So I just got done running our second session of F&D, and while it's going well there are a few issues we're having with the system that I'd appreciate a bit of help with.

1. Stat Min-maxing. Several of the players already have stated that they feel that going with 5 in a single stat is simply the best choice. We have "the Brawn guy", "the Agility guy" and "the Intellect guy" and already things feel a bit silly given that the Intellect guy can mysteriously know and engineer everything. Is this normal and the right way to start?

2. Unstructured Force healing. It seems that a character with the Force Heal talent can use the heal power an unlimited number of times in unstructured play, letting dark side results fail, thus healing the entire group completely between every encounter unless there is a harsh time limit. Is this the intent? I seem to recall that Warhammer had a similar problem which was never addressed.

3. Loot. As ex-D&D players of course the PCs have taken the opportunity to strip the weapons and gear from every defeated enemy and even attempt to drag off scrapped droids for salvage. While this doesn't seem very Star-Wars-ish it is hard to believe that captured enemy weapons, especially ones that don't need ammo, would not be valuable to someone. However it does mean that after completing Hidden Depths the players could sell 12 Blaster Carbines and Vibroblades and pool the resources amongst themselves. Is this number of credits entering play intentional?

(The players also had the team healer knock Ironarm unconscious and then attempt to remove his cyber arm..)

4. Auto Fire. This just seems incredibly powerful. This was how Ironarm was killed: a player shot him with a repeating blaster for 11 damage, dealing 6 after soak, no problem. Oh wait, it has autofire and the PC got a triumph and two advantages, that means he takes 2 extra 11 point hits and suffers another 12 after soak, bringing him over threshold in the very first round. He literally delivered his speech about "you're not Jedi" and was then cut down in a hail of energy bolts. The same repeating blaster guy could drop cavetrooper groups in a single burst of fire although that is at least fairly canonical. Still, it seems to create an incredibly initiative-centric combat system especially if the bad guys also had autofire weapons. Is this intended?

5. Involving morality. One of the PCs has Obstinance as their weakness so I re-used the Obsession test from the adventure, and I was able to use Reckless (although not by the suggested test because they'd already had one "the solution is to just leave" test - the Reckless guy was the guy with the repeating blaster so I just had him check to see if he'd gun down unknown shadowy creatures) but I'm not sure how to use Mercy/Weakness. Pride/Arrogance is the Intellect guy who certainly does play arrogant but I wasn't sure how to use it with something that wasn't physically visible and was to some extent justified. How does this work?

5? That's a little odd. A human would have had to spend 120 of their initial XP to get there (30 for 3, +40 for 4, +50 for 5), and they'd be pretty boring outside of their element. After my first character I never bought an ability above 3, relying on Dedication for further increases. My characters accomplish most of the tasks they attempt and they feel like they can attempt a lot.

I haven't read up on it, but I doubt Healing was intended to work that way.

Looting the bodies happens in any RPG with money. I've had my characters sell looted weapons at a large discount to freedom fighters on my homeworld in Edge of the Empire (gaining some money, yes, but giving us contacts and a bolt hole) and routed money back to Alliance in Age of Rebellion (gaining us increased Duty). Our Force and Destiny characters are Clone Wars era Knights, so we're trying to be above money in that, despite all of us wanting to upgrade our gear.

If you don't want them to loot stuff, you could try enforcing the Encumbrance rules - they're a pain. Or reward them for being selfless. Or make looting the bodies risky - it's unlikely the Empire will be kind to anyone dealing in looted Imperial issue weapons, which may put a lot of buyers off.

Stripping bionic crap from bodies is pretty ghoulish - I hope they got some Conflict for that.

Autofire is the biggest killer in the system. Are you doing it right though? Add 1 to the difficulty. Score 1 extra hit for every 2 advantages (unless you've got a Jury Rigged weapon [sigh]). Against enemies with significant Adversary ratings it can be hard to score more than a singe extra hit.

Still feeling my way around the morality system so can't really comment on your last problem.

I'd say min-maxing stats is semi-OK. Generally though, I've found plenty of situations where the "best" character for a given task is often not available to perform a given check, so PCs being able to handle a broad array of minor tasks is always useful. Min-maxing is just a recipe for most of the party to always fail on a task.

I coulda sworn Healing had some phrasing in the base power that worded it as being limited to once per scene. Or at least that you can't just test on it again immediately after the first attempt. Doesn't it also act as a stim pack (and even use the same counter as stim packs)?

The easiest way to handle looting is encumbrance and how much time the party has. But otherwise, I wouldn't be too against the party making a couple credits off selling blasters. On things like cybernetics, I would probably start handing out conflict like candy if the party actually engaged in the theft of cybernetic parts from living victims, and would likely say they're damaged beyond usefulness on dead opponents. It also likely should earn them some enemies in the long run. As well, selling such an item would likely be a bit difficult, and would either require a check to find a proper fence, or selling it for only a fraction of its value.

By all means, Autofire is effective, and as above, just make sure you're doing it right. Realize enemies can do this too (of course you run the risk of just handing more autofire weapons to the party if you go this route)

Morality is a bit tricky. I would say that it seems like its OK to give conflict for actions that fall "outside" of the characters selected Morality options (as above, doesn't matter what their Moralities are, give them conflict for trying to take a sentient's cybernetics), as long as the action is suitably immoral. My GM is being a tad bit on the extreme side here (and arguably against the spirit of the rules), and actually gives me Conflict on both PC actions (per normal rules) as well as OOC side comments at the table (more of a gaming group in-joke, but I have a bit of a morbid sense of humor). I actually police myself pretty well on that second part, to pretty good comedic effect at the table ("Why don't we just throw the unconscious bodies off the edge here in Nar Shadaa, don't want to leave evidence. Oh wait, ok, I'll take my conflict for suggesting that; lets not do that"). Generally though, threaten the players with Conflict for not behaving as good jedi - being overly violent (killing captured combatants, "no witnesses" mentality), being overly greedy (stealing everything that isn't bolted down), etc.

Heal is used in the same manner as stimpacks: 5 uses in a 24 hour period, and heal counts against the limit on stimpacks as well. I don't know how you're keeping track of time and days in regards to this.

I believe the Heal part of the Heal/Harm power shares the same limits as Stimpacks, meaning you can only heal 5 times a day. I hope someone corrects me if I am wrong. I would also take a note from the "Medicine" skill description. Medicine can only be done once per scene. The justification is that there's only so much that medicine can do for any particular injury. I don't allow another medicine check until circumstances have changed.

Look over the encumbrance rules. Even the brawny guy will have a problem carrying 13 vibrosword. Note that if the thief has a morality, theft (even if the owner is dead) is 2-3 conflict. You would be within your right to award that per item taken. I would lean closer to the "3" rather than the "2", since you're basically stealing from a corpse.

Are you increasing the difficulty for the autofire guy? Before the roll is made the attacker must declare all targets to fire upon. Of those targets, the opponent with the highest difficulty to hit will be your base difficulty, then the difficulty is increased once.

1.You will always have Min/Maxers.Just roll with it, they may be fantastic in one or two things but that means they are going to be bad at more things, so where as 1 or two players my do well the others won't and they group will have to find a way to compensate for this short-fal either better gear, better roleplay or just better team work.

2. Yes Force heal is great, And yes it follows the same rules for Stimpak use. Also one thing to consider if a player attempts a force heal on a character but rolls dark side and chooses NOT to use it one of the characters stimpak uses are still used.

3. Loot is great. Be aware that you will not be able to sell items and gear for the same price that the players would buy them for, no trader in their right mind would buy and sell rifles at the same price, just bad business. I would probably reduce the price listed on the book to about 35-50% for core worlds and probably 70-80% for outer rim planets, this will help players to think about what's worth carrying to a trader or not.

4. Yes, Auto-fire is an incredibly powerful ability which you will find is one of the greatest debates on the forums. Tell the players your happy for them to use auto-fire, that means you can use it too, Also don't forget Sunder is fun to watch the Heavy rifle wielding player cry at the table

5.Morality is all about the light and darkside of the force. Actions within the game and possibly with breaking of table rules may incur conflict. Each session you may structure an encounter that will play into a characters emotional weakness or strength such as Anger/ Discipline. The player can roll a discipline check if they succeed they take the "High Road" and don't incur conflict but if they fail they were tempted to the easy path and took the darkside route , gaining conflict.

1. So, when I started GMing this system, nearly every player tried to get two characteristics at 4 or one characteristic at 5. This was done out of habits gained from other systems where each player in the party picks a role, specializes in it, then super specializes in it, simply because in other systems only super specialists tend to succeed as often as most players desire. As time went on, and campaigns changed, most of the players adapted to this system and chose starting stats to be more generalist characters. The "shooty" guy still woud get agility 4 with their first dedication, the "talky" guy would get presence 4 with theirs, and so on. As the GM I did my best to curb super-specialization by incorporating more skills into each encounter that couldn't be solved by just one person rolling against it. If everyone has to roll the resilience test because of the noxious fumes, or if everyone has to roll the discipline/cool check to not soil themselves because of the big scary thing roaring at them, and so on. When the "battle hardened tough as nails commando" failed a fear check because they had base presence and willpower and no cool or discipline, they rethought how they were going to spend XP. Some people say split the party, which can work (and often does), but I also say to make everyone do more stuff. The more stuff they fail miserably at, the more XP they will spread around to fail less spectacularly.

2. As others have said, 5 is the limit, the limit is 5. This limit is shared with stimpacks. So if you use two stimpacks, then get force healed twice, and then stimpack 1 more time, that's it for that 24 hour period. As for when the GM starts the 24 hour cooldown, that's ambiguous, whatever is decided, just be consistent in the application.

3. As for loot, rule number 1: Most enemies that die in an explosion or a fire or a massive release of energy typically don't leave all their gear lying on the ground perfectly intact for players to pick up. Rule number 2: Encumbrance limits. Rule number 3: Encumbrance limits. This one is very important. A character has an encumbrance limit of 5 + brawn. Things like backpacks and utility belts raise this limit. Other things count against the limit. Exceedingly small things with 0 Encumbrance will add 1 Encumbrance per 5 objects (not easy to store) or 10 objects (easy to store). This isn't per category of item, it's per item. So no, "Well, 9 stimpacks are still 0 Encumbrance, and 4 of those are still 0 Encumbrance." That's 14 items, that's at least 1 Encumbrance. If players try to loot anything and everything, then enforce Encumbrance rules. Also, keep in mind that an unconscious player has an Encumbrance value equal to their own Encumbrance limit, plus the Encumbrance of all their gear. It gets really hard to pull your incapacitated buddy out of combat while you're also trying to loot all those blasters. Rule number 4: Selling loot. It's not a given. It's a Negotiation check for legal goods and a Streetwise check for illegal goods. One success allows you to sell the item at 25% of its listed price, 2 successes equates to 50% and it caps out (from successes) at 75% for 3 successes. Advantages can increase the sale price by 5% per advantage. Note that social tests are opposed and that good "merchant" NPC's will probably have at least 2-3 in their presence stat and somewhere between 2-4 negotiation or streetwise. This results in large counter pools, red dice, and the possibility of Despairs. Note that not every NPC will want to buy looted goods, or have all the money available to purchase said goods. Note that selling the goods from whatever organization you just looted them from in the same area that organization operates in will likely result in repercussions. One last note on looting, it's not always something that players should be punished for, sometime's it's okay.

4. Autofire. Oh Autofire. Yes, it is really powerful. Like others have said, it's use must be declared before rolling the dice, you add a purple die to attempt it, you specify all the targets you want to attempt to hit, and the first target is automatically the hardest one to hit (read, worst dice pool). Then, they roll. Many players and GM's here on this forum have their own complaints with Autofire, some have house-rules. I handle it my way, which keeps it RAW, even if they use Jury-Rigged on an Autofire weapon. Firstly, in most places in my games, large rifle type weapons (even legal ones) will place the wielder under suspicion of ill intent. This may not be from the law, it may be from the lawless. But if a bunch of people see a guy walk by with a BFG and then later here about a bunch of people getting killed by a BFG, they will tend to remember said guy, and provide info about that guy. Enemies can also use Autofire. There is always a way to deal with it. Sundering items is a thing. Sniping is a thing. Sneaky backstabbers are a thing. Squad rules from the Age of Rebellion GM Kit are a thing. They do a really good job of protecting a BBEG from an Autofire equipped murder hobo. If you have a player who absolutely must have an Autofire weapon, give them an ACP Repeater Gun from Lords of Nal Hutta. It's a heavy blaster pistol with autofire, as a carbine sized weapon that uses Ranged(Heavy). It still lets them spray and giggle, but it's damage output isn't the same as a heavy blaster rifle or a repeating blaster. Also, sometimes it's okay to let players be murder hobos, and sometimes an encounter can be designed around letting the combat monster have his moment. It just shouldn't be every encounter, or done at the expense of others' fun. Besides, minions are there to get killed, if Autofire doesn't have enough minions to kill, send in more minions! Note: A Triumph on the bad guys' rolls or a Despair on the good guys' rolls can introduce reinforcements., aka more Autofire fodder. Destiny points can also be flipped to do this.

5. Here, my advice is going to be far shorter than the other sections. The ability to apply this well and execute encounters triggered off of a player's morality will come with time. You will learn how to make it work with your group. How it works with my group will most likely be different than yours. The same goes for Duty and Obligation in AoR and EotE. I really recommend you watch more movies and TV, read more books (or if you already do this, draw more inspiration from them). Many stories out there include moral conundrums for the protagonist(s). Try a lot of different ways, see what works and what doesn't, don't fall into a rut and decide not to try other ways.

Other's have given good responses so I won't pile on except to comment on min-maxing.

The advice given by the designers is to buy up Attributes at Character Creation so it's not really min-maxing to do so. However new players to the system should be told that you really don't need to have an Attribute above 3 to be really effective across an entire campaign. A 4 is great and there isn't any reason not to get it, it just depends on what you want to do with your PC. Getting a 5 is really not necessary to shine early in the PC's career and is arguably better when achieved through Dedication.

As for each PC taking a specific role I'd teach them early on by throwing in a few encounters where having multiple challenges rely on the same Attribute/Skill set (two power terminals need to be de-activated at the same time to achieve the goal so that the one "Mechanic guy" can't do both). Have the Ranged guy get attacked by melee opponents while the melee guy gets a lot of fire from opponents at Medium range. Have the Agility guy make a Cool check before climbing down the side of that cliff, or the Brawn guy need to make a Coordination check to get across a broken walkway. My personal favourite is to have an NPC start taking to the meat-head first and force him to make the first social roll that will set the tone for the rest of the encounter.

And just a side note having a high Intellect doesn't mean the PC knows everything especially if they have no Ranks in the appropriate Knowledge Skill. A high Intellect and little or no Skill is like knowing a little bit about a lot of things, it's not the same as knowing a lot about a few things and you should adjust your answers to reflect this. As the GM can also choose to upgrade the difficulty of a check if the PC has no training instead of giving only more generalised information to represent a lack of training too. If you look at the adventure in the back of the F&D book you will see that you should give varying levels of information from checks based on not only a Success but if you get Advantages and such. You aren't penalising the Player by doing this.

Basically the game rewards multifaceted PCs if you run it that way.

So I just got done running our second session of F&D, and while it's going well there are a few issues we're having with the system that I'd appreciate a bit of help with.

1. Stat Min-maxing. Several of the players already have stated that they feel that going with 5 in a single stat is simply the best choice. We have "the Brawn guy", "the Agility guy" and "the Intellect guy" and already things feel a bit silly given that the Intellect guy can mysteriously know and engineer everything. Is this normal and the right way to start?

2. Unstructured Force healing. It seems that a character with the Force Heal talent can use the heal power an unlimited number of times in unstructured play, letting dark side results fail, thus healing the entire group completely between every encounter unless there is a harsh time limit. Is this the intent? I seem to recall that Warhammer had a similar problem which was never addressed.

3. Loot. As ex-D&D players of course the PCs have taken the opportunity to strip the weapons and gear from every defeated enemy and even attempt to drag off scrapped droids for salvage. While this doesn't seem very Star-Wars-ish it is hard to believe that captured enemy weapons, especially ones that don't need ammo, would not be valuable to someone. However it does mean that after completing Hidden Depths the players could sell 12 Blaster Carbines and Vibroblades and pool the resources amongst themselves. Is this number of credits entering play intentional?

(The players also had the team healer knock Ironarm unconscious and then attempt to remove his cyber arm..)

4. Auto Fire. This just seems incredibly powerful. This was how Ironarm was killed: a player shot him with a repeating blaster for 11 damage, dealing 6 after soak, no problem. Oh wait, it has autofire and the PC got a triumph and two advantages, that means he takes 2 extra 11 point hits and suffers another 12 after soak, bringing him over threshold in the very first round. He literally delivered his speech about "you're not Jedi" and was then cut down in a hail of energy bolts. The same repeating blaster guy could drop cavetrooper groups in a single burst of fire although that is at least fairly canonical. Still, it seems to create an incredibly initiative-centric combat system especially if the bad guys also had autofire weapons. Is this intended?

5. Involving morality. One of the PCs has Obstinance as their weakness so I re-used the Obsession test from the adventure, and I was able to use Reckless (although not by the suggested test because they'd already had one "the solution is to just leave" test - the Reckless guy was the guy with the repeating blaster so I just had him check to see if he'd gun down unknown shadowy creatures) but I'm not sure how to use Mercy/Weakness. Pride/Arrogance is the Intellect guy who certainly does play arrogant but I wasn't sure how to use it with something that wasn't physically visible and was to some extent justified. How does this work?

Hit them in the dump stats. They think they can be a one trick pony and get away with it? Put the High Brawn character in a social encounter. Have the Intellect character piss off a barfly and cause a bar fight. so on and so forth.

Looting will happen. One way to prevent it is to not give them time. Have the authorities arrive a few moments later. They have time to grab 1 item. Sirens are coming do you still want to be here when they arrive?

People are not going to take kindly to someone carrying around a machine gun. Did they buy the license. I suspect the license would not be accepted in most cases. Look how people freak out about people in our world carrying a rifle. imagine how they would react to a machine gun. Have your npcs behave similarly.

the Reckless guy was the guy with the repeating blaster so I just had him check to see if he'd gun down unknown shadowy creatures)

I think the real problem is just that you're still learning the system and your players are too. They're doing what they think will give them the most advantage, not realizing that they likely just haven't read the parts of the rules that balance out what they're trying to do. Learn the balance points, talk with the players, offer an opportunity to rebuild, and see if things go better.

1. Stat Min-maxing. Several of the players already have stated that they feel that going with 5 in a single stat is simply the best choice. We have "the Brawn guy", "the Agility guy" and "the Intellect guy" and already things feel a bit silly given that the Intellect guy can mysteriously know and engineer everything. Is this normal and the right way to start?

Only 2 Willpower across the board you say?

Seriously though, hyperfocusing makes sense from a D&D dungeon crawl "never split the party" perspective, but it's too easy to hit em in the dump stat here. Every time they roll Threat, they take that much strain. New bad guy? He's got a stun cannon. Need to sneak into an enemy camp? It's surrounded by 500,000 volt shock fence, Agility guy will do great, the other two will be hilarious to watch flop around like fish. Hmm a despair while running from those Farplizards? Guess Nerdlord just got separated, hope he's up to taking on an angry farplizard by himself.

That said I wouldn't just hammer em, give em an opportunity to re-balance things a little before you slap em in the face with some GM min-maxing of your own. Don't force it of course, if they want to min-max let em, but as the GM you're obligated to provide an appropriate challenge.

2. Unstructured Force healing. It seems that a character with the Force Heal talent can use the heal power an unlimited number of times in unstructured play, letting dark side results fail, thus healing the entire group completely between every encounter unless there is a harsh time limit. Is this the intent? I seem to recall that Warhammer had a similar problem which was never addressed.

There is a hard time limit. Each instance counts as a stimpack usage, so 5 total per day. A landspeeder with an auto-blaster should illustrate this limitation if you want to get nasty, though just keeping things rolling will probably be nicer. This isn't D&D, the players can't set up camp in the middle of an Imperial Depot because the wizard is out of spells. Push push push. The players make mince-meat of those stormtroopers? Oh look, a dozen more show up, guess the first group called for help. Oh look, and they brought a gunnery team with a heavy repeater.

3. Loot. As ex-D&D players of course the PCs have taken the opportunity to strip the weapons and gear from every defeated enemy and even attempt to drag off scrapped droids for salvage. While this doesn't seem very Star-Wars-ish it is hard to believe that captured enemy weapons, especially ones that don't need ammo, would not be valuable to someone. However it does mean that after completing Hidden Depths the players could sell 12 Blaster Carbines and Vibroblades and pool the resources amongst themselves. Is this number of credits entering play intentional?

(The players also had the team healer knock Ironarm unconscious and then attempt to remove his cyber arm..)

I think you posted this elsewhere, but just to hit it again...

Track Encumbrance: Most gear gets really heavy really fast.

Gear sales Starts at 25% list: And requires a negotiation check, streetwise if it's Restricted. Oh.. is that success with a threat? Yeah, he'll buy it, but he knows it's hot. He'll give you 200 credits for all of it, take it or leave it. He doesn't care it was 40 Enc and you dragged it all out of that sinkhole, that's what it's worth to him.

Make looted Imperial Gear count as restricted: Those E-11s and vibro-blades have imperial serials and are marked as "Imperial Property" right on the side. No way you can dump em in any old pawn shop. Also I'm spending a destiny point to upgrade the check, if you roll a despair you lose half the load and all take a crit as the deal went bad.

Karma's a female dog: Greed is an easy way to earn conflict. Maybe they don't care, but I suspect they will.

Also talk to your players. If they're D&D monkeys they may think they need the gold for magic items as they level. They don't....

4. Auto Fire. This just seems incredibly powerful. This was how Ironarm was killed: a player shot him with a repeating blaster for 11 damage, dealing 6 after soak, no problem. Oh wait, it has autofire and the PC got a triumph and two advantages, that means he takes 2 extra 11 point hits and suffers another 12 after soak, bringing him over threshold in the very first round. He literally delivered his speech about "you're not Jedi" and was then cut down in a hail of energy bolts. The same repeating blaster guy could drop cavetrooper groups in a single burst of fire although that is at least fairly canonical. Still, it seems to create an incredibly initiative-centric combat system especially if the bad guys also had autofire weapons. Is this intended?

It's working as intended, it's just the min/max nature of the beast that's causing issue. Without that 5 Agility he'd be hitting a lot less. Also I suspect you had Ironarm try and Solo the players? Yeah... don't do that... I know it's probably what the books said, but that's an... issue. Soloing the players usually requires special attention.

There's some things to address though:

1) Check those stats. That repeater? It's Enc 7 and Cumbersome 4. That means if he's Brawn 2, his ET is only 7. So if he's got pretty much anything on him other then the clothes on his back, he's overencumbered (and even if he does only have the clothes, they'd better not have an enc >3). For every point over his ET he takes a Setback on all Brawn and Agility based checks. Every point, and that's cumulative with setbacks for other reasons. Which brings us to cumbersome 4... that means he's gotta have a Brawn 4 to use this weapon or increase the difficulty of all checks to use it by 1. Now, Cumbersome can be offset with some attachments, but being that fubar on cumbersome limits his options to Bipod, Tripod, and steadycam harness... that'll be a negotiation check to purchase....

2) Imperial valor, Squads, and other things will allow a character to pass off hits/damage to other characters, make use of them. Squads are especially good at this as they are by-hit, not by-damage. So had Ironarm been squadded with say 6 other guys then those three hits would have removed 3 guys (regardless of actual damage) and that's it. For Squad information see the AoR GM Kit.

3) Sunder that poop! If the player ever faces an opponent with Sunder, damage that gun. Break it completely if you can. With an Enc that bad he'll likely be unarmed.

4) Ammo? Yeah, it's a thing. If that guy rolls a despair on a check, he's out of ammo. And unless he's got gear or a talent that fixes that... he's out-out. The Extra Reloads item is 1 Enc btw... just saying...

I'm ok with the stat min/max considering how rare stat increases will be post Char gen. If they lean to heavily on being one hit wonders then give them challenges they're weak at but otherwise manageable.

Looting is fixed a couple of ways. Encumbrance rules is a good start. But also making it more trouble than it's worth. Where are they going to off load all these weapons? Won't the Empire take notice of their trafficking in stolen Imperial equipment? Make it unsafe or unwise for them to take weapons to later sell back and they'll stop.

Or my personal favorite, tell them upfront to knock it off. This isn't D&D, this is Star Wars. We don't see Han and Luke looting dead Stormtrooper gear on the Death Star. Tell them you expect better and that if they continue they won't see a benefit. Often times a frank out of character discussion of what you expect as the GM will fix it. I've found that when people are transitioning from a different style of game a frank discussion of what is considered acceptable behavior in the new game will yield good results.

So many good points here.

Force them to split up, give them tasks that have to be done simultaneously or they wont succeed, then throw curve balls at the split parties. Reasonable Curve Balls, not GM is an A@@ curve balls. and not every time.

This is not a GM vs PC Dungeon crawl, its a game where all the people at the table work together to tell a story about the adventures and hi-jinx of a Party of Characters. I have played in and GM'd sessions where no initiative has ever been rolled, social or combat, and yet they where a blast of fun. This system covers a wide variety of encounter options, Social, Chase, Space Battle, Ground Battle, Bar fight, Jungle Exploration, Metropolis Exploration. The list goes on and on, don't put them in places where combat is always an option; they need information, are negotiating with a Hutt, are significantly outnumbered, are working for someone who wants it on the quiet. And if combat is their first port of call give them Conflict.

Then your group must unlearn what you have learned.

>Snip Awesome Post<

Amazing! Great answer.

Thanks for the replies!

1. The idea of "hit them in the dump stat" I don't really like very much - every character is going to have some weakness that the GM can nail, after all, and if I'm doing it on the basis that their failure is predetermined then I'm just railroading them for no reason. If there's some house rule on stat balance to avoid this that's much more reasonable? We have had some rather goofy consquences from the min-maxing so far (like the fact that the only guy who has made a lightsaber never uses it) but nothing forced. (Although it seems a bit unreasonable to me that Mechanics gets so much in-system love compared to other skills.)

2. I like the idea of using encumbrance to restrict looting although there isn't always a time limit available - if there's no time limit, especially at the end of an adventure, then the PCs can just take as much time as they need to loot as much as they can, carrying 1 at a time if necessary. Hidden Depths has an encounter with 6 Cavetroopers and Ironarm outside the PC's ship, making it really easy to bundle the loot on before blast off. And surely the Rebels can deal with marks on Imperial weapons? (Ok, maybe they can't - I've mostly read FaD)

3. Thing with using AutoFire against them is that it'll tend to reduce combats to initiative roll-offs. The system seems extremely lethal for a cinematic game and certainly at the time I made attack rolls I was conscious that a bad roll could drop a PC right there.

On min-maxing:

I wouldn't necessarily say "hit" them in the dump stat, but I would comment that these deficiencies should come up naturally. Life isn't so simple that you always -only- do the stuff you're good at.

-Perception checks. Players generally should be called to make these, especially for gathering bits of extra info

-Deception. Even if they're generally honest, it seems odd that they would consistently just always tell the truth (or not hide info). And broader, lacking a party face probably means more combats, which by extension results in more noise to their actions.

For example, in my last game, the party was involved in a shootout near a turbolift. The party was retreating to the lift, and was attempting to go down. 2 of the 3 members were in the lift itself, one knocked down from a serious hit. The PC that was down made an attack, rolling well but had a despair. GM ruled that this meant the lift was damaged and begun going down in free-fall. The PCs in the lift needed to quickly succeed on a mechanics check. Nobody in the lift had the skill. They succeeded eventually, but it was tense. The PC at the top (me) was then forced to find an escape (although I had it easy, spent a destiny point for there to be a useful service ladder in the lift shaft, and then I jumped to it - although I didn't have ranks in Athletics, but I went with, as a human, buying 4 characteristics at 3 at chargen, brawn, agility, willpower, and presence).

Another example, we're rather constantly lying about the "why" we're getting involved in things. We're playing an early imperial era game, (months after end of clone wars), and while we're working with Bail Organa, and clearly against the empire, we don't want to let that fact on. We have to be coy, and this is taking deception checks. Similarly, while by all means, roleplaying should be prioritized, consider having charm checks when engaging with NPCs, to at least gauge general disposition.

Another, you mention your party has a brawn, agility, and intellect character. How are you handling availability checks?

How are they on initiative? Both initiative types are keyed to characteristics they seem to have dumped.

Not having discipline makes those post-combat strain recovery pretty rough.

Deception is opposed by discipline. If they don't have that, NPCs can lie to the PCs all the time and they likely would have some difficulty in determining this.

And generally, if the party is "fine" with these deficiencies coming up and still living with it, then fine, that works. What I would avoid though is being -too- nice to overspecialized PCs. Yes, the party might not have a face, and yes, that might make the harder availability checks a bit annoying, but don't ignore the availability and selling rules in light of this. For example, if the party lacks a medic/healer type, don't make healing easier, give them access to an NPC medic.

I guess the idea is to always make sure the players are at least making -some- roles on things they're not good at.

And surely the Rebels can deal with marks on Imperial weapons? (Ok, maybe they can't - I've mostly read FaD)

Oh they can deal with imperial marked weapons.... but there's a catch....

The Rebel Alliance is exactly that, an alliance of different groups all opposed to the Empire, the standing government of the galaxy. They aren't a pawn shop. They're a bunch of militiamen hiding out in the woods. So they might not have credits to buy weapons with. Have you seen their State-of-the-Art starfighters? They don't even have the money to run them through the wash and touch up the paint!

As the GM you have to adjudicate player decisions and actions. So let's adjudicate this one... (You can read along with me in your book! You will know it is time to turn the page when you hear the Imperial officer get strangled like this: *gaaaak!*)

Scenario: The player's have a dozen Imperial Issue blaster carbines they want to sell to the Rebel Alliance. The Carbines have a Rarity of 5, and a base value of 850 credits.

Turn to page 157 in your F&D core and you will see the base difficulty chart for buying and selling items based upon their rarity.

*gaaaak!*

On page 158, you'll also see the table for adjusting the Rarity of an item based on your current location. We'll assume the players are on an out of the way world in the outer rim, increasing the Rarity to 8, meaning a Daunting (4 Purple) base difficulty. Since the players are actively trying to sell pilfered Imperial weapons to a group of paramilitary wacko's, this would qualify as a "Black Market" deal, meaning the Skill used would be Streetwise. Since getting in touch with a Rebel group to sell weapons is inherently risky for many reasons, let's spend a D-point to upgrade that to make it more dangerous. (3 Purple, 1 Red) and since the players just shot up a group of stormtroopers the day before to get it, we'll be nice and only toss two Setback on top of it to represent the general apprehension that anyone might have toward buying imperial weapons right now, and a third to represent the common issues of Rebel supply. This isn't a "Trading" situation (the player looted this gear, and didn't buy it bulk with the intent to resell) so the increased cost when trading multiplier doesn't apply.

So the Streetwise Check to unload these carbines will be 3 Purple, 1 Red, and 3 Black. This is where your Min/Maxed players are likely to feel the squeeze, as they'd need a group composed of a Ridiculous 6 min/maxers to cover all the ground. One for each Ability. As is you've got Agility, Brawn and Int maxed... no Cunning though, so at best a player will have 2Y, but more likely it'll be 1G 1Y or 2G, putting their odds of success somewhere between Poor and LOL. This isn't hitting them in the Dump Stat, it's just basic GMing, as if you compare this check to a more balanced character with more utility in the dark arts, they'll have better dice, and the ability to actual reduce the difficultly through Talents.

If successful (Bahahahaha!), the carbines "Street Value" starts at 25% (still on page 158, top right column) of the base value, or 212.5 each, giving the total value for the dozen only 2,550 credits. If the players succeed with two success, the street value goes up to 50%, and if they get 3 or more, it caps out at 75%, netting 5,100 and 7,650 respectively. Which is nice, but still questionable considering the risk:

However that's assuming it's only a flat success. Triumph, Advantage, Threat and Diaper Despair are likely, with Pile o' Threat being the most likely. So now you have to ask... what could possibly go wrong while trying to sell weapons on the black market? There's lots of solutions...

Threat - You're robbed, you lose one blaster per Threat.

Despair- The buyer was an Imperial sting operation, you get away but lose the entire load and one of you got injured. He counts as starting the next adventure with an Average Crit.

Success with threat - The rebels want the weapons, but don't have the credits, they offer 1 ton of compressed wheat wafers as trade.

Success with Despair - The rebels want the weapons, but don't have the credits, they offer a heavy repeating blaster as trade (spoiler: it's broken, 3 Threat on a Gunnery check to use it = it explodes like a frag grenade)

Just as a few options.

Hidden Depths has an encounter with 6 Cavetroopers and Ironarm outside the PC's ship, making it really easy to bundle the loot on before blast off.

You sure about that chummer?

This isn't D&D, the encounters aren't restricted to a closed sound-proof dungeon room. All it takes is one incidental for a stormtrooper to use his headset comlink and call for backup. One TIE strafing them players will make them drop the loot and run considering how a medium laser can 2xHT them in one shot. Force heal that...

3. Thing with using AutoFire against them is that it'll tend to reduce combats to initiative roll-offs. The system seems extremely lethal for a cinematic game and certainly at the time I made attack rolls I was conscious that a bad roll could drop a PC right there.

See my post above, if the character in question is min/max at 2/5/2/2/2/2, he probably can't even hold that gun up, adding additional difficulty beyond the existing Auto-fire increase. Also remember that the auto-fire difficulty is set at the most difficult target the character wishes to shoot at, so a couple ranks of Adversary, some range, and some defenses will go a long way. Squadding is also a good idea, as it allows you to increase the cost of auto-fire to 3 Advantage.

Hmm, is there a summary of these Squad rules somewhere? I know someone posted a reference, but I've already had to buy 1 additional mostly-redundant book and get scalped by Amazon resellers for dice in order to run the game in the first place, I'm getting a bit tired of the financial chiseling. I take it the idea is that a Nemesis or Rival class opponent joins a group of Minions and adds their WT to their WT pool?

As for "they could call for backup and they get strafed by a TIE.." yes, whooptie-doo, the GM can kill the players. But it'd be nice to have a better solution than "if you do this stuff I don't like then rocks fall and everyone dies".

Hmm, is there a summary of these Squad rules somewhere? I know someone posted a reference, but I've already had to buy 1 additional mostly-redundant book and get scalped by Amazon resellers for dice in order to run the game in the first place, I'm getting a bit tired of the financial chiseling. I take it the idea is that a Nemesis or Rival class opponent joins a group of Minions and adds their WT to their WT pool?

As for "they could call for backup and they get strafed by a TIE.." yes, whooptie-doo, the GM can kill the players. But it'd be nice to have a better solution than "if you do this stuff I don't like then rocks fall and everyone dies".

When he says call in a TIE, its more a matter that this is something that should alarm the players to act fast. Its not so much about actually rolling that vehicle scale damage against the players, its that they -know- they don't have time to loot all the bodies.

Hmm, is there a summary of these Squad rules somewhere? I know someone posted a reference, but I've already had to buy 1 additional mostly-redundant book and get scalped by Amazon resellers for dice in order to run the game in the first place, I'm getting a bit tired of the financial chiseling. I take it the idea is that a Nemesis or Rival class opponent joins a group of Minions and adds their WT to their WT pool?

As for "they could call for backup and they get strafed by a TIE.." yes, whooptie-doo, the GM can kill the players. But it'd be nice to have a better solution than "if you do this stuff I don't like then rocks fall and everyone dies".

The basics are this: You make a Leadership Check which allows the PC to create and join a Minion Group (Squad/Squadron). If successful The Squad/Squadron now assumes the PC's Initiative and the PC, as it's leader, can order it (Leadership roll) into formations that either add Boost Dice or give Setbacks to opponents. Additionally as the Squad/Squadron takes damage the PC can choose to allocate it to the Minions, eliminating them as necessary. The Squad/Squadron in all other respects acts as a Minion group and makes it's attack separately (So the PC makes their Attack in addition to the Squad/Squadron)

Thats pretty much the gist of it.

Thanks for the replies!

2. I like the idea of using encumbrance to restrict looting although there isn't always a time limit available - if there's no time limit, especially at the end of an adventure, then the PCs can just take as much time as they need to loot as much as they can, carrying 1 at a time if necessary. Hidden Depths has an encounter with 6 Cavetroopers and Ironarm outside the PC's ship, making it really easy to bundle the loot on before blast off. And surely the Rebels can deal with marks on Imperial weapons? (Ok, maybe they can't - I've mostly read FaD)

If you're going to list reasons for why they can loot then why list looting as a problem? You're the GM. They don't have to have Rebel Alliance contacts. The Alliance doesn't have to pay them (they are a band of rag tag individuals after all). Like looting is really only a problem if you let it be a problem. When you stop rewarding the behavior the behavior comes to an end. They'll see no point in looting if they never get anything worthwhile out of it.

Or ...... just tell them to stop it because this isn't D&D and you don't want to run Star Wars like a D&D game.

Like seriously if the issue bothers you and you don't want to use the in game suggestions then just talk to them like adults. Most adults will listen.

3. Loot. As ex-D&D players of course the PCs have taken the opportunity to strip the weapons and gear from every defeated enemy and even attempt to drag off scrapped droids for salvage.

* No respectable merchant will deal with hot imperial blasters and armor.

* A respectable merchant will prove his loyalty to the New Order by dropping a dime on them

* Going to the Black Market will get them pennies to the dollar if they're lucky

* Go to the black market with a big enough bounty on their head and that contact will dime them out.

* Good luck hauling fifteen suits of stormtrooper armor with you while you are trying to stealth through a base.

* Good luck simply trying to hold ten blaster pistols at once - brawn or no brawn, there's volume and space to consider.

* Good luck explaining to the customs agent why you have three crates of Stormtrooper armor in the cargo hold.

* Who has time on the battlefield to strip the enemies when there's an AT-AT bearing down on them and reinforcements on the way.

Hmm, is there a summary of these Squad rules somewhere? I know someone posted a reference, but I've already had to buy 1 additional mostly-redundant book and get scalped by Amazon resellers for dice in order to run the game in the first place, I'm getting a bit tired of the financial chiseling. I take it the idea is that a Nemesis or Rival class opponent joins a group of Minions and adds their WT to their WT pool?

It's in the AoR GM Kit (waaaaay in the back) out of the three GM kits additional rules, the squads/squadrons is the best simply because its more usable in more campaigns no matter what core you're working from.

Since my last few posts have been stupid long, I'll compress with spoilers:

What Squads/Squadrons do:

As for "they could call for backup and they get strafed by a TIE.." yes, whooptie-doo, the GM can kill the players. But it'd be nice to have a better solution than "if you do this stuff I don't like then rocks fall and everyone dies".

Ok, my bad here. You're new, so I gotta remember to teach and train on some of these things.

While yes, the up-front idea is the TIE is scary, and will motivate the players to get moving, I actually picked it for a real encounter design reason.

The TIE likely won't even be able to hit the players:

If the TIE does hit, it won't kill anyone (unless the GM wants it to, and even then it's pretty low odds, Killing a PC is HARD):

The real moral of the story here is: Being a GM will mean planning the adventures, but also improvising when you need to. Having a few modular encounters on hand is great, but having a few stupid-simple aces up your sleeve is even better. A TIE coming in and strafing the players as they load their ship is well within the realm of believably, will give the players a healthy respect for vehicles, and can be easily modified to fit any situation.

You could do what I've always done for Star Wars (especially, though other games too): Everyone's gear isn't just magically completely intact and usable.. Especially not when attacking with lightsabers, grenades, etc. After a battle, I call on the players to make a Loot check. They collectively pick a skill, usually either Perception (for finding usable pieces of gear) or Mechanics (for seeing what parts are good from one thing and can go on another to make it work), though I'm open to other skill if the case can be made (I think I let them use Athletics once, to grab stuff that was bolted down). The member with the highest skill makes the check, with the others aiding (assuming they can all spend that much time looting; often, one or two will have to be doing Medicine checks on the others). Usually, I have Mechanics take longer (about 5 minutes for Perception, and 10 for Mechanics). Each Success means a roll on the loot table I use (I got it on the EotE boards, I think, but I've also messed with it a bunch. It's basically a d100 roll with tons of random items on it). A Triumph lets you roll instead on the Rare Loot Table (both rare items, and interesting plot hooks, like a Deed to an Unknown Piece of Property or something like that). I'm generally willing to fudge up or down a bit on the table if that item rolled doesn't match what would make logical sense to be there. But here's the weird thing: It almost always fits. Maybe not at first, but what my players love to do is come up with a little narrative about all the items they found, especially if one is kind of random or off the wall (One, while killing a big bad bounty hunter, they got 2 rare loot rolls... and got Picture of a Family and Love Letter. They then came up with a whole backstory to this family-man bounty hunter on the spot, which was fun, even though it didn't really get them anything). If, however, they don't want to roll on the table, but want a specific item that the npcs actually had on them, I require they spend 2 successes, plus an additional one for every 3 rarity (Meaning, 0-2 is 2 successes, 3-5 is 3, 6-8 is 4, and 9-10 is 5), and if it's restricted, or otherwise rare or unusual or one-of a kind, they have to get a triumph before I'll even allow it. Then, Advantage can be used to reduce time, at 1 less minute per 2 advantages. If they don't want to take that much time to loot,(like I said, 5 for Perception, 10 for Mechanics), they can take a setback die to reduce 1 minute from the time taken. I usually set the difficulty using common sense... If Blast Weapons or weapons with Sunder were used in the combat, that difficulty is going to be hard-formidible, while if they say, poisoned everyone, only easy, maybe even simple. I'll increase the difficulty if the guys being looted just didn't have a lot of stuff, and sometimes I'll reduce if there's a treacsure trove of gear. I usually only upgrade is there's something that could reasonable happen by getting a despair, like an AT-ST shows up, or something. My players are huge loot hounds, but this system keeps them happy, and I think it's fairly simple.