Ship Damage & Roll20

So I am new to this system, going to be running my second game in a few hours and am planning on them doing some ship combat. I understand the majority of it, but I can’t figure it out how you figure out the damage you roll.

Security + Weapon Damage + Scale ?

I am using roll20, and that’s the only combination I can think of that matches the dice that are rolled. So for example Security 5 + Phasy Array 10 + Scale 5. So is that 20 dice rolled?

I am taking the example of a Jem’Hadar Attack ship and when I roll the damage it does : Disruptor Cannons 9 + Security 4 + Scale 3 = 16 dice rolled?

Is that right or is roll20 doing something wrong, should I modify the damage section of those ships?

Think I figured it out, I think the enemy ships the damage is already calculated so that’s why I was getting so many dice rolled for the damage. When I in putted the information from the book to roll20, it just added the Scale and Security on top of the number…

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Yes, with the sheets on Roll20, all you have to do is add the base damage number. The sheet auto-calculates the scale and Security and adds it to the base damage when you click the icon to roll. Same for main characters and support characters. It automatically adds Security to your base damage for the weapon.

Example: Constellation Class ship with Phaser Banks, Security of 3. Scale of 4.
(Scale) 4 + (Security) 3 + (Banks) 1 = 8 Total.

In the sheet, enter 1 into the weapon damage section, and when you hit the roll button, it will roll 8 challenge die.

Example for Main Character: Security 3, Type-2 Phaser or Unarmed Strike.
(Security) 3 + (Phaser) 3 = 6 total.
(Security) 3 + (Unarmed) 1 = 4 total.

Query: How do you use damage for ship-mounted weapons???

In other words, how many 6-sided dice do you roll for say, damage caused by Type X phasers? How much for Type-VI photon torpedoes? How many dice do you roll for damage caused by Quantum Torpedoes? I checked through ALL the books Modiphius ever put out, and I can’t find a table for ANY of these!!! (A Nova Class Starship, for example, has 11 Type Xb phaser arrays, and 2 forward mounted torpedo tubes. Now, Type Xb would cause the same damage as X, but…you get what I’m trying to ask, right?)

The rule system does not go into this much detail — type Xb vs. type X. It is generally assumed that larger ships have more phasers, and ships with higher Security rating have better weapons.

The Klingon book does a better job explaining weapon damage (p. 228). Basically it comes down to this:

  • The base damage of an energy weapon is equal to ship’s Scale + Security (this is the number of Challenge Dice you roll)
    • Banks add 1 dice
    • Cannons add 2 dice, but the range is reduced to Close
    • Arrays don’t add any dice, but you can use the Area or Spread Effects.
  • The base damage of a torpedo weapon is equal to ship’s Security
    • Photon Torpedoes add 3 dice
    • Quantum Torpedoes add 4 dice

So a Nova class ship (Scale 3) with a Security rating of 4 attacking with type Xb phaser arrays would roll 7 Challenge Dice. When attacking with type-VI photon torpedoes, she would roll also roll 7 Challenge Dice.

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THANK YOU!!! (I was more wondering about how much damage the Torpedoes did, and how many phasers could be fired–although for that, I read the answer, that for each additional phaser array fired that happens to have the target in its line-of-sight, you add an additional difficulty, and therefore wouldn’t want to fire more than two phaser arrays at once.) Our torpedo tubes, with older gaming systems–and from every source I could find–lists that we can fire only 4 torpedoes each round. That makes sense, because a smaller ship like ours only carries 55 torpedo casings, of which 15 are science probes, and the remaining 30 are warheads.) In this version of Star Trek, where science and deduction role playing are stressed, the actual number of science probes must be noted; i.e., if you only have ONE Type-9 probe, and it’s launched, the crew would have to configure another one before launching. By the way, our security rating is only a 2. So, we’d be rolling 5 Challenge Dice instead of 7, correct? (We excel at Sensors, so I upped that System from 10 to 12, and our Advanced Sickbay Advantage ups our Medical Dept. to a 4. Everything else is the same as in the book.)

I have a related question (this was incredibly helpful!)

On Roll20 when you attack with a ship it rolls the dice. Is there a simple guide to interpreting the rolls?

Is this for the Effect dice? There’s a table repeated throughout the books and other material, but basically:

1 - 1 damage inflicted
2 - 2 damage inflicted
Delta symbol - 1 damage inflicted plus one effect
0 - 0 damage inflicted

(Incidentally red results don’t mean anything, that’s just a carry-over from the default Roll20 API.)

Just add up the damage and the number of effects, and apply accordingly!

If you’re not good at adding up on the fly (no shame for that), you can modify a trick I learned from Champions back in the day:

  1. count the number of dice
  2. add 1 for every 2 rolled
  3. subtract 1 for ever 0 rolled
  4. count and apply effects

Does that help?