My PCs are so skilled that that they can one shot anyone, and fights are like this: I plan out cool villains (four of them), but the PCs kill one earlier, so it is only three. Then they find the villains, beat them all in vigilance, one-shot two with a thermal detonator, shoot the other one, shoot the other one again, and win with the villains never firing a shot. What can I do?

They really shouldn't have their hands on Thermal Detonators too easily and it's a little tough to use one of them except in pretty open settings.

The squad rules in the AoR screen cure this. You simply surround your main antagonist with an appropriately sized layer of hapless minions to act as an ablative meat shield.

Beef up your baddies...more Adversary, higher Soak, higher Wound & Strain Thresholds, more Defense, and/or better dice pools, especially for combat and initiative skills.

just make a mirror group of your player's characters. sick them on them from time to time if they don't get killed. i also made a homebrew rule that if a baddy has adversary 2 or higher, they can't be killed by crits. they have to lose all of their wt before they can be dropped. kinda makes the boss fights a little more fun and less anti-climactic. i will totally allow it to happen sometimes if it is too awesome or too funny.

I would try creating a wider variety of scenarios for your party. Try putting them in a position where they don't have their typical equipment. Have these climatic fights take place in areas where they have to get through customs or other security that won't allow them to bring their weaponry in.

As mentioned above, give the squad(ron) rules a go to protect them, and make sure to give appropriate ranks of adversary. Use Dark Force points as needed. Try adding some wild beast adversaries, perhaps throw a trained rancor in the mix, something that can suffer a fair bit of damage. Or put the baddie in a small walker or airspeeder against the party on foot. Maybe even put the final confrontation in the form of an aerial battle, or an undersea one.

If the PCs have found a foolproof plan to defeat a scenario, you have to expect them to keep trying it until it stops working. Don't throw the same thing at them again. Go way outside the box. It should make things more fun for everyone.

People has said a lot of good stuff here about nemesis battles.

Also use the rule from EotE GM kit that allows Nemesis to use 2 initiative slots per round. That gives the nemesis quite a paunch that is hard to deal with for the PCs.

Also give them really mean weapons like HRB or disintigrators and such.

Also, use fear checks.

Also: Thermal detonators - throwing range: short, blast radius: short.

Just sayin'.

Since Star Wars can be played as fantasy in space, I imagine there are innumerable creatures and races who are unknown to the party. I do not hesitate to use deviantArt and the bestiaries of other RPG games to find creatures that should truly frighten any party of sentient humanoids. Some creatures could have natural access to some force powers. They create environmental effects such as toxic clouds, set things on fire, high stealth and camouflage.

In my experience, the adversaries in the books are not strong enough to stand up to high XP PC's without modification or other assistance. If your players have become that strong and probably a little complacent, it's time to take off the gloves and throw some hard punches.

They could change their tune if 2 squads of 8 stormtroopers started blasting them with stunners.

That said, can they pick a lock? Swim across a beast-infested river? Perhaps you could have them face a villain they can't punch in the face, like an impending tidal wave or something like that.

Also, don't neglect the environment. A fight should happen in a cool place--on a bridge with no handrails over a bottomless shaft (surprisingly common in the SW universe), on a wind-blasted winter plateau, clinging to the edge of a mile-high skyscraper or atop an airspeeder that one of them is piloting through rush hour traffic on Coruscant. Give them environmental penalties.

Having the baddies be ready for them doesn't just mean boost dice to their initiative checks, either. Have them start in cover; or if they know some/all of the party is skilled in melee, on a balcony that will take some work to reach. Have them set traps. Let your BBEG cackle wildly as they walk into what they realize is a trash compactor, and rub his hands together and monologue as they work to get out of it. Have him haughtily declare that he's too good for the likes of them, and leave them to deal with a squad of stormtroopers as he strolls away.

One of the last fights my PC's had was on catwalks over a mine quarry, and I set it up entirely because I went looking for pictures of a mine and a cool pic came up. Because my PC's are all incredibly good at combat, it was a cakewalk, even though they were trapped out in the open against a couple of different minion groups...until one of those groups bolted for the gantried crane and started using the hook on the end as a weapon. Just a throwaway battle, but I suspect it will be one they'll remember--even though mechanically, they absolutely destroyed the opposition.

Personally, beasts are a good way to scare PCs. Ive used two: a 30m tall swamp worm and an undead rancor. The worm size ups soak due to personal vs planetary scaling. The rancor had a special way to be killed. Even using explosives on it only turned its leg to bone but it still shambled against them.

Dont be afraid of big, tough baddies.

Don't rely on combat as being the only thing to challenge your players.

Social encounters, chases with intent to capture, space or vehicle combat. If you aren't mixing up the challenges the players face then they will specialise in what you are giving them.

Thermal Detonators, we see them less frequently in the movies than light sabers, if you ever have a player with one he should be treating it as the last one he may ever see. Finding one should almost be an adventure unto itself, underworld, streetwise and all sorts of negotiations skills would be needed.

Have planetry laws enforced and don't allow the players anything bigger than a blaster. Even in AoR you may have to infiltrate a base or some place guarded by far too many minions, and in order to do that you'll have to have the players leave all heavy and bulky weapons behind.

I said this in a similar thread and I think it applies here as well:

If combat is not a challenge to the PCs then they shouldn't receive much, if any, EXP for defeating their opponents. This isn't to punish Players but to acknowledge a fact, you only really learn much the closer you get to failure. So if your Players are just shooting they're way through problems and don't break a sweat doing it then give them less EXP.

However if they are able to resolve situations differently, without as much combat or through more ingenious ways using other skill sets then reward them with EXP (not necessarily more but more then they should get from a combat cakewalk).

I said this in a similar thread and I think it applies here as well:

If combat is not a challenge to the PCs then they shouldn't receive much, if any, EXP for defeating their opponents. This isn't to punish Players but to acknowledge a fact, you only really learn much the closer you get to failure. So if your Players are just shooting they're way through problems and don't break a sweat doing it then give them less EXP.

However if they are able to resolve situations differently, without as much combat or through more ingenious ways using other skill sets then reward them with EXP (not necessarily more but more then they should get from a combat cakewalk).

When I make my xp payout chart for adventures, there are no check marks for combat. I just view combat as something that everyone contributes to and is a given to the overall session xp. I give out bonuses for good role-playing, specific checks I have set aside, and allowances for monumentally good rolls.

I said this in a similar thread and I think it applies here as well:

If combat is not a challenge to the PCs then they shouldn't receive much, if any, EXP for defeating their opponents. This isn't to punish Players but to acknowledge a fact, you only really learn much the closer you get to failure. So if your Players are just shooting they're way through problems and don't break a sweat doing it then give them less EXP.

However if they are able to resolve situations differently, without as much combat or through more ingenious ways using other skill sets then reward them with EXP (not necessarily more but more then they should get from a combat cakewalk).

When I make my xp payout chart for adventures, there are no check marks for combat. I just view combat as something that everyone contributes to and is a given to the overall session xp. I give out bonuses for good role-playing, specific checks I have set aside, and allowances for monumentally good rolls.

I understand, I generally do the same thing. I'm thinking though that if a group is always blowing through combat because they're so good at it and as a result see every problem as just another nail to pound down, then even if they do technically "solve" the problem by killing everyone have the PCs really grown much? Do they really deserve a lot of EXP for doing what comes easy?

Like I said, it's not to punish the Players, they will after all get other rewards (credits, equipment, etc.) they just shouldn't really gain much EXP because they aren't really challenged much.

Agreed. Although people say their PCs aren't challenged, I wish they would post details of builds, weapons, opposition, etc. It's tough to really assess the details without the details...............

It also might be time to retire those characters, if they have rank 6 in several skills with an attribute of 4 or higher tied to it, and a laundry list of talents.

I think something to consider, is that if you play a lot, or intend for the campaign to last many, many sessions, it is a good idea to drastically reduce the amount of XP to hand out per session, to keep them from becoming overpowered too quickly.

As a GM, another way to combat this phenomena is to vary the challenges widely, away from combat, so that most PCs feel a stronger pull to diversify their skills and XP expenditures across a variety of things, instead of just combat from the start. The more social encounters and skill challenges you present, where failure has real consequences, the long combat should remained balanced and fun for the party.

and win with the villains never firing a shot. What can I do?

Easy - put them in a situation where they cant win by firing a shot. Present them with a task that has to be sorted out with diplomacy or problem solving or planning and careful execution. That crime lord might be the weakest gun on the planet, but he'll have your ship on his back lot and in pieces before the desert tray has made it's rounds if they're not careful.

Keep in mind that Adversaries in Edge of the Empire don't have to follow the same character creation guidelines as the PCs.

The way I look at it, anything my PCs can do, the enemy can do too.

Something else people tend to not think about is that the adversaries listed are really to get a group started, they are the beginning and not the end. It's going to be necessary to tweak things tougher and make adjustments to match threat to character capability as group's progress. More liberal use of Rivals, the second Action option for Nemeses, heavy weapons for minion groups, etc.

Greetings! This is one of the main "problems/chracteristics" of the game. When characters arrive to higher skill levels, they can hit easily anything.

You can apply things like: more Soak, Wounds, Setbacks from Cover/Armor, far ranged combats or/and low visibility, minions, minions, more minions XD

Personally, we are considering to more "base difficulty" like: For each 2 Agility, you add 1 Difficulty to being hit. Its a minor patch but for a standard human with 2 Agi becomes 3 purple (maybe can only be applied to Rivals/Nemeses/PC's).

One of my players chars have 5 Brawn, 5 Weapons Skill and Innate Focus, so, can easily become 5 Y 1 G. In a match he fight against a "pseudo Vader" with above 5 Reds and 3-5 Setbacks on "Defense". He used to get between +1-2 Boosts and used to impact on that monster with above 30 Wounds 3/3 times.

So, add so many things you need and found your own style. Do you wish that heroes "easily" hit your final bosses? Then its ok. If not, add some resources that people posted here or add extra Difficulty from Agi.

Hope I helped

Upgrading the difficulty and/or adding setback dice isn't just about making the player miss the NPC - that's probably not going to happen once they get a certain number of dice. What you have to remember is that the more negative dice are in a pool, the fewer successes and/or advantage the player will roll. And the less he rolls, the more hits it will require to take down the opponent. Give the NPC decent soak (and don't be afraid to add Cortosis Weave to armour if your player has high Pierce rating), increase the wound threshold to 20+ and give several ranks of Durable.

Combat is supposed to be exciting, but generally the players are supposed to win (they are the heroes, after all). You need to make it challenging enough that they don't feel they have a slam-dunk victory on their hands. Once a few of them are up to more than half their wound threshold in damage they're going to start to feel the pressure, especially if they're dealing with NPCs who have the skills and the weapons to cause some serious hurt on a hit. Then a win is going to feel like a relief and an accomplishment, not just another day at the office.

Oh, and pile on a few successive combat encounters without them having enough time to heal completely or recover every last point of strain. That racks up the tension quite nicely.

You have two options: House rule harder enemies. Make adversary 5 a things or something. Or, do what I did, and end the game when they are getting too powerful. I noticed this happening and wrote an ending. Tomorrow we start our second campaign.

if all else fails... reroll.

While XP is something we have got plenty of, credits are the real strong suit. We all have jetpacks, three thermal detonators, and various other gernades, one player has a fletchite launcher, a personal stealth field, heavy battle armor, and a sniper rifle, one player has a carbine, heavy battle armor, and a flamethrower, and one has an HOB Heavy Repeating Blaster and powered armor. The battles are so quick that the tension only lasts for like, two rounds max.