I am slowly gearing up to start GMing an adventure for some friends, I've played some D&D as a PC but this will be my first time DM/GMing.

Today a friend came round and we had a go at creating a character for him, he came up with a pretty cool backstory for a Trandoshan marauder who specialises in brawling.

Having not really read up on hand to hand specifically I had a more detailed look at the rules this evening and became a little confused about how melee/brawl combat is handled with NPC groups.

Primarily in terms of damage dealing and range etc. The way my friend configured their character they are likely to be dealing many crits, do you keep track of those on a per group member basis? how about range and engagement with the group? it feels like NPC groups are easier to understand/handle when ranged combat is the primary way of "interacting"

If they are engaging a minion group, each hit can cause a critical. If there are sufficient Advantages on a roll to cause more criticals than the number of hits a +10 is added for each additional activation. So if you're player were dual wielding a pair of swords, or makes a 2 weapon check for a pair of open hand strikes, they can inflict two critical hits. In the case of a minion group that would kill two outright and then you would determine damage as well and apply that to the remainder.

That's for minion groups where you can impact more than one minion with a single attack. Obviously attacking Rivals and Nemeses is per each target.

Just remember, each individual 'hit' can cause a separate critical roll.

Range in hand to hand combat is the "engaged" range band.