How can an Ewok take out a Scout Trooper?

[thalcos]

Okay, so if you want to go deep into Star Wars lore, the Ewok Adventures movies showed that Ewoks are more than capable (and willing) to pick up blasters and use them. Even heavy weapons.

So, sure, the FIRST Ewok attacks on Endor were with rocks and spears to knock over the stormtroopers... but what happened just off camera was that the Ewoks disarmed the troopers and then executed them at point blank range while they were being held down.

Someone's even edited some of the Ewok Adventures footage into Return of the Jedi to make the point:

https://streamable.com/hz7s3

I'm convinced.

[Phantasm]

Even in RotJ, Ewoks had no problems picking up enemy blasters.

[Frost]

Originally Posted by thalcos

So, sure, the FIRST Ewok attacks on Endor were with rocks and spears to knock over the stormtroopers... but what happened just off camera was that the Ewoks disarmed the troopers and then executed them at point blank range while they were being held down.

Works for me. Mind you I reckon that for gaming purposes you need to approach Star Wars on the basis that the only bit in the films that is 'real' in universe is the kid at the end of Last Jedi telling the story.

The way the films are presented is very much a legend or fairytale as oposed to a realistic narrative.

[Plane]

if trooper armor wasn't flexible (allowing you to inflict 1 crushing per 5 crushing) then I think there are still some ways to inflict damage to people in non-flexible armor

1) B431 falls says all non-natural armor (flexible or non-flexible) counts as flexible when calculating blunt trauma from the crushing damage from falls

The extrapolate from this: falls are COLLISIONS, so what if we applied this to collisions in general?

So it wouldn't just be falling off the speeder bike that does damage, but also the speeder bike ramming into a tree?

Or perhaps shoving someone into a wall?

I also like the idea of not requiring a minimum of 5 damage to inflict blunt trauma, always having 20% of crushing and 10% of cut/impale leak through (0.2 and 0.1 increments) is a lot cooler and grittier. Same thing for the 'hurting yourself' rules.

Though maybe giving a tiny amount of natural DR (like 0.1 or 0.2) for certain body parts could balance that out.

[joppeknol]

For some reason, gravity on Endors moon is much higher than your would expect (2G or 3G). The special effects team just thought it was to difficult to show in the movie.

This should make rock and ewoks throwing them much more effective.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by joppeknol

For some reason, gravity on Endors moon is much higher than your would expect (2G or 3G)

I think that's actually the gravity of the planet the moon orbits...

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Endor/Legends (about the moon) mentions:

Gravity 85% standard[1]

Ref cited is 2004 sourcebook for the RPG https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Geo...ter_Rim_Worlds

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Endor_(planet)/Legends mentions

Gravity 2.5 standard

(same source, the D20 rPG)

[pawsplay]

I'm not looking for convoluted explanations why what we screen isn't real. Just suggestions for nuts-and-bolts approaches to make it work.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by pawsplay

I'm not looking for convoluted explanations why what we screen isn't real. Just suggestions for nuts-and-bolts approaches to make it work.

And you've been waiting for this for *checks original post* 11 years? My hat is off to your patience, sir.

I think the original responses covered most of the ground needed here, it all comes down to what stats you want the armor to have and how you want the Ewoks to have overcome it (ranging from useless cosmetic armor to the Ewoks using captured blasters). My personal inclination would be to have the armor actually be pretty decent, with the Ewoks having to rely on traps and dogpiling (followed by stabbing through the eye lenses). Of course, part of this would be strongly influenced by Jedi: Fallen Order (where higher-ranking storm-troopers have armor that can actually tank a hit or two from a lightsaber) and the like.

[Plane]

edit: added note: there was a 200lb chimpanzee named Travis who actually TORE OFF the hands of a woman named Charla Nash in 2009

Chimps stand between 3'3" and 4'11" while Ewoks range from 3-4 feet. Both are arboreal.

Supposedly they're lighter like 30 pounds though I don't really understand how (hollow bones like birds?) but maybe that's a baseline while higher ST lifestyles could increase their weight to chimp-like levels. Certainly would expect that of warrior-caste Ewoks. I've also seem 30kg which would be 66 pounds, but even that seems low. This isn't just some child, it would be like a muscular dwarf, they're a STOCKY species, not gangly-limbed youths.

Tearing off limbs, if Ewoks can emulate Travis in doing it, is something so amazing that we've only seen it visited in GURPS Fantasy for berserkers who have a speciall all-or-nothing Cutting Attack followup to define it. You can't even do it under usual rules, yet a chimp did it IRL.

Originally Posted by SuedodeuS

This will make it so that teddy bears with small rocks and stone spears won't be able to harm armored ultra-tech soldiers without making use of effective traps - or finding weak points in the armor (Targeting Chinks).

Or using momentum
https://www.starwars.com/news/5-tips...unt-as-an-ewok

Pro-tip: try sneaking up on stormtroopers. Backstabbing a buckethead with a spear does more damage than a frontal attack.

As an Ewok, you can jump from elevated areas and perform a lethal plunging spear attack, eliminating any stormtrooper in a single blow

The closest I can think of to a GURPS mechanic for this is how Martial Arts allows you to substitute slam damage (based on HPxSpeed) for thrust damage (based on Striking ST) when using a Move and Attack.

If you can do that from "speed I got from running forward" then it seems reasonable to allow it for "speed I got from falling downward". That would be a reasonable tactic for stubby-legged creatures like Ewoks to use, vertical momentum rather than horizontal.

There should probably be some kind of reasonable limit for this though, in either case. At some point transitioning the rapid deceleration of your spear into the rapid deceleration of your body (ie what allows you to add your own HP mass into the damage the spear does based on it's own meager weight) won't be possible because of the amount of Grip ST that you would need to keep ahold of it.

A low-ST guy falling at terminal velocity for example, might be able to add SOME of his momentum into the spear before the rebounding forces rip it out of his hands and he continues falling and leaving the spear behind.

Overpenetrating the target (spear can keep on moving) would of course limit the amount of rebound, but there would still be some, proportionate to the amount of force it took to rip through them.

I'd be interested in ideas on how to crunch this up. The idea of varying degrees of grip quality is present in Technical Grappling (represented as Control Points a wielder has on their weapon).

A zero-risk situation of grip loss would be holding a weightless (not necessarily massless) weapon, or any weapon in zero gravity.

Minimal-risk would be holding onto low-weight weapons and doing nothing with them: you might gradually tire out holding a 10lb warhammer at your side and eventually drop it, but that could take hours unless your ST was pathetic.

Actually swinging the weapon about (whether to attack or to parry, whether you miss or hit a target) should compromise (or at least risk compromising) grip CP in gradual amounts (probably in decimal increments) which require compensation to retain maximal control.

This is all so minor for average or low-intensity combat ie "it's not even worth a full control point or action point" that it wouldn't work in a non-tenth CP/AP system unless you wanted to keep a separate tally that eventually folded into whole-point losses.

In terms of the terminal-velocity Ewok able to gain enough momentum to impale some hundred-DR stormtrooper suit though, that's definitely the territory where I could see attack-rebound mattering in terms of several AP/CP at a time.

There are conceptual difference we should note regarding retaining grip on a weapon via an instantaneous swing (striking ST) vs holding a weapon in a rigid position while moving (running forward or falling downward) with it. If constructing mechanics for continuous grip degredation in response to actions, those should probably be acknowledged somehow.

Air resistance is only a factor that would matter with wide weapons, and even a big mallet is probably going to be narrow compared to the body of it's wielder unless you're some 6 inch fairy wielding a 48 inch head hammer. Basically imagine running with an open umbrella in front of you (your grip prevents handle from moving toward you) or behind you (your grip prevents handle from moving away from you)

With that resistance not being a factor, you don't need to worry about overcoming the inertia of your weapon to get it moving with a fall (gravity is handling that for you, at the same rate it is overcoming you own intertia) and the falling Ewok instead deals with a situation of "the spear is hitting the stormtrooper and I am not" so they are effectively using the spear to break the weight of their own fall, which adds together as a cumulative impact of the spear against the stormtrooper. If you lack the grip ST to do that, you only partially transfer your momentum to the spear, lose your grip (and maybe some palm epidermis) and the remainder of your momentum carries you to fall either atop the stormtrooper or adjacent to him.

You pretty much need to share the hex (in horizantal terms) of both the spear and the stormtrooper if you want to keep the spear angled directly downward to maximize transfering your weight into it. If you want to fall aimed at a hex adjacent to them, then to have the spear tip hip the stormtrooper would require angling the spear diagonally, which would limit tranfering your weight into them.

Diagonal-angled spears during falls would also be a different angle of force on your grip, which might make it easier to hold on to. Squeezing a bar hard enough that the friction prevents it moving perpendicular to your forearm (ulnar/pinky or radial/thumb) is in my experience harder than squeezing it hard enough to prevent it moving away parallel to the forearm (compare hanging from a horizontal rope/bar vs hanging from a vertical rope/bar for time)

In terms of crunch to represent that it might be somehow related to the -4/yard for wrap shots? Perhaps to both DX and/or ST rolls for retaining CP from the wrenching that happens as the spear is stuck in the target and you have a sudden "free disarm" attempt made by the enemy's own mass when it's stuck into him (immobile) and your momentum wants to keep you falling past him.

As for 'teddy bears', Ewoks might actually be pretty strong. There seem to be mixed interpretations of this though. Two 'star wars RPG' adaptations made them weaker than humans for example:
*In the Fantasy Flight Games version of the Star Wars RPG they had a BU (burliness) stat of 1 compared to 2 for humans (3 for wookies/hutts)
*they are -2 ST in Star Wars Saga (humans are base, hutts +2, wookies +4)

But this could just represent baseline inborn ST, their LIFESTYLE could end up making them much stronger than humans because they spend all their lives climbing trees and stuff. Humans could have a higher baseline but sedentary stormtroopers fall behind bodybuilder ewoks, basically.

Bodybuilder ewoks wouldn't just have higher ST (lifting/striking) but also higher HP for mass-based moves.

One house rule I like is instead of substituting slam for thrust, to add slam to thrust. This could be seen as double-dipping (ArmSt/StrikingST and HP are both derived from ST) but I like how it makes running/falling attacks scarier. It creates more incentive to back up and use them if you've already closed with a foe.

We can distinguish both forms:
1) "I have pre-thrust my spear, and am just running forward with my arms already extended" (sub slam, you're not moving your arms so you don't get to use 'thrust' from arm/striking ST)
2) "I have not pre-thrust my spear, I thrust it last-minute as usual concurrent with my running/falling"

Since the latter case should be trickier, a reasonable tradeoff might be to apply a -2 penalty (doing two things at once) to be able to ADD (rather than substitute) slam+thrust damage. It's easier to make an accurate hit if you've pre-thrust the spear

Running (or standing!) with a pre-thrust spear is probably more exhausting though (it's easier leverage-wise to hold weights closed to your body than with arms parallel to ground). In a system where you're tracking APtenths this should matter.

"Keeping a foe at bay" for example could be done by keeping a spear pointed at a foe and occupying the 3 hexes between you, but holding it that way for minutes/hours will fatigue your arm way faster than keeping the spear vertical (which also usually allows you to rest it on the ground, if you shift to a lesser grip) because even though you're holding the same weight off the ground, you're doing it at different levels of efficiency based on skeletal alignment and muscles.

In terms of quick running attacks it wouldn't amount to much, but for someone running for several seconds (or CONSTANTLY doing this over several minutes of combat) adding that up to more fatigue would be realistic.

Slam-based damage should probably also somehow replace the +1/2 yards rate used for a Stop Thrust bonus. Not sure whether it would make sense to use the mass of the stopper or the stopped or some combination of the two. I guess using whatever the usual collision rules are and combining their effects with a strike?

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Dienekes

You could reconcile it by dealing with the movie instead of the events depicted in the movie; that is, treat the movie as a storyteller's version of something that really happened in the game world. There's really no such thing in the real world as the objective, unbiased, multi-POV, detailed understanding of events that most movies provide, so you're under no obligation to have that kind of understanding in your game.

Storytellers inevitably distort real-world happenings, usually for good reason. ("300 Spartans held off a million Persians for a week!") It is undeniable that the Rebellion won a great victory on Endor. How? Well... The PC's all know, in convenient detail, the story that the victory involved spear-carrying munchkins laying out stormtroopers, etc., etc, and they even have the option of believing that story. Whether the storyteller (Lucas) got it exactly right is another question, one that the GM doesn't have to answer OOC, except to define how cinematic the campaign is.

Besides sparing the players' suspension of disbelief and allowing the dangerous bad guys to be dangerous enough to introduce tension into the story, it makes the larger-than-life deeds of the settings heroes truly legendary.

Actually it was 300 Spartans and a few thousand other guys no one ever heard of because they aren't as cool as Spartans held up about 200,000 Persians, most of whom weren't Persians, didn't want to be there, and were held up mainly by their traffic control problems. Just saying.

But I would like to know why Scout troopers are wearing all that gear in the jungle? They are after all scouts and their job must proximate special forces who are not intended to be in a fight that will cost a lot anyway. I suppose it is fitting with the Imperial forces conspicuous.

And of course the Ewoks would not have made real spec ops people look that absurd. The NVA counter-recon teams came off about even and those were not lovable teddy bears.