I was running an endboss solo encounter for my group, a pirate captain who felt the treasure they were after really belonged to him.

I set up a three stage encounter with him using stealth, then melee weapons with it ending with him displaying some force powers to really give them a challenge.

after two rounds, one of the players crits him and through dual wielding and specialization tree stuff adds 100 to his crit roll, killing the endboss in one hit and ending the encounter I'd taken some time setting up.

Some of this is my fault in that an oversight on my part allowed this player to get crit 1 on both of his enhanced vibroswords. A couple of ridiculously high rolls by their weapons mechanic gave them extra hardpoints to put all of the extra modifiers on. I used some destiny points and other stuff to keep the boss from dying so he could at least try to use some of the force powers, but he was easily killed by the next hit before he could act.

I don't begrudge my players the kill, I wanted them to kill him, that was the point of the encounter, but them killing him this easily, and in a way that skipped most of the encounter annoys me a bit. I could be a jerk and just break his sword the next time he rolls a despair, but that feels a bit cheap. I don't mind him one hitting minions or even a couple of rivals, if they're important enough later I can always resurrect or whatever, but if I'm setting up an elaborate bossfight, I'd like it to take them a bit longer.

Any tips you guys might give me?

I know this opinion will be unpopular but I'd probably just fiat his not-death somehow (and use Destiny), cause a distraction that would allow the battle to progress to the next stage. Perhaps minions or an environmental thing or something. If he was a Force user he probably would have had the Sense tree to double-upgrade incoming attacks on top of ranks of Adversary.

I wouldn't have let the players fight him alone. If he's that big of a deal, he'd have a couple groups of minion support at least, possibly with a lieutenant (Rival) or two as well. Just depending on the situation.

But, well, this game has more than enough tricks to make any dedicated combatant pretty OP. Melee looks like the bigger offender til you remember Auto-Fire and disruptors.

Solo encounters almost never work out like you plan, as anyone whose seen the Power Rangers will attest. There are just too many chances for a party to make a lucky roll. It's not just in EotE, but pretty much every RPG.

It's best just to forget about solo-bad-guy fights as it will only end in disappointment. Either yours or your players (when their fairly rolled kill gets taken away).

Remember, Luke one-hit-killed the Death Star.

Han one-hit-killed Boba Fett

Vader one-hit-killed the Emperor

There's a lot of possibilities depending on what you were doing...

Mechanically there's a few options like multiple ranks in Defensive Stance, defensive weapons and armor.

Tactically it sounds like there's more you could have done that would have made a difference too.

Moving in early and using a weapon with the sunder quality against sword man could be used to remove at least one ubersword from play. (never underestimate Sunder as a great way to soften up a player without resorting to pounding him with a meat tenderizer).

Using something like Crippling Blow then just backing up to short each turn would keep sword man moving, and sucking strain each time.

As Ksha have said more environmental effects or additional opponents always changes things.

Also was the guy's force powers all that important? I mean it's cool that he had em, but did you add them so he could be more cool and forcey, or were they an intentional part of the design that had some kind of synergy with other elements?

This is sort of the whole challenge of encounter design: taking your "goal" of the battle and translating that into an interactive event.

So doing it again (and making a lot of assumptions)...

Start the encounter with the pirate blowing a hole in another section of the ship. Players must make an Athletics check. Failure means sucked back to Short Range, +2 Threat makes it medium. All actions take +2 setback from rushing wind until the breach is mitigated. Since he's a Solo, the Captain would have a very unusually high WT, or Soak.

The Pirate Captain stands ready, taking cover and activating Defensive Stance if the players are at Short Range or longer. If the players are all together, toss a stun grenade at them too going for some strain damage and disorient.

On his first attack against Sword Man the Captain uses a vibro axe, hoping to score a Sunder and remove a sword from play or generate enough Adv to for the target to drop a weapon.

The Captain uses Dodge if things get dicey

Second Attack against Sword Man the Captain goes for a crippling blow, and uses his Maneuver to take a step back, putting Sword Man at short range. Any left over Adv is used to regenerate Strain for more use of dodge.

That's at least the first few moves. I'd probably look at the players skills and make a few test rolls just to see if the plan looks like it'll hold up. But you can go from there...

New boss talent: Critical Resistant

Critical hits on this character cannot be greater than X+10 for each existing crit.

Run some tests to see what you want X to be. Maybe 50, maybe 30. Base it on how fast you think critical hits will be happening.

Also, by doing this, you WILL be blocking your players ability to get criticals which he has worked for. Because of that, you're going to want to add another character to the boss fight who WILL be vulnerable to criticals and will also pose a big threat (have him engage the crit heavy player with some serious firepower) allowing your crit heavy player to feel like a badass when he takes him down.

If you think this is bad, watch how fast an opponent in a starfighter dies. It doesn't matter too much if they have talents to add Setbacks and to Upgrade difficulty because characters generally succeed at what they set out to do. It only takes one or two hits to destroy any starfighter in the game with medium laser cannons, and if they're Linked it can be even more certain.

@Ghost of man,

Thanks for those, and yeah the force powers were kind of important, he was going to use them to collapse the room where the party was in so they'd have to dodge incoming ceilings and be less able to loot his body for overpowered weapons:)

But yeah I probably could have used the environment a bit more, I just wasn't prepared or expecting him to get killed at that point.

And he was supposed to have a lieutenant, his second in command who had murdered the parents of one of the party members, but a couple of triumph rolls earlier in the adventure got him killed, and they made sure to kill all of the other pirates before going after the captain.

I like the idea of critical resistance and likely would only use that on the really big bossfights where I want to make the players work for it a bit. They're breezing through most of the stuff I throw at them and I wanted to really challenge them here. Luckily most of my campaign is talky stuff or skill challenges with races and heists, and we've had a number of nights without any combat at all. But when things do get to shooting/stabbing they tend to be murder on legs.

I was running an endboss solo encounter for my group, a pirate captain who felt the treasure they were after really belonged to him.

I set up a three stage encounter with him using stealth, then melee weapons with it ending with him displaying some force powers to really give them a challenge.

after two rounds, one of the players crits him and through dual wielding and specialization tree stuff adds 100 to his crit roll, killing the endboss in one hit and ending the encounter I'd taken some time setting up.

Some of this is my fault in that an oversight on my part allowed this player to get crit 1 on both of his enhanced vibroswords. A couple of ridiculously high rolls by their weapons mechanic gave them extra hardpoints to put all of the extra modifiers on. I used some destiny points and other stuff to keep the boss from dying so he could at least try to use some of the force powers, but he was easily killed by the next hit before he could act.

I don't begrudge my players the kill, I wanted them to kill him, that was the point of the encounter, but them killing him this easily, and in a way that skipped most of the encounter annoys me a bit. I could be a jerk and just break his sword the next time he rolls a despair, but that feels a bit cheap. I don't mind him one hitting minions or even a couple of rivals, if they're important enough later I can always resurrect or whatever, but if I'm setting up an elaborate bossfight, I'd like it to take them a bit longer.

Any tips you guys might give me?

Some ranks of Durable to cushion critical rolls.

More adversary dice to eat up spare advantages.

More use of disabling effects like Ensnare or Concussive.

There's always a bigger fish...

One hit kills on bosses make players feel good. Nothing wrong with that really. I have basically one-shotted several end bosses on videogames, and I never feel cheated. It's my payment for building up my skills and saving a lot of good stuff for that fight.

I wouldn't personally have even used Destiny to save the pirate, because that cheapens the sword guys action, and lets the next PC who hits him claim the spotlight that rightfully should have been the sword guys.

As has been said before, Solo fights are just a bad idea in Tabletop games, unless you add in some gimmick that forces the fight to last longer. (A red dragon that flies out of range of the PC's and then dive attacks them with fire, An Aqualish pirate with a shield that needs to be disabled before he can be hurt, etc.)

Making the fights about more than simply killing is the key. Then it won't matter if your sword guy has duel wielded uber swords. If the fight is only about killing the bad guy, you can't be too upset that the guy who is good at killing stuff kills him well.

(Plus, the guy is using melee weapons, which can be thwarted just by blocking movement.)

There's always the (N)PC version of Massive... not that it exists as far as I know, but it's a thought if crits become too easy and start with too high a modifier (i.e. +100 on first crit roll type of thing)... but then you also got Durable which is a nice crit reducing ranked talent, slap on a few of those next time.

This won't fix the issue of course, but they can help with evening the odds - along side a few rivals and minion groups. Also, heavy armour and weaponry on these could help.

Solo encounters almost never work out like you plan, as anyone whose seen the Power Rangers will attest. There are just too many chances for a party to make a lucky roll. It's not just in EotE, but pretty much every RPG.

It's best just to forget about solo-bad-guy fights as it will only end in disappointment. Either yours or your players (when their fairly rolled kill gets taken away).

Remember, Luke one-hit-killed the Death Star.

Han one-hit-killed Boba Fett

Vader one-hit-killed the Emperor

I would only have a single boss intentionally start a fight if it was some sort of monstrous creature (Rancor) or droid (Droideka), anything else would either be too susceptible to focus fire from a group of combat-trained PCs, or its defensive capabilities would be so out of proportion to its appearance as to break immersion.

I've got two serious roleplay parties who both have minimal combat skills, so I can get away with a single powerful Silhouette 1 enemy like a Magnaguard Droid or a Barabel hunter as a "boss fight", but for any group with military-grade weapons or training, much less specialist equipment like heavily modified vibroswords, you'll probably want to put multiple high-level enemies in.

An easy change would be tracking Strain for Rival-level NPCs. This keeps them relevant as PCs get stronger, and gives them the flexibility to interfere with your players' plans. If I have an extra Maneuver or a couple of Advantage/Threat, I generally use it to make my NPCs harder to hit or hurt in some way.

One hit kills on bosses make players feel good. Nothing wrong with that really. I have basically one-shotted several end bosses on videogames, and I never feel cheated. It's my payment for building up my skills and saving a lot of good stuff for that fight.

That's a video game. In a tabletop RPG, there are more people at the table. I'd be a little disappointed if someone just a bit higher in initiative solo'd the whole fight and I had nothing to do. I'd be more annoyed if I was the GM, but then again the GM is in the best position to alter the encounter to drag it out longer.

I wouldn't personally have even used Destiny to save the pirate, because that cheapens the sword guys action, and lets the next PC who hits him claim the spotlight that rightfully should have been the sword guys.

"Rightfully?" Jesus. If a particular player feels like they have the "right" to be the one who lands the killing hit, that player and I are going to need to have a talk about their entitlement issues. I don't even feel bad if combat-focused characters don't get the kill. They get more than their share of glory in RPGs, seriously. And it's likely they've already softened up the enemy.

And he was supposed to have a lieutenant, his second in command who had murdered the parents of one of the party members, but a couple of triumph rolls earlier in the adventure got him killed, and they made sure to kill all of the other pirates before going after the captain.

Eh, they could have killed all the others that they knew about. Doesn't mean they got them all, if a cluster appeared to support their boss!

There's always the (N)PC version of Massive... not that it exists as far as I know, but it's a thought if crits become too easy and start with too high a modifier (i.e. +100 on first crit roll type of thing)... but then you also got Durable which is a nice crit reducing ranked talent, slap on a few of those next time.

This won't fix the issue of course, but they can help with evening the odds - along side a few rivals and minion groups. Also, heavy armour and weaponry on these could help.

I really wish that things like Rancors had Massive. Of course, if Critical ratings were simply modified by Silhouette difference, it would help a bunch.

I would only have a single boss intentionally start a fight if it was some sort of monstrous creature (Rancor) or droid (Droideka), anything else would either be too susceptible to focus fire from a group of combat-trained PCs, or its defensive capabilities would be so out of proportion to its appearance as to break immersion.

If you can score at least 1 point of Damage greater than Soak, then a Critical Hit can kill the Rancor just as easily as a Jawa.

One hit kills on bosses make players feel good. Nothing wrong with that really. I have basically one-shotted several end bosses on videogames, and I never feel cheated. It's my payment for building up my skills and saving a lot of good stuff for that fight.

That's a video game. In a tabletop RPG, there are more people at the table. I'd be a little disappointed if someone just a bit higher in initiative solo'd the whole fight and I had nothing to do. I'd be more annoyed if I was the GM, but then again the GM is in the best position to alter the encounter to drag it out longer.

I wouldn't personally have even used Destiny to save the pirate, because that cheapens the sword guys action, and lets the next PC who hits him claim the spotlight that rightfully should have been the sword guys.

"Rightfully?" Jesus. If a particular player feels like they have the "right" to be the one who lands the killing hit, that player and I are going to need to have a talk about their entitlement issues. I even feel bad if combat-focused characters don't get the kill. They get more than their share of glory in RPGs, seriously. And it's likely they've already softened up the enemy.

And he was supposed to have a lieutenant, his second in command who had murdered the parents of one of the party members, but a couple of triumph rolls earlier in the adventure got him killed, and they made sure to kill all of the other pirates before going after the captain.

Eh, they could have killed all the others that they knew about. Doesn't mean they got them all, if a cluster appeared to support their boss!

Okay, I'm not going to get into an argument with you about my opinion, but I will answer some of the things you mention.

First, gaming since the 70's, so I know the difference between a videogame and a tabletop one. However, there are many similarities, and if you don't see that, I'm not going to try to point them out to you. Especially nowadays, the two mediums are growing closer, learning from one another. Would you seriously say that the Specialization Trees are not straight out of a videogame?

Also, the point about someone a bit higher in Initiative killing the baddie and making you feel bad is invalid in EotE, where the PC's can act in any order THEY choose. You should have asked to go before the Combat Monster PC if you wanted a swing at the baddie. As a player, I always choose to have the combat pros go first, so that they can effectively save the rest of the PC's (who aren't combat characters) butts.

Regardless, the fight in the OP had gone 2 rounds... everyone should have gotten an action.

Yes, "Rightfully". I think you read or interpreted what was originally said completely wrong.

If I make a combat focused character, and then the GM uses fiat to make my really good roll that kills a boss not count and the next guy kills the boss instead, I'll feel a bit cheated. If I make a combat oriented PC, and I don't kill something, that's cool. If the GM cheats me from having some spotlight, that's just lame.

Spotlight time for character specialization is a big thing I focus on as GM. It makes players feel good and have fun with their characters.

The Destiny as described was not used to make the initial attack less effective, it was described as being an excuse for GM fiat after the fact. If I'm reading the original post wrong in this regard, then my mistake, using Destiny to make a roll harder is perfectly reasonable.

You're the GM, you're not god of the table. Look at yourself when talking about entitlement.

If it's wrong that a single combatant goes down easily to a group of opponents, then I don't want to be right.

I don't think this is a video-game mentality, it's a d20 mentality.

In those games, it is expected to have an encounter where everything from a group of 12 to a single enemy can be balanced to give the party a challenge. It's an accepted part of play, and it works for those games.

This is not one of those games.

This game works more like a story. If this were a film or book, a character thinking that they could take down a moderately sized group of PC-types alone without much problem would either seem incredibly bad-ass, or (more likely) crazy. Run this game with that in mind, and you will do fine.

I totally agree with you there Doc.

One of the reasons I dislike running a large group (6 or more PC's) in an RPG is the game becomes less heroic and more like a murder swarm running over everything, unless you always have an unrealistic amount of baddies waiting to shoot at the PC's. (This is of course compensated for if you have only a few combat-centric PC's in the party, and the group is good at RP.)

You using your Nemesis ranks people?

2-3 ranks of that 'can' make a fairly bad guy even worse and minimise the criticals, the other thing to consider if they're fighting someone on home-ground, feel free to add in Black dice for leaky steam pipes, poor visibilty, cover and more importantly: a way out.

People might like where they live, but someone comes chopping down my door with their laser sword, I'm gunna pull back to somewhere more advantageous to my survival... unless I'm insane, confident enough to win or functionally retarded.

If I know you're coming, I'll booby trap hallways with claymore/flecette mines, doors with grenades, mouse droids with thermal detonators built in and of course, a pit in the floor with a Rancor loaded up with viagra and meth. Heck, maybe I've got a mate on retainer with a sniper rifle who can keyhole your face from 500m.

Don't be afraid to be cheap, nasty and a complete bastard.

You using your Nemesis ranks people?

2-3 ranks of that 'can' make a fairly bad guy even worse and minimise the criticals, the other thing to consider if they're fighting someone on home-ground, feel free to add in Black dice for leaky steam pipes, poor visibilty, cover and more importantly: a way out.

People might like where they live, but someone comes chopping down my door with their laser sword, I'm gunna pull back to somewhere more advantageous to my survival... unless I'm insane, confident enough to win or functionally retarded.

If I know you're coming, I'll booby trap hallways with claymore/flecette mines, doors with grenades, mouse droids with thermal detonators built in and of course, a pit in the floor with a Rancor loaded up with viagra and meth. Heck, maybe I've got a mate on retainer with a sniper rifle who can keyhole your face from 500m.

Don't be afraid to be cheap, nasty and a complete bastard.

I'll keep the last line in mind:P

Problem was that this wasn't exactly home turf for the bad guy, both him and the party were on an asteroid filled with a boobytrapped labyrinth behind which was a treasure room, so both the bad guys and the party had to navigate the labyrinth first, which, by way of having walls that moved, proved to be more helpful to the players since they had someone in the control room had hacked the console, since apparently they just shrug off daunting hack checks. Next boss fight I'll give the boss a couple of durable ranks, thanks for that suggestion 2P51 and Jegergryte, and give him some kind of home court advantage like you suggested, MKX.

Thanks for all the advice guys, I try to have a mostly RP campaign, with combat on occasion even being resolved narratively by them bribing or otherwise charming enemies into fighting for them. So when I do big boss fights I kind of want them to be memorable, the things you've said will certainly help with keeping my boss alive long enough for cool **** to happen.

There's always the (N)PC version of Massive... not that it exists as far as I know, but it's a thought if crits become too easy and start with too high a modifier (i.e. +100 on first crit roll type of thing)... but then you also got Durable which is a nice crit reducing ranked talent, slap on a few of those next time.

This won't fix the issue of course, but they can help with evening the odds - along side a few rivals and minion groups. Also, heavy armour and weaponry on these could help.

I really wish that things like Rancors had Massive. Of course, if Critical ratings were simply modified by Silhouette difference, it would help a bunch.

Silhouette could be a good indicator, but then again some larger creatures are fragile, what about calling it Hulking or something along those lines?

I see it as both a special ability for creatures and beasts, but also a quality for armour - I don't think making it a ranked talent is a superb idea.

It basically functions as Massive, but only against character scale weaponry.

Why not simply give the 'end boss' the one signature ability from the hired gün? If hoh want a boss to lst longer, that with nemesis ranks will help.

I had this very thing happen to me just last night. One of the two baddest NPCs in the end fight got the Marauder's modded vibroknife in the eye for a Critical Injury of 161. Instant death. And he still had two ranks in Durable. From now on, any boss-type NPCs I want to keep alive for a while will have 6-8 ranks in Durable, just to make the players work a little.

I actually find it fairly hard to 'scale' encounters in SW so far as well, I've run a couple lately that I don't feel where much of a challenge and I guess that's part of the fact they where literally random. That's kind of the process of figuring out just what PC's can do as much as knowing what NPC's can do I guess and it takes practice.

PC's are fairly tough buggers though, so I'm not too afraid of accidentally 'offing' one of them, the few times a player got decked, they get bundled into the speeder by their crewmates and a week or so later after a bit of surgery/panelbeating, they'll probably be fine.

Minion groups are another thing to look at, half a dozen mook minions blasting away with cheap guns and a sergeant (rival grade opposition) or something equivalent, telling them what to do can pump out some fairly ferocious firepower.

Handy for when you need to dent them on the way in so big-bads can have a chance at fighting back.

Having unconcious PC's wake up in the big bads jail later on just means another adventure

I sometimes think people on these forums forget the players are supposed to win in RPGs.

The players killed the Big Boss way faster and more efficiently than you thought they would. Okay, that is going to happen. I've lost count of the times it's happened in systems far more difficult for the PCs than EotE.

The best thing to do is look to the movies for your examples. In the films, what Big Bad did the PCs ever face down alone?

Answer: None.

The closest thing to a traditional boss fight was the fight against Jabba, and that was against Jabba the Hutt, Boba Fett, and a metric ton of henchmen and minions. I believe EotE works best when you've got a nemesis, a rival or two, and a bunch of minions on the field. A doctor with zero ranks in Ranged-Light and a good blaster at his side can be absolutely lethal if he does nothing more than get a solid check result. A min-maxed combat monster is terrifying.

Don't let your villains go it alone. After all, even Darth Vader made sure the Emperor had his back against Luke (sort of).