Listen to the order 66 podcast episode 7 the list strikes back.
Listen to episode 11 The Holocron 2.0
Listen to episode 10 Triumphant Despair

All these episodes discuss triumphs and despairs..

The best advice is you know where the players are going think about what kinds of things triumphs and despairs would do in the various environments..

How do you deal with these? Maybe it's an issue with my mind as I treat them as a BIG DEAL, when they aren't that bad at all?

Yeah, this. The fluff text will have to believe every triumph is "game changing". Presumably this is to help inspire people new to the game to feel free to experiment with narrative input as players. Those players coming from rules-heavy systems, or a more "antagonistic" background like my own, might need that kind of encouragement initially. But the examples given in the combat chart aren't that overblown, so eventually you have to scale accordingly...

Oh, and Skill Monkey has a lot of nice narration of various Triumphs and Despairs.

It's very much worth the listen, but I find he leaned towards a "roll a triumph own the world" result, which might be helpful in the beginning, but not as much for seasoned PCs/players.

Looking back on my campaign (players are on about 930 XP now I think) there has been a natural progression from Triumph/Despair being a really special "OH MY GERDDDD!!!!!" kinda moment to them only being treated that way when someone has a really cool idea to use them.

The majority of combat related despairs can be narrated very quickly and easily if you use them for out of ammo / dice pool upgrades MOST of the time. Dice pool upgrades are a favourite of mine. "You swing wildly with your vibro-axe hitting the bad-guy and cutting them down. Unfortunatley your wild attacks have left an opening in your defences that the other bad guy can take advantage of, giving them 1 upgrade on their next attack against you". Sometimes however you pull out a really cool despair result when the pacing of the combat suits it. It's all about tempo and pacing and drama, use them appropriately!

Oh, and make sure to use a despair on a character with the Spare Clip talent to make them run out of ammo every now and then. It makes them feel special...

Thank you for recent posts!!

This was the mental progression I was going through.

They use to be epic...now they became tiresome and comical as durosspacer pointed out

Guess it is time to tone them down to being just a bit better than advantages unless something truly inspires someone's like hygtric mentioned!

Just a paradigm shift in my mental process!!

PS - I've listened to all the order 66 pods . They are great car listening to and from work !

Thank you for recent posts!!

This was the mental progression I was going through.

They use to be epic...now they became tiresome and comical as durosspacer pointed out

Guess it is time to tone them down to being just a bit better than advantages unless something truly inspires someone's like hygtric mentioned!

Just a paradigm shift in my mental process!!

PS - I've listened to all the order 66 pods . They are great car listening to and from work !

I thought they covered triumph and despair really well. you should listen to those episodes again that talk about them.

another use for despairs---another squad of minion reinforcements arrive...ramps things up a little.
have them get the party in a crossfire...

If the frequency with which you're encountering Triumphs and Despairs is getting unacceptably high, consider upping the bar. In fact, it might be worthwhile to tie that to XP as well. So, in the early days, a single Triumph was encounter altering, but after 200xp a single Triumph falls to the lower end of the spectrum (kills a minion, enhances a crit or activates a weapon ability only) and now two Triumphs are required to be encounter altering. At 500xp two Triumphs get capped at the lower end and three Triumphs are required to be encounter altering. At 1000xp, three Triumphs are lowered and four Triumphs are encounter altering. However, in order to alter the encounter significantly, all of the Triumphs need to be spent whereas each indivudal Triumph can cause a lower end effect.

Have a similar system with Despairs.

The original point of Triumphs and Despairs were to have cool and interesting things occur -rarely- and -spontaneously-. If Triumphs and Despairs are showing up -frequently- and -regularly-, consider upping the threshold necessary for "awesomeness".

I'll add my voice to those of others. The "fluff" descriptions of Triumph and Despair are not matched by the listed table of "suggestions" for how Triumph and Despair can be used.

I think this is partly due to the the table being "suggestions" and groups are free to allow them to be used to create whatever effects they want and the "fluff" descriptions being a guide for spending them on narrative effects.

The table is an excellent guide as it makes Triumph and Despair useful but also reigns them in so they don't reproduce the effects of Talents. I'd stick to the table which mostly means Triumph will be used to activate weapon qualities or upgrade others actions or create interesting and effective "narrative" effects (like adding or removing a feature of the encounter) and Despair will be used to hinder the players by upgrading the difficulty of their checks, giving enemies extra maneuvers etc.

Secondly, I'd say that if you have PCs that can one shot most enemies then I'd make the enemies tougher (Adversary 3, more minion groups, throw in Inquisitors with Parry 5, Reflect 5, Imperial Valor, Harm, etc). Use the suggestion in the GM section of having adversaries with almost comparable or slightly better characteristics and skills than the players with potent Talents thrown in to make them challenging. High level power play is a two way street - the PCs can also be taken out with one or two hits from powerful adversaries.

This can also be seen as a good thing - a lot of systems work at high levels but they bog down into fights that take a long time to run through but it sounds like your combats are still short and cinematic.

Here'sMyQuesTion How The Hell Did You Get Most Of Your Stats Up To 4And5? You Can't Raise Them By Xp After Creation. Only The Dedication Talent And Cybernetics. Unless You Replaced Your Entire BodyAndBuried All Your Points Into 5 Our 6 Trees, You Should Only Have Like 2 OR 3 That Are That High. One Of The Things I Love About This Game IsThat Even At High levels, This Built In Built In Fails Safe Keeps You From Being Too OP.

.

As To Combat: Mooks. As A Vet Of Many Games, I Love Mooks. No Matter The Level, Due Too The Upgraded Die, A Group Of Mooks Can Be Dangerous Too A Hero At Any Level.

Third: You Have A Jedi! Good ****! You Should Be Facing Inqusitors And HandS. Equations Of Storm Troopers And Bounty Hunters. At That Xp, The Empire Will Know.

Here'sMyQuesTion How The Hell Did You Get Most Of Your Stats Up To 4And5? You Can't Raise Them By Xp After Creation. Only The Dedication Talent And Cybernetics. Unless You Replaced Your Entire BodyAndBuried All Your Points Into 5 Our 6 Trees, You Should Only Have Like 2 OR 3 That Are That High. One Of The Things I Love About This Game IsThat Even At High levels, This Built In Built In Fails Safe Keeps You From Being Too OP.

.

As To Combat: Mooks. As A Vet Of Many Games, I Love Mooks. No Matter The Level, Due Too The Upgraded Die, A Group Of Mooks Can Be Dangerous Too A Hero At Any Level.

Third: You Have A Jedi! Good ****! You Should Be Facing Inqusitors And HandS. Equations Of Storm Troopers And Bounty Hunters. At That Xp, The Empire Will Know.

He never said most stats were a 4,5 or 6.

I think the reason why Triumps are so "underwhelming" in the listed combat tables is to keep the purely mechanical effects somewhat limited. I've always found that if you spend Triumphs (and to a lesser extent Advantages) to create more narrative results they are much more powerful. Personally I'm also much more inclined to let one of my players use a Triumph to do something awesome if he takes the time and effort to describe how something cool happens rather than just say, "I upgrade my next check once".

Here'sMyQuesTion How The Hell Did You Get Most Of Your Stats Up To 4And5? You Can't Raise Them By Xp After Creation. Only The Dedication Talent And Cybernetics. Unless You Replaced Your Entire BodyAndBuried All Your Points Into 5 Our 6 Trees, You Should Only Have Like 2 OR 3 That Are That High. One Of The Things I Love About This Game IsThat Even At High levels, This Built In Built In Fails Safe Keeps You From Being Too OP.

.

As To Combat: Mooks. As A Vet Of Many Games, I Love Mooks. No Matter The Level, Due Too The Upgraded Die, A Group Of Mooks Can Be Dangerous Too A Hero At Any Level.

Third: You Have A Jedi! Good ****! You Should Be Facing Inqusitors And HandS. Equations Of Storm Troopers And Bounty Hunters. At That Xp, The Empire Will Know.

He never said most stats were a 4,5 or 6.

ToQuite Him, Most Characters Haves Abilities In The 4_5 Ranges For Their Primary Abilities, With 4 Levels Trained. . I Was Just Trying To Get Classification On That Sentence

Thank you for recent posts!!

This was the mental progression I was going through.

They use to be epic...now they became tiresome and comical as durosspacer pointed out

Guess it is time to tone them down to being just a bit better than advantages unless something truly inspires someone's like hygtric mentioned!

Just a paradigm shift in my mental process!!

PS - I've listened to all the order 66 pods . They are great car listening to and from work !

If you assign a value to a Triumph or Despair, it might be a little easier to work around multiples. I usually figure a Triumph is mechanically worth 5 Advantages, since that's the most you can spend on a single effect. Narratively, it's worth more, but only if the player is willing to put effort into describing what's going on.

Replacing Minion Groups with Rivals (or increasing the size of Minion Groups for redundancy) may also help, as a Triumph or a high damage roll won't be an instant-kill. Allowing the Nemesis to use the AoR squad rules, or at least introducing cover or environmental effects, can prevent all of the PCs from focusing them down early.

You could houserule that Triumphs and Despairs do cancel (or that either side can spend Advantage or Threat to cause them to cancel). This is a little brute-force, but it might work. Rolls will still swing one way or the other, just less drastically so.

EDIT: Also, one way to better conceptualize why individual Triumphs and Despairs aren't as big a deal as they used to be in your campaign is by increasing the perceived threat level of the enemies. You don't have to actually change the stats (although you might want to), just increase the emotional tension. Replace Stormtroopers with the 501st or even Dark Troopers, crime bosses with Black Sun Vigos, Rebel Troopers with SpecForce Commandos. If the players feel like they're operating on a higher level, it may be easier for them to accept why a single Triumph isn't changing the course of the battle.

I do think you should consider what others have said about character hyper-specialization. Skill checks wouldn't be having such extreme results if the dice pools weren't so large. Yes, they'll get larger naturally, but the impression I have is that most of these characters are focused overwhelmingly on combat, especially since they're achieving such impressive dice pools with only a moderate amount of XP.

I'm not saying this is something that can be changed for this campaign, but it's something to keep in mind. A broader set of challenges (social, investigative, technical, explorative) can show that other abilities are valued besides combat prowess. I don't mean tossing one or two important rolls their way; I mean whole encounters, sessions, maybe even storylines dedicated to these things. Then, when new characters are created, the players will be more willing to diversify, since they know non-combat skills will be important.

Try this for size your bad boy nemesis has friends who are as powerful as your group send one in for each of them and build them exactly to counter their ability

Here'sMyQuesTion How The Hell Did You Get Most Of Your Stats Up To 4And5? You Can't Raise Them By Xp After Creation. Only The Dedication Talent And Cybernetics. Unless You Replaced Your Entire BodyAndBuried All Your Points Into 5 Our 6 Trees, You Should Only Have Like 2 OR 3 That Are That High. One Of The Things I Love About This Game IsThat Even At High levels, This Built In Built In Fails Safe Keeps You From Being Too OP.

.

As To Combat: Mooks. As A Vet Of Many Games, I Love Mooks. No Matter The Level, Due Too The Upgraded Die, A Group Of Mooks Can Be Dangerous Too A Hero At Any Level.

Third: You Have A Jedi! Good ****! You Should Be Facing Inqusitors And HandS. Equations Of Storm Troopers And Bounty Hunters. At That Xp, The Empire Will Know.

He never said most stats were a 4,5 or 6.

ToQuite Him, Most Characters Haves Abilities In The 4_5 Ranges For Their Primary Abilities, With 4 Levels Trained. . I Was Just Trying To Get Classification On That Sentence

primary abilities. That means brawn for the melee guys, agility for the ranged guys etc. That is easy to do at 500 xp.

You guys are silly to put an end to this hubub I'll go over our group

Human Jedi - agi 6 rest 2s, noob of the group ataru striker/ tracker who pilots and shoots guns. Barely ever uses his light saber and has this zen Buddha thing going on trying to get to morality 100. His only force power is the presence one lets him see the future.

Drall outlaw tech / trader - 5 presence, 4 int. the group "face" and negotiator. Never does combat with his brawn 1 and agi 2...

Wookie doctor - brawn 4 int 4 - bowcasster and vibrio ax and heals people

Human rebel ace pilot - agi 4 pilots and has dual blisters just got the rebel aced book and wants to do the space ship tweaking class

Twilek bounty hunter force sensitive - pre 4 and cun 4 - the dralls bodyguard uses the cohersion and move powers

FYI, I just made a starting character with 4 Agi and 4 Int, so it's really easy to get to 5 or 6 after 500xp (and kind of hard to avoid it).

Again, it seems he's not asking about combat balance (though that might also be an issue, it's not the focus of his question). He's asking what to do with all the Triumphs and Despairs that are flying around everywhere.

I still suggest making a scale for Triumphs. Narratively, with the frequency they appear in higher XP games, they can't have the encounter-altering ability they did out of the gate. A simple rule would be that in order to use the narrative value of the result, one would need to a) have it uncancelled by its opposite and b) require the use of all of the respective results. That way, if 2 Triumphs and 1 Despair appear, there would be no Narrative effect; just the purely mechanical benefits described earlier.

also use things like these

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-n7ekVbbfnRcE9HUE14LWczaVk/edit

look at what they do with triumphs and despairs. make sure you have a list you can pull ideas from.

Thanks for posting this! This is a fantastic resource

FYI, I just made a starting character with 4 Agi and 4 Int, so it's really easy to get to 5 or 6 after 500xp (and kind of hard to avoid it).

Not with a human, though!

You could do it with a Drall, though that leaves Brawn at 1, a significant drawback in this game. Though true to the species, I guess.

In general, I think everyone should remember there are lots of other skills in this game, and no players will be rolling lots of yellow dice on all of them. If anything, our experiences suggest it's better to be broadly skilled than hyper-specialized. There should be more to the game than shooting stormtroopers.

Mirialan. +10 XP from starting obligation, 3->4 Agi (40xp), 2->3->4 Int (70xp), 110xp total.

Nothing else and you have to dip into obligation, but you -can- do it.

The Environmental Set Piece doc is priceless in my opinion, a massive saving grace for times when scene creativity either runs dry or goes in an unexpected direction.

If you're having difficulty with narrating the effects you could just use the Triumph/Despair to downgrade/upgrade a dice pool. You could even go so far as spending multiple despairs to remove a destiny point, which I believe is a Critical Injury option as well.

Here'sMyQuesTion How The Hell Did You Get Most Of Your Stats Up To 4And5? You Can't Raise Them By Xp After Creation. Only The Dedication Talent And Cybernetics. Unless You Replaced Your Entire BodyAndBuried All Your Points Into 5 Our 6 Trees, You Should Only Have Like 2 OR 3 That Are That High. One Of The Things I Love About This Game IsThat Even At High levels, This Built In Built In Fails Safe Keeps You From Being Too OP.

.

As To Combat: Mooks. As A Vet Of Many Games, I Love Mooks. No Matter The Level, Due Too The Upgraded Die, A Group Of Mooks Can Be Dangerous Too A Hero At Any Level.

Third: You Have A Jedi! Good ****! You Should Be Facing Inqusitors And HandS. Equations Of Storm Troopers And Bounty Hunters. At That Xp, The Empire Will Know.

He never said most stats were a 4,5 or 6.

ToQuite Him, Most Characters Haves Abilities In The 4_5 Ranges For Their Primary Abilities, With 4 Levels Trained. . I Was Just Trying To Get Classification On That Sentence

primary abilities. That means brawn for the melee guys, agility for the ranged guys etc. That is easy to do at 500 xp.

okay, okay. i was reading it like most of their attributes were at 5. that makes more sense now.

as one of my roomates has just brought out,
"have you seen episodes 1-3? they happen all the time there."

"serously what do think that thing R2 did against those huge battle droids that tried to kill him. those were triumphs. he's not a battle droid."

he raises a good point, lol

At high level XP play the system has issues with Damage/soak balance and Success/Failure balance.

If despair/triumph cancel each other that should balance out Somewhat.

One of the main issues with combat success/failure is that not everyone has access to the defensive talents. Another issue is that the use of the defensive talents is costly in strain. The first issue can be handled by allowing people to have access to a number of levels of defensive skills from a base pool open to everyone. It's very hard to create a character that is defensively unbalanced, so this won't likely be an issue. You can however restrict the total number of levels you can reach. Giving access to the defensive skills can solve one part the success/failure balance issue. The next is the insane strain you'd have to pay to use a high level of defensive talents. It's easy to simply pay only half the strain.

It takes 10 upgrades getting from 2 purple dice to 6 red dice. 6 red dice vs 6 yellow dice has a propability around 50% for success, so the dice themselves are very well balanced. This makes it a lot easier to work with and balance the system, than for instance WFRP3.

So if you had 5 levels of melee defense, 5 levels of ranged defense and 5 levels of dodge, then you'd be able to upgrade attacks by 10 levels. It would cost 10 strain for one attack and of course dodge being more expensive as it only works for a single attack.

So it's not hard to balance this out, it's just that getting many levels of defensive skills is hard. If everyone has access to 2 levels of each from a base pool and you could never upgrade the difficulty by more than 10 levels, then it could work out. If for instance you have bought 2 levels of dodge from the base pool and then advance in a tree that has dodge, you have the option of ticking the dodge in the tree for free (without getting an extra level) or purchase it and get an extra level.

Perhaps adding two or more levels of soak to the base pool of talents would be alright too.

Then it's just a matter of setting the price for these base talents. You also have to take into account the price of the base skill versus the individual prices of the talents in various trees.