Star Trek Adventures "One Shot" Recruiting and Out-of-Game Thread

Just to touch on this briefly: strictly speaking, “just stunning them” is full combat in ST:A.

There are specific rules for Lethal combat, but they’re… confusing to say the least. Basically you have to declare that you’re using lethal damage, everything gets more dangerous (more Threat as a starting point), and then… I honestly don’t know. The rules are super unclear.

But Stun is the default combat state. To give you an idea of how this should work following the full rules:

Most of you have between 9 and 15 Stress. Stress is “Health” in ST:A. Once it’s full, “Bad Things” start to happen (unconsciousness, injuries, Complications, etc).

A Type-2 Phaser (the over-the-wrist Dustbuster style… still one of the stupidest designs for a gun ever…) does a total of 7D6 damage… but keep in mind that that’s 7D6 where the results are 1, 2, 0, 0, Delta, Delta. That’s an average of about 5-7 points of damage (and some deltas, which add effects sometimes) for a full hit that’s not blocked by cover or armour (armour is rare in ST:A, but not unheard of… the Borg have biophasic shielding, or some such, and Changlings are naturally resistant to damage, and so on).

Heavy cover (like hiding behind a shuttle) gives 4D6 Resistance: you roll Resistance and subtract that total from the damage received. Light cover (forests) are 2D6.

What this all boils down to is that on average a human-sized target in the open has to be hit 3-4 times to go down. Grunts, Goons, and Henchfolk are a little easier… factor on 2-3 hits. But it’s not as trivial as “Point Phaser Stun World.”

Okay. All that stated: I dislike combat as a general rule in ST:A. We’ll probably do a fight or two to give y’all a feel for it (just because I don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s bad… and you may very well enjoy the combat system!), but most of the time if you get a drop on a non-plot-critical critter and hit it once, it’ll drop like a sack of potatoes.

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