A question for fellow GMs - As the subject title says: At what point are characters too powerful and how do you provide a fun challenge without asking the players to start new characters?

I ask this after one of my players one-shotted the traitor in Onslaught at Arda I before we even reached the end of Episode II. I've ditched Episode III for the moment.

Some background:

Four players, each with characters still being played ever since we first got our hands on EotE core book the moment it launched in the UK. Approx 700 earned xp accumulated over that time - made worse by adventure books having inconsistent reward rules.

Two of the characters are built for critical hit insanity, one for huge damage and huge soak, and the last as a skilled pilot.

Past attempts to make things more challenging:

Upgrade every roll a couple of times, or more, depending on the situation.

Boost health of bad guys (soak is more of an issue).

Ditched the system requirement for the GM to show his rolls, thus allowing for "tweaks" on the fly.

Added talents etc mid fight to counter players uber skills.

Problems encountered:

They still have more positive dice than the negative dice I can field.

They know how the system works (two rules lawyers) and always call me out on it when the villain doesn't die after a huge amount of damage.

One of the players gets very uptight about tweaks as he can't abandon a players vs GM mindset.

Tried making villains as if I were building a PC, but with Adversary talents...still not enough hit points or soak to survive one single minigun volley (with autofire triggered).

So far the most success I have had is by setting them on each other using the Influence Force powers. Can't keep doing this unfortunately. In fact, the only time they struggle is vs the Force.

Does anyone have any ideas before I start throwing Star Destroyers at them?

Are the PCs stats somewhere accessible? If we could take a look, maybe some weaknesses would become apparent.

Give the Nemesis personal scale ray shields, so blaster weapons just bounce off. But make them “ablative”, so that after they’ve reflected a certain amount of damage (say, 100 points), then they overload and their circuits are fused, so they are a non-rechargeable defense mechanism.

Throw large size groups of minions at them, so that even if they kill a dozen or more, the minion group is still throwing five yellow dice to hit them.

Give the bad guys talents or abilities that ignore Pierce and Breach, as well as lots of levels of Adversary and Durable.

Use the squad rules from AoR, so any hit that makes it through to the Nemesis can be redirected to one of the nearby minions, for as long as there are minions nearby. And make sure that the Nemesis escapes before there are no more minions.

There’s a few ways to defuse this bomb and make the targets more difficult to kill, without giving them weapons or equipment that would make the PCs just that much more of a pain to deal with.

All that said, it sounds like you’ve got some people who are really good at the roll-playing and the rules lawyering, and it might be time to hit the reset button and start over with new characters — or maybe new players.

All that said, it sounds like you’ve got some people who are really good at the roll-playing and the rules lawyering, and it might be time to hit the reset button and start over with new characters — or maybe new players.

This is the 100% correct answer.

There is a point when you have to either get them to back down or get a new crew.

After 700 XP they are pretty established at making your life as a GM hell. How you put up with it for that long is inspiring.

We can give you ideas about how to make the baddies better and survive longer, but even if it was more challenging they would just push and push until they broke past that barrier and not be fun for you again.

If they are Real Life friends.. I'm sorry. If they are not, drop them, get a new group to game with... immediately.

There is no gaming experience that requires that you be stressed or that you should put your happiness behind their desire to go against you.

Meanwhile, you could also use the Dr. Doom solution — every time that he gets defeated, the PCs discover that this one is actually just a DoomBot, and the real Dr. Doom has escaped.

What if General Grievous had a bunch of droid “clones”, and you could never be sure that you were fighting the real General Grievous?

Even so, that will get boring, quickly.

You need to find a way to solve the real problem, which is with the players and not the characters.

Well, the big question I have for you: are they having fun? Are you having fun? If the answer is yes to both, then who cares? Let them punch out a Rancor every week. Keep going until one party or the other stops having fun.

The other question: have you talked to your players about your concerns? Find out if they want to reboot the universe, just play a new set of characters or whatever. Get everyone on the same page.

If you do start over, consider encouraging them to spread out, not up. Two or three talent trees will be more than enough to keep the points from accumulating too fast, plus have LOADS of room to grow. Also, consider reducing slightly the points you hand out, assuming that you do the 20 for a game (or about 5 an hour of meaningful game). Perhaps going for 15 for an evening instead of 20?

I created a character and gave it 700xp. I ran through three careers as much as I wanted and took a handful of skills and raised them to 3+ but while I did end up with some pretty impressive combat skills I was terribly deficient in many other areas. As such I am not going to mirror the others comments.

Rather, the question I have is just what are you putting in front of your players?

If you are putting combat encounters to your players all the time then such specialisation will cause you grief. They only have to take 3-5 skills and they have you covered.

If you are running space combat, speeder cases, environmental challenges, social encounters, knowledge challenges and espionage missions, then even 700xp will not see such a high degree of specialisation that there will not be something that can entertain your characters.

Try running some home brew missions where the players are not expected or required to draw a gun.

Lots of good suggestions here, and a topic I've been considering myself.

My group has a mix of players, some having joined later. I've already mentioned to my players that I am considering wrapping up our current campaign within the coming year. (probably within the first half)

Now, I never listen to the Order 66 podcast, where the hosts and guests (I'm hearing Sam Stewart in particular) regularly refer to "Retired" characters. What would your players consider a "crowning achievement"? I'm referring to an accomplishment that makes a difference in the Galaxy, not making some ridiculous single combat roll. Look at motivations and Obligations and let them resolve them.(or achieve some great mission related to their Duty, if AoR.)

But, as Desslok said, if everyone is having fun, carry on. But do mix up the adventures a bit.

Here's an idea, have them get lured into a building that turns out to actually be the Imperial Army Sector base. Start out with five squadrons of Stormtroopers, and every time a despair is rolled another squadron of stormtroopers emerges into the fray. Drop an inquisitor in there too. See how long these superheroes can last the entire might of the Imperial Army without a chance for a break.

Then when they're KO'ed, they wake up in a detention block seperated without their gear or weapons, facing an ISB officer with an interrogator droid visiting each cell. If they're so awesome, let's see them get out of that one.

If they need a hand have a Hutt launch his own rescue squadron for his favorite concubine who is also imprisoned for substance smuggling. They'll save the PCs, but not their items. Now they're free, penniless, and owe obligation to a Hutt for saving them.

Yes, in the end the Fun is important. But I think there needs to be some challenge too, else you're just narrating to your players and don't need the dice. If they're playing at a very powerful level I don't think it's a problem to deal some very punishing twists to level the playing field.

It is a matter of taste.

You will be always capable of design challenges for your PCs, no matter how many XPs they have. You just will need to scale the challenges. When they will have zillions of XPs, you will have to face them against impossible odds

-Cracking the highest security door in the whole galaxy while fighting a horde of Rancors.

-Fighting with the PCs star ship against a significant fleet of Star Destroyers.

-Convincing the Emperor to retire to a paradise island and promote the PC to new ruler of the Galaxy

-Convincing a bunch of Jawas to give for free their sand crawler and its contents

-Besting Darth Vader with the Force

It is SW, it is fantasy, nothing stops you from designing encounters!

The question is, up to which level of challenge you, as GM, feel comfortable?

In my case for example, PCs with 200 XPs start to become too powerful for my taste in their main area. I really like "low power" level games. I am not really a fan of "super" heroic type of games.

Never.

The dice system does have perfect balance, although the game mechanics governing difficulty and combat defense do not.

It's easy enough to scale defense and the advesary talent, plus difficulty to allow for maxed out characters to work perfectly.

Your PCs are at the top of their game (and almost double what my crew reached and I was already having problems, wow!)

Rather than ratchet up the difficulty of tasks with upgrades - making tasks that used to be easy harder because they have more dice isn't fair - present them with challenges dice can't solve inherently. Throw multiple challenges at them at the same time, for example:

1. They need to escape this landing platform

2. There are stormtroopers shooting at them

3. The codes for the docking clamps have been changed

4. The tractor beam has not been disabled

5. There are support craft en route carrying the Big Bad Boss

6. It's weathering badly, be that snow or rain or whatnot

7. They need to escape because the structure is collapsing

So you have some time constraints, several things for everyone to do, and the blaster bolts are flying. Any number of things can go wrong, and they cannot control time no matter how many triumphs they roll.

This sort of encounter worked well for my group and kept the excitement high and the narrative flowing - there was always some high action going on for everyone. I too worry about "GM vs PCs" and I think this way of designing encounters doesn't feel adversarial or set off the rules lawyers (I'm a recovering Matlock myself.)

p.s. once they're aloft in a ship, they're just another mote in the cosmic medium. Shoot their ride up and leave them adrift, see how that sets them. A decent squadron of elite snub fighters could get the job done, no need for capital craft - their ship might be tricked out, but it doesn't have 800XP.

here's a random ideathat I've said before: stop giving out XP. not every character gets stronger. Spiderman doesn't spontaneously developed new powers every movie. han solo can't one shot vader. if you think they are powerful enough, stop giving XP. the game is about a story, not becoming a 15th level monk.

nemesis. start using those enemies more. they don't go down till they reach 150 on the chart and hhave access to talents. surround them with mooks, who are dangerous at any XP level. you have yourself a fight.

if you think they are powerful enough, stop giving XP. the game is about a story, not becoming a 15th level monk.

Perhaps greatly reduce the points for each game? Give out 5 for the evening? That way there's still a sense of progress and accomplishment, but it's slooooooow.

I ask this after one of my players one-shotted the traitor in Onslaught at Arda I before we even reached the end of Episode II. I've ditched Episode III for the moment.

One-shotted the traitor? Can you elaborate how this happened? The traitor has some pretty heavy plot armor that keeps the character from being attacked until Episode III. In fact, the Traitor isn't the difficult part of the Arda I adventure and is easily dispatched when faced in Episode III. The difficult combat is supposed to be the AT-ST and Stormtroopers at the very end of the adventure.

Edited to add:

Problems encountered:

They know how the system works (two rules lawyers) and always call me out on it when the villain doesn't die after a huge amount of damage.

If you don't want the villan to die, then why are they fighting? In Arda I, the PCs are trying to figure out who the traitor is. Once they figure it out, they can't find the traitor until plot events happen for the traitor to pop out, make a dramatic statment, and escape. All of that should be done in narration. No initive rolls should be made. Players don't have a moment to react. Even in the ensuing chase, the players are one step behind and either the traitor is out of range or the players don't want to hit the hostage. Once they reach the starship and the Traitor is escaping, well, if they are carrying around weapons that can damage a starship then you have other problems. Let the plot armor of narration keep the baddies safe until it's time for them to actually fight.

(Really, the Traitor should've revealed themself off screen and escaped so that players can't complain that they don't have a chance to roll some dice, react, and kill the Traitor. I got through my player's complaint when I stumbled into this by asking them to think about it like a video game cutscene and that things happen beyond their control.)

Lets look at what you have left. Sure, they straight up killed the Traitor. How does the Rebel leadership deal with this? They could be mad at the players because they wanted to take him captive for questioning or sending false reports. Were the players 100% sure that this was the Traitor? If the Traitor hadn't revealed themself yet, then it's still up in the air. Heck, the players could be labeled as the Traitor because they straight up murdered someone. Have some negitive concequences for their actions. As valuable as the Traitor was for the Empire, the Traitor would be just as valuable (if not more so) to be captured by the Rebels.

Use negative reinforcement to teach the players some discretion on who to kill.

Ditched the system requirement for the GM to show his rolls, thus allowing for "tweaks" on the fly.

Already some good advice, but I didn't see this mentioned yet.

I think this is a bad idea, and might even be contributory to the issues. It's all about perception. It's one thing to have never shown them in the first place, and another to first show and then hide. The old "hide the GM dice behind the shield" method rested on the (faulty) assumption that the GM wouldn't lie about the results. Players wilfully suspended disbelief so long as the game "felt" right, so long as there was no reason to suspect a GM of lying, and so long as the players didn't feel that the GM would tweak things against them.

But now, given the way the system works, that paper-thin facade is torn away. If you go back to hiding, then the player is going to assume the worst...that the GM is out to get them. If players are rules-lawyers and/or treat the game as a PCs vs GM session, it only makes things worse.

It sounds to me like each PC is a master in their class. I could be wrong, but it also sounds like the scenarios don't involve everybody or pull the PCs out of their element on a regular basis...the fighters get to fight, the pilots get to pilot, the slicers get to slice, etc. You have to pull them out of their comfort zone, make the thugs keep their fingers off the trigger at a social event, make the slicer deal with a surprise patrol at what he thought was an isolated terminal, have the pilot do some street research...

Honestly, it sounds like it's high time to get captured, stripped of their gear, taken to a remote prison planet, escape, and have to cross a hostile wilderness with nothing but their wits and fingernails. If they escaped with prison clothes, introduce a fungus that slowly eats the clothing, so they finally emerge from the bush totally naked. That'd be different...

They know how the system works (two rules lawyers) and always call me out on it when the villain doesn't die after a huge amount of damage.

One of the players gets very uptight about tweaks as he can't abandon a players vs GM mindset.

Whatfrog has the hammer hit on the nail perfectly, perhaps he has that little green love child of Miss Piggy and Kermit with him telling him exactly what to say. The issue with hiding the rolls is creating a situation where the players are just not trusting you. Those statements in the quote are in essence: "My players don't trust me."

I am a big advokate of forming your pool for the player (where possible) and explaining each dice. Far better to have a player ask why there are RRP for him to hit a guy at medium range before the dice are rolled. "Oh he has three ranks of adversay and I upgrade the dice three times."

The more you communicate to and with you players the better. As long as they ask reasonable questions and you have reasonable answers the trust of your job will return.

I am learning how to coach fencing, and some advice my coach is giving to me applies to my earlier comment. Explain the action from the students POV and don't even bother with what you are doing. They don't care about you, what happens to them, that is important. So when you form the pool always (where possible) form the pool for the player to roll. Then have that player make the initial call on what the dice may do.

Having the player read the dice was interesting for me, mostly they are conservative, and they would hold back. So if they generate the seed of the heroic action as they see it and you then add awesome for them, the get to see that they are part of the story and again they are helping you personalise it.

A final tool for you to use is the Adversary Talent and check what happens when you upgrade YY 3 times!! I also note that when the boys talked about their NPC Deli and spoke about Adversay they may have missed something. Minnions can have Adversary too.

A squad of stomtroopers are heading your way, they move together as a unit covering each other and making very good use of any cover they can. You glimpse their arm patches, (make a Warfare Roll), oh nice... You know that patch these guys are the 8975th they have survived the battle of Jinkeen and were instrumental in the defeat of the rebellion there. These guys are tough. Now, my players expect harder troopers, when I add more wounds, an extra soak and 3-4 adversary they were warned.

I have a spreadsheet I am working on, that has a one page summary of my players characters:

http://www.ridersyd.com.au/scl/player_summary.xlsx

Feel free to use and alter that to suit yourself. If you have a look, I can mess with my guys buy having a fight on a conveyor belt or a series of platforms where they have to jump and leap around. Yeah, not with those athletics skills guys.

Honestly? at 700 XP and you are having problems?

I think you had problems back when they had 100 to 200 XP and it has only gotten worse.

What about non-combat encounters? or are all the encounters combat related? Seems all your issues revolve around combat. If that is the case here is my suggestion

Overwhelm them

Each player can really only take out one NPC at a time. Design a Nemesis for each character and use the same amount of XP (or more). then have each nemesis with a group of henchman. acting as bullet sponges

or have a force user with battle meditation, force them to make fear checks with reduced willpower to increase the difficulty of checks. Put him inside an AT-ST, or surrounded by gunners in turrets.

A good GM can figure out ways to overwhelm them. But you CANNOT just throw out one BBEG and expect to win.

A question for fellow GMs - As the subject title says: At what point are characters too powerful and how do you provide a fun challenge without asking the players to start new characters?

I ask this after one of my players one-shotted the traitor in Onslaught at Arda I before we even reached the end of Episode II. I've ditched Episode III for the moment.

Some background:

Four players, each with characters still being played ever since we first got our hands on EotE core book the moment it launched in the UK. Approx 700 earned xp accumulated over that time - made worse by adventure books having inconsistent reward rules.

Two of the characters are built for critical hit insanity, one for huge damage and huge soak, and the last as a skilled pilot.

Past attempts to make things more challenging:

Upgrade every roll a couple of times, or more, depending on the situation.

Boost health of bad guys (soak is more of an issue).

Ditched the system requirement for the GM to show his rolls, thus allowing for "tweaks" on the fly.

Added talents etc mid fight to counter players uber skills.

Problems encountered:

They still have more positive dice than the negative dice I can field.

They know how the system works (two rules lawyers) and always call me out on it when the villain doesn't die after a huge amount of damage.

One of the players gets very uptight about tweaks as he can't abandon a players vs GM mindset.

Tried making villains as if I were building a PC, but with Adversary talents...still not enough hit points or soak to survive one single minigun volley (with autofire triggered).

So far the most success I have had is by setting them on each other using the Influence Force powers. Can't keep doing this unfortunately. In fact, the only time they struggle is vs the Force.

Does anyone have any ideas before I start throwing Star Destroyers at them?

A better question is probably at what point are people not having fun anymore? I don't sweat too powerful too much.

Well - I've been there and I sympathize. But with help and suggestions from the people on this forum I found a way to provide fun, challenging encounters for 700xp groups - my PCs are at this mark too.

- Minions: you don't have to use hordes of minions (but do, if it is possible -it's fun ). You can make them stronger too. More wounds, heavier weapons and top each group with a leader (rival).

- Villains. Forget about using PC-building steps, that's a mistake I did. Just take give your Nemeses whatever talents make sense, it's ok to max ranks on the ranked ones if they're combatants (durable, endurance etc.).

- Talents. There is one talent people often overlook and which makes perfect sense to use - Bodyguard. It upgrades the difficulty to hit the person you're protecting. Give your Nemesis 4 bodyguard rivals, each with this talent. Suddenly its 4 upgrades on top of any adversary (at least 3 for 700xp group), dodges, etc. And while the group is taking down the bodyguards, the villain is escaping to his Auto-cannon-equipped walker or just dishing out damage from his BFG.

- Ready modules - they're usually written for starting parties. You need to seriously upgrade skills and options available for the NPCs!

Wow, some really amazing advice. Thank you everyone.

I think I struggle because recently we have been using the adventure books, so I tend not to adjust them too much for fear of losing what was intended of the story and action sequences. A lot of those are quite combat heavy, which is great for my players who are all combat orientated.

I find it a lot easier to create challenges for the players when I design my own adventures, unfortunately demands on my time forced me to use the pre-made stuff. The adventure books also have fairly inconsistent wording regarding XP rewards, so going back to my own created stuff will allow me to control the XP rewards a little better.

As for how they ended up shooting the traitor...it was one of those situations where the players inevitably derail the story. The traitor panicked and went for the hostage situation early and they shot him with a really amazing sniper shot (that I allowed as I thought they'd fail) as he tried to make his break for the escape vehicle.

unfortunately demands on my time forced me to use the pre-made stuff.

Have you seen the Environmental Set Pieces designed and linked in the Community Resources thread? That might save you a load of time when you're building your own encounters.

unfortunately demands on my time forced me to use the pre-made stuff.

Have you seen the Environmental Set Pieces designed and linked in the Community Resources thread? That might save you a load of time when you're building your own encounters.

There was a thread a while back, and I forget who posted it. (Please chime if this was you) The GM who posted made a great observation that spending LESS time preparing has made the game sessions more fun and enjoyable. I agree with this approach.

When I ran my players through "Long Arm of the Hutt" they came up with a crazy plan to get the Lylek to chase them and lure it to Angu Dromb's camp. I think I had them roll some attacks, with weapons on stun, and piloting checks to keep the speeder "just close enough" to keep the creature following them. I improvised some perimeter defenses around the camp, added more adversaries and sketched a basic layout of the camp. They crashed through the gates, let the beastie in, and started fighting. It became a hectic Triple-Threat match, with the Lylek as a complete wild card. (pardon the mixed metaphor) They ended up getting Dromb to surrender, and much of that chapter got scrapped, and we all had a lot of fun.

When I ran my players through "Long Arm of the Hutt" they came up with a crazy plan to get the Lylek to chase them and lure it to Angu Dromb's camp.

When we were in that scenario and met the Lylek, we quietly and slowly backed out of the cave and let it feast on the NPCs who had been stupid enough to run in there. Not even my Wookiee was stupid/brave enough to try to fight one of those.

However, we did go back to that same Lylek later. We had beefed up, and taken out Teemo, and we’d run across a Majordomo of a different Hutt who decided that he wanted to have us deliver a shipment of Twi’Lek slaves in a sealed container. Once we discovered that the cargo was slaves, and that they were Twi’Leks, we took them back to Ryloth and reunited them with the rest of their people. Then we had to come up with a suitable replacement cargo to deliver. We figured that an angry Lylek would be a great choice.

We quickly realized that an adult Lylek was much too large to fit into a cargo container of that size, so we hoped that the one we had run into previously had some younger ones around. Indeed, it turned out that was the Momma, and she had two baby Lyleks. So, we had to figure out how to draw the Momma out of the cave, and then capture the babies.

My Wookiee volunteered to be the one to draw out the Momma. The other PCs set up around the mouth of the cave with various weapons, so that we could try to kill the Momma once it came out, and hopefully none of them would hit my Wookiee.

Chewnawa went in, made loud noises, and got it to follow part way out. But she refused to come all the way out. That’s when he had to attack one of her tentacles, to get her into enough of a rage to follow him blindly. He was fortunate enough to have a Grav Belt which allowed him to jump a lot further than would normally be possible, so he was able to jump over the deep pit we had dug in front of the mouth of the cave, whereas it was a big enough hole to make her stop just outside the cave.

Everyone who had been waiting then fired their respective weapons, and she was still standing, and mostly unhurt — But now seriously pissed off. That’s when the pilot in his YT-2400 — who had been hovering above the mouth of the cave — fired the ventral dual Medium Laser Cannons, and she was no longer even a stain on the ground.

There was a bit of Momma-goo that was splattered against one of the walls, and so when we went back inside to get the baby Lyleks, one of the PCs got the bright idea of covering himself in Momma-goo, so that he now smelled like Momma and that would help us in our task. Oddly enough, that actually worked with one of the baby Lyleks, and so we were able to coax it out and into one of the other ships. The second baby Lylek was not as cooperative, and IIRC we used blaster weapons set on Stun.

We then put the unconscious baby Lylek into one of the cargo containers and sealed it up, and the other cargo container was filled with a small amount of explosives and the contents of the bilge and the refreshers on top of that.

We then delivered the cargo containers with their new contents to the specified location, albeit later than we should have been.

What happened after that is a different story.