I'm having a bit of trouble on this regard, 5 sessions in my party has either steamrolled encounters or ended with everyone near dead with multiple crits. I can't seem to dial in encounters, any suggestions?

I have an NPC that accompanies my group that I use to either get them in or out of trouble. I can use him to balance things out... Mostly as comic relief.

Analyze both ends of the problem. What is happening in the steam-rolled encounter? What is hurting the PC the most in the tough encounters?

Typically, in a steam-roller encounter you can boost it up a few easy ways. Add a minion to a minion group. They get tougher that way (more wounds to kill) and deadlier (another upgrade from green to yellow). Add another group, or if you don't want minions, add a Rival. You can also use the Squad rules (Age of Rebellion GM Kit) to protect a Rival or Nemesis in a group of minions (thus, letting the big guy do more damage before he goes down). You can also add armor or upgrade the weapons of minions and rivals to make them stronger. If the encounter is almost right, then have the npcs make more use of cover (setback dice to the PCs attacks).

If an encounter is too tough look at the same factors. Are the PCs having trouble hurting the opponents? Downgrade their armor so they have less Soak. The the opponents hitting really hard? Downgrade their weapons, or make a minion group smaller so they don't have as many yellow upgrades. Give the PCs more opportunities for cover and/or better cover. Strip your npc opponents of some cover opportunities, or let their cover get blown up quickly so they're more in the open.

The key is to figure out what's going on in your current encounters and tune them. Also keep on eye on the PCs, you might have one combat monster that is much better then the rest of the group. When they dominate, the encounter is easy. If they're absent or occupied, the encounter gets rough quick. If that's the case, then put in something rough for that character to get tied up with that should last about half the encounter. The other players can fight against the rest without his help, then he'll be able to pitch in when they start getting hurt.

Also, don't feel bad about fudging an enemy's Soak or attack value halfway through the encounter if it seems like the enemies are far outclassing your PCs.

Maybe lower the Soak of your enemy or just track minions or wounds more loosely. It can make a world of difference in an encounter to just say "2 of the Stormtroopers go down" instead of "1 of the Stormtroopers goes down" if the PC are having trouble.

In a videogame, the computer can't say "these 5 enemies all have 20 health left but let's just have 3 of them go down because it seems like it would help the narrative here." As a human GM, we can do that.

If they’re steamrollering the current group of minions, have more groups show up. And larger groups.

If they’re getting toasted by the current group of minions, you could do some Fear checks or just roleplay some of them deciding that they don’t want any part of this anymore. Or, they take the PCs prisoner and then you’ve got a nice jailbreak scenario.

These minions are usually people, so they can also choose to flee if they're getting overwhelmed. It ends a boring encounter a little early and means there are still potential ambushes lying in wait.

They all end up dead? I hope you mean knocked unconscious and not that you rolled 151+ on the crit table for all of them. Which, waking up as captives and stripped of your gear is the start of great adventure.

As for the too hard side, sounds like the players need to learn how to run away. In this game, I feel that it's encouraged to run away since you get XP for a gaming session not how many bad guys you kill.

As for being too easy, how many fights are you throwing at the group in a single day? I've found it's not any one fight that's hard, it's the day of fighting when your resources are running low that's hard. If you don't have a doctor/medic, they can only heal so much between fights. You can only use so many stimpacks in a day. A couple hits here and a couple hits there add up over time and soon enough the party will fear the most basic of minions because their wounds are low and they can't heal any more.

To give better advice, what characters are in the group? What types of weapons do they use? Are they all non-combat or are there some combat monsters?

If your players are rolling over minion groups, stop using minions. Use more rivals, have them at 5.6 soak and give them a Wound threshold of 15+. Throw in some talents like Dodge or Side Step, or maybe a rank of Adversary, and you have just drastically increased their survivability.

Now, that takes care of the "killing the NPCs too quickly" issue. If you need the NPCs to pose more of a threat you can do that quite easily by adding talents like Point Blank (or Barrage, as appropriate), Feral Strength (for melee NPCs) and the Deadly Accuracy talent for those times when you need more damage output without piling your goons down with hideously expensive and rare equipment. Throw in some cheap attachments like the laser sight to get some bonus Advantage. I also highly recommend talents like Soft Spot, Anatomy Lessons and their like; they let you flip a Destiny point to add damage which means that if your NPC is targeting a tanky PC he can flip one and get a damage boost, while if he's shooting at one of your squishier players he can choose not to.

For the flip side of the coin, where your players are taking a beating, here are a few things to think about. Equip your NPCs with pistols instead of rifles - the lower base damage makes a big difference. Avoid the Lethal Blows talent and weapons with the Vicious quality unless you want to up the danger level of the encounter; those crits +30 can do some serious damage to your players. And spend the NPCs' Advantages and Triumphs more on modifying the battlefield and creating interesting situations (hitting fuel tanks, setting off sprinkler systems, making gangways collapse, etc.) rather than critting your PCs.

When your PCs are having a hard time don't crit them! If they have multiple crits after an encounter, it's because you did it to them. Seriously, triumphs and advantages for crits are boring anyhow; use them for more exciting stuff.

Especially triumphs: Remember that annoying piece of gear, you were letting that guy have in a weak moment; how unfortunate, it's just got hit by a blaster, so sorry it's beyond repair.

When your PCs are having a hard time don't crit them! If they have multiple crits after an encounter, it's because you did it to them. Seriously, triumphs and advantages for crits are boring anyhow; use them for more exciting stuff.

Especially triumphs: Remember that annoying piece of gear, you were letting that guy have in a weak moment; how unfortunate, it's just got hit by a blaster, so sorry it's beyond repair.

That's just about the worst use of a triumph I can think of. Not only are you removing a piece of equipment that you gave the player, you're doing it in combat, randomly, without any mechanism for the player to respond. That's pretty much the definition of player vs. GM and I can't recommend against it more strongly.

When your PCs are having a hard time don't crit them! If they have multiple crits after an encounter, it's because you did it to them. Seriously, triumphs and advantages for crits are boring anyhow; use them for more exciting stuff.

Especially triumphs: Remember that annoying piece of gear, you were letting that guy have in a weak moment; how unfortunate, it's just got hit by a blaster, so sorry it's beyond repair.

That's just about the worst use of a triumph I can think of. Not only are you removing a piece of equipment that you gave the player, you're doing it in combat, randomly, without any mechanism for the player to respond. That's pretty much the definition of player vs. GM and I can't recommend against it more strongly.

I probably wouldn't destroy the item for good, but I would damage it for an encounter and/or until repaired. Three Advantages can be used to disarm the target and that blaster doesn't have to land at their feet. It could've fallen off a ledge or something. A Despair can be spent to damage a tool or melee weapon the character is using. I don't see why you couldn't use triumphs (maybe two?) to follow the Sunder rules and damage any item. But I would be careful, because the players will want to do anything you do to them back at your favorite NPCs.

... I break/loose/destroy PC equipment all the time using triumphs and despairs. Our group finds it as a very organic way to bleed the group of money. Granted, if it's the players 'signature' item or such, it's usually recover/repairable but that's how you use money! If your players have to actually pay for their medical care, it might even prove cheaper. In the end it's all just loss of player resources vs. gain of resources.

5 minions in a group per PC, 2 Rivals per PC, 2 Nemesis or 1 Nemesis + 1 Rival for the whole group.

It sorta works.

One of the things you have to understand about FFG's take on SW is that if you're looking strictly at combat or adversarial encounters to challenge your players you're often gonna run into this problem.

Combat may not be lethal in the strict sense of what the word lethal means, but it is very easy going just by the numbers to remove multiple PC's from combat in a short order - and the same is true for NPC's so it's hard to gauge how much time combat will take and/or how hard it'll be just by comparing the stats of the combatants.

So, instead of controlling fights that way, you have to use exterior, narrative factors to throttle up or down combat speed and effectiveness by assigning dice values to various factors. In that way, the environment and circumstances become a sort of pseudo-NPC. It's a different way to steer the flow of a combat and a game, but you'll get used to it.

When I was having trouble early on grasping the combat encounter strength I decided to make an arena and just pit my PCs against things until it became too much, at that point I had the data I needed.

The arena was not part of the story and all gear/consumables were replenished after each round, except if I was testing multiple fights in a row.

It was very informative and my Players were more than happy to help with it.

When I was having trouble early on grasping the combat encounter strength I decided to make an arena and just pit my PCs against things until it became too much, at that point I had the data I needed.

The arena was not part of the story and all gear/consumables were replenished after each round, except if I was testing multiple fights in a row.

It was very informative and my Players were more than happy to help with it.

Fatedtodie makes a good point, often times Fight Clubs are invaluable for gaining insight into how combat works. I always run them when I can.

If you're using Oggdudes generator, it gives the total XP you've spent on a particular NPC in the stat block, I just rolled my first NPCs with it today.

I'm curious whether or not a single 500XP Nemesis is a good matchup against a group of 5, 100xp player characters.

If you're using Oggdudes generator, it gives the total XP you've spent on a particular NPC in the stat block, I just rolled my first NPCs with it today.

I'm curious whether or not a single 500XP Nemesis is a good matchup against a group of 5, 100xp player characters.

He won't be. One guy against 5 is going to end with the players walking all over him in one round. Unless you give him abnormal stats, crazy good gear or some other advantages the 5-1 ratio will simply be too much. This isn't like many games (e.g. Pathfinder) where one super-buff monster can prove a challenge to your whole group by itself.

Throw in a couple of rivals or minions to soak up some extra fire. Keep the nemesis further back so everyone can't target him at once right from the outset. Then you'll have an interesting fight on your hands.

I've got 4 players in my group.... 2 have double ranks of Dodge, 1 has Full upgraded Sense defensive tree, 1 has no defensive talents. With that in mind, I usually go for groups of 3 minions, which is gonna total YYG with an occasionnal B from Aim. With this setup, i'll probably roll YYGRPB to hit my players. I'll have a little over 50% hit rate which is gonna be fine by me. They also have 4 to 7 armor rating, so if I shoot them with Blaster Rifles for 9+success, it should take around 3 hits to drop one.

Knowing all this, I could probably go with 5 groups of 3 Stormtroopers. Or I could go with 3 groups of 3 Stormtroopers plus a Stormtrooper Sergeant with his 2 meatshields. The first combination is pretty standard and straight forward. The second group has fewer members, but the Sergeant can give free maneuvers or bonus boost dices to his minion groups, so it's gonna be more dynamic and the Sergeant group is gonna be hard to take out (1 rank of Adversary plus cover, and 2 meatshields).

The main goal is to have my players feel they have to use their defensive talents often... or holding their breath if they don't use them
I prefer to drop my players pretty even so they all end the fight all evenly beat up... If I have to drop a player towards the end of the fight, I'll probably drop the most dangerous of them, to make the less combat oriented character shine a little and save the day. That way, the combat dude can brag that he took half of them down and that I had to focus fire on him, and the non-combat dude can brag that he dropped the last guy and saved everyone Everybody feels special and feels he contributed to the fight in an equal measure.

To balance encounters, you have to look at your characters defensive talents to not give too much attack dices to your ennemies. You also look at their armor rating and wound treshhold to make sure you don't use too little or too big guns. Then you check how long you want to make the encounter and adjust the numbers of groups/minions. You can also (and you should) throw in some environmental effects to add setback dices to their checks... it will add some flavor and make the fight run longer with fewer ennemies.

Hope it helps.