I've been playing with my group for years, from Dark Heresy 1st ed through Shadowrun 4-5th. After a brief hiatus, we've decided to start up Star Wars - so to get things going, I'm going to run a couple of the premades while we get used to the system.

Assault on Whisper Base

Operation Shadowpoint

Perlemian Haul

Dead in the Water

So, I ask to you more experience players / GMs, any suggestions? I also have a few specific questions.

1) Character creation seems to have them pretty undergeared, if you don't take on additional obligation or spend duty - 500 credits gets you a starched shirt and a butter knife, whereas 3000 credits gets you decent armor, a repeating blaster, and a backpack full of assorted bits. Is it recommended to spend your starting duty, or am I missing something?

2) During the final bits of one of the missions, the players are severely outmatched and outgunned - how do you recommend handling the 60+ NPCs all in a fight at once?

Currently I'm leaning towards just dictating the results narratively (with the players fighting out the "final push") with the amount of allies surving a result of leadership tests / additional defenses procured, but I feel like there's another solution I'm missing.

3) How the heck does rewarding duty work? I listened to the order 66 podcast and still don't quite get it - if duty is rewarded to everyone equally, and the rewards are distributed evenly, if one person spends duty at char gen what incentive is there for anyone else to hold on to some?

1) You're missing the part where base characteristics can only be increased with XP upon character creation. That extra xp can often mean 1 more point on a characteristic. That's one more die you'll be rolling on checks, and by extension a better chance for success.

2)Depends on what's going on. But that's a method.

3) Duty, like obligation, is usually rewarded individually, but its TOTALED as a group. So if you all keep that duty your total duty will start higher and it'll be that much less time until you can cross 100 and get a payday.

1) Personally, I'd give them whatever equipment you feel they need at the start... unless you really want them to be fresh-meat recruits off the boat armed with slugthrower rifles. If they're meant to be part of the Alliance army, they should at least have a basic weapon like a blaster rifle without having to scavenge one from stormtroopers. This isn't a videogame.

2) I handle this stuff narratively - I prefer not to get bogged down in fiddly details and to keep the action moving quickly. But there are also some rules that look okay for squads and formations in 'Onslaught at Arda' and 'Dead In the Water'.

3) What Ghost said. But I threw out keeping track of Duty anyway and just awarded the +2 strain bonus when the selected duty correlated with the adventure at hand

1) It's pretty clear that the designers fully intended for the PCs to start dirt poor, and that they'd have to lower their Duty (or take increased Obligation in EotE) if they wanted a bunch of shiny new toys. However, don't overlook the benefits provided by the Base of Operations option for a group's starting Rebel Resource; that extra 1000 credits can go a very long way, and if following Andy Fischer's suggestion that the PCs should each earn about 5 Duty per session, it won't take very long for them to hit their first Contribution Rank, and thus either pick up more gear (so long as it's Rarity 4 or less) or a starship; thus far, only the YT-1300 from EotE fits within the Rarity no greater than Contribution Rank plus 3. And if your PCs really, really, really want a ship... they can always "liberate" one from the Imps during one of their earlier missions. Or, you can figure that the Alliance arranges for the party to be transported to whichever planet their mission takes them, whether that transport be a Rebel-aligned smuggler dropping them off or simply having booked passage on a no-frills shuttle (much as Anakin and Padme did to reach Naboo in AotC).

2) That's more of a GM thing, and would pretty much require you to revise the module to either stage the NPCs so that all 60 don't show up at once, or to give the PCs the opportunity to engage in a "strategic withdrawal" so that they have more control over where the battle is fought. Or better yet, give those PCs that don't have great combat skills the option to make use of their environment to find alternative ways to whittle down the amount of bad guys faced. For instance, a PC that's good at Computers could override the local Imperial security protocols and close the blast doors at key points for a few rounds, reducing the number of bad guys the PCs have to face by a considerable number as the bad guys try to open the blast doors. Don't fret about having all those various methods planned out ahead of time, but instead let your players make suggestions.

3) The incentive to not spend all your Duty at character creation is that you'll have a better chance of your own Duty being triggered, and thus earning you and the rest of the PCs a bonus to their Wound Thresholds (which can be pretty darn handy to have in some of those bigger fights, especially if the GM rolls doubles).

I'd also suggest taking a look at Onslaught at Arda 1, as that has a number of ways that a PC with a specific Duty can earn additional Duty during the course of the adventure on top of what's awarded to the group. Plus, you as the GM can decide that certain PCs should be awarded additional Duty above what the general award was simply because they did things that fit into their selected Duty type. So a PC with the Political Support Duty might be awarded a couple extra points above what everyone else got simply because they were able to convince the influential head of a noble house to support the Alliance's cause.

I ran Assault on Whisper Base tonight, and even with the PCs starting out dirt poor it went pretty well. The melee characters did under preform since one was using brass knuckles and the other didn't have the skill to get crits with her vibroknife, but the commando with a light repeating blaster and the rest of the players with pistols did enough to get through the encounters.

Since AoWB gives the players both a Lambda and a base at the conclusion, I didn't give them the option to select that during char gen.

For the next mod, where the Moff tries to retake his base, I managed to take a peek at the mass combat rules and I think those should help - break the combat into stages where their preparations will help (buying turrets or recruiting allies or whatever) and leave the PCs out of combat until a late stage 'push' of mercenaries while narratively, they see their allies and the remaining troopers duke it out.

I'll let y'all know how it actually works out when we meet up again in a couple weeks!