For those that care, going with one posters constant example of 4 Agility against Medium range, and assuming 2 ranks in the appropriate skill, the 2D results for the check (2 ability, 2 proficiency, 3 difficulty) results in the highest point at 2 successes, 0 advantage (this is Net after cancelling with failures and threat). That makes up 251,226 of 4,718,592 possible results, or about 5% of the results. Expanding the selection outward so that successes range from 1 to 3, advantages range from -1 to 1 (-1 means a net Threat) now encompasses 37% of the results. A second expansion gets successes ranging from 0 to 4 and advantages range from -2 to 2 now encompasses nearly 70% of the possible outcomes. The possible results that allow for a second or greater hit (2 or more Net Advantage) is only 10.5% of the possible results with the most likely result being 1 success and 2 advantage. Removing one Difficulty die would reduce the Net negative results (obviously) and would move the results slightly more down and to the right (so 1 more Net Advantage).

Ahh, the joy of having an app that takes in the dice counts and spits out a nice table of charts. What is interesting is how sharp the spike is of the 2D surface showing that the big results (high successes or high advantages, but never both) are really the minor results of all the dice.

I've yet to alter anything major, but after discussions here I think I'm going to simply implement that Jury-Rigged can't affect Auto-fire advantages.

In my games it's an incidental to flip a weapon on or off auto-fire. While on, difficulty is increased per RAW, advantages may trigger extra hits, and a new house quality "Ammo Hog" is in effect. I never liked the added description on the Heavy Blaster Pistol about 3 threats to run out of ammo. That sounded like a quality to me, so I created "Ammo Hog" which does the same thing and applied it to the Heavy Blaster Pistol. Later, I gave the Ammo Hog quality to any weapon running in auto-fire mode. If you start spitting out more rounds you will tend to run out of ammo sooner.

Hey here's is a house rule that actually makes sense.

One thing I have to wonder is...What range band our you designing your encounters at? Are they all happening at short range? cause the only way I could see someone getting 6 hits is when they are shooting a minion group at short range...

wrong. it doesn't take much to roll an absurd number of dice on offense. it's much harder (if possible at all) to pump defense up to the same level. you might be able to do it for a special nemesis, but not every fight is against a campaign "endboss". actually very few fights are.

it's hilarious when you run an app to try and disprove what people see at their tables regularly. maybe you missed a few things that actually happen when people play, like aiming, use of talents, weapon mods or boost dice from allies? i think you just might have.

anyway, this discussion is pointless (no matter how much we seem to enjoy having it, considering it comes up every other week ).

some people think that certain stuff is imbalanced or broken. some people think that the same stuff is ok.

one group uses houserules to address their problems. the other group doesn't, cause to them there is no problem.

one thing that makes roleplaying games great is the fact that everyone can play as they choose. some people like their star wars like ww1. others... nor so much. and that's ok.

ps: still waiting for those builds that are comparable to autofire in damage output for the same xp. (keep the discussion going, right? )

So your premise is it is hard to have the bad guys start at long or extreme range? It is hard to use cover? It is hard for a GM to use adversary? it is hard to use defensive talents like sidestep? The Force power sense? and various other talents that upgrade or increase difficulty to hit your character? It is hard for minions to have armor?

So your premise is it is hard to have the bad guys start at long or extreme range? It is hard to use cover? It is hard for a GM to use adversary? it is hard to use defensive talents like sidestep? The Force power sense? and various other talents that upgrade or increase difficulty to hit your character? It is hard for minions to have armor?

wow, all those possibilities other people have never heard or thought of! thank you, daeglan!

One thing I have to wonder is...What range band our you designing your encounters at? Are they all happening at short range? cause the only way I could see someone getting 6 hits is when they are shooting a minion group at short range...

wrong. it doesn't take much to roll an absurd number of dice on offense. it's much harder (if possible at all) to pump defense up to the same level. you might be able to do it for a special nemesis, but not every fight is against a campaign "endboss". actually very few fights are.

it's hilarious when you run an app to try and disprove what people see at their tables regularly. maybe you missed a few things that actually happen when people play, like aiming, use of talents, weapon mods or boost dice from allies? i think you just might have.

anyway, this discussion is pointless (no matter how much we seem to enjoy having it, considering it comes up every other week ).

some people think that certain stuff is imbalanced or broken. some people think that the same stuff is ok.

one group uses houserules to address their problems. the other group doesn't, cause to them there is no problem.

one thing that makes roleplaying games great is the fact that everyone can play as they choose. some people like their star wars like ww1. others... nor so much. and that's ok.

ps: still waiting for those builds that are comparable to autofire in damage output for the same xp. (keep the discussion going, right? )

Vibroaxe weilding marauder. Double lightsaber weilding character. Ataru striker with saber swarm. a gunslinger with paired hh50 blaster pistols. And so on.

So your premise is it is hard to have the bad guys start at long or extreme range? It is hard to use cover? It is hard for a GM to use adversary? it is hard to use defensive talents like sidestep? The Force power sense? and various other talents that upgrade or increase difficulty to hit your character? It is hard for minions to have armor?

wow, all those possibilities other people have never heard or thought of! thank you, daeglan!

apparently not since you are having an autofire wielder getting 6 hits in one shot. Only way I can figure getting that result is to be at short range with no cover or armor.

i guess /ignore it is then.

Whatever. If you want to whine about it instead of answering valid questions. I provide lots of ways to increase the difficulty to hit a target. Which are just as numerous as ways to increase the odds of hitting a target. The claim that it is easier to get positive dice sounds like a lack of creativity. Not using the advice given in the List. For example use elevation. Put gunners at extreme range above the characters for example. going to be hard to move closer. Or extreme range and behind cover...Have reinforcements arrive. And so on. This is not rocket science. Study some tactics. Like how machine guns are used in the real world. Like keeping the PCs heads down while they move riflemen into position for a cross fire.

ahhhh... "/ignore" such a wonderful tool. a bit like autofire.

What? This system is hardly unique in having dark corners where things don't work quite as expected. Personally I think this system is far more robust and "error tolerant" than most, one reason I've decided I won't play anything else...even if it's a fantasy campaign I'll be using one of the several well-constructed adaptations.

you sound like those WOW PVPers who are constantly calling for rebalancing the game every update.

What systems work better you think? Honest question, not **** headed challenge. I will say this game's variety is part of the 'problem'. You end up with multiple points of failure potentially.

First, IMO, I think a lot of the "X is overpowered" threads we see in these forums are based on a misunderstanding of the RAW governing the item in question, or (and this is totally my opinion) an over-statement of 'overpowered'.

And I think it is not only Auto-fire. Also the High Soak issue comes often, and the close combat high critic "build". These are top stars in these forums. And then we have signature abilities, and the Move force power...

For those that care, going with one posters constant example of 4 Agility against Medium range, and assuming 2 ranks in the appropriate skill, the 2D results for the check (2 ability, 2 proficiency, 3 difficulty) results in the highest point at 2 successes, 0 advantage (this is Net after cancelling with failures and threat). That makes up 251,226 of 4,718,592 possible results, or about 5% of the results. Expanding the selection outward so that successes range from 1 to 3, advantages range from -1 to 1 (-1 means a net Threat) now encompasses 37% of the results. A second expansion gets successes ranging from 0 to 4 and advantages range from -2 to 2 now encompasses nearly 70% of the possible outcomes. The possible results that allow for a second or greater hit (2 or more Net Advantage) is only 10.5% of the possible results with the most likely result being 1 success and 2 advantage. Removing one Difficulty die would reduce the Net negative results (obviously) and would move the results slightly more down and to the right (so 1 more Net Advantage).

Ahh, the joy of having an app that takes in the dice counts and spits out a nice table of charts. What is interesting is how sharp the spike is of the 2D surface showing that the big results (high successes or high advantages, but never both) are really the minor results of all the dice.

Yeah, when you're just rolling the ability/skill/difficulty combos, the results are pretty tame. However if you start adding in 2-3 boost dice, the results get kinda bonkers.

And there are a lot of ways to add boost dice.

First, IMO, I think a lot of the "X is overpowered" threads we see in these forums are based on a misunderstanding of the RAW governing the item in question, or (and this is totally my opinion) an over-statement of 'overpowered'.

If so many people, repeatedly, misunderstand the RAW... may be the RAW have some flaws.

And I think it is not only Auto-fire. Also the High Soak issue comes often, and the close combat high critic "build". These are top stars in these forums. And then we have signature abilities, and the Move force power...

Add in low crit weapons (Lightsabers, vibroblades) to that list too.

As far as the flaws, I think there's a few issues at play.

First, I agree with what you have *literally* stated here: IMO, there's a problem with the rules as written . In some cases, the rules are poorly designed, but in many other places the rules are fine, but by the Force are they dense. There's always going to be a struggle in any kind of technical writing between brevity and clarity. In for the Star Wars game, FFG went on brevity. Hard.

This is in support of the narrative style, I get that, but obviously it leads to some issues. In beta, I raised concerns about places where small additions to the text would go a long way to ameliorating headaches for GMs, and those comments almost universally met with comments like "Your players are bad; they're causing the problem, not the game" and "You shouldn't play this game."

So the devs stuck with the wording and this is what we've got to work with now.

Even beyond that, the devs apparently adopted what I refer to as an 'omission by intent' style. The style allows groups to fill in the blanks implicitly to tweak the game to their liking, but makes it very difficult to figure out where something is omitted intentionally or if it suffers from poor design.

Second, there's always going to be people misunderstanding rules in RPGs, just because of the volume of mechanics. Its easy to miss an exceptionally important line of text that vastly changes how a mechanic works. Many of the "X is over-powered" threads get de-bunked in the first page because someone points out the situation is already disallowed or nerfed from the OP's description due to existing text in the book.

Finally, [almost] everyone wants to be game designer. A lot of players and GMs *want* to find bugs because then they can showcase how clever their solutions are and impress the community. Even in *this* thread, the OP presents an HR to address the issue he's actually asking about (AF activation costs 3 adv vs 2 adv).

tl;dr Yeah, there are issues with RAW, but there are issues with the community, too.

no system will ever be flawless. i love ffg star wars, but it's fairly obvious there are some mechanical issues. so what?

those with a bit of experience can easily solve those for themselves and their groups, those without either work stuff out by themselves, learning as they go or have a great forum to fall back on.

talking about the game is part of the hobby.

AS THE OP , the question of whether autofire is broken or not has been answered to my satisfaction. The answer I'm getting is that it depends on your individual gaming experience and personal expectation of what a Star Wars RPG aught to look like. Most of the posters on here have had different reasons to support their arguments, but it usually boils down to one of these two broad factors.

I appreciate the various suggestions as to house rules to "nerf" autofire while still keeping it worthwhile.

Since there seems to be some sore feelings going around, before this gets out of hand I want to gently remind everyone that I'm a PLAYER wanting to keep problems from developing in the game I'm starting, and not a GM with existing problems. I would like to nudge the conversation towards these questions:

If I use autofire, (or for that matter, any of the "OP" combos out there), how do I tell if I've started to step on other players' toes?
What preventative measures do you suggest, apart from simply not *trying* to break the game from the get-go?
If I do start to step on other's toes, how do I fix the problem without making a new character?

you'll never get a definite answer for questions like this. what's broken is always a matter of opinion.

if other players get bored every time it's your turn cause you are so much more powerful than them that's a strong indicator that you've "stepped on their toes". anoother one is if the gm starts putting you up against opponents that seem too strong for the other characters cause to make fights interesting there need to be opponents that can face the damage output. if combat runs into "we need to keep that guy in the fight or we are toast!" that's another sign something's wrong.

just don't overdo it. autofire without "jury rigged" isn't that bad (and still fun and useful). don't load up on true aim. true aim, high stats, modded weapon, jury rigged, that's when things get really ugly. don't spec-hop just to get jury rigged or that extra rank of true aim. play a "normal" character. stay away from a few of those things and you'll do fine. as long as any other fighting characters in the group are at a similar level, there's no problem. well, i guess that turned into "don't try to break the game". sorry, but that's all you can do. if you don't want to break the game, don't try.

as a gm i'd let you reassign xp in that case. that's what i usually do in such cases, if players want to keep their characters but something broke one way or the other.

AS THE OP , the question of whether autofire is broken or not has been answered to my satisfaction. The answer I'm getting is that it depends on your individual gaming experience and personal expectation of what a Star Wars RPG aught to look like. Most of the posters on here have had different reasons to support their arguments, but it usually boils down to one of these two broad factors.

I appreciate the various suggestions as to house rules to "nerf" autofire while still keeping it worthwhile.

Since there seems to be some sore feelings going around, before this gets out of hand I want to gently remind everyone that I'm a PLAYER wanting to keep problems from developing in the game I'm starting, and not a GM with existing problems. I would like to nudge the conversation towards these questions:

If I use autofire, (or for that matter, any of the "OP" combos out there), how do I tell if I've started to step on other players' toes?

What preventative measures do you suggest, apart from simply not *trying* to break the game from the get-go?

If I do start to step on other's toes, how do I fix the problem without making a new character?

What preventative measures do you suggest, apart from simply not *trying* to break the game from the get-go?

If I do start to step on other's toes, how do I fix the problem without making a new character?

This is simple. You always have a choice as to how to spend advantages, you do *not* have to spend them to get extra hits. So if you decide it's too easy to get multiple hits and you feel you're stepping on people's toes, use the extra advantages instead to pass boost dice to allies, or impose setback on enemies, or recover strain, etc.

Trying to avoid certain Talents leads to too much angst during character development, waiting to see if your restraint in development paid off in actual play. Just use whatever restraint you feel is appropriate during the action and be done with it.

This way you don't even have to suggest any rule changes or nerfing at all.

what whafrog said! that's much better advice than mine.

One way to tell if you're stepping on anyone elses toes in the group is if there is another "combat" character pay attention to how much of the action they get and if their character is contributing significantly to combat encounters. Put yourself in their position - would you be happy if your character was as useful as theirs?

In addition to whatfrog's great advice on what to do if you think you are outshining another combat character I'd add that you don't have to super optimize your character. If you feel like you're outpacing another PC then spend some of that XP on something else you find interesting.

EDIT Btw, I'm not implying that you're trying to create a super optimized character - my point is that if you're using a more XP efficient way of being very combat effective you have spare XP to spend on something else while still keeping pace with other combat characters.

What preventative measures do you suggest, apart from simply not *trying* to break the game from the get-go?

If I do start to step on other's toes, how do I fix the problem without making a new character?

This is simple. You always have a choice as to how to spend advantages, you do *not* have to spend them to get extra hits. So if you decide it's too easy to get multiple hits and you feel you're stepping on people's toes, use the extra advantages instead to pass boost dice to allies, or impose setback on enemies, or recover strain, etc.

Trying to avoid certain Talents leads to too much angst during character development, waiting to see if your restraint in development paid off in actual play. Just use whatever restraint you feel is appropriate during the action and be done with it.

This way you don't even have to suggest any rule changes or nerfing at all.

This right here, for the win... want to make sure the rest of the party loves your machine gun style? Lay a bunch of setback dice on your enemies (as they dive for cover) instead of taking them all out - then the melee monster gets to close in and help clean up, the support characters don't get taken out, but still have a chance to do something, the face gets to yell something disheartening, etc...

and suddenly, you're part of a team, and not Rambo.

AS THE OP , the question of whether autofire is broken or not has been answered to my satisfaction. The answer I'm getting is that it depends on your individual gaming experience and personal expectation of what a Star Wars RPG aught to look like. Most of the posters on here have had different reasons to support their arguments, but it usually boils down to one of these two broad factors.

I appreciate the various suggestions as to house rules to "nerf" autofire while still keeping it worthwhile.

Since there seems to be some sore feelings going around, before this gets out of hand I want to gently remind everyone that I'm a PLAYER wanting to keep problems from developing in the game I'm starting, and not a GM with existing problems. I would like to nudge the conversation towards these questions:

If I use autofire, (or for that matter, any of the "OP" combos out there), how do I tell if I've started to step on other players' toes?

What preventative measures do you suggest, apart from simply not *trying* to break the game from the get-go?

If I do start to step on other's toes, how do I fix the problem without making a new character?

Blessed are the players who take a proactive approach to not borking their GM's game.

The advice above is great: Be part of the team, communicate with everyone at the table (Players for combat plans, GM for feed-back. etc), tweak your play-style if it's problematic, don't build your character to be a one-trick pony...

You've probably already done the most important thing: Knowing you're getting into a realm where a mechanic can be abused. And lets face it...

Knowing is half the hassle .

Edit: Props to MC PeePee Pants

Knowing is half the hassle.

I resemble that remark!

The way I see it, the biggest issue w/ autofire is scoring multiple hits on a single opponent. If you want to use autofire, go ahead imo, just target every enemy in sight and put a single hit on as many as you can. That way, you get to be an autofire boss and the GM's baddie lives more than 1 turn.

First of all, kudos to OP for your concerns. Not every player thinks of the complete game experience first and his character second!

Pretty late to the party, but having a heavy in the new group I thought about autofire and jury rigged. At the worst case my houserule would be : I'd go with 1 adv. for the first hit. and 2 adv. for every following hit.

That way jury rigged does its job consistently but doesn't turn the weapon into the last arch.

The way I see it, the biggest issue w/ autofire is scoring multiple hits on a single opponent. If you want to use autofire, go ahead imo, just target every enemy in sight and put a single hit on as many as you can. That way, you get to be an autofire boss and the GM's baddie lives more than 1 turn.

This also goes well with what whafrog said. By targeting every enemy I can legally throw out setbacks by spending adv, even to the ones I'm not killing. iGranted, it would be a more effecient use of advantages and time to simply kill everyone, but imposing some self-restraint and saving some of the bad guys for my buddies keeps everyone happy.