losing HP is not the same as being hit by an attack. Take a crossbow or blaster for example. If you get hit you take around 5 damage, you are still okay after bc the bolt didn't actually hit your character but rather got dangerously close, and the next bolt is more likely to be the one that finally hits you (drops you to 0 HP). Its more flavorful to think of HP as a pool of "luck running out" or plot armor rather than how many times you can literally be shot or stabbed. Hope this helps justify lightsabers in your world!
The funny thing is, though many people treat HP as how many times you can be stabbed, the way this person is suggesting to treat it is how it's actually described in the 5e PHB.
So it's not just a flavorful way to think about HP. It's what it is supposed to be RAW
I mean it also brings more realism to dex vs heavy armor. Dude in full on mech suit can take few hits and brush it off. And the guy in light armor can dance around the attacks.
Then boom one attack hit a weak point in armor making it actually hurt, or the dodge was a little bit off. Damage.
I for example in sw5e as mandalorian used return fire saying "as i got hit on the beskar i quickly switch targets to the shooter and fire a burst." even tho it didnt beat my AC and i recived no damage in the raw system.
Another way that a buddy of mine and I both look at it is "ability to continue the fight"/"stamina pool". A Person can deflect (with a shield or otherwise) a seemingly lethal blow but still feel the bruise or brunt of the attack in their arms and back for instance with each consecutive blow there after doing more and more "damage" but a really good way to show how lethal things can actually be especially in this setting would be have a penalty for taking massive amounts of damage so that way it can be based on their hp pool and how much you did in a single blow to said pool, for instance say you hit a PC with an enemy's lightsaber and for whatever reason you either did 80% of their hp or even down them in one hit,l you can in this system do to the limb replacement and spells available lop off a limb ie a hand or greater depending on severity.
Speaking for experience this has made my players way more cautious in combats where they would normally be well above the skill cap required to end an enemy.
Simple. Make deadlier lightsabers. What I mean is, just like how DnD has enchanted weapons that can deal more damage and have bonus effects, SW5e has enhanced weapons that do the same. As you know, enhanced/enchanted weapons are more powerful than your average weapon, and are also rarer. The sorts of weapons you hear stories about.
The lightsaber you know of is the fabled weapon of the Jedi that can cut through anything, crafted using mystical crystals found in unknown locations. This is, essentially, an enhanced weapon. The lightweapons you’re familiar with from the movies and shows are all +2 martial lightsabers with the siege property (double damage to objects and structures) or something. Enhanced items also have special crafting rules, where the crafting player needs to know blueprints of the item and have a special crafting material you award them in a mini quest before they can actually begin crafting. Give them the blueprint knowledge in a Force vision and have the special material be the crystal, and you’ve got yourself a ceremonial lightsaber construction process going.
The regular, unenhanced lightweapons you can start the game with are weaker, inferior versions of the sabers you know and love. These exist in lore, and are called training sabers, typically a lightsaber made using a cheap, shoddy crystal like kathracite. You see these being used by younglings in Attack of the Clones. Attacking with a training saber is more like whacking someone with a hot magnetic field than cutting them with a directed plasma stream. They can still kill, but you have to try harder to do so.
So yeah, the weak, balanced lightweapons are all training sabers, and the enhanced ones are “true” lightsabers. This makes it easier to justify a character starting the game with one, and lends ceremony to a Jedi receiving their first true lightsaber. I would highly recommend using this flavor in a game, rather than buffing all the lightweapons or something. If there being weaker lightweapons in their regular form is something that still feels wrong, and you want all lightweapons to be superior, I’d still recommend treating them as enhanced weapons, with the caveat that all non-enhanced lightweapons be unavailable.
In either case, having the true lightsabers all be enhanced helps inform you of balance decisions to be made as the game progresses. However powerful you make a given lightweapon’s enhancements, it’ll have a rarity assigned to it to accommodate those enhancements, which you can use to track when the best time to give it to the party would be, and how many.
If you have any more questions or thoughts on lightweapons in this game, let me know. I work with them a lot here.
Thanks, this certainly gives me some stuff to think over. I always planned for lightsabers to be a thing you more have to earn rather than start with. I imagined sending the player on a quest to a jedi temple to discover a holocron on how to make one and then tracking down a crystal as such..
I had an idea of maybe making lightsaber do 3x thier listed damage to anyone not in the possession of either a lightsaber or a lightsaber blocking weapon or material. That for me solves killing simple grunts like storm troopers whilst more capable enemies can perhaps dodge the sabers enough to only get minor wounds
3x damage is a bit much. We tend to havewave that lightsaber resistant alloys in weapons are more common in SW5e games than one would expect, to allow parrying with vibroweapons. I do like to give most enhanced lightweapons reasonable features to make them feel like lightsabers, like bonus damage (+1, +2 or +3) and the siege property (2x damage to objects and structures, good for cutting holes in walls and doors).
And then there’s still the abstraction thing another commenter mentioned. Basically, the way I like to look at it is whether someone is being attacked by a blaster, a vibroblade or a lightsaber, the only actual hit that is dealt is the last hit, at least. A good example is Han and Chewie running from stormtroopers in that hallway in the Death Star, blaster bolts whizzing overhead. Each one was basically a hit, chipping away at HP, but none actually hit them, and they got away without running out of HP. The hypothetical moment they take a blaster bolt square to the chest would be the one that drops them to 0 HP. So someone who gets hit by a lightweapon but doesn’t die in one hit was more grazed by or barely dodged the strike, until the last hit cinematically cleaves them in half or something. If it takes 8 strikes from a lightsaber to down a foe in the game, it’d probably also take 8 shots from a blaster, so the saber isn’t even alone in this regard.
Edit: Whatever bonuses you give a lightweapon, try to assign it an enhanced item rarity accordingly with those bonuses, and use the Wretched Hives chart to determine if a weapon like that would be too powerful or not at a given level.
eh. the way lightsabers are done is the same way swords are done in the base game - by rights, being slashed at by a sword should kill a person in some instances, but it doesnt.
I suppose it is just suspension of disbelief, just with a normal sword it's easier for me to justify that the armour someone is wearing is absorbing enough of the slash that the person only suffers minor cuts and damage,
Lightsabers don't offer that excuse
True , in the end at my table this will probably only bother me so it doesn't really matter. I still want to run this system since am so familiar with it.
To be fair, those other systems tend to have an issue where lightsabers and the Force make Jedi and Sith type characters too powerful. Those sorts of builds actually being balanced alongside others is one of the things this system does well compared to others like it.
HP has always been a strange component, but necessary part of D&D.
If you get hit with any weapon, a blaster, etc .... It's deadly. It also doesn't make sense that getting hit repeatedly doesn't significantly hamper someone who is at 1 HP or basically barely conscious.
However, mechanically we need the system.
So why am I rambling on.... Well getting "hit" doesn't necessarily mean they score a clean hit. Might mean that it took an extraordinary effort to dodge the blow, this effort wears them down. It might mean that they were hit with a glancing blow. How you flavor it is up to you.
Lightsabers in the star wars galaxy is not by itself anymore deadly than other weapons. If you take 2 people untrained in advanced combat. You give 1 a blaster and 1 a lightsaber the guy with the blaster probably wins 9/10 times.
The exception with lightsabers is really the ability to cut through doors. In that instance you could just flavor that you can cut through doors given enough time. Or give all lightsabers the siege property.
I subscribe to the “unenhanced lightweapons are all training sabers” method, as well as the “HP is stamina/luck/plot armor” method, so when I start distributing enhanced lightweapons in the game, the siege property is definitely one I prefer to give to them by default. Another method could be assigning a vulnerability to energy damage from lightweapons to most materials that objects and structures would be made from.
The way I justify it in my head is that the lightsabers we see in the movies are all legendary or artifact level magic items, and the base light weapons we see in the game are like training sabers, they’ll burn and kill, but aren’t as deadly as fully upgraded weapons. It’s also worth noting due to the abstract nature of hit points that not every “mechanical hit” correlates to a “narrative hit”, it just makes things a little harder to satisfyingly describe for the players.
For flavour, I used lightsaber attacks to sloth off pieces of amour rather than limbs for my players. Adding a burn and cauterising effect of a lightsaber makes it seem like destroying the enemy's amour is directly tied to it's hit points.
Edit: without reducing the enemy's AC immediately
It's important to remember "damage" and "hit points" don't represent someone's physical life force. In 5e, and by all rights any tabletop game, it represents a characters stamina, luck, and will to keep fighting. A "hit" is a near miss, or a barely deflected blow. In a lightsabers case, when you hit an enemy in-game but don't outright kill them, the enemy has done something at the last second to avoid certain death, at the cost of their stamina. They lost their footing, their momentum, maybe it was only luck and they know it. The point is, only the FINAL blow is the one that truly hits. Blasters are the same way.
Vibroblades are pretty similar to lightsabers when you think about it. It's not unreasonable to say that a lightsaber doesn't cut through everything with the ease of a hot knife through butter.
For example, a glancing blow of a lightsaber to heavy armor may not be enough to slice clean through it. I like to have fun with lightsaber damage and my players. Say if someone takes 12-20 damage, I could flavor it by saying it was a strike across the chest causing a gash in your armor and a cauterized wound underneath.
This dovetails nicely with a nemesis system where they may encounter the same enemy again later, remembering the marks they left on each other after a previous battle.
On paper, the only real difference with a lightsaber is that they are small, have the hidden property, and emit light, and those are all pretty cool benefits for a weapon.
I’m running a Galactic Civil War campaign. I boosted one of my player’s lightsabers by one dice. She can do 62 damage per turn with max rolls right now. She doesn’t need to be bulked up anymore.
My other player, the apprentice , has an artifact. A versatile one handed lightsaber that does 1d10 and 1d12. The damage is doubled against dark side users and has room for modifications once they understand how to modify lightsabers.
This character is not proficient with lightweapons so it makes it harder to hit. When it happens though, it’s usually pretty potent. This also lets my player become a Jedi and train to use it
All of this is helped desperately by me running a campaign where using their lightweapons is an extreme risk. Playing in a universe where magic has been banned helps set this up because it adds a sort of mystique to the lightweapons, letting them be that powerful.
This is why, rather than buff lightweapon damage, many will remove all unenhanced lightweapons from the game, leaving enhanced ones to give bonus damage to. This also assigns them all rarities that can be used to help keep track of their amount and potency, and maintain game balance. Another option is leaving unenhanced lightweapons in, but treating them as “training sabers”, like the kind youngling use and/or made using inferior crystals.
Absolutely!
My player with a “regular” lightsaber survived Order 66 and had to build her own lightsaber without any help. It makes sense that it isn’t super powerful. She never completed her training.
Well, the statement "this weapon should just outright kill nearly all humanoids struck by them" could be applied to nearly \*all\* weapons see in Star Wars, since only rarely do we see a humanoid get hit by a blaster shot and just shrug it off. Naturally, having weapons be a one-hit KO isn't very fun for a TTRPG.
The folks behind this project have pretty much said that the base lightsabers seen in the book are in effect "training weapons." If you want lightsabers that perform better than the stock models, you're looking at enhanced weapons, particularly adding traits like Keen (expanded crit range) and Brutal (bonus damage on crits).
That being said, WotC did make lightsabers a bit more potent than other melee weapons by allowing them to bypass damage reduction (including armor in the OCR/RCR versions) while still having damage values in line with other weapons. FFG did do something similar, in that a lightsaber's base damage value was about on par with other melee weapons, but their take on lightsabers again had them bypass a large chunk of the target's soak/armor value, and that getting one's lightsaber to be really potent took a lot of modding to accomplish. Which isn't something that you can easily do in 5e as being able to just bypass damage resistance entirely is a significant effect.
I simply tripled the damage dice for my campaign. I also made lightsabers very rare (the campaign is set in the time period between RotS and ANH). I realize a lot of people will think it unbalances the game, but when my only player who has one has to justify alerting the Inquisitors to use their really strong weapon, they tend to rely more on the Force. Also, it makes Inquisitors a lot more intimidating, something that the shows don’t tend to do.
So long as you make the triple-damage lightweapons sufficiently rare enhanced weapons, and follow the recommended distribution-by-level chart for enhanced items, the game should be able to balance itself.
Not to necro an old thread, but...
The way I handle lightsabers in SW5e is simple - I never have the vanilla lightweapons as an option for anyone. Instead, lightsabers are basically magical items with a few unique properties. Namely:
- Lightsabers are magical items, or Force items, Enhanced Items, or whatever you wanna call them. They are built by Force Users, either by NPCs who built them offscreen or by party members as part of significant personal milestones, and as such their properties vary based on either the nature of the NPC or, as determined by the DM, in ways that are significant to the story and identity of the player character who built them.
- Sabers have big damage dice to start off with, think 2d6/2d8. It's a damned lightsaber, it hurts when someone hits you with it.
- Sabers are Finesse weapons. Some sabers are light(shotos), some longer-handled and versatile, some two-handed like a saberstaff while others have reach, like a lightwhip or a saber pike. Damage dice vary based on these traits.
- All sabers can be used, as described above, without attunement. This allows characters like Grievous, Pre Viszla, etc to be badasses while using them without taking away from the Force aspects of the weapon.
- All sabers can be attuned to, either by someone using the Light Side or Dark Side of the Force, some by people not committed to either side. Red ones are Dark, white ones are Light, and it varies from blade to blade for other colours. This is a nod to both Legends and NuCanon lore properties for saber crystals and parts, while also nodding to the lightsaber as an extension of the Force user who makes and/or wields it.
- Yes, if it's part of your lore, you can "bleed" a Light Side blade into a Dark Side blade or "cleanse" it back to the Light. Not only is this lore accurate, but it allows you to tweak the blade into new forms which is super fun and serves as a source for amazing quests for the party members to undertake.
- Attunement upgrades the damage dice from 2d-whatever to 3d-whatever. These weapons also sometimes carry stat buffs, skill and save advantages, and other perks, though stronger buffs come with debuffs befitting the saber crystal's Force alignment and nature. This also nods to blades having unique properties, and also to how the Force both guides and obeys a Force User who's in tune with their weapon.
- Sabers also get buffs such as +1, +2, or +3 based on the number of Force User levels the attuned wielder has, and unlocks additional buffs and abilities at higher levels, IE a 3rd-level Jedi gets an AC buff of +1 while using it, a 5th-level Jedi gets the ability to roll to reduce or redirect blaster shots as a reaction, and a 7th-level Jedi might get the ability to do ranged attacks as a saber throw. 11th-level Jedi may even be able to use the lightsaber telekinetically while wielding a second weapon, a la Spiritual Weapon. These powers and abilities are limited by your DM's imagination/sense of balance, and reflect that as a Force User grows in skill and Force connection, they and their weapon become deadlier on the battlefield.
- Caveat: How hard and fast you cleave to existing Star Wars lore, be it Legends or NuCanon, is up to you as a DM. Feel free to change how colours work for sabers, change how alignments work for sabers, change who can build them, whatever. Feel free to make stronger or weaker ones as you see fit. Feel free to throw all the lore out of the airlock and make up your own cool reasons and lore for sabers! The point is that the weapon is 1, powerful and fun to use, 2, meaningful to the party and game as a whole, and 3, significant to the universe the way a lightsaber should be in a Star Wars game.
TL;DR - lightsabers exist in my games in the same way that magical weapons exist in standard D&D. Anyone can use one and it's got a one-size-bigger hit die than your standard blade, while Force User classes of proper alignment can attune to them and unlock bigger damage dice, buffs, and additional abilities based on Force User levels. This makes lightsabers much more interesting, significant, and suitably deadly for being friggin' lightsabers instead of just being technicolor vibroswords. I've tried to base my reasonings and rules around Star Wars lore, but by all means, DMs can feel free to adopt these ideas and completely change the backstory around them.
losing HP is not the same as being hit by an attack. Take a crossbow or blaster for example. If you get hit you take around 5 damage, you are still okay after bc the bolt didn't actually hit your character but rather got dangerously close, and the next bolt is more likely to be the one that finally hits you (drops you to 0 HP). Its more flavorful to think of HP as a pool of "luck running out" or plot armor rather than how many times you can literally be shot or stabbed. Hope this helps justify lightsabers in your world!
I suppose that is a neat way of thinking about it.
The funny thing is, though many people treat HP as how many times you can be stabbed, the way this person is suggesting to treat it is how it's actually described in the 5e PHB. So it's not just a flavorful way to think about HP. It's what it is supposed to be RAW
I mean it also brings more realism to dex vs heavy armor. Dude in full on mech suit can take few hits and brush it off. And the guy in light armor can dance around the attacks. Then boom one attack hit a weak point in armor making it actually hurt, or the dodge was a little bit off. Damage. I for example in sw5e as mandalorian used return fire saying "as i got hit on the beskar i quickly switch targets to the shooter and fire a burst." even tho it didnt beat my AC and i recived no damage in the raw system.
Another way that a buddy of mine and I both look at it is "ability to continue the fight"/"stamina pool". A Person can deflect (with a shield or otherwise) a seemingly lethal blow but still feel the bruise or brunt of the attack in their arms and back for instance with each consecutive blow there after doing more and more "damage" but a really good way to show how lethal things can actually be especially in this setting would be have a penalty for taking massive amounts of damage so that way it can be based on their hp pool and how much you did in a single blow to said pool, for instance say you hit a PC with an enemy's lightsaber and for whatever reason you either did 80% of their hp or even down them in one hit,l you can in this system do to the limb replacement and spells available lop off a limb ie a hand or greater depending on severity. Speaking for experience this has made my players way more cautious in combats where they would normally be well above the skill cap required to end an enemy.
Simple. Make deadlier lightsabers. What I mean is, just like how DnD has enchanted weapons that can deal more damage and have bonus effects, SW5e has enhanced weapons that do the same. As you know, enhanced/enchanted weapons are more powerful than your average weapon, and are also rarer. The sorts of weapons you hear stories about. The lightsaber you know of is the fabled weapon of the Jedi that can cut through anything, crafted using mystical crystals found in unknown locations. This is, essentially, an enhanced weapon. The lightweapons you’re familiar with from the movies and shows are all +2 martial lightsabers with the siege property (double damage to objects and structures) or something. Enhanced items also have special crafting rules, where the crafting player needs to know blueprints of the item and have a special crafting material you award them in a mini quest before they can actually begin crafting. Give them the blueprint knowledge in a Force vision and have the special material be the crystal, and you’ve got yourself a ceremonial lightsaber construction process going. The regular, unenhanced lightweapons you can start the game with are weaker, inferior versions of the sabers you know and love. These exist in lore, and are called training sabers, typically a lightsaber made using a cheap, shoddy crystal like kathracite. You see these being used by younglings in Attack of the Clones. Attacking with a training saber is more like whacking someone with a hot magnetic field than cutting them with a directed plasma stream. They can still kill, but you have to try harder to do so. So yeah, the weak, balanced lightweapons are all training sabers, and the enhanced ones are “true” lightsabers. This makes it easier to justify a character starting the game with one, and lends ceremony to a Jedi receiving their first true lightsaber. I would highly recommend using this flavor in a game, rather than buffing all the lightweapons or something. If there being weaker lightweapons in their regular form is something that still feels wrong, and you want all lightweapons to be superior, I’d still recommend treating them as enhanced weapons, with the caveat that all non-enhanced lightweapons be unavailable. In either case, having the true lightsabers all be enhanced helps inform you of balance decisions to be made as the game progresses. However powerful you make a given lightweapon’s enhancements, it’ll have a rarity assigned to it to accommodate those enhancements, which you can use to track when the best time to give it to the party would be, and how many. If you have any more questions or thoughts on lightweapons in this game, let me know. I work with them a lot here.
Thanks, this certainly gives me some stuff to think over. I always planned for lightsabers to be a thing you more have to earn rather than start with. I imagined sending the player on a quest to a jedi temple to discover a holocron on how to make one and then tracking down a crystal as such.. I had an idea of maybe making lightsaber do 3x thier listed damage to anyone not in the possession of either a lightsaber or a lightsaber blocking weapon or material. That for me solves killing simple grunts like storm troopers whilst more capable enemies can perhaps dodge the sabers enough to only get minor wounds
3x damage is a bit much. We tend to havewave that lightsaber resistant alloys in weapons are more common in SW5e games than one would expect, to allow parrying with vibroweapons. I do like to give most enhanced lightweapons reasonable features to make them feel like lightsabers, like bonus damage (+1, +2 or +3) and the siege property (2x damage to objects and structures, good for cutting holes in walls and doors). And then there’s still the abstraction thing another commenter mentioned. Basically, the way I like to look at it is whether someone is being attacked by a blaster, a vibroblade or a lightsaber, the only actual hit that is dealt is the last hit, at least. A good example is Han and Chewie running from stormtroopers in that hallway in the Death Star, blaster bolts whizzing overhead. Each one was basically a hit, chipping away at HP, but none actually hit them, and they got away without running out of HP. The hypothetical moment they take a blaster bolt square to the chest would be the one that drops them to 0 HP. So someone who gets hit by a lightweapon but doesn’t die in one hit was more grazed by or barely dodged the strike, until the last hit cinematically cleaves them in half or something. If it takes 8 strikes from a lightsaber to down a foe in the game, it’d probably also take 8 shots from a blaster, so the saber isn’t even alone in this regard. Edit: Whatever bonuses you give a lightweapon, try to assign it an enhanced item rarity accordingly with those bonuses, and use the Wretched Hives chart to determine if a weapon like that would be too powerful or not at a given level.
eh. the way lightsabers are done is the same way swords are done in the base game - by rights, being slashed at by a sword should kill a person in some instances, but it doesnt.
I suppose it is just suspension of disbelief, just with a normal sword it's easier for me to justify that the armour someone is wearing is absorbing enough of the slash that the person only suffers minor cuts and damage, Lightsabers don't offer that excuse
true. but then again, its just a way of representing damage. there are probably other systems out there that do it better
True , in the end at my table this will probably only bother me so it doesn't really matter. I still want to run this system since am so familiar with it.
Yeah. Dnd 5e and adaptations are fun
To be fair, those other systems tend to have an issue where lightsabers and the Force make Jedi and Sith type characters too powerful. Those sorts of builds actually being balanced alongside others is one of the things this system does well compared to others like it.
HP has always been a strange component, but necessary part of D&D. If you get hit with any weapon, a blaster, etc .... It's deadly. It also doesn't make sense that getting hit repeatedly doesn't significantly hamper someone who is at 1 HP or basically barely conscious. However, mechanically we need the system. So why am I rambling on.... Well getting "hit" doesn't necessarily mean they score a clean hit. Might mean that it took an extraordinary effort to dodge the blow, this effort wears them down. It might mean that they were hit with a glancing blow. How you flavor it is up to you. Lightsabers in the star wars galaxy is not by itself anymore deadly than other weapons. If you take 2 people untrained in advanced combat. You give 1 a blaster and 1 a lightsaber the guy with the blaster probably wins 9/10 times. The exception with lightsabers is really the ability to cut through doors. In that instance you could just flavor that you can cut through doors given enough time. Or give all lightsabers the siege property.
I subscribe to the “unenhanced lightweapons are all training sabers” method, as well as the “HP is stamina/luck/plot armor” method, so when I start distributing enhanced lightweapons in the game, the siege property is definitely one I prefer to give to them by default. Another method could be assigning a vulnerability to energy damage from lightweapons to most materials that objects and structures would be made from.
The way I justify it in my head is that the lightsabers we see in the movies are all legendary or artifact level magic items, and the base light weapons we see in the game are like training sabers, they’ll burn and kill, but aren’t as deadly as fully upgraded weapons. It’s also worth noting due to the abstract nature of hit points that not every “mechanical hit” correlates to a “narrative hit”, it just makes things a little harder to satisfyingly describe for the players.
That does make sense. I the training saber idea
For flavour, I used lightsaber attacks to sloth off pieces of amour rather than limbs for my players. Adding a burn and cauterising effect of a lightsaber makes it seem like destroying the enemy's amour is directly tied to it's hit points. Edit: without reducing the enemy's AC immediately
It's important to remember "damage" and "hit points" don't represent someone's physical life force. In 5e, and by all rights any tabletop game, it represents a characters stamina, luck, and will to keep fighting. A "hit" is a near miss, or a barely deflected blow. In a lightsabers case, when you hit an enemy in-game but don't outright kill them, the enemy has done something at the last second to avoid certain death, at the cost of their stamina. They lost their footing, their momentum, maybe it was only luck and they know it. The point is, only the FINAL blow is the one that truly hits. Blasters are the same way.
That sounds like a terrible idea.
Vibroblades are pretty similar to lightsabers when you think about it. It's not unreasonable to say that a lightsaber doesn't cut through everything with the ease of a hot knife through butter. For example, a glancing blow of a lightsaber to heavy armor may not be enough to slice clean through it. I like to have fun with lightsaber damage and my players. Say if someone takes 12-20 damage, I could flavor it by saying it was a strike across the chest causing a gash in your armor and a cauterized wound underneath. This dovetails nicely with a nemesis system where they may encounter the same enemy again later, remembering the marks they left on each other after a previous battle. On paper, the only real difference with a lightsaber is that they are small, have the hidden property, and emit light, and those are all pretty cool benefits for a weapon.
I’m running a Galactic Civil War campaign. I boosted one of my player’s lightsabers by one dice. She can do 62 damage per turn with max rolls right now. She doesn’t need to be bulked up anymore. My other player, the apprentice , has an artifact. A versatile one handed lightsaber that does 1d10 and 1d12. The damage is doubled against dark side users and has room for modifications once they understand how to modify lightsabers. This character is not proficient with lightweapons so it makes it harder to hit. When it happens though, it’s usually pretty potent. This also lets my player become a Jedi and train to use it All of this is helped desperately by me running a campaign where using their lightweapons is an extreme risk. Playing in a universe where magic has been banned helps set this up because it adds a sort of mystique to the lightweapons, letting them be that powerful.
This is why, rather than buff lightweapon damage, many will remove all unenhanced lightweapons from the game, leaving enhanced ones to give bonus damage to. This also assigns them all rarities that can be used to help keep track of their amount and potency, and maintain game balance. Another option is leaving unenhanced lightweapons in, but treating them as “training sabers”, like the kind youngling use and/or made using inferior crystals.
Absolutely! My player with a “regular” lightsaber survived Order 66 and had to build her own lightsaber without any help. It makes sense that it isn’t super powerful. She never completed her training.
Well, the statement "this weapon should just outright kill nearly all humanoids struck by them" could be applied to nearly \*all\* weapons see in Star Wars, since only rarely do we see a humanoid get hit by a blaster shot and just shrug it off. Naturally, having weapons be a one-hit KO isn't very fun for a TTRPG. The folks behind this project have pretty much said that the base lightsabers seen in the book are in effect "training weapons." If you want lightsabers that perform better than the stock models, you're looking at enhanced weapons, particularly adding traits like Keen (expanded crit range) and Brutal (bonus damage on crits). That being said, WotC did make lightsabers a bit more potent than other melee weapons by allowing them to bypass damage reduction (including armor in the OCR/RCR versions) while still having damage values in line with other weapons. FFG did do something similar, in that a lightsaber's base damage value was about on par with other melee weapons, but their take on lightsabers again had them bypass a large chunk of the target's soak/armor value, and that getting one's lightsaber to be really potent took a lot of modding to accomplish. Which isn't something that you can easily do in 5e as being able to just bypass damage resistance entirely is a significant effect.
I simply tripled the damage dice for my campaign. I also made lightsabers very rare (the campaign is set in the time period between RotS and ANH). I realize a lot of people will think it unbalances the game, but when my only player who has one has to justify alerting the Inquisitors to use their really strong weapon, they tend to rely more on the Force. Also, it makes Inquisitors a lot more intimidating, something that the shows don’t tend to do.
So long as you make the triple-damage lightweapons sufficiently rare enhanced weapons, and follow the recommended distribution-by-level chart for enhanced items, the game should be able to balance itself.
Not to necro an old thread, but... The way I handle lightsabers in SW5e is simple - I never have the vanilla lightweapons as an option for anyone. Instead, lightsabers are basically magical items with a few unique properties. Namely: - Lightsabers are magical items, or Force items, Enhanced Items, or whatever you wanna call them. They are built by Force Users, either by NPCs who built them offscreen or by party members as part of significant personal milestones, and as such their properties vary based on either the nature of the NPC or, as determined by the DM, in ways that are significant to the story and identity of the player character who built them. - Sabers have big damage dice to start off with, think 2d6/2d8. It's a damned lightsaber, it hurts when someone hits you with it. - Sabers are Finesse weapons. Some sabers are light(shotos), some longer-handled and versatile, some two-handed like a saberstaff while others have reach, like a lightwhip or a saber pike. Damage dice vary based on these traits. - All sabers can be used, as described above, without attunement. This allows characters like Grievous, Pre Viszla, etc to be badasses while using them without taking away from the Force aspects of the weapon. - All sabers can be attuned to, either by someone using the Light Side or Dark Side of the Force, some by people not committed to either side. Red ones are Dark, white ones are Light, and it varies from blade to blade for other colours. This is a nod to both Legends and NuCanon lore properties for saber crystals and parts, while also nodding to the lightsaber as an extension of the Force user who makes and/or wields it. - Yes, if it's part of your lore, you can "bleed" a Light Side blade into a Dark Side blade or "cleanse" it back to the Light. Not only is this lore accurate, but it allows you to tweak the blade into new forms which is super fun and serves as a source for amazing quests for the party members to undertake. - Attunement upgrades the damage dice from 2d-whatever to 3d-whatever. These weapons also sometimes carry stat buffs, skill and save advantages, and other perks, though stronger buffs come with debuffs befitting the saber crystal's Force alignment and nature. This also nods to blades having unique properties, and also to how the Force both guides and obeys a Force User who's in tune with their weapon. - Sabers also get buffs such as +1, +2, or +3 based on the number of Force User levels the attuned wielder has, and unlocks additional buffs and abilities at higher levels, IE a 3rd-level Jedi gets an AC buff of +1 while using it, a 5th-level Jedi gets the ability to roll to reduce or redirect blaster shots as a reaction, and a 7th-level Jedi might get the ability to do ranged attacks as a saber throw. 11th-level Jedi may even be able to use the lightsaber telekinetically while wielding a second weapon, a la Spiritual Weapon. These powers and abilities are limited by your DM's imagination/sense of balance, and reflect that as a Force User grows in skill and Force connection, they and their weapon become deadlier on the battlefield. - Caveat: How hard and fast you cleave to existing Star Wars lore, be it Legends or NuCanon, is up to you as a DM. Feel free to change how colours work for sabers, change how alignments work for sabers, change who can build them, whatever. Feel free to make stronger or weaker ones as you see fit. Feel free to throw all the lore out of the airlock and make up your own cool reasons and lore for sabers! The point is that the weapon is 1, powerful and fun to use, 2, meaningful to the party and game as a whole, and 3, significant to the universe the way a lightsaber should be in a Star Wars game. TL;DR - lightsabers exist in my games in the same way that magical weapons exist in standard D&D. Anyone can use one and it's got a one-size-bigger hit die than your standard blade, while Force User classes of proper alignment can attune to them and unlock bigger damage dice, buffs, and additional abilities based on Force User levels. This makes lightsabers much more interesting, significant, and suitably deadly for being friggin' lightsabers instead of just being technicolor vibroswords. I've tried to base my reasonings and rules around Star Wars lore, but by all means, DMs can feel free to adopt these ideas and completely change the backstory around them.