expect from the system.

Today, let's look at hit points and the condition track.

What's Wrong With Vitality Points and Wound Points?

The vitality points and wound points of the Revised Core Rulebook have one primary problem: They're a little too lethal in the long run. Consider that a player character is meant to survive literally hundreds of encounters over the course of his or her career. In contrast, an opponent is usually meant to survive just a few rounds. Any mechanic that is meant to force an opponent to meet with a sudden demise in just a few rounds of combat (such as a critical hit that kills him instantly, or nearly so) will almost certainly come back to haunt the PCs, too. That might not be a problem in Dungeons & Dragons, but death is a lot more permanent in Star Wars.

For example, consider a scoundrel who has a Constitution score of 12. The character doesn't wear armor, and over the course of his career, he's hit by an average of one shot from a blaster rifle per encounter. (Some encounters, particularly at higher levels, might involve more hits, and others might involve less; this is just an average.) Let's take three important factors into account.

1. Assuming that an attacker can hit the scoundrel on a roll of 19, there's a 10% chance that any hit from a blaster rifle is a critical hit.
2. There's about a 2% chance that any critical hit from a blaster rifle kills the scoundrel instantly (that is, a roll of 22 or higher reduces his wound points to –10).
3. The scoundrel faces an average of 13.333 challenging encounters per level.

Therefore, the character has a 39.1% chance of being killed by sheer dumb luck at some point before attaining 20th level. In fact, in a party of four heroes like this, the chance that all of them will reach 20th level without being killed in this manner is less than 14 percent.

Worse, if a character has a lower Constitution score, or if he takes more than one hit from a blaster rifle in an average encounter, his chance of instant death can be substantially higher. Consult the table below.

ODDS OF INSTANT DEATH DURING A CHARACTER'S CAREER

* Assumes an average of one, two, or three hits from a blaster rifle over the course of an average of 13.333 challenging encounters per level. The percentage shown is the likelihood of being killed by a single critical hit at some point prior to attaining 20th level.

** After this many independent hits from a blaster rifle, half of all characters will have been killed by a single critical hit.

Keep in mind that the table includes only the likelihood of being killed outright by an opponent's lucky roll. Sure, losing your hero to sheer dumb luck when you made all the "right" decisions isn't much fun. But the table doesn't include the chance of being reduced to negative wound points and failing to stabilize, being slowly worn down by repeated hits, taking two critical hits in one fight, or any other source of danger. In other words, this estimate of mortality doesn't include any of the other challenges that we expect heroes to face. When you take those other dangers into account, too, the chance for death rises even more.

Our Alternative: Hit Points

Given all this, we decided to use hit points in Saga Edition. It avoids the "incredibly unlucky instant death" problem described above, it has the advantage of using a single measure for all damage, and it's a simple, familiar standard that is common to many games (including Dungeons & Dragons and Star Wars Miniatures).

What do hit points represent? Here's a quote from Saga Edition:

Hit points are not a universal gauge of concrete, physical toughness. If a soldier and a small tank both have 100 hit points, that doesn't mean the soldier is physically as tough as the tank! Hit points are deliberately abstract so that the same measure of damage can be applied to an inanimate object (such as a wall), an animate object (such as a tank), a massive creature (such as a Krayt dragon), or a high-level character. Consider what hit points mean to each of them:

• The high-level character's durability comes mostly from avoiding attacks, rolling with blows, and so forth. Only a fraction of his survival is based on his physical ability to absorb damage.
• The Krayt dragon's hit points include skill and speed, but a much greater portion comes from its sheer size and bulk. In other words, it's hard to hit something that big in a way that will cause critically injuries.
• The tank's hit points are completely physical in nature, but they aren't determined only by its size and mass. They also account for qualities such as the resiliency of the tank's systems, the volatility of its fuel and payload, the number of redundant and backup systems, and so on.
• The wall's hit points are completely physical and almost entirely determined by simple physical characteristics such as the type of material used to build the wall, the thickness of the wall, and so on.

Over the years, some players have developed a terrible misconception that a character with 100 hit points can be shot almost a dozen times in the chest. Not true! Both a high-level soldier with 100 hit points and a stormtrooper with 10 hit points will be grievously injured and possibly killed by a single blaster wound to the chest. However, the high-level soldier will dodge the first nine shots, and the stormtrooper won't. (If it helps, imagine that a high-level hero has a reserve of "virtual hit points" to offset attacks that would otherwise be lethal. Once he has exhausted his reserve, the blow that finally reduces him to 0 hit points will solidly connect and cause serious physical trauma.)

Damage Threshold and Condition Track

There was one particularly nice thing about the vitality point/wound point system: It allowed for a character to be injured in a way that impaired his abilities but didn't render him unconscious. In fact, a common criticism of any hit point system is that characters are 100% healthy until they fall over from their injuries. Still, even the vitality point/wound point system didn't capitalize on this strength as well as it could have. By the time a character took wound damage, he was usually very close to being out of the fight.

In Saga Edition rules, we tried to keep this strength and expand on it. Thus, the performance of a character, droid, vehicle, or object will degrade over time if it takes sufficiently large amounts of damage. Every target has what's called a damage threshold. If the target takes damage equal to or greater than the threshold, it moves a step down the condition track.

The condition track is a unified system to cover all conditions that degrade a target's capabilities, including poison, stun blasts, fatigue, serious injury, morale effects, and anything else you can imagine. Each step that a character moves down the track imposes an increasing penalty on his actions and defenses, from –1 to –2 to –5 to –10. In addition, because the character is barely staying conscious, he's limited in what actions he can take.

When a character moves five steps down the condition track, he falls unconscious (or becomes disabled, for nonliving targets). In most cases, characters can "catch their breath" to move back up the condition track, and they can do so more quickly if they break away from combat for a round or two.

Thus, the damage threshold measures how much damage is required to move a target down the condition track. In addition, the threshold determines how much damage is needed to seriously injure or kill the target.

A character's damage threshold increases as he becomes more experienced. At low levels, a relatively weak weapon (such as an ordinary blaster pistol) is still a fairly serious threat, so 1st-level heroes have reason to fear a group of stormtroopers. At high levels, characters are more adept at avoiding damage, so they can dodge, parry, or block attacks that would be devastating or even lethal to lower-level characters. Thus, a Jedi Master and a Sith Lord can tear into each another for an extended period without slowing down too much.