How powerful are the Stormtroopers/Imperial Army/Navy Troopers in your game?

Each system has addressed Stormtroopers slightly differently.

- Stormtroopers(in WEG) are certainly a cut above the average; however, despite being called the elites of the New Order, these guys are pretty much on par with your average Imperial Army trooper; in d20, there a varying levels for Stormtroopers, making them more of a challenge, potentially, for high-level PCs.

- Imperial Army Troopers; while not the shock troops of the Empire, these guys have a fairly well-rounded skillset in the WEG sourcebooks for non-heroics and are about even in combat prowess with the stormtroops; I don't honestly remember ever seeing the Army in d20 stuff. What about anyone else?

- Navy Troopers; these guys are jokes, yet accurately depicted based on their training to preform only the most basic grunt functions - hangar security, cell security, munitions guards, etc.; d20 Navy guys have just a few Thug levels as I recall, like stormtroopers, but not as many.

- Death Star Troopers; supposed to be better than the average Stormtrooper or Army conscript, trained in many forms of combat, and quite deadly with a blaster, and WEG depicts this quite well in their game stats; Death Star Troopers in d20 are scary, too, shown as level 4 Soldiers in the Rebellion Era Sourcebook!

So GM out there - how do you handle these NPCs? Do you like to have your Stormtroopers with some heroic levels to reinforce the feel of "elite"? (I've heard of some GMs statting their Stormies around 3-5th level!) What about the Army and Navy, or even the Death Star Troopers? For the purposes of challenging the part, how do you typically use them? Has anyone ever done anything unique and given Stormtroopers/Army/Navy a Force Point or some other kind of ace in their sleeve to use against the PCs? Do you have a particular group that is more often than not known as the canon fodder? Do you even bother to remember the other branches, since the Stormtroopers outnumber both the Navy and the Army, and chose to use the more recognizable Stormtrooper?

Personally, I think the d20 Stormtrooper stat blocks work fine. Occasionally, I like to give a Stormy Sergant a level of Solider or Noble or something, but nothing too drastic. I'd never really paid much attention to them before, probably either confusing them with the Navy Troopers or simply assuming them to be weak security guards, but apparently, the Death Star Troopers are the ones that are the best of the best. I really need to start using them somehow in my game.

 

Well, the Imperial Sourcebook by WEG had lots of specialized troopers--Stormtroopers, Snowtroopers, Shadowtroopers, 0-G troopers, Aqua-troopers, etc.

Now, as for upping the challenge: troopers get tougher as they get closer to bad guys. The troops on the remote outposts get the stats provided in the stock book. The one's guarding the bosses get a couple extra D of blaster and dodge, and maybe a skillpoint or two. Elite troopers get up to 6 or 7 D of both, 5D in command and some other skill (Vehicle piloting, gunnery, computers, Tactics, etc) and anywhere from 3 skill point to a forcepoint.

So that's how I dealt with it.

 

I've rarely made posts before but I thought I would chime in on this one. I have always thought that the SW Stormtroopers were named after the Nazi Stormtroopers. These "troops" were not known any superior fighting ability so much as their fanatical devotion to the cause. As the latest SW RPG Saga rulebook says on P. 278 "[Stormtroopers]...are obedient and devoted the Emperor. They cannot be bribed, blackmailed, or seduced..." To place this in more in our world, if a soldier was ordered to kill a whole family in cold blood, he may still do it (depending on the soldier) but he would not like it and may resist the order. A Stormtrooper on the other hand may follow the order without question or hesitation and may feel they are doing a good thing. Put another way, if the Emperor orders your world's population slaughtered, no amount of begging or sights of crying orhpans would stop them. These are not a pretty examples but I'm just trying to explain the difference.

 

That was pretty much the only reason I could see for people being affraid of the TPM battle droids. A good swift kick will break one in half. Their aim is only mediocre. But they have no conscience to appeal to and will methodically kill. Plus they come in numbers.

 

Hell, in RCRB rules a squad could fire as a battery and destroy things...

 

Stormtroopers: Fanatically loyal and driven shock troops
Rebel soldiers: ordinary people who have decided to abandon the safety of conformity and risk their lives to promote ideals. They've trained themselves to be capable combattants.

Would you pit National Guard against Navy Seals or Mossad?

Oh, if I'm feeling really obnoxious, I'll put a sergeant (4D command) in with the squad of stormies so that they can coordinate fire on one member of the party at a time.

 

I'm actually incorporating some D&D 4E concepts into my Saga Edition campaign.

Normally, stormtroopers and other low-level enemies can't hit PCs after a certain point unless they roll a nat 20. Also, the enemies' defenses and hp are so low that the PCs almost always kill them with one hit...almost. It's a real pain when one or two stormtroopers have 2hp because the 3d8 blaster rifle rolled low damage and you have to keep track of that.

The concept of the 4E "minion" is to have an enemy that poses a minor threat to the PCs while only usually needing one action on the part of a PC to dispose of it. So a minion's attack bonuses and defenses are comparable to enemies that are on par with the PCs, while only having 1 hit point and a static damage ammount.

So a stormtrooper minion used against a party of 14th level PCs would have comparable attacks and defenses to a CL 14 enemy, but would only ever deal 12 points of damage on a hit (average for a blaster rifle) and would only take one hit to kill it.

 

To make stormtroopers tougher, in d6 I just added more troops and made them use combined fire because that was easy.

d20 I had a table for troopers with differing levels, never more than +1 or +2.

In both I often used the "get them before he raises the alarm" shtick to make it more challenging for higher levels.

As an aside, I never used the "Stormtroopers can never be bluffed/seduced/etc" as written. Only came up once or twice, but it is just totally unrealistic to me.

 

Now that I've played 4th ed and seen how that minion rule works, I've gotta admit that makes a fair amount of sense. Nice call.

 

OMG! Koohii complements a game system other than d6? lol

 

Hey, I really liked "The Night Life" game system and world, but it went bankrupt and disappeared in the mid 90s, well before WEG had problems.
In fact, for supernatural monster RPGs, The Night Life was a lot more interesting to me than WhiteWolf ever was. Unfortunately, not enough people saw it that way.

Worse, they had a story arc in the adventure books that was supposed to span 3 books, but only the first 2 were ever published.

The system was quick and easy, very similar to WEG except it used D10 & percentile dice, and had tied in with the other lines, "It came from the late, late, late Show" and "ACE Agents/ACE Supers". Each race/species of kin had separate special powers, starting powers, and appropriate limitations. The more you used/abused your power, the more it affected your character. If you slaughtered a bunch of people with your claws, it had a greater effect than if you did it with a knife or a machine gun. If you isolated yourself from the human world, you became less connected with them. If you spent time among humans to maintain connection, you recovered much faster. (Not to mention you had better feeding opportunities).

Plus they had nice grusome monsters.

 

That is a fantastic idea. I've not used or seen minions in a D&D game yet but after reading the rule it fits perfectly with a squad of throw-away enemies. The DMG suggests replacing a single creature with four minions of that level. I think that works fine with SE rules, a CL 1 stormtrooper replaced with four sotrmtrooper minions provides roughly the same actual CL as the single normal stormy but would be much more satisfying for players.

 

I'm not pro-4th at all, but the minion rules work great (only played low levels).

Annoying little **** that you at least have to spend an action on to take care of. Really makes the game more tactical if you are using minis.

When we had a new player we described them as "Stormtroopers" to get the point of cannon fodder across

Edit: Force Unleashed just came out, how does that address them?

 

In universe they are probably super-elite; out of universe they are lovable cannon fodder.