Hey folks,

are there significant rules for Lightsaber duels in Force & Destiny? I feel with the ordinary rules, there is not so much of a fight with attack, parry etc... or am I wrong?

Have you somethimg homebrewn for this?

Normal combat rules account for parries, side steps, dodging, ripostes, disarms (Both of weapon and actual arm!).

Take a look at the Makashii Duelist tree - they are very suited for 1-on-1 lightsaber duels.

Yeah, I don´t tried it yet (we are moving slowly on this, our Jedi is at the beginning of his path), but playing 2 sessions, when I thinking about a lightsaber duel, I feel someone falls fast. And about the Makashi, the fighters won´t be both Makashi.

Wouldn´t it be great to have very star wars themed, long duels with all the familiar action?

Keep in mind that while the system definitely allows for a more Prequel-era style of play, it's first and foremost goal is to emulate the Original Trilogy, and lightsaber duels weren't particularly long and drawn out, and probably half of their length comes from talking between the opponents.

That said, you don't necessarily need huge amounts of Parry ranks or even Supreme Parry to keep fights going for long periods of time. If you want each person to keep spending Advantage to go towards strain recovery and making attacks harder to hit instead of going straight for criticals, there's nothing wrong with that. But it really doesn't need any homebrewing since heavily modded lightsabers to rack up base damage should probably coincide with high amounts of XP spent on Lightsaber talents and Force Powers anyways.

Yeah, I don´t tried it yet (we are moving slowly on this, our Jedi is at the beginning of his path), but playing 2 sessions, when I thinking about a lightsaber duel, I feel someone falls fast. And about the Makashi, the fighters won´t be both Makashi.

Wouldn´t it be great to have very star wars themed, long duels with all the familiar action?

Saga-Edition gave us long, drawn out duels... They sucked, and took forever. A million die rolls don't make a game great.

FFG's Star Wars system gives us Knight-level duels that last 3-5 rounds (in my testing of 2 Knight-levels vs an Inquisitor), but each roll is significant to the narrative. The trick is to savor the duel and narrate it fully, not to roll again and again and again until we're all bored to tears. The book also allows a round to be up to or longer than a minute, so the narrative can stretch out a bit.

Okay I´ll keep that in mind and will try that. Becoming boring is a good point, I certainly hope that the rules can carry The Return of the Jedi intensity combined with a good narrative. In think that we will have about 2-3 duels in the whole campaign, so they should matter...

But you gave me an idea... the talking... Maybe rolling once or twice a social test after acting it out in roleplay and give setback/boosts and conflicts for that.

Okay I´ll keep that in mind and will try that. Becoming boring is a good point, I certainly hope that the rules can carry The Return of the Jedi intensity combined with a good narrative. In think that we will have about 2-3 duels in the whole campaign, so they should matter...

But you gave me an idea... the talking... Maybe rolling once or twice a social test after acting it out in roleplay and give setback/boosts and conflicts for that.

My Taipani noble has Supreme Scathing Tirade- coercion check to inflict strain as a maneuver.

Witty Barbs in melee combat come standard!

If you have it, i suggest looking at the Showdown rules in Fly casual. It can be used for melee duels as well.

Not to mention, advantages and threat can be peppered in to your narrative and help build the flavor of the action.

I´ll check that out, thx.

You were a good inspiration, thank you very much...

Looking forward for my adventure Escape from Corellia, next week on Saturday. It´s a shame, the older you get, the more fun you´ll have to game, but the less time you get to game...

The Duels between Luke and Vader were long though. I'd actually like to see the Bespin lightsaber duel done in this system.

The Duels between Luke and Vader were long though. I'd actually like to see the Bespin lightsaber duel done in this system.

The Bespin duel has a run-time of 8 minutes, which, according to the game's roughly a minute per combat round, means 8 rounds.

-It takes 51 seconds for the first attack, so assume that's Luke walking up and drawing a lightsaber, and Vader is waiting. Initiative is Vader, then Luke.

-The 2nd round (opening swings) nets Vader a lot of advantage and knocks Luke prone.

-The 3rd round Vader disarms Luke and uses Drive Back to push him into the carbon freezing chamber pit. Luke manages to Surge out, then grab his lightsaber (the hose attack against Vader is narrative).

-4th round, Luke drops a Destiny Point and gets enough advantage (no success) to push Vader off the edge.

-Luke hikes around a bit until 3:30ish when Vader uses Move to attack him with a Magnitude upgrade for multiple objects. The GM rules Luke gets sucked out the window, but he catches on. That's the 5th round, but Luke didn't get much in in terms of attacking.

-Next round, Vader uses Drive Back some more to push Luke back, and Luke lands a light blow on Vader's shoulder.

-7th round, Luke is pushed steadily back and knocked prone, and he gets up and attacks some more. No dice.

-8th round, Vader lands a beastly critical hit, and Luke is now maimed. Narrative resolution wraps things up.

This is only going to happen in game if the GM is pulling punches. Luke is Knight-level or near that range, and Vader is spec'ed out with Inquisitor rules, so it's going to be one-sided, plain and simple. If I were the GM, I'd contemplate just killing Luke off (I had an important NPC warn him not to go, then brought a previous character's ghost up when he wouldn't listen! ), but with the plot, I don't want to kill Luke. So I'm going to cut down on Vader's skill to reflect him playing nice and not make the player feel overwhelmed, just pushed around.

You have to look at the Bespin duel from that perspective: Vader is toying with Luke most of the time, and that's what is dragging the duel out. The second duel is more of a backdrop for a deep internal conflict via words.

I actually did the "duel of words" in one of my games (convention game, actually) where in addition to the lightsaber attacks/maneuvers every round, the players would also roll Charm vs. the inquisitor's cool (a conflicted former friend). (The inquisitor would have rolled Coercion vs. the player's cool, in return, but didn't want to deal with that.) Successes caused strain damage, with the Inquisitor "coming back to the light" when his strain threshold was depleted.

Thats kinda how I see the E6 duel - there was a whole fight of wills and presence going on behind the lightsaber duel.

From talking with Sam Stewart and a couple other FFG folks involved in the design of Force and Destiny, the main element to keep a lightsaber fight from being over in one or two rounds is the Parry talent. If you look at the Inquisitor rules, you'll note two things, the first of which is that Parry 5 is an option to let the Inquisitor or similarly-themed major villain be able to cut down on the amount of damage they take from a PC's lightsaber attack.

The second is that of the lightsaber options, they only get the standard unmodified Ilum Crystals (Damage 6, Crit 2, Breach 1, Sunder), making it more likely that a lightsaber-wielding PC with ranks of Parry will be able to tank a few hits without getting completely obliterated in the opening couple of rounds.

Ostensibly with 4 ranks in Lightsaber, the advantage is going to go the Inquisitor, particularly if you assigned a 4 or 5 to whichever characteristic they wind up using for the Lightsaber skill; most PCs are probably going to be lucky to have more than 3 ranks in Lightsaber and better than a 3 in their governing characteristic for the skill. Things go a bit more in the PC's favor if they've got Improved Parry and a means to upgrade the difficulty of attacks coming at them, since a successful hit is more likely to have the necessary 3 threat or despair result to allow the PC to pull off a free hit, which if they've tweaked their saber for better damage will still get past the Inquisitor's Parry, and if you have the Inquisitor suffer strain to use Parry like every other PC and NPC does, they've also got to burn valuable strain if they want to reduce the damage, again putting the fight a bit more in the PC's favor as that's advantage the Inquisitor can't spend on other things, like disarms, triggering critical injuries, or just giving themselves boost dice or free maneuvers.

Another crucial element is where the duel is set. Putting the fight on a flat, plain, and generally uninteresting surface isn't going to do much to inspire your player(s) to be creative. But you put it into an environment like the carbon freezing chamber in ESB, the Death Star throne room, the Mustafar Separatist base, or the bowels of the Theed palace, and a lot more possibilities open up for both the PC and NPC to take advantage of and get creative with their usage of advantage, triumphs, threat and despair.

Quick question: Is there an example of a lightsaber fight somewhere in F&D (β)? Or someplace else?

In general I get the rules but a nice example would help a lot ... especially when it comes to making the fight more interesting with Force abilities etc.

Thanks for the info!

Daniel.

Lightsaber combat is pretty much exactly the same as other combat. The only real exception is the introduction of Parry from FaD, which is pretty much necessary for surviving hits because of Breach.

So basically, 2 players, each with a basic lightsaber are in a battle. Let's say Player 1 goes first, swings his saber, and succeeds with just 1 success, Player 2 activates his 2 ranks of Parry in response. Player takes 3 strain to activate Parry, and gets to reduce the base damage of the incoming attack by 2 + 2 (the number of ranks he has). So the Basic Lightsaber's 6 base damage decreases by 4 to 2, so moving into damage, Breach shoots through Player 2's Soak, and Player 2 takes 3 Wound damage (2 from the decreased base damage + 1 from the uncancelled success).

That's pretty much all there is to it. Just pretty much the same as normal combat. And Parry also kicks in with pretty much every other melee weapon I think, so technically you can do vibrosword fights like this as well.

Lighsaber fights between low XP characters are like duels in Samurai films. Both try to stare each over down, then swing swing swing someone falls over. A very quick and nasty fight.

It's only when you get dedicated high XP duelists that it becomes more like the Erol Flynn/Princess Bride style duels with lots of probeing and feints (or with the mechanics lost of Parry usage) before someone eventually runs out of strain and then gets dropped.

So as a poster above me said it will normally only be a couple of dice rolls so use it as an oppotunity to make it a narrative event.

I ran some tests with two Knight-level Jedi and an Inquisitor (albeit with slightly worse Parry), and those duels lasted 3-5 rounds because the Inquisitor had a lot of health and yeah, Parry, and he had to split his attention across to targets. It wasn't overly samurai-ish, but it didn't take long.

Really, it will be a samurai duel if it's one-on-one and you use the Showdown rules from Fly Casual , but most of the time, I feel like the whole party will be facing the Inquisitor / BBEG so it will be longer.

I made some house rules for the D6 system some time ago because I was tired of how lightsaber duels devolved into just rolling massive pools of dice until someone got hit and died. It involved heavy use of various "verbal attacks" called Taunts, based on how combatants in the movies would trash-talk each other in between hacking and slashing. I made a quick-and-dirty translation to this system that I posted in this thread: https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/89286-lightsaber-duels-and-roleplaying/

Take a look and see if it's something you can use.

I like those rules, although I'd take them as guidelines, more than actual rules. For a dramatic duel, I, being ever the Star Wars GM, would establish that each duelist gets a social test each round, and then take pointers from what you've got there.

I like those rules, although I'd take them as guidelines, more than actual rules. For a dramatic duel, I, being ever the Star Wars GM, would establish that each duelist gets a social test each round, and then take pointers from what you've got there.

That sounds similar to the chase rules as a starting point. Instead of pilot checks, allow the social check of your choice.

I agree with the focus on narrating the duel/combat taking place.

Correct me if i'm wrong, but with regular combat, a combat check doesn't necessarily mean you 'actually' got hit. You could narrate it as such, but with lightsabers being so lethal, taking hits from an NPC could mean close misses and scrapes instead. The criticals really show the physical effects.

In between rolling dice, there could be quite a number of attacks taking place (similar to blaster shots going all over the place in a firefight) and these are interspersed with the actual dice rolls each round. There are also those 'lightsaber-lock' moments where the two combatants (or multiple like Maul/Obi-wan/Qui-Gon) face each other down with maybe a taunt/threat/evil cackle before disengaging from the lock again and back to the flurry of blows. Perfect for adding in the social side of the combat.

As someone mentioned before, use the environment, and the talents such as 'drive back' to move the action along.

Having said all that, i don't have the beta and have never run a duel like this, but think it would be awesomely cinematic.

Hope it helps and of course feel free to critique!

Wouldn´t it be great to have very star wars themed, long duels with all the familiar action?

Well, considering that each round is more than one swing of the lightsaber, I would say that yes it's very appropriate. Lets dissect Vader vs Luke on Bespin:

Round 1) Initial engagement, back and forth - Vader rolls enough advantage to force Luke down the stairs and used his maneuver to jump down himself. Vader also got a triumph, allowing him to disarm Luke. Luke gets enough threat to blindly step backwards and fall into the carbon freezing chamber.

Round 2) Luke, who was lucky and got the first initiative slot, jumps out of the pit and uses his maneuver to retrieve his saber (Yeah, Move should be an action, but since all he's doing is picking it up with his mind, the GM says "Yeah, that's a cool, cinematic moment. Go for it"). Vader attacks, gets a despair and a face full of steam and a shove off the platform for his trouble.

Round 3) Vader gives up the saber attacks, uses move to bombard Luke and gets a triumph to blow out the window. Luke generally fails his attack, but flips a destiny point to manipulate the environment - "So I get blown out the window - but there's a catwalk below that I can just barely land on!"- The GM doesn't want to end the campaign, so he goes with it.

Round 4) More back and forth, with Luke running low on strain and nearing his wound threshold. Luke gets a crit, but rolls low (something in the teens) and only wings Vader. Vader also gets a crit but rolls much, much higher and removes a limb, ending the fight.

I think I've read this before... maybe in the FaD Beta Forums?

I think I've read this before... maybe in the FaD Beta Forums?

Same thread, brought back via the dark side arts of Threadromancy.

Prior to today, the last post was over three weeks ago.