The other thing to remember, and this is BIG:
Exceeding wound or strain threshold means being TAKEN OUT.
Not killed. As in - not dead.
Get stomped on by a bunch of StormTroopers, and guess what? You wake up in a scary place. The story goes on...
Another thing to mention, is that hitting zero doesn't cut it. You have to exceed the threshold, so you don't drop till -1.
Count for the bad guys too.
- I expect "combat" characters to have a high soak (10+) and high wounds (20+), when they get to "high" XP levels. If your players don't have that, then they're not, to my definition, "combat" characters.
See, I learned about the “fistful of dice” problem early on. So, I specifically AVOIDED getting a really high soak for my Wookiee Marauder. Yeah, he had a fairly high Wound Threshold, but his Soak wasn’t that much more than anyone else in the party. I actively worked to avoid creating an imbalance in the game, precisely because I wanted to keep things challenging and fun for a longer period of time. I went well out of my way in buying talents so that I avoided creating problems for my GM.
Most of the other players in the game didn’t work so hard to avoid imbalancing the game, and yet that didn’t cause problems for the GM. One guy was even a little munchkin in terms of what he accumulated, but he was already the Heavy with the big-ass LRB, and so that was something the GM would have to deal with no matter what.
This game is pretty robust in terms of mechanics, but if the GM runs a Monty Haul campaign and the players participate in massive munchkinism, then I can see where things would get out of hand.
IMO, this game does better in resisting those problems than anything else I’ve seen, but any game will ultimately break down at some point, if you abuse it heavily enough.
IMO, this game does better in resisting those problems than anything else I’ve seen, but any game will ultimately break down at some point, if you abuse it heavily enough.
It will also break down if there's not enough variety in encounter types. If all my group ever did was get in personal-scale combat, my Technician would just fill out the Outlaw Tech tree and maybe a cross-career spec in Doctor and be done. If all we did was fight vehicle combat, I could call it good with Mechanic. As it is, we do enough different things that I want to explore all of those trees, and if the GM throws more difficult Computer checks against me I might have to invest in Slicer as well.
And that is why even at 600 xp I was still having room to grow. I did not have all the force powers i wanted. I did not have all the talents in the 2 trees I had. Was I effective? yes. Did I have plenty of room to grow? yes. could the GM still challenge me? yes.
There are weapons for the early game, that assume soak 2-5 and 10-15 wt, then there are the missile tubes, heavy blaster rifles and lighsabers that are designed for soak 8-12 and wt 20+
we have most of us doing our good pools are at YYG, some at YYY
Sorry for the long response time, Christmas stuff and all that. Posts are long enough again that I'm gonna go back to bullet pointing:
I said that the dedication and the skills accounted for 70 xp, not that he just bought it, try to extrapolate a little. 130 xp for all the talents in addition to dedication itself and the lightsaber ranks. But thank you for addressing any of the points I made. He still rolls survival, discipline, and vigilance better than what you described as your party average with 70 xp to throw around. In addition to lightsaber and coercion. So you're telling me that has the best-in-party on a combat skill, a social skill, a spotting skill, a mental skill, and survival, is good at one thing?
Mistype, that was one Y too many, meant to type YYYYYYG, that's what the math was for. Although you could probably get 8 in brawn from strength enhancing systems or Power Armor, though it's never a situation that's come up.
You said you were at 3s and some of the party 4s providing YYGG as a highest result. Now you say YYG is the backup, that's only 0.625 and 0.5 advantages less. I wouldn't call that much better.
There was one character who bought 5, I explained why he had 5 and I really don't see why this is some sort of huge point of contention.
I would say the point of a 1 in a stat is to represent a deficiency endemic to the species, unless you are playing someone who represents an abnormality. It isn't really anything I would be opposed to.
- Just like the jedi, he has agility as his big skill for shooting, stealth, and piloting. At most other things he isn't better than any other character. His competent mechanics can be explained by 2-3 ranks, his charms by a slightly higher presence. He still isn't any less specialized than the disciple. 2/4/2/3/3/3 for Han bloody Solo, a build achievable for a human with one rank in dedication. At 350xp, that would give Han 150xp to play around with after reaching dedication in any smuggler tree except gambler. He could pick up a dozen skills, a second tree and dedicate that, exile and sense or some such in order to represent latent force sensitivity, etc.
- In my games we try to play a bit closer to real people and characters, rather than main character archetypes. Most people are good at things, bad at things, and okay at things, but rare is the person that has 3s across the board, or ranks in every skill. Just ask a football player to fly a plane, or a chemist to run a marathon. Even then, the chemist probably won't know much about physics, the football player would be equally unqualified to mountain climb. The same is true for teachers, IT workers, lawyers, garbage collectors, and even soldiers. They all have specialties, they all have proficiencies, they all have averages, they all have flaws, and they all have nadirs.
- However, the same is true in media. Look at a group like, I don't know, the Scooby Doo gang; each of them is obviously a different person, good at different things, and that is why they work well together. Both in terms of success and of keeping the viewer interested. You can have them split up and look for clues to have funny, unexpected, or nerve-wracking moments, or you can keep them together and let the total be greater than the sum of its parts.
- To go further into what I said before, as groups accumulate numbers, each overlapping skill becomes more and more redundant. The more similar each player, the fewer options the GM has open to change things up, or even increase the difficulty. This situation is even more apparent in FaD, where each career provides a combat tree that works with a different ability, as combat is one of the few places where the number of participants is unlimited.
- I didn't necessarily mean that the player had made a good character, only that the build didn't limit the potential for a good character.
- They aren't all in squads, some split up in order to keep the melee combatants away from the bulk of their forces. Even inside squad formation, they wouldn't all cluster together, but set up ranks in order to form a firing line, spread out to take advantage of their range, or skirmish to minimize loses.
- The issue I had here remains: both sides have huge damage output and comparatively few wounds. Also that slicing through waves of garbage isn't satisfying or engaging for players or GM.
He isn't actually the best at Vigilence in our party... second best, but he is outclassed by a Mystic who has various other bonuses to iut regardless of his lower stat. Discipline... isn't really an active skill most of the time. He is quite good at it with 5 dice, yes, but it doesn't ad a great deal to the party as a whole. Survival is based of Cunning, not Will. The only social skill he is any good at is Coercion, where he does very well, yes, but it isn't often the most practical one, especially since we are playing Jedi.
Pretty sure characteristics are capped at 7 when including cybernetics etc. But obviously a moot point if it was simply a typo.
I was making a general point. Our group don't currently have a great deal of overlap in our specialisms too much (there are some areas, mostly combat related, where there is obvious overlap), and some of us have specific skills where we are better (skills can get you higher, and there is the effects of talents etc). My point was that you can broaden out without invalidating the specialists. If you have the point where those that are not specialists in the relevant areas are at YYG or YYGG or something then by then Specialists should be noticably better.
I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with a 1 if it was a a character point and/or he had invested points in raising a stat that wasn't Will. INstead he just invested a bunch of points into the 4 and that was it.
We will just have to agree to disagree on the prospect of building characters. To me a big part of any game is genre emulation, and the simple truth is that in most stories "realistic" heroes are generally of above average compentence in most areas, while specifically amazing at anything. They are usually smart, while having allies and enemies that are smarter than they are, they are generally physically able, while not being the strongest or fastest there is, they are usually able to engage with others at a reasonable, if not noticably skilled level, while not generally being arch manipulators etc. Of course, partly this can be attributed to being the main characters, and an RPG is a cast of characters, which does change things slightly. However, even in a team there are certain general skills which are useful for everyone to have at at least competent levels.
The Scooby Doo Gang? Aside from Scraggy and Scooby they are all relatively smart... in fact aside from Velma being a bit more knowledgable than the rest, there isn't much between the others...
I think you are putting too much into the deployment of your mooks. The system isn't really designed with that level of sophistication to its combat deployment. If you can engage with 1 mook you are engaged with all in that group. If you use that level of detail you should be using Rivals... and the truth is that rivals do suffer to lightsabers quite badly. I wouldn't suggest using only mooks, but with lightsabers in quantity I would suggest mooks as the chaff of the encounter, rather than small rivals.
- I know how damage works, but once a character has accumulated more wounds than their threshold allows, they still need to be healed for that full amount before they can rejoin the fight. I'm sorry if the word "below" was confusing, I should have said beyond. Still 20-some-odd damage to a health pool of 14 requires more than 1 stimpack's worth of healing to resuscitate that character.
Not true. They just need to be healed up to the point where their current accumulated wound damage is AT or BELOW their Wound Threshold.
So, if their WT is 27 and their wounds are at 28, they only need one point of healing before they can get back up and into the fight.
If their WT is 14 and their wounds are at 20, then yeah — they’ll need more than one stimpack to get back up and fighting. But two stimpacks would definitely do it, unless they’ve already had one or more stimpacks applied that day.
- If a character is unconscious at the end of a fight their side loses and the party cannot rescue them, that usually means character death in my games. We've had two scenarios where characters have been taken prisoner, but unless there is a solid justification for the enemy keeping them alive, then it's time to roll up a new character.
If they are a Minion or Rival NPC, that rule may be fine. But you should not be using that rule for PCs and Nemesis-class NPCs.
The Empire should pretty much always have reasons why they want to keep someone alive — so that they can question them and find out about their friends/compatriots/associates/whatever, if nothing else. Same for pretty much everyone else the party might meet.
Bradknowles, how can you reconcile the two parts of that post with each other? You think the game is balanced and robust, but even as you created your character you had to work to avoid imbalance? Following that logic you could make a equally good case for 3.X being balanced and robust. Yes if you avoid every powerful spell, prestige class, feat, and item then it isn't an issue. But that's you ignoring vast swathes of the system and then claiming that it doesn't require house ruling to fix huge, glaring problems.
I think this game is better at resisting that kind of problem than anything else I’ve played in the last ~35 years or so, but even this game will reach a breaking point. As I got into the game, I could see where things would likely start to break with regards to my character, and so I did what I thought was appropriate to try to avoid those problems.
In the end, my character wasn’t the one causing the most problems for the game, and probably never would have. Even the Heavy with the LRB wasn’t causing the most problems for the game.
The most problems for that game were coming from another player who wanted to do incredibly crazy, silly, stupid stuff, that would derail the narrative of the game, and that sometimes involved using ships and vehicle-scale weapons against personal-scale targets which caused problems for game mechanics. But the derailing of the story ended up being the biggest problem.
That game shut down, and we started up an F&D campaign with the same group. That GM has since had work conflict issues, and I have now taken over as GM. But I don’t think I’m going to have the same kinds of problems with that player.
I’m sure I’ll have a whole host of problems myself, but not that one.
Honestly, the only thing that makes this game "broken" is Cortosis. As long as you make Cortosis armor exceedingly rare (I've gone so far as to disallow it in my games) in your game, soak can be overcome.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is how it is possible for players to get to 600+ xp without becoming this broken? What happened in my game that made things go this far?
Easy! Try having more skill trees. 700 points looks like chump change when you're trying to get four careers past the 15 point tier. And god forbid you have to buy force powers or Sig Abilities!
Edited by Desslok
- I don't know how you can almost kill a speeder in one shot with a pistol. At any xp level. Even with a Nova Viper, let's say 3 ranks in point blank shot (or jury rigged, or another, similar talent), and deadly accuracy with 3 ranks in ranged light, you still need 7 successes to destroy a 74-Z in one hit.
Almost as it takes two hits, or a really good crit.
Nova Viper with a Blaster Actuating Module with two dmg upgrades, Jury Rigged for dmg and two Point Blanks. And Deadly Accuracy (Ranged Light). At short range my base damage is 16 and my dice pool is YYYGBluBluPBlk. I can easily get the 5 successes to whack two HT of the average speeder. The speeder bike is toast.
That obviously doesn't work on anything with even armor 1 mind you, but little does past that point.
Honestly, the only thing that makes this game "broken" is Cortosis. As long as you make Cortosis armor exceedingly rare (I've gone so far as to disallow it in my games) in your game, soak can be overcome.
Even Cortosis isn't that bad. It should be rare, but even then, when our Jedi who has YYYG dueled a Mandalorian traitor in Cortosis battle armor, she was still beating him up fairly well. And she doesn't have maxed out sabers.
Once she brought out the second blade he took off acter a nasty crit to the face.
I read the title, and was going to jump in with a position of "enough is enough." The next session I have planned (mid January due to holiday scheduling) was planned as a big finish to the campaign I am running. After reading many (not all) of the posts, I think I am willing to continue: just with some changes.
The main problem I run into is that it is an open game. It started at the gaming store, and now at a local Geek Bar. That means I frequently get new players. Now, introducing people to the game is one of reasons our group is there, so this is a good thing. It does pose problems with a high XP game. I prefer to start new players at a base character, perhaps with accelerated advancement, but not just throwing them in with 600+ and talents that bend game mechanics when they are still trying to grasp the mechanic to begin with.
The second problem is a little more selfish. I've been GMing for over 2 years and want to play, now. Luckily, that seems to be a possibility in a month or two.
This is technically a FaD question.
Has anyone capped "stacking talents" like Parry and Reflect?
If you dig into multiple saber trees these can easily become unwieldy - and even redundant.
I've been considering letting players skip over them once they've hit 5.
The other thing to remember, and this is BIG:
Exceeding wound or strain threshold means being TAKEN OUT.
Not killed. As in - not dead.
Get stomped on by a bunch of StormTroopers, and guess what? You wake up in a scary place. The story goes on...
Another thing to mention, is that hitting zero doesn't cut it. You have to exceed the threshold, so you don't drop till -1.
Count for the bad guys too.
It is exceed threshold. You count up not down. You will have a lot less confusion in many areas in the game if you count in the same direction the devs do.
This is technically a FaD question.
Has anyone capped "stacking talents" like Parry and Reflect?
If you dig into multiple saber trees these can easily become unwieldy - and even redundant.
I've been considering letting players skip over them once they've hit 5.
Considering the amount of xp needed to first buy the specs to get all the talents and the talents themselves, it works out because that's xp that isn't being spent elsewhere.
Vondy- Your game so your choice.
But if a Force user isn't spending XP to pick up Grit or Strain Talents to leverage Parry or Reflect along the way, they will be awesome for a few number of attack and then drop.
Specialization for high numbers can produce problems, but not problems that cannot be dealt with. Blast damage, Strain damage, poison, and environmental damage are all things that Parry and Reflect are useless against in combat. Let alone all the ways to mess with a hyper specialized Parry/Reflect character out of combat.
Let them make their choices and show them why generalizing, may not be sexy with the high numbers, but is a good way too.
Also try and parry a flamethrower.
The other thing to remember, and this is BIG:
Exceeding wound or strain threshold means being TAKEN OUT.
Not killed. As in - not dead.
Get stomped on by a bunch of StormTroopers, and guess what? You wake up in a scary place. The story goes on...
Another thing to mention, is that hitting zero doesn't cut it. You have to exceed the threshold, so you don't drop till -1.
Count for the bad guys too.
It's a minor point, but you guys are counting backwards. You get dropped when you exceed your wound threshold - 14, 15, Out - not drop below it.
The other thing to remember, and this is BIG:
Exceeding wound or strain threshold means being TAKEN OUT.
Not killed. As in - not dead.
Get stomped on by a bunch of StormTroopers, and guess what? You wake up in a scary place. The story goes on...
Another thing to mention, is that hitting zero doesn't cut it. You have to exceed the threshold, so you don't drop till -1.
Count for the bad guys too.
It's a minor point, but you guys are counting backwards. You get dropped when you exceed your wound threshold - 14, 15, Out - not drop below it.
It doesn't matter.
If your threshold is 12, whether you drop at 13 or -1 is the same. It's just personal preference.
<snip>
<snip>
<snip>
It doesn't matter.
If your threshold is 12, whether you drop at 13 or -1 is the same. It's just personal preference.
Not in the grand scheme of things. But all the rules are worded with the assumption that you count up, so that will have to be kept in mind.
However you track wounds, just make sure everyone is doing it the same way. I've been playing a doctor for 2 years, and it's frustrating when half the group is counting up and half the group is counting down. So when I build the dice pool for my medicine checks to heal their wounds, I have to ask if they are counting up or down, and then do the math to determine if it's average or easy.
- I know how damage works, but once a character has accumulated more wounds than their threshold allows, they still need to be healed for that full amount before they can rejoin the fight. I'm sorry if the word "below" was confusing, I should have said beyond. Still 20-some-odd damage to a health pool of 14 requires more than 1 stimpack's worth of healing to resuscitate that character.
Not true. They just need to be healed up to the point where their current accumulated wound damage is AT or BELOW their Wound Threshold.
So, if their WT is 27 and their wounds are at 28, they only need one point of healing before they can get back up and into the fight.
If their WT is 14 and their wounds are at 20, then yeah — they’ll need more than one stimpack to get back up and fighting. But two stimpacks would definitely do it, unless they’ve already had one or more stimpacks applied that day.
- If a character is unconscious at the end of a fight their side loses and the party cannot rescue them, that usually means character death in my games. We've had two scenarios where characters have been taken prisoner, but unless there is a solid justification for the enemy keeping them alive, then it's time to roll up a new character.
If they are a Minion or Rival NPC, that rule may be fine. But you should not be using that rule for PCs and Nemesis-class NPCs.
The Empire should pretty much always have reasons why they want to keep someone alive — so that they can question them and find out about their friends/compatriots/associates/whatever, if nothing else. Same for pretty much everyone else the party might meet.
Bradknowles, how can you reconcile the two parts of that post with each other? You think the game is balanced and robust, but even as you created your character you had to work to avoid imbalance? Following that logic you could make a equally good case for 3.X being balanced and robust. Yes if you avoid every powerful spell, prestige class, feat, and item then it isn't an issue. But that's you ignoring vast swathes of the system and then claiming that it doesn't require house ruling to fix huge, glaring problems.
I think this game is better at resisting that kind of problem than anything else I’ve played in the last ~35 years or so, but even this game will reach a breaking point. As I got into the game, I could see where things would likely start to break with regards to my character, and so I did what I thought was appropriate to try to avoid those problems.
In the end, my character wasn’t the one causing the most problems for the game, and probably never would have. Even the Heavy with the LRB wasn’t causing the most problems for the game.
The most problems for that game were coming from another player who wanted to do incredibly crazy, silly, stupid stuff, that would derail the narrative of the game, and that sometimes involved using ships and vehicle-scale weapons against personal-scale targets which caused problems for game mechanics. But the derailing of the story ended up being the biggest problem.
That game shut down, and we started up an F&D campaign with the same group. That GM has since had work conflict issues, and I have now taken over as GM. But I don’t think I’m going to have the same kinds of problems with that player.
I’m sure I’ll have a whole host of problems myself, but not that one.
<snip>
<snip>
<snip>
It doesn't matter.
If your threshold is 12, whether you drop at 13 or -1 is the same. It's just personal preference.
Not in the grand scheme of things. But all the rules are worded with the assumption that you count up, so that will have to be kept in mind.
However you track wounds, just make sure everyone is doing it the same way. I've been playing a doctor for 2 years, and it's frustrating when half the group is counting up and half the group is counting down. So when I build the dice pool for my medicine checks to heal their wounds, I have to ask if they are counting up or down, and then do the math to determine if it's average or easy.
It helps to do math in the same manner the Devs do.
Hellooooo all!!! This has been a pleasure to read, and now I shall throw in my two cents...
So I have been GM with my group for about six months. We had a campaign going before, a few years ago, but I was becoming frustrated with scaling difficulty and had scheduling issues, so I decided to call it, but after months of playing 2nd edition dnd with the group, I grew increasingly bored with the d20 system and the weekly dungeon crawl... There is a bad guy in town, townspeople ask us for help, go to castle or hideout, kill lots of stuff, session over. Week after week. Dull. I can see the appeal in this kind of play, it is fun to go around and kill stuff, but as a dwarven cleric with pretty crappy stats (rolled), compared to a minotoar paladin and a gnome wizard with insane stats, all i do is follow around big guys and heal them. Not much fun for me as a player, but enough griping.
Naturally, after playing this wonderful system, I really dont want to go back to d20, plus I love starwars like a fat kid loves cake. So I offered to start up another campaign in this system. Only three members of the group decided to play since scheduling conflicts and one who cant play without movement squares and a map of a dungeon in front of him (stuck in d20 forever), and these three voiced unhappiness that they lost their old characters and all the cool stuff they had. So, to be an overly awesome GM, I just said screw it and gave them all knight level experience with some of the best possible gear they could get, because I want to make my players happy and ensure they have fun. It is a win win for me either way, or so I thought.
Now, I see everyones points here, and I am of the opinion that this system can scale nicely, but it requires some experimentation and extreme care and caution from the GM. I learned the hard way from the first campaign, but I am a little older, smarter, and wiser now when it comes to running a campaign. So I fully expected the gear to make combat a little unbalanced, but I was cool with that, because I am there to play with them, not against them, and it is still fun. The problem this created was with player happiness. They have novaviper blaster pistols, heavy battle armor, heavy blaster rifles, cool looking threnchcoats, speeder bikes, disruptor weapons (hidden at the base), skyhoppers, a Pathfinder class ship... the list goes on... but they never seem to be happy!!! I told them from the start that they would be able to start with the cream of the crop, because they complained about losing all the stuff, but they always want something better. That is a campaign issue that should probably be in another thread, but I just have to voice my dissapointment with them for not appreciating all I gave them just to make them happy at the outset and all I have given them since. It is like they complained about having to work to get all the good stuff, and now they are complaining because they have all the good stuff. I dont get it. Whatever. Moving on.
Herein lies my problem. I love to let my players shine. We have a droid heavy marauder outlaw tech. Min maxed like a boss. 6 brawn and 1 in everything else with a melee of 5 and a soak of 11. He is a walking tank. We also have a smuggler gunslinger pilot. 5 agility and pretty balanced otherwise. Soak 3. That is a disparaging gap between soak. Now the droid duel wields a cortosis shield and a mining gun (essentially a lightsaber but with melee and inaccurate). So with his armor, he has a defense of 4. Smuggler defense 1. So if I want anything to hurt the droid, it will probably kill the smuggler pretty easy. I have run many combat where nothing can touch the droid and is scaled pretty well for the other players. Still fun. I have run encounters where the nemesis beast is crazy insane tough and it just stands there and goes toe to toe with the droid while the others keep distance and shoot. Still fun. Basically I try to cater to all players in my game. The droid was built to do one thing, and I give him lots of opportunities to show off his awesome melee power. But the minute the min maxer cant reach a thug on a building because he cant hack the door (computers/int) or cant convince the rebel base commander to do what he tells them (coercion, negotiation, charm, whatever other than brawn) he seems to have a hissy fit. Like what can I do? I told him from the start that he was min maxing and warned him of the dangers, but he is such a snow flake and just wants to do all this crazy stuff and when he cant he gets all butt hurt and he has done it to himself. No one built the character but him. Man it is getting annoying.
So I stomach it and move one, try to keep all happy and just keep rollin. I don't complain or punish him, just tell him "Hey! You built a one trick pony! Don't be surprised when he is useless on a ship!" (Aside from giving him the whole list of suggested non pilot actions print out, which he has never used once.) So his droid is pretty tough and this has developed into a sense of hubris in combat. He thinks he is now the starwars superman. This has started to annoy me. No one is invulnerable from blaster fire. Not in my game. It just would not be fair. So I throw in some more pierce weapons when it comes to fighting and try to make combat encounters varied and exciting, with plenty of stuff for the other guys to do in combat aside from just killing stuff. (Yes I love order 66 podcast and pretty much always follow the list, it has become engrained in my soul).
Last session big bad villain released a mutated form of the rakghoul plague upon ord radama at the end of the arda 1 module, tweaked to suit a longer running campaign. They just had a huge battle with a large group of troopers, droid was fine, but bounty hunter was at the threshold and smuggler was critically wounded a couple times. They go back to the city and I set off the explosions and the city is in ruin, fire everywhere, and the plague starting to spread quickly. Of course I want to give them an opportunity to rest before it really hits the fan, and as predicted, they immediately search for one. Not to make it too easy, I give them a speeder repair shop, but it has a few of the newly transformed ghouls feeding on some unfortunate citizens in the front. Just three, an easy combat for the group, probably a one round deal, but they are hurt so they want to try to avoid it. Droid fails stealth. Other two go in the shop and hide, droid stands in street and kills ghouls. But not before the ghouls let out a gut wrenching screech with is answered by lots of screeching in the city getting closer. So basically saying to player, "Ok you made up for failed stealth and got to satisfy your blood lust, now you should probably go take a rest with your buddies so we can move on!" He stands there. Screeching getting closer. Lots of it. He stands in the street. He sees 24 ghouls running toward his position at extreme range. He stands there. Long. Medium. You get the point. So I have to be honest, at this point I am getting kinda pissed. I am not the type to get mad at my players, but this did it. I gave him plenty of time to go hide or run away or whatever so the guys can rest and we can move on, but he thinks he is not killable and just stands there!!! So he enters combat with 24 and I grouped them into 4 groups of six, they had pierce 1 on the claws. This city is a never ending supply of these ghouls by the way, and I think if he would have had it his way, he would have done combat for eight hours while the other two sat there. Not very fun for the other guys in my opinion.
Anyway, after three rounds the ghouls have barely touched him. He is standing there, and they cant make it through his defense, I think they possibly scored two hits for two damage from the pierce one? I'm thinking that this doesn't make sense. Even if he is a crazy tough superman droid, 24 minions should be able to at least make him sweat. His smug smile at not being able to be his has me a little heated. So I decide to make it a little harder on him. I turned the four groups of 6 into two groups of 12. Make it faster and more dangerous. He loses his ****. Soooo mad at me. It isn't fair. I cant do that. He gets extremely upset and starts making some angry comments. So I tell him to cool it, it is a game, and just see what happens. Turns out the two groups are still barely able to hurt him, I think they were doing about 2 or 3 damage each hit against his soak (base damage 6 pierce 1). So he is alright, not dying, just really pissed he cant stand there and blatantly fight a never ending swarm of zombie like ghouls while the other guys rest. Yeah, I could have just let him fight the groups of six, kill them all, and narrate that he kills a mountain of them while the guys rest and at the end of the eight hours he is sitting on a pile the size of mount Fuji, super cool. But I admit I kinda lost my cool and decided to show him that even he isn't invulnerable. Was I wrong to do this? I want them to feel cool about being awesome, but I still want the game to be challenging and to have character death as a consequence of really bad decision making, which in my opinion, not running or hiding from a huge swarm of ghouls is pretty dumb. So even though I cant hurt him too bad, I keep knocking him down, disarming him (which he says I technically shouldn't be able to do since he is a droid and his weapon is built into his arm, even though I told him aside from the benefits a droid get in the text, he follows the same rules as the other players. Is this wrong as well?), and pinging him with small damage and he is getting really mad at me.
Realizing he is no longer having fun, I hint that maybe the other players should help him. They climb onto the roof (smart) and start laying down fire as he runs away. He gets to the door of the place and goes in (which is also dumb imo since the ghouls saw him go in and there were more coming, but I decide to just move on and narrate the last round of combat, they get 8 hours, all is well in the galaxy (but he is butt hurt now).
Fast forward, final battle, super boss, all of campaign leading up to this fight so far. I wanted to make a really tough baddy nemesis that would pose a real challenge to the group and possible lead to them having to run. Following the line I am on (super bad guy releases plague on city, they have to escape, can you say resident evil?), I created Nemesis the nemesis, very fitting. Following the rules for super nemesis in the FaD CRB, he has a five brawn with four training in brawl. But I already know this isn't enough to stand up to the droid. So I give his force rating three, adversary three, cortosis gauntlets, cyber legs and arms (brawn 7), powered armor (brawn 8), parry 3, force enhance (his dice pool is getting pretty gross now for brawling), and force heal which could heal 6 damage per hit. He is a super force to be reckoned with, but after they killed the freighter size nemesis beast on the demon moon of zxun, I wasn't to worried, plus I had plans to give them opportunities to escape if need be and figured they would be smart and try to take out his power armor. So his armor ends up being the same as the droids in the end plus one. 5 black with three upgrades. I admit, this sounds like overkill, but I have been scaling this campaign and with the droid, I had a pretty good idea they would make it, but it would be tough.
So.... Do they win? Yes. Are they messed up? Yes. Do any pc characters die? No. But you know what they did? Complained the entire combat. Defense 5? That is soooo stupid... this game is dumb. Not fair. This isn't even fun. They won!!! They had a really hard battle and won, and the guys defense was only one higher than the droids, but is was "sooooo stupid." This has really upset me!!! Like, how can they think that they are the only ones in the galaxy who would buy super armor or sweet gear? Do they think that the culmination of ten session of play and at 500+ experience I was just going to be like "here is the ultimate bad guy who has been behind all the bad stuff going on since you started playing! He is an emperors hand!" I don't get it. I have given them so many times to shine and blow up stuff and kill house size things, but the minute they face an adversary that is just slightly more powerful than just one of them, they lose it and complain about the game.
So... How am I supposed to balance the difficulty without making my snow flakes cry? I think it was rather easy to build this dude following the rules of the game, didn't break any, but then I do and my players cry like babies and complain about the system. I wanted them to win! I would never make it unwinnable, but I want them to work for it! They weren't happy even after I just handed them tons of sweet gear and ships. They aren't happy after I make them work for something... I get that they are some ole g's, but dude, why do you even game? Just to show up and roll dice and always "win" the game? I am working to balance this huge gap between character toughness, try and give them things they want, let them all shine when they can, and still have some challenging fights, but they just don't get it. I can really see how this system can be difficult to run when you take that all into account, but that is more of a player problem, right?
What is the deal? Am I a bad GM? Did I make huge mistake here? I can understand that giving them the gear at the outset could be a problem, but I saw it coming and let it happen, that is not my problem. I guess the part of the book about starving the players is more important than I initially thought, but then again they did just get a sweet ship and save the galaxy, but they still aren't happy. Does any one have any advice for me? I could really use some, because it is getting to the point where I almost want to stop running the game again. Just seems like I cant make them happy, and when I challenge them, they get upset about it.
Do I need to read a book about anger management? Because I thought that grouping the minions was a fine way of showing him that he is not invincible and it didn't break any rules...
On a final note, I am looking for some kind of way to play online, since I don't know that many gamers and live far from a gaming store, I have been running games for years without a chance to play, and just for once, I want to be able to show up to the game or the forum and play just me, not ten different characters and have to try to make a group happy. Anyone have a recommendation or looking for online players? I know this was a rant, but it is just a culmination of lots of frustration with the last few sessions, I needed to vent, I am normally pretty laid back and easy going dude. Give me a datapad and a tookit and I will be happy. I don't need a lightsaber or super powers. Just want to play starwars for once. Not run it everytime.
Help me super cool nerd fanboy jedi master forum geeks, youre my only hope.
Sincerely, Farth Dader
Let me just say, the Brawn disparity in your group is not unique. For many, this is not a problem. Their group and playstyle make it just a matter of degrees. The slicer and the consular never really get shot at anyway, or at least do their best to stay out of line of sight while supporting with their abilities in ways that aren't focused around dealing personal damage (Slicer hacks turrets/blast doors, Consular rallies allies/whatevers, you get the idea). So, it doesn't really matter too much if the combat monster can soak everything, and kills all the things...after all, in the group's dynamic that's exactly what he's supposed to do. Whether the rest of the group is getting shot with blaster rifles or repeating blasters/missile tubes, they're all ducking and hiding anyway so the relative power levels are not really critical.
It sounds like you and your group come from a more traditional and combat oriented RPG background. In any event, combat is a major focus of your campaign...not just the "combat monster's" time to shine. In those kinds of situations, the Brawn disparity can become seriously problematic. When designing combat encounters, threatening the min-maxed combat monster will often insta-gib the rest of the group, and if they want to enjoy or participate in a meaningful way that's not particularly inspiring for them. You can only design so many MMO encounters (you know the ones, with the tank, the spank and the support), before it begins to lose its appeal...at least that's how I felt about it.
What it amounts to is that you let one of your players "break" the combat mini-game. This is not difficult to do...when I was beta-testing, I already identified Brawn as a potential game breaker. But in truth, its no more problematic than spiked Presence and social skills in a campaign of politics and intrigue...its just that those statistics are used in a different set of circumstances. However, because combat was such a major portion of your campaign (nothing wrong with that btw), the Brawn issue really affected your fun level, and probably the rest of the group as well.
That said, I think the real issue wasn't mechanics or their susceptibility to abuse: The droid player was a munchkin. Not just a power gamer, or a min-maxer, or an optimizer...but an actual munchkin. I don't know if he's a munchkin all the time, or just for this game. Some optimizers can usually control themselves, but occasionally cross the line. Whatever the case, he definitely crossed the line in your game. There were two dead give aways:
1.) Doing something stupid, because he knew he had mechanics on his side. Facing down an entire city of rakghouls qualifies as stupid. In my games, being wilfully stupid trumps mechanics every time.
2.) Whining whenever things didn't go his way. This means he has expectations that you play "his" game, rather than running your own. This is unacceptable on just about every level.
Now, part of it is that I think you're bending over backwards for your players. Partly to get them to actually play the game, and partly because it sounds like that's the kind of guy you are. Unfortunately, that means you're also tolerating toxic behavior at your table...when you really should be stomping it flat. A character min-maxed to this extent is not really the problem (Although it is certainly a warning sign)...the player abusing it is.
A few things to consider if you move forward from this: The droid's Brawn rating puts him in a size category similar to Rancors, Hutts and land speeders. This means its totally acceptable to shoot him with Heavy Repeating blasters, starship sized weapons and missile tubes. If he has a problem with this, point out that he's really in a class with Droidekas and AT-STs, rather than personal scale combat.
Additionally, you can introduce Support NPCs. These NPCs do different things such as Sergeants that allow minion groups to Volley Fire for additional damage, or techs who hack or ECM the combat monster. In this way you escalate damage without necessarily throwing more hardware at them, and you can attack the skills and attributes that the munchkin dump statted. While this may make him rage as well, these are legitimate ways that you can deal with these kinds of things. It also has the added bonus that it gives small sub-objectives that the more versatile/mobile PCs can target in order to get through the encounter.
But really, to me it sounds like the real problem is the munchkin at your table.
Edited by BladehateThanks, this is helpful... We are a very combat oriented group, I only started playing with them around four years ago and it was 4th edition. That and our 2nd edition campaign were and are very combat oriented, as is our starwars sessions. I knew that it would be from the get go, and I am perfectly fine with that, not that I dont throw in the occassional social encounter or race or surviving in the wilderness kind of deal... I think they enjoy these very much, but as little snacks between major combats.
I have seen this term "munchkin" on these forums recently, and I admit I am not familiar with the lingo. I know he is a min maxing power gamer to the core. In our second edition campaign he runs this elf that can shoot like ten arrows a turn... I dont know what he uses to do this, but he is putting out well above 50 damage sometimes, I believe he broke 100 once with some very lucky rolls. Even our dm for that says he has broken the game, but we are the kind of group that usually allow it if you can do it within the rules... It does make it less appealing for the other guys, but when I cast strength of stone on the paladin minotoar and he gets the strength of a storm giant, it is really no different. But to answer your question, yes he is an optimizing power gamer to the core.
There have been times where he as a player has tried to sweet talk his way into certain situations, and while i will never tell him he cant try, usually with a prescense of 1, he fails. When this happens he usually tends to get violent with the npcs. Physically assaulting them and what not, which has led to some pretty bad situations for the rest of the party... Usually not a good idea to physically handle a genereal of a rebel base...
I have been looking at some options, I know I can attack his strain threshold, I can give my baddies some ion weaponry or anti droid weapons, that would not be overkill on the other players and it would give him some higher tension combat, but I have been kinda waiting until now to do it since up until now they have only been working with rebels and are were pretty unknown in the galaxy. That kind of changed last session soooo...
In the end, I guess this also boils down to me being a little over compensating to them for the game? I feel like my job as the gm is to ensure every player gets to do what they want within reason and present situations where they can all shine... In your game you say that being willfully stupid trumps mechanics, how do you do it without upsetting your players? What do you do? How can I as a gm continue to cater to the group without bending over backwards? I guess I am still unsure of where the line is, I have only been gming for a couple years now. I am generally a very nice person, and as gm I usually just allow it if it adds to the fun without breaking the game session, but I can also be quite the opposite if pushed, I am no idiot, I just don't want to have to be a **** if I can help it. How do you handle your players? What can I do better in the future?
Anti-droid weaponry, slicing attacks, and high degrees of pierce/breach will level the playing field really quickly.
Two groups of minions lead by rivals toting droid disablers will make him have a very bad day. Concussive means he loses his action, 12 base damage means his WT is being chipped away.
Another stupidly simple way of dealing with him is dropping him in a pit.
Just be creative and throw things at him for which he's not prepared. If he's that much of a combat monster, the enemies fighting him should be running away across terrain they know. Lead him into traps, towards vehicle-scale weapon emplacements, away from the objective. At this point in the game, he should have a (well deserved) reputation and those facing him should take that into account.
In the movies and TV shows, whenever Vader showed up, everyone ran. This guy is Vader to the enemies of the party and they should act accordingly.