Hi there!

I played the Beginner's Game with some friends and it was a cake walk for them.

The rules say that every critical injury to NPCs means that they are defeated.

We had the situation e.g. in the Cantina that the PCs hit almost every time because only a max of 2 difficulty dice were added to their pool (for medium range). Oskara has two proficiency and two ability dice with her Blaster Carabiner. The chance with even two difficulty dice to score enough success is quite high. Needing only three advantages to trigger a critical injury the chance to score one is also very high.

As a result there was pain and death everywhere, as they (not only Oskara) scored criticals all the time and hit almost every time.

Did I miss something?

Thanks

Endrin

It sounds like you are playing the game correctly. I feel that I should mention that only minions are killed by critical injuries. Rivals and nemesis are not.

That aside, I think the Beginner's Game is meant to be easy. It's not only designed for players and GMs who want to see if Edge of the Empire is the game for them, but also for people brand new to RPGs. I imagine the difficulty was dialed down specifically for those new to Roleplay Games.

Finally, the Core Rules go into more detail on critical hits. In the Core Rules, critical injury results are determined by a d100 roll with modifiers based on talents and weapon qualities. More importantly, most weapons only trigger one critical injury for that attack. If you have enough advantage to trigger a second critical injury, +10 is added to that d100 result.

It's pretty easy to make combat monsters in this game that will mow down baddies in every encounter, but I get the impression that Edge of the Empire does not put a huge emphasis on combat. Not in the same way games like D&D 4e do.

Sounds like the dice rolling was really good!

The purpose of the Beginner Game is to teach the game to beginners. I'm sure that everyone was able to appreciate how effective Oskara is with 4 Agility and 2 ranks in Ranged (Heavy).

Going forward from here, if combat is simply too easy for your PCs, start small and go from there:

1) make sure your baddies are using cover (this can grant 1 ranged defense, or possibly 2 for really good cover)

2) make sure your baddies' dice pools are up to snuff. If Oskara is rolling 4, these guys should be rolling 3 at least.

3) increase the range of the encounters so Oskara has to move in closer to hit bad guys, and make tactical choices that involve either staying in cover or shooting after using a maneuver to move.

4) have a baddie roll 3 Advantage against Oskara and disarm her. Or target her gun with a maneuver and 2 setbacks. Make her use a backup weapon.

5) engage her with a big bad melee dude. Her difficulty to hit will be Hard (3 purples), while he's only rolling against an Average difficulty. Then have your melee dude use his 2 Advantage to critically injure Oskar.

Thank you for your replies and advice. I'm kind of used to that enemies are strong enough just by stats and not making them more of a challenge by their tactical behaviour. Understanding that this is more necessary in EotE could give our game more diversity, so these are good suggestions. Thanks!

My mostly right newbie players played narratively smart, which translated into boost dice at pivotal rolls which they aced and circumvented what could have been difficult encounters (the circumventing was indicated in the adventure book) and got creative beyond that... spent advantage in the spaceport control terminal hacking to put set back dice on anyone else who would have tried to access the doors/docking clamps on the docking bay... stormtroopers couldn't even get into the bay before they were ready to take off and had the hyper matter reactor igniter installed. And for good measure they wiped out the stormtroopers with the ships guns