Role-playing Games Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for gamemasters and players of tabletop, paper-and-pencil role-playing games. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Could a lightsaber deflect a laser blast from a non-personal source like a TIE Fighter, a Scout Walker, or even a Turbo Laser such as the ones on the surface of the Death Star (RAW)?
It seems like this would be covered by the Scaling rules (personal scale, vehicle scale, etc..) but I can't seem to find it.
The SW d6 2nd ed. RAW (in my reading :)) says, under "Lightsaber combat" (p.151) that a Jedi may use lightsaber combat to parry blaster bolts. (Bold emphasis mine.)
From this it seems to follow that you can parry any weapon that shoots blaster bolts, ie. has and is firing at you some kind of blasters.
I'd allow parrying the shots of the Scout Walker, but none of the other examples you listed, since those aren't using blasters for the firing: they use laser cannons etc.
Sure, blaster is not too strictly defined in the SW lore (afaik, but I may be wrong) - however, for a RAW answer, I'd go for the above. A weapon that explicitly has "blaster" in its name can be parried. Others that don't, simply can't be.
First of all, there's no RAW in the rulebook on this. Then;
It seems plausible to assume that the lightsaber can easily deflect up to 5D (its listed damage) of personal scale blaster bolts. Use the scaling rules to find out the equivalent blasters of larger scale. That means it can deflect up to 3D speeder scale and 1D walker scale blasters. (Note that all of the vehicle weapons in the rulebook are bigger than that).
Also it makes sense to assume that the damage of a single bolt from repeater weapons are 1D-2D less than the listed damage for the weapon. So our lightsaber could still handle a flurry of bolts from a 7D (personal scale) repeating blaster, if the Jedi is skilled enough to intercept them all. (Maybe add that 1-2D to the difficulty?)
Also keep in mind that in the SW universe, weapons called laser cannons are still blasters firing bolts of hot plasma (lasers are used to heat the plasma in the chamber), and can be theoretically deflected by a (large enough) lightsaber.
Lightsabers contain huge amounts of power. (ie cutting through blast doors). I believe that the lightsaber itself is capable of handling anything up to about an AT-AT cannon. The real problem with that is that it would require an immense amount of strength. So, if the force user could either roll an extremely high strength roll (with or without enhance attribute), or roll a very high sense total (to deflect the bolt just right in order to minimize the force required for deflection), I think that they could deflect almost almost all vehicle and starfighter scale weapons.
