A group of friends and I are looking to start a Star Wars campaign sometime in the next few months. We're looking at EotE and so far, like what we see. As we don't have any experience with the rules in actual game play, I thought I'd post here and get a question we have answered.

How do the rules fare with parties composed of higher level characters? We'd hate to start a campaign only to reach the half way marker and find that there is no longer a credible threat to us enemy wise (short of making everything max'd out). So in essence, we're looking at longevity of the rules. If the rules break down, or get silly like other RPG's after a certain experience point threshold (aka level), we're curious how/when that occurs. I believe I read a comment somewhere (in a review, or post somewhere) that eventually the defenses get so out of hand, no one can be hurt; plus nemesis enemies get to be very easy as players do to much damage.

Again, as my group and I have no real experience playing with these rules, I'm hoping for some more knowledgable people to comment.

The characters tend to become more offensively powerful but not really defensively. There are few means to raise armor and wounds significantly so even base weapons in the hands of minion groups remain a tangible threat.

One beauty of the system too is that even if minions aren't that effective damage-wise, they are still using advantages to pass boost dice to their nemesis leaders or to add setback dice to the PC's rolls. You can also group minions into larger pools so their dice pool is higher, as well as simply add more minion groups. Minions are still very effective, unlike, say, kobolds against level 10 D&D characters.

Rivals and Nemeses can be scaled to whatever threat-level you need.

Yeah, leveling your Threats is simply not a problem in this game. The numbers (Soak, Wounds, Strain, Defense, ranks of Adversary talent, etc) can be set at whatever level you deem appropriate for the game, as can the difficulty of tasks your group needs to perform.

The higher XP level your PCs attain to, the more awesome stuff they can do, but I have never seen the game get to the point where it stops being challenging. The numbers are all entirely up to the GM, so you really can determine how much of a challenge your party has to face at any given time. And the beauty of it is, the more you play with a group of PCs, the more you get a sense of what they can handle (e.g. what they're good/bad at). This allows you to design scenes and encounters that everyone enjoys more and more as play progresses.

At least, that's what I've found to be true in my games.

The best defense is offense in this game, ending the fight quickly. Higher level players will be able to do that more easily but they end up being quite nearly as squishy as even beginning players. They will have a bit more soak and defense, and a few more wounds but that gets eaten up quickly with blaster rifle hits. The way to challenge them is to just insure there are enough target sets to keep them engaged for whatever number of rounds you deem fitting, be they minions/rivals/nemeses.

I'll agree with everything posted so far in this thread. I'm actually enjoying the leveling and that threats can still remain threats. Like it was said above, higher level characters are better at mowing down obsticals but defences only grow so much and threats are still deadly.

To put stuff in a numbers perspective, they cap skills at 5 and Attributes at 6. (There are exceptions to get over this.) So, the offensive dice pool can only grow so big. It's not that hard for a character to start with a 2 skill and 4 stat, so there is room for growth but yet it can take time. Skill points can be bought up with XP, but Attributes can only be bought up with the Dedication talent which is at the bottom of the talent trees. It takes A LOT of XP to max out an Attribute and a long game to max out two.

Talents are really where the fun is. Sure, there are talents that can make a character more deadly, but they can only make you so deadly. (Like others have said, defences only grow so much so that squad of storm troopers who were deadly at the start of the game are still just as deadly later on. They'll just die quicker against leveled characters.) The fun part of talents is that they give characters fun and unique stuff to do. High level characters end up being pretty good, but nothing too game breaking.

Speaking of player defences. Other than armor, the next easiest way to up defences is through talents such as Dodge. The compensating factor on these talents is that there is a cost to the player to use them. Dodge enough times and your Strain begins to suffer. Players have to manage their resources to stay effective, especially after a few fights.

Like all systems, there are places where the rules break down when someone builds a niche character. For example, it is possible to build a character with a super high Soak, which means they take little damage from attacks. The nice part about Star Wars is that it's easy to challenge these characters. Have a mission where they need to talk through the adventure to solve a problem or one in space ships. Throw people out of their comfort zone. Do that enough times and players will start wanting to diversify their abilities.

Another limiting factor is the dice. I love and hate the dice system at the same time for the same reasons. There have been times when I'll roll 5 good dice and get nothing but advantages and fail the roll. Which means that I failed what I was doing, but because of the narritive system I was able to fail in such a way that it didn't hinder us. The flip side is also true. I've seen successes when only one success was rolled against a bunch of threat. So, the player succeded but yet something bad happened. While these results can be frustrating, it's fun and cool when you use them to help build the story.

I don't know if you've ever played other Star Wars games before, but in my experience in the D20 systems was the the Force can get out of hand as characters level. In this system they kept the Force somewhat weak and it takes quite an investment to make it powerful. It takes quite a bit of XP to become good and the rest of your skills and abilitys suffer. Also, since the default setting is just after A New Hope, if the party is throwing around force powers left and right, then the Imperials would be on their path. Everything should get harder because someone, possibly the asmatic man in black, are hunting the force users. There are a lot of great role playing reasons to limit characters to keep them from getting too over powered.

This game is designed to be more on the story telling side than the hack and slash combat side. I'd highly recommend this game if your group is looking for some fun story telling adventures.

There are a lot of great resources on this board for new players. Take a look around and if you have any more questions feel free to ask. While some of the threads may get a little prickly when it comes to "what Star Wars means to me" (which happens with all fandoms as large and popular as Star Wars) all of the threads for helping new players learn the rules and figure out the game have been great.

Wow. This ended up being longer than I thought. I hope this thread helps you out. Welcome to FFG EotE. May the Force be with you.