I'm wanting to create another (larger) Ion weapon for personal use. In Core (beta) we have large vehicle sized Ion weapons with the special quality, "Ion", that deal strain damage to vehicles. Damage is 8 to 10 on vehicle scale. We also have the personal scale Ionization Blaster (think Jawas) that causes 10 damage with the quality Stun Damage (droid only).

I'm imagining a large support-sized ionization gun (think light repeating blaster size).  I would want this weapon to have at least a chance of affecting small vehicles (it can take out a landspeeder). The Ionization Blaster affects only droids. Would it create any problems for the game system if I changed this to Stun Damage (droids or vehicles)? Also, for vehicle scale weapons, it would make sense for them to be able to target droids, not just vehicles, with their Ion weapons. If there are no indirect problems, weapon quality "Stun Damage (droid only)" could be deleted and replaced by the current "Ion" weapon quality if the wording allowed it to be used against droids also (not just vehicles).

Did the last Core beta discussion stay with the 10x conversion between personal and vehicle scale? If so, the current Ionization Blaster would have a damage of 1 on a vehicle scale. I would want a larger personal Ion Gun to do more vehicle damage then the small Ionization Blaster, but pumping it up to 20 damage (personal scale) and 2 damage (vehicle scale) would make it too much of a hand-carried droid killer. The E-web tripod mounted repeater does 15 damage, for example.

Thoughts please.

You could always give it the Breach quality, though it may run into the same "Droid Killer" problem.  The Cumbersome quality could also represent the "Big honkin' shoulder cannon"-ness of the weapon.  I guess in my head I'm seeing the ion version of the SE's Blaster Cannon.

Although really, I can't think of a reason not to just give it special text that states "The Shouder Hoisted Ion Target System counts as a vehicle weapon fired by a silhoutte 2 vehicle, even when fired by personel ", that way it's hard to hit the droids, and is effective against vehicles.

hehehe the gun is called a "S.H.I.T.S"… I need to get to bed

-WJL

I think with any "anti-vehicular" weapon, you're going to run into the issue of it being a "character killer," whether the damage be ion or not.

As it stands, FFG is sticking with the "vehicle/starship damage is 10 times the character scale value,"

I'd say your best bet might be to use the Heavy Repeating Blaster as a base, maybe with slightly less damage (base damage of 12?), drop the Autofire, Pierce, and Vicious qualities and replace with them with the Stun: Only Droids and Breach qualities.  Yeah, it'll pretty much take down a droid in one shot, but most weapons rated for "anti-vehicle" usage are going to drop a character pretty fast, with the Missile Launchner under explosives, which pretty much guarentees a character hit with this is going to drop unless they possess an extraordinarily high Wound Threshold.

Thanks for the suggestions!

Sturn said:

Welcome.

Atlhough re-reading my above post, probably be best to add Ion (what you were probably intending to do anyway) rather than Stun: Droids Only trait.