Hey everyone!

Just a quick question:

After our first session we found out that we did one thing wrong.

When you are attacking with a melee or brawl weapon the rulebook states that the check is average.

Then my question is: When is an "engaged" attack an easy check then?

If you attack with meelee, brawn, ranged (light) and ranged (heavy) it is at least average.

I find it strange that the game says that engaged is easy when it basically never is?

Or have I misunderstood something here?

Thanks for the help!

Engaged is always average for melee (before being modified by talents, GM meddling, house-rules, etc), melee can only be used while engaged (unless you're a Rancor with short range reach ...). See page 204, last paragraph, right hand side column.

Ranged weapons have difficulties ranging from easy to hard, short to long respectively.

Being engaged is a sub-range of short, wherein melee weapons can kill you, this is kind of a disadvantage for people wielding ranged weapons, so ranged light weapons add 1 difficulty die and ranged heavy weapons add 2 difficulty dice while engaged with an opponent. To get out of this difficulty increase, you can use a manoeuvre to disengage and then attack at short range with an easy difficulty, or you can modify your weapon to suffer less from being engaged (there's at least one in the CRB).

My problem then is: Why does the rules say (and my gm screen, references and so on) that engaged is an easy check, when it mostly never is?
When you have to have special things to make an engaged check easy, why is it labeled as an easy check? Is it because of interacting and so on? It's strangely written, but thanks for the clear up

Arguably shooting while engaged with a control panel wouldn't incur a penalty to ranged weapons, even if the target was the control panel - of course most GMs wouldn't (at least shouldn't) require a combat check for that most of the time, or add difficulty dice if it's important to determine precise damage.

I think they set engaged as easy because it is within short range (so the base is easy), but it is also modified by weapon type. Which Table 6-1 Ranged Attack Difficulties on page 205 specifies: it says easy plus modifiers and references a table on page 210. Also, it takes up less space than writing "ranged light average[dd]" and "ranged heavy hard [ddd]" ...

Also, and I'm just kinda spitballin here, the devs tend to leave wiggle room for later material. So it's possible that it can be easy... if you have Talent X from Tree Y found in Supplement Z....which hasn't been released yet.