I have to say I love the creativity of my group. I've been taking my crew through the Long Arm of the Hutt, but they've taken it in some fantastic directions. The last time we played, despite the inclusion of combat encounters, not a single blaster was drawn on the part of the players... and they still managed to talk their way through it.

The first encounter was in New Meen with a group of Angu Drombb's thugs. They had just crashed a large piece of construction equipment into the house and were getting ready to take the players' skiff to get a new one.

The party emerges from the house. Our droid politico (he's a chef droid) cuts loose with a scathing tirade, with three successes and a triumph, he inflicts 4 strain on each of the minions. Two of the drunkards just cut and run outright. Now outnumbered, the pilot manages to convince the remaining thugs to surrender (trust me, I gave them upgraded difficulty and setback dice). One runs away, leaving an aqualish thug.

The players then take the thug back to Drombb, but the Outlaw tech manages to produce some detonite using his Utility Belt talent, and rigs up a blast collar for the thug, to help ease along negotiations. With it being a mine site, he successfully scrounged up two more charges of the stuff for future use.

So instead of a shootout at the Cantina, it's a standoff. The politico makes for a great negotiation, but rolls a Despair along with success. The thugs produce Trex who has a hostage of his own (sister of the bounty hunter with a family obligation), so a swap happens instead of a shootout. Plus they discover who their backer is... all without firing a single shot.

Gotta love it. They were quite proud to pull off such an encounter without it getting violent.

Granted, Drombb's thugs are still out there, and the Outlaw tech bluffed that other explosives might be hidden somewhere in the camp (they aren't). So they have a few days of peace coming to them.

I'll be curious to see what happens next.

The party emerges from the house. Our droid politico (he's a chef droid) cuts loose with a scathing tirade, with three successes and a triumph, he inflicts 4 strain on each of the minions. Two of the drunkards just cut and run outright.

Great story. I love it when parties can solve problems in ways other than fighting.

However, it wonder if you got the Scathing Tirade rules a bit wrong, or if the Politico rolled a ton of Advantages or the GM allowed the Triumph to deal the extra damage. Tirade as written is 1 target per success, only 1 strain each. Additional strain is delt by 1 Advantage per target per point of strain. If you roll 2 success and 1 advantage, you can do 2 strain to 1 target and 1 strain. In your example, it seems like there were at least 3 minions in the group. 3 success would be able to target all 3. In order to do 4 strain to each, the player would've had to roll 9 advantages, which wern't mentioned in the example.

I hope this helps. Keep up the good fight and keep figuring out how to finish combat without combat. Good stuff.

The tirade rolled a triumph, which I may have over-allowed in terms of dealing additional strain to the targets.

Since they were a minion group, it made for a better story anyway. I am still trying to get my head around how Scathing Tirade works. Of course, there is the law of diminishing returns as well. This particular player tends to roll really well or really poorly. Give him a yellow dice, and you can almost guarantee a triumph...

Anyway, the triumph "counted" for three additional advantage plus one additional success on a minion group of 4 (so all 4 minions lost 1 strain each, which counted towards the total pool). However, I though that each advantage could be applied to each target. My bad.

So in this case, yes I blew it, but even then 7 total strain would have been delivered to a very low-powered minion group instead of the 12 I let slide. I'll keep that in mind for next time. Of course next time, he may end up rolling two triumphs.

I appreciate the feedback.

I would allow a Triumph to get rid of one minion in the group, no issues. So that's worth like 5 damage right there.

So effectively 8 total damage delivered to the group with that triumph. That's fair. I think next time with a Scathing tirade to be that effective, perhaps a fear check would be appropriate.

Also, given that is was a scathing tirade, even though strain = wounds for minions, I basically had the minions abandon their posts when their wounds threshhold was reached. Especially since blasters were all kept in their holsters.

With those results, and that group of minions, it's very easy to say you get the same results with that Triumph. No problems there at all. I'd say that the net result was that you played it right.

There is another thread around here where we're discussing Tirade and dealing extra damage with Successes. Apparently in the Coercion skill they talk about being able to spend two successes for extra damage. I have a question in to the developers about it and I'll post the response when I get it in the developer answer thread.