So it sounds like we're back to one of the big problems that the d6 system had.

I don't think it's the same. Similar maybe, but a) you can still measure dice pools against what you want to achieve, and b) this system scales far better...IMHO, which, admittedly, is limited as I didn't play D6 a lot.

The d6 has basically the same thing, here you compare dice pools, where as there you compare how many d6 each PC\NPC had. The only real difference is that everything was an opposed role in d6, but Destiny has a few set difficulties.

So in the aspect of comparing an NPC to a PC in regards to a specific task, then it is no different.

Difficulties weren't dice pools in D6. The GM set the value inside a given range (0-5 for very easy, 6-10 for easy, etc...) and depending on what was going on determines if someone could roll to change that. For example a living being could roll their Dodge skill to increase or replace the difficulty chosen by the GM. But, hacking a computer system, or flying through terrain didn't have opposed dice rolls.

Now, something like social skills would be opposed rolls, but that is the same as FFGs Star Wars. But unlike FFG's where the positive dice are slightly favored against the negative dice, in D6, a d6 is a d6 is a d6. So, less important which side of the "pool" you wind up on.

Looking at the fundamental question of learning a new system with players who are a) also new to the system and b) a pretty personal connection like your kids (which limits the "Player, go find yourself another game" options), I also recommend running yourselves through one of the beginner boxes. They do a good job of steadily introducing rules and mechanics, and the NPCs are specifically structured for the pre-gens*. This kind of experience can create a nice foundation for your own intuitive understanding of NPC balance.

I personally had a great experience running the F&D with my wife and another couple, none of whom came in with any RPG experience. Really smooth introduction to the system for first timers, especially the F&D box with a gradual approach to the Force. On a side note, if you've never run an RPG when two players are therapists, I highly recommend it. The humor value of some REALLY deep exploration into character motivation and feelings is well worth the price of admission!

*If none of the pre-gens calls to your players, basic character creation rules can work pretty well too.

Yeah, using the beginner tools is always great since they introduce the games main themes and concepts in small doses.

I think this all boils down to expectations. Long story short, some other gaming systems give you a built-in yardstick.. be it level, experience spent, or some other clear indicator of a threat rating. EotE doesn't. It takes a far more practiced eye to gauge lethality in this system.

As noted, a lot of gaming systems provide a fairly rigid, say, bony framework to build within - stifling creativity a little bit, but ultimately making for a smoother experience assuming everyone comes into the game with very little knowledge about the system. Players can rely on things working the same way every time because there's a precedent for it. Fireball is always fireball. This allows a GM to gain a good understanding on how things will interact prior to a gaming session, if the GM is willing to put in a little reading and thought exercise. The FFG system is a little more... I hesitate to say 'spineless' because that has a negative connotation. We'll call it cartilaginous because that fits better, and I wanted to use 'cartilaginous' in a sentence today because I'm literally the only one in my building at work today and bored silly. Things are more fluid, and harder to predict. You know the level 10 deathknight is going to wipe the floor with your starting level 2 party (starting at level 1 is forbidden by the Geneva convention, or should be.) It's a bit harder to predict, without some actual experience running the system with live players, if that bounty hunter is going to vaporize your starting crew. The cartilaginous EotE can snap around and bite it's own tail in a blink, where the bony d20 system can't move with that sort of grace, giving you the ability to anticipate things.*

*I'm not an ichthyologist and Google is most unhelpful today in providing me the information on whether bony fishes can, indeed, bite their own tails with ease or if this is a rare feat amongst them.

A nemisis level advesary is designed to be able to deal with a party of players while alone, or occasionally with minions as backup.

They are built with rules to allow for omni-competance because otherwise they would not be a threat.

If you used the PC rules to make an advesary that was good at say social interaction, they would be weak at combat. If you made one that was say a beast with a blaster, then a jedi could potentially destroy him in melee range, or a good face type character could talk him down from anything he does. A party full of characters with interesting strengths and weaknesses works because they (in theory) work together and complement each other. The nemesis is generally expected to be the threat by themselves. If a nemesis isnt powerful enough to give the average group second thoughts about even confronting him at all, he isnt doing his job.

A nemesis has to be good enough to meet every member of the party head on, against their strength, and give a good fight, a hard challenge. Possibly a reason to escape instead of fight because they are that scary. They are working with an action deficit right out the gate, they are only getting one (or sometimes two) turns compared to one from each party member, they need the edge of being frankly, just better than players are capable of. Han may have pulled a blaster on Vader in empire, but no-one (on screen or audience) thinks for a moment that he is going to win that fight, Vader is a nemesis, he is scary, he needs to be, or the movie (or game) wouldnt be good.

If you are trying to emulate character level enemys, look more at rival tier enemys, they tend to be much closer to realistic player stats, and require either a few of them, or a lot of minions in support before they become threatening to a full party.

Even more rigid systems don't avoid the need to compare capabilities. I have, on more than one occasion, TPK'ed a party in D&D 3.X with an encounter that was theoretically average in difficulty because the monsters involved had higher Grapple modifiers than anyone in the group was prepared to deal with. In a 4e Dark Sun game I played in, we got wrecked by a Tembo that, by level comparison, we should have been able to easily handle, because its special qualities negated all our means of controlling it, leaving it with full run of the battlefield.

Even if EotE had a more structured system, you'd still have to look at the NPC's capabilities and ask yourself "Can they hurt this adversary?" "How badly can this adversary hurt them?" "Are there logical tactics available that the party is completely unable to counter?" "Is running away even a viable option, given relative mobility?"

Which brings up the point, that even in more rigid systems like D&D 3.0+ or Pathfinder, that having a "Balanced encounter" has little to do with, "My PCs are Power level X so the NPCs should be at the same power level."

You need to have a firm understanding of the underlying math of the system and how the PCs will stack up to the NPCs and vice-versa. In D&D it is realtively easy, for an "Average Difficulty" encounter both the PCs and NPCs should be able to hit each other between 60% and 75% of the time. Also, average damage output should be considered as well.

As noted previously, that unlike a Class/Level system where a level X player will be at a specific power level, in this system a Marauder, BH, Enforcer with, say 250 XP, will be built differently then a Politico or a Doctor with the same amount of XP. While the combat centric characters will have a less difficult time in a combat situation then the social characters will, the reverse will likely be true for the social characters in social encounters.

Which means, that if your party is all social type characters at the 250 XP level, then throwing them into a situation where they need to face a combat situation that was tailored to a combat heavy party of the same level, will likely be a TPK or a massive failure for the party.

I understand everything that has been said in this thread, but I think in regards to the OP question as far as for the rules not allowing the option to use XP to increase a character base stats after character creation, where as some of the NPC entries plainly did so, just seems to be as I stated before broken in that is effectively stating that one entity within the SW universe can do something that another (one who is supposed to be the star of the story - the PC) cannot.

If XP can be spent during Character Creation to show a character's Ability Score development before beginning a life of adventure, how is that they can no longer do so after the adventure starts? It just doesn't make sense to me, which is why I would allow my players to do so throughout the course of the campaign.

And yes in regard to comparing NPCs to PC comparing total xp may not always give an accurate picture of challenge between the two, but if one compares the xp used to develop the combat based skills & talents (and ignores the xp used for non-combat traits) this can give you a better idea on whether someone will get their butts kicked. I know some out there will say "simply compare the dice pools" but there are talents that can adjust these dice pools or have an effect on the outcome of the dice rolls which cannot be taken into account when doing a "simple dice pool" comparison.

If i have 3 pcs with a xp total of 60 xp spent on combat traits and 230 xp on non-combat traits I can be fairly certain that throwing an NPC with an xp total of 140 xp spent solely on combat traits at them will probably get them all killed or captured in a combat encounter.

I understand everything that has been said in this thread, but I think in regards to the OP question as far as for the rules not allowing the option to use XP to increase a character base stats after character creation, where as some of the NPC entries plainly did so, just seems to be as I stated before broken in that is effectively stating that one entity within the SW universe can do something that another (one who is supposed to be the star of the story - the PC) cannot.

That's not broken though. They have separate rules to achieve separate things. Calling it broken is like calling Force users broken because they can do things others can't. The system doesn't treat PC's and NPC's the same. Having separate rules for them isn't broken. And it's not like PC's can't raise their stats just as high. The only difference is PC's have access to dedication. NPC's don't since NPC's aren't built using talent trees.

If XP can be spent during Character Creation to show a character's Ability Score development before beginning a life of adventure, how is that they can no longer do so after the adventure starts? It just doesn't make sense to me, which is why I would allow my players to do so throughout the course of the campaign.

PC's can advance their stats after the adventure starts. They just can not use straight xp to do so. Instead they have talents which serve that function. Thus it all adds up and makes sense.

And yes in regard to comparing NPCs to PC comparing total xp may not always give an accurate picture of challenge between the two, but if one compares the xp used to develop the combat based skills & talents (and ignores the xp used for non-combat traits) this can give you a better idea on whether someone will get their butts kicked. I know some out there will say "simply compare the dice pools" but there are talents that can adjust these dice pools or have an effect on the outcome of the dice rolls which cannot be taken into account when doing a "simple dice pool" comparison.

Using xp to judge challenges is bad because of the divergent way in which XP can be spent. As such two PC's with exactly the same amount of XP may be challenged by two different things. What challenges one PC will not challenge another. Dice pools is easier and faster way of comparing, more so since you don't build NPC's using XP in the first place. Also ...... who really wants to track all the xp for all the NPC's.

By comparing dice pools all you have to do is look at the relevant traits for the challenge and just compare. No math. No having to consider where the XP was spent. Just does X and Y look close or the same.

"I understand everything that has been said in this thread, but I think in regards to the OP question as far as for the rules not allowing the option to use XP to increase a character base stats after character creation, where as some of the NPC entries plainly did so, just seems to be as I stated before broken in that is effectively stating that one entity within the SW universe can do something that another (one who is supposed to be the star of the story - the PC) cannot."

So a D&D Dragon that can fly, breathe fire at will, has a Strength of 22+ and so on where PCs are typically capped at 18 to 20 stat wise, cannot fly or breath fire is not broken? The monsters obviously use a different set of rules for creation then PCs do and no one complains....

I played/ran Saga for a long time, mostly because of miniature combat. I invested a lot in grid maps, scenery and miniatures. Having recently started running the FFG version, I adapted basic miniature rules for combat. Ranges are in increments of 6, the rest is narrative and dice. My players seem to enjoy it.

Now I get that this is an NPC, but the PCs should have the ability to achieve these scores just like the NPC.

That's a terrible idea. When I'm building an NPC, I'm generally doing it with an end goal in mind: what is this character's function in the game I'm building. When I'm running a game, I have a dozen things to keep track of and I need to be laser focused on some aspects. I don't need an NPC to be fully fleshed out, I don't need them to have all the irrelevant talents and tiers in the tree to get to the stuff that's important to what they're doing.

So yes, a GM should be able to throw out any ol' numbers they want, irregardless of the rules, so they can get to this place, game balance be damned.

PCs need that better balance because they're not disposable, they'll be hanging around for a while. So yeah - I see no issue here.

I would allow them to improve their Characteristics to 5 through XP and use the dedication talent for anything they want to improve to a 6.

That's a terrible idea. The game engine starts to break down when you're throwing around that many dice. Having to work towards dedication keeps that from spiraling out of control

And that is great if the group you have has RPGed before and you know how they play and what they expect, but if you have a group who are all new to not only the system but each other your advice (knowing your group) simply cannot be followed as you don't know yet.

Let me tell you a story. Back in 1986, me and some friends got our hands on the Star Wars Role Playing Game. Oh sure we had seen D&D, Top Secret and other mainstream games - but we still had no real idea of what we were doing.

And so I cracked the book open, stumbled through character creation. Then I realized I was doing it all wrong, scrapped it all and started over again. Once we sort of had our characters, we had someone read Tatooine Manhunt and struggled as we stumbled through that. And then I GMed - Strike Force Shantipole wasn't out yet, so I had to come up with a game. And it sucked, it was a terrible game shamelessly ripped off from an episode of Blake's 7 I watched the night before and I was a terrible GM.

You know what happened? I got better. Time and experience was the answer to overcoming my suck.

So lets fast forward to 2013. Years of WEG under my belt, and a new Star Wars RPG drops. Cool! I grab the book and started reading. You know what happened? I stumbled through character creation, realized I was doing it all wrong, scrapped it all and started over again. And then once we sort of had our characters, I read the Beginners Box Set and we struggled as I stumbled through that. And while the game was fine and I was an terrible GM because I was learning the rules. And later on, I was still working on getting the balance for NPCs - early encounters were too easy and next week I compensated too much the other way and made the fights too hard.

It's called learning the system.

Do you think Gary Gygax didn't have a learning curve when he was building his game? Do you think Greg Costikyan didn't screw up the first drafts of his games? Was there a guide to creating and running games for D&D back in the seventies? Guess what - everyone is in the same boat.

So yes, I expect new players to have the exact same problems learning the system as every single other person in this forum did. And they will overcome those problems through the same way we did: time and experience with the system.

People can always do as they like at their tables, I know I do. However, direct purchase of attributes with xp just eliminates the point of buying skills quite a lot, and cuts the shelf life of a campaign dramatically.

Actually that reminds me of something from the old Ghostbusters RPG from WEG. They had a sidebar that said "If the players complain about the inequity in experience points between their Ghostbusters and the Gods and Demons that they regularly face, we present you this document awarding you one million [XP} points to use as you see fit", there was a check made payable to the GhostMaster for 1,000,000 experience and that if the GM needed more to send 100,000 dollars in small unmarked bills to their home office.

So how they got their Characteristics to these scores is unlisted. Makes it difficult to "build" NPCs i you are like me and want to ensure fairness between NPCs and PCs

You're building characters for different purposes. PCs are designed to be played over a long campaign. They are designed to improve at a certain rate so that, over a campaign of months or years, the character continue to gain new things every so often, providing something new to play with regularly.

NPCs are created to provide a challenge to the PCs. They are designed to be defeated, whether in combat or socially. Allied NPCs are designed to serve a purpose for the group. They're not meant to be built with standard character generation rules because they aren't standard characters. In the simplest terms, NPCs are either obstacles or tools. They are there to be beaten or used to beat others.

Now, we gussy these obstacles and tools up with names, faces and personalities. We endear them to the group, or we make the group hate them. But that's really all the thought that needs to go into them. The only question you need to ask is "What does this NPC need to fulfill its function?" Then you give the NPC that stuff.

There's even a talent designed explicitly for NPCs: Adversary. PCs can't get this at all.

It's difficult to worry about "fairness" when you can get the same xp for defeating 20 NPCs in a session as you do for defeating none.

As for over- or underestimating the strength of an NPC, that's not even an issue. If an NPC is too strong, then the PCs have destiny points to help them upgrade their skill checks against it. And, since NPCs will rarely, even as nemeses, be fighting alone, it's pretty easy to remove other, lesser enemies from the battlefield through expenditure of advantage and threat.

If an NPC is too weak (say that the BBEG of the campaign is facing the party for the first time, and they proceed to mop the floor with him), then it's a simple matter of flipping over a Dark Side destiny point and invoking Deus Ex Machina to save him, which will let you tweak him later on. Also, you could bring in some minion groups to fight with the NPC, which will force the party to divide up their firepower at multiple targets or risk dying quickly. I've seen a lot of people greatly underestimate minions; I was one of them. Then, I almost killed a party of three with a minion group of three stormtroopers.

And in combat, I don't need to know about TK-529's totally awesome swoop piloting skills, or the fact that he aced his Core Worlds history quiz in school if I've got him shooting at Rebels trying to demolish a small orbital shipyard. I need to know how good he is with a blaster, how much damage he can take, and how much damage he can dish out. Everything else is extraneous information that can be made up on the fly to add flavor.

The only system I really know that builds NPCs and PCs using the same rules is Third Edition D20-based games. Then, in Fourth edition and continuing into Fifth, WotC figured out that it wasn't worth the trouble completely statting out every NPC. I'm sure there are other systems that do it, but I don't play them, and I certainly don't run them. Session prep would take way too long.

Now I get that this is an NPC, but the PCs should have the ability to achieve these scores just like the NPC.

That's a terrible idea. When I'm building an NPC, I'm generally doing it with an end goal in mind: what is this character's function in the game I'm building. When I'm running a game, I have a dozen things to keep track of and I need to be laser focused on some aspects. I don't need an NPC to be fully fleshed out, I don't need them to have all the irrelevant talents and tiers in the tree to get to the stuff that's important to what they're doing.

So yes, a GM should be able to throw out any ol' numbers they want, irregardless of the rules, so they can get to this place, game balance be damned.

PCs need that better balance because they're not disposable, they'll be hanging around for a while. So yeah - I see no issue here.

I would allow them to improve their Characteristics to 5 through XP and use the dedication talent for anything they want to improve to a 6.

That's a terrible idea. The game engine starts to break down when you're throwing around that many dice. Having to work towards dedication keeps that from spiraling out of control

And that is great if the group you have has RPGed before and you know how they play and what they expect, but if you have a group who are all new to not only the system but each other your advice (knowing your group) simply cannot be followed as you don't know yet.

Let me tell you a story. Back in 1986, me and some friends got our hands on the Star Wars Role Playing Game. Oh sure we had seen D&D, Top Secret and other mainstream games - but we still had no real idea of what we were doing.

And so I cracked the book open, stumbled through character creation. Then I realized I was doing it all wrong, scrapped it all and started over again. Once we sort of had our characters, we had someone read Tatooine Manhunt and struggled as we stumbled through that. And then I GMed - Strike Force Shantipole wasn't out yet, so I had to come up with a game. And it sucked, it was a terrible game shamelessly ripped off from an episode of Blake's 7 I watched the night before and I was a terrible GM.

You know what happened? I got better. Time and experience was the answer to overcoming my suck.

So lets fast forward to 2013. Years of WEG under my belt, and a new Star Wars RPG drops. Cool! I grab the book and started reading. You know what happened? I stumbled through character creation, realized I was doing it all wrong, scrapped it all and started over again. And then once we sort of had our characters, I read the Beginners Box Set and we struggled as I stumbled through that. And while the game was fine and I was an terrible GM because I was learning the rules. And later on, I was still working on getting the balance for NPCs - early encounters were too easy and next week I compensated too much the other way and made the fights too hard.

It's called learning the system.

Do you think Gary Gygax didn't have a learning curve when he was building his game? Do you think Greg Costikyan didn't screw up the first drafts of his games? Was there a guide to creating and running games for D&D back in the seventies? Guess what - everyone is in the same boat.

So yes, I expect new players to have the exact same problems learning the system as every single other person in this forum did. And they will overcome those problems through the same way we did: time and experience with the system.

So how they got their Characteristics to these scores is unlisted. Makes it difficult to "build" NPCs i you are like me and want to ensure fairness between NPCs and PCs

You're building characters for different purposes. PCs are designed to be played over a long campaign. They are designed to improve at a certain rate so that, over a campaign of months or years, the character continue to gain new things every so often, providing something new to play with regularly.

NPCs are created to provide a challenge to the PCs. They are designed to be defeated, whether in combat or socially. Allied NPCs are designed to serve a purpose for the group. They're not meant to be built with standard character generation rules because they aren't standard characters. In the simplest terms, NPCs are either obstacles or tools. They are there to be beaten or used to beat others.

Now, we gussy these obstacles and tools up with names, faces and personalities. We endear them to the group, or we make the group hate them. But that's really all the thought that needs to go into them. The only question you need to ask is "What does this NPC need to fulfill its function?" Then you give the NPC that stuff.

There's even a talent designed explicitly for NPCs: Adversary. PCs can't get this at all.

It's difficult to worry about "fairness" when you can get the same xp for defeating 20 NPCs in a session as you do for defeating none.

As for over- or underestimating the strength of an NPC, that's not even an issue. If an NPC is too strong, then the PCs have destiny points to help them upgrade their skill checks against it. And, since NPCs will rarely, even as nemeses, be fighting alone, it's pretty easy to remove other, lesser enemies from the battlefield through expenditure of advantage and threat.

If an NPC is too weak (say that the BBEG of the campaign is facing the party for the first time, and they proceed to mop the floor with him), then it's a simple matter of flipping over a Dark Side destiny point and invoking Deus Ex Machina to save him, which will let you tweak him later on. Also, you could bring in some minion groups to fight with the NPC, which will force the party to divide up their firepower at multiple targets or risk dying quickly. I've seen a lot of people greatly underestimate minions; I was one of them. Then, I almost killed a party of three with a minion group of three stormtroopers.

And in combat, I don't need to know about TK-529's totally awesome swoop piloting skills, or the fact that he aced his Core Worlds history quiz in school if I've got him shooting at Rebels trying to demolish a small orbital shipyard. I need to know how good he is with a blaster, how much damage he can take, and how much damage he can dish out. Everything else is extraneous information that can be made up on the fly to add flavor.

The only system I really know that builds NPCs and PCs using the same rules is Third Edition D20-based games. Then, in Fourth edition and continuing into Fifth, WotC figured out that it wasn't worth the trouble completely statting out every NPC. I'm sure there are other systems that do it, but I don't play them, and I certainly don't run them. Session prep would take way too long.

Actually that reminds me of something from the old Ghostbusters RPG from WEG. They had a sidebar that said "If the players complain about the inequity in experience points between their Ghostbusters and the Gods and Demons that they regularly face, we present you this document awarding you one million [XP} points to use as you see fit", there was a check made payable to the GhostMaster for 1,000,000 experience and that if the GM needed more to send 100,000 dollars in small unmarked bills to their home office.

Bit of a difference between an Imperial moff who could have conceivably been born, raised, and attended the very same military academy with the playerr's starship pilot and a god

Having the ability to throw out any ole numbers you want is fine, but in the end you need to be able to explain how the NPC go to that stats, whether then experiec, magic, force-abilities, etc... there needs to be an in-game system for why the NPC can do something that the PC can then follow if they choose to follow the same path.

No there doesn't. NPC stats and how they got there don't matter in the grand scheme of things. And why are you telling PC's the NPC stats anyway? Emulate the concept? Sure whatever. Clone the NPC stat sheet? Not really.

I am not saying that an NPC has to be fully fleshed out when you use them, I am simply saying that they (NPCs) should not break the rules to which the Players adhere to (at least not within an in-game explanation, magic, the force, implants, etc...).

There are plenty of games in which NPC and PC rules are different. This is one of those games. There is nothing wrong with having different rules for different character types.

I will truly never understand when people say a system has to do X. No it doesn't. If this system doesn't do X play a system that does do X. If NPC and PC having the same rules is your thing that has to happen ..... play d20 or Saga. But I don't buy that every gaming system has to be a replicate of the other game out there.

And no I am not saying "don't learn the system" (as you seem to imply), I get that new players and DMs need to learn the system whenever a new system is dropped, but that does not xcuse the developers from making a game mechanic that is fair, balanced, and makes senseot just from amanical standpoint, but also from a "setting" standpoint. With the current setting you have NPC humans that have achieved characteristics that other humans within the system cannot simply because the mechanics do not allow it without massive amount of xp and multiple specializations.

These rules are fair, balanced, and makes sense. If an NPC human does something that normal humans can't ...... that's on the GM not the system. I mean just because a GM can give a human a Brawn of 8 doesn't mean he should. But that's more a fault of the GM and not the system itself. I'll let the GM who does that make his case before I decide if it's wrong though.

Why did FFG do this? I don't know, it doesn't make sense, especially when they could have achieved the same results by granting higher ranks in Skills rather than in Characteristics.

They did it because they don't agree with the gaming philosophy that PC's and NPC's need to follow the same rules? From the looks of it it was done to speed up game play, npc building, and to give the GM room to create NPC's that fit the narrative needs of the GM, with out requiring a special rule to do something new.

It's a fairly solid thing to do. Games with different NPC/PC rules are soooooooooo much more flexible to run.

but in the end you need to be able to explain how the NPC got to those stats, whether through experiece, magic, force-abilities, etc.

Um, no you don't. In all my decades of GMing, I've never explained my NPCs to my players. It's not a Top Secret secret or anything, but I've never let them look at my bad guy sheets, let alone justified why that Wookiee has the stats he does to anyone.

I am simply saying that they (NPCs) should not break the rules to which the Players adhere to (at least not within an in-game explanation, magic, the force, implants, etc...).

That's ridiculous. An NPC stat block needs to be streamlined for efficiency - I don't need to know that my Nemesis Pilot has Lets Ride, Rapid Recovery, Natural Pilot, Defensive Driving just so I can give them Brilliant Evasion. I don't want to have to hunt around through 50 talents when I'm running a game with my End Boss trying to find one on top of running a game, applying rulings and crafting an entertaining story.

Hell, sometimes I change bad guy stats on the fly IN the game. Geeze, my guy is going to utterly obliterate my team? I'll dump half his soak. The players just curb-stomped my End Boss in the first round? Look at that - he now has a wound threshold of 30 instead of 20. My Nemesis stands alone against 5 PCs? Then he gets to go again at the end of the turn and I shant care one whit that the Players can only go once in a turn.

You want fair and balanced, giving the NPC what it needs to survive a round of combat is COMPLETELY fair. Does what I'm giving him serve the story? Yes? Then on the sheet it goes. NPC - PC construction parity can go hang for all I care as long as the game is interesting and the story is served.

Actually that reminds me of something from the old Ghostbusters RPG from WEG. They had a sidebar that said "If the players complain about the inequity in experience points between their Ghostbusters and the Gods and Demons that they regularly face, we present you this document awarding you one million [XP} points to use as you see fit", there was a check made payable to the GhostMaster for 1,000,000 experience and that if the GM needed more to send 100,000 dollars in small unmarked bills to their home office.

Bit of a difference between an Imperial moff who could have conceivably been born, raised, and attended the very same military academy with the playerr's starship pilot and a god

https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/134532-npc-creation-guide-from-order-66-podcast/

This is what you need. There are hundreds of player resources to make your life easier that I don't think you even tried searching for, not to sound too antagonistic. You're really missing the point on npcs in this system though especially with such a narrow focus on nemesis.

Minions are worse than players and have special rules, are you going to build every minion like a player? Rivals are meant to rival the players but are you going to give them unneeded talents? They don't use strain so why would they grab a strain talent from the tree? A nemesis is supposed to be better and a challenge and not something you look up how their three desperate spec trees all look in the heat of an encounter.

Also about your earlier comment on why not let a player boost their core to give during game when they can boost skills to 5: 5 ranged (light) makes you have 5 green dice for ranged light (assuming you had no agility score somehow). 5 agility gives you 5 green dice FOR EVERY AGILITY SKILL. Yellow dice are way better for the sake of advantages, but if you're letting players start to gain 4-5 in characteristics you're going to quickly have characters who you can't challenge without risking throwing too much at them. Yes, a nemesis might be sitting on two or three or even four 4-5 characteristics and that's when they have a glaring weakness or they need a covered base. You can't give your ace enemy pilot 2 willpower if you don't want the Face character to charm her and rib the encounter.

Also, another thing previously mentioned, why are you telling players enemy stats? At best they should know wound threshold, MAYBE. MAAAAAYBE. And even that's a hard MAYBE because your players should be able to judge how strong someone is by how you narrate. If you threw some random thugs sty them in a bar fight and had them dropping like flies to the players rolls of 5 damage they should feel like those guys are weak when it takes 3-5 hits to take down the Rival status bouncer who comes in to clean up as you describe him shrugging of hits at first to clearly being injured and they should realize later when they have strong weapons doing 9 damage and they're hitting your bbeg sith Lord and he's deflecting bolts or staunchly walking through them that he's stronger than they are for now. That's why this is a game with narrative dice. You're making yourself crunch more numbers than you need to if you're making npcs like the players because you want your players to feel like that character could exist. It took Luke 3 adventures to finally beat the Emperor and he had help from another nemesis level npc.

Also apologies if this comes out a gnarled mess. First time poster and posting from mobile at 7 am.

I'd hate to answer a question with a question, but since it's suddenly a "broken" aspect of this game, is there an RPG where you go through & make opponents with the CHARGEN system, or documentation showing how opponents were created with the CHARGEN system?

D&D 3.0+/Pathfinder do build NPCs like you build PCs. Adding levels and feats on the same chart progression.

Shadowrun, GURPS, Savage Worlds, D6 (WEG Star Wars, D6 Fantasy, D6 Space, etc...), TORG, FFG Star Wars build NPCs with stats as needed. Same with HERO/Champions.

In HERO you can gauge the strength of an opponent by how much XP was spent on all the abilities, but like other non-level based systems, equal expenditure of points doesn't mean equal balance for something like combat.

D&D (old school) didn't have NPCs built like PCs.

Not sure about other systems like FATE.

This is what it boils down to for me.

I don't believe that NPC's and PC's should be built using the same "rules." The GM should have the liberty to build his encounters and foes how he sees fit. I think that provides better tools for the GM to do his job.

Let me make this straight, I don't tell the PCs the NPC stats, unless I am trying to help that PC become a GM and I am teaching the system to that person.

In this system however if they are paying attention to the GM's rolls, they can certainly make a decent guess, and yes the Core Rulebook says to make your dice rolls where everyone can see them as they may have talents or abilities that have an affect on the GM's rolls. Age of Rebellion page 305 Dice etiquette

The only time you don't is if it is something that is a surprise or cannot be affected by the PC

@Kael: "There are plenty of games in which NPC and PC rules are different. This is one of those games. There is nothing wrong with having different rules for different character types."

Having different rules is one thing, having no rules is something else.

@Desslok "That's ridiculous. An NPC stat block needs to be streamlined for efficiency"

I am not saying that an NPC block does not need to be streamlined, Just because I know that the NPC has x amount of talents, when preparing I still only put what I think will be relevant at the time I will be using the NPC.

@Ekorihs: "This is what you need. There are hundreds of player resources to make your life easier that I don't think you even tried searching for, not to sound too antagonistic. You're really missing the point on npcs in this system though especially with such a narrow focus on nemesis."

I get that there are sources out to help and what, I even get that the system builds NPCs for specific purposes and what not, the point of the OP however was asking a question about how to increase his Core stat with XP which can only be done during character creation. NPCs only got involved because they can apparently do this (unless I completely missed how NPCs are built, which is impossible to miss because there are no rules other than give them what you want to have) and yet PCs cannot. I don't believe that is a fair system.

@Lord Dynel: "I don't believe that NPC's and PC's should be built using the same "rules." The GM should have the liberty to build his encounters and foes how he sees fit. I think that provides better tools for the GM to do his job."

And that is your opinion and you are entitled to it. In this I just think we will have to agree to disagree.

To sum all this up, I just don't agree with not allowing a Character to increase their base stats with XP which seems pretty clear to me that this is how some NPCs were designed (IMO).

And in response to JalekZem who posted: "So a D&D Dragon that can fly, breathe fire at will, has a Strength of 22+ and so on where PCs are typically capped at 18 to 20 stat wise, cannot fly or breath fire is not broken? The monsters obviously use a different set of rules for creation then PCs do and no one complains...."

There is a huge difference between comparing a dragon born with scales, wings, a tail and is a supernatural creature with a human and comparing a Human NPC with a Human PC. And in D&D that Human PC can eventually get all those things you state the dragon has (flight, fire breath, Strength 22+), it's called magic.

To sum all this up, I just don't agree with not allowing a Character to increase their base stats with XP which seems pretty clear to me that this is how some NPCs were designed (IMO)

Then make sure your rivals and minions have strain and make sure your minions have racials because it's not fair to them because that's how the pcs are designed.

Having different rules is one thing, having no rules is something else.

They have rules for them. The rule is create them as you deem fit with a list of abilities that one can give them and an explanation of how the various NPC types works. They are rules light, but there are still rules.

NPCs only got involved because they can apparently do this (unless I completely missed how NPCs are built, which is impossible to miss because there are no rules other than give them what you want to have) and yet PCs cannot. I don't believe that is a fair system.

NPC's aren't built like PC's. You seem to keep comparing them to PC's creation when they aren't created the same way. If they aren't created the same way then why expect a PC to be able to do something they can? Or why should a PC expect to be able to do what they can? They aren't built using the same set of rules to begin with.

And so far the system itself has proven to be very fair, unless we are judging fairness by some completely odd way.

To sum all this up, I just don't agree with not allowing a Character to increase their base stats with XP which seems pretty clear to me that this is how some NPCs were designed (IMO).

NPC's aren't built with XP to begin with so the comparison to how NPC stats are improved vs that of PC's is invalid. In order for the comparsion to hold true NPC's would first have to earn XP, which they don't. You keep focusing on on the fact that NPC stats aren't held to the same standard but nothing about an NPC is held to that standard. NPC's are given stats. They don't spend XP to raise a stat. If a GM decides to raise his NPC stats as he uses the NPC that's his business. But the NPC himself doesn't earn xp. He doesn't go on adventures and gains XP and makes Obligation rolls and all the other stuff PC's actually do and worry about. NPC's are built to satisfy a story need. And the rules as presented gives the GM the flexibility to make them as he needs them.

If we were to be fair then Minions need strain. And PC's should gain increases in skills not based on XP but based on the number of PC's are in the party (to mirror how Minions stats change based on the number of grouped Minions). But I don't see you arguing that PC's need to have skill ranks increase based on the number of PC's in the party. Sooooo obviously on some level you accept that NPC's and PC's do things differently. The fact that NPC stats can be raised to any level by the GM (NPC's don't earn XP after all) shouldn't be an issue if you're ok with all the other ways that PC's and NPC's differ from each other.