My players aren't yet built up enough to, say, square up against an Inquisitor, but for when they do, they've mentioned how it's strange a lightsaber just rolls against the usual 2 melee difficulty dice. They've posited examples like the Duel of the Fates and the Mustafar duel, and suggested that using a lightsaber to attack someone should use the opponent's lightsaber skill, if any, as the difficulty; I argued that because the system is more narrative, something like the Duel of the Fates could have been just one or two rolls, narrated as a large duel across the reactor chamber. Basically, in my players' suggestion, if an inquisitor with 3Y1G for lightsaber attacked a player with a lightsaber roll of 2Y1G, the inquisitor's difficulty would be 2R1P instead of 2P.

Pros of using the opponent's skill as difficulty:

• More representative of swordplay
• More room for dramatic results via upgraded difficulty dice
• Makes lightsaber fights last longer
• Still lets you mulch minions

Cons:

• Far more chance of despairs
• Makes it harder for lightsaber users to shine?

Anyways, I'm interested in hearing what you guys think!

The Niman, Makashi Duelist, and Shi-Cho trees have a talent called "defensive training" that adds setback dice to an attackers roll if you are using a lightsaber or melee weapon. There are other talents, like Dodge, that do the same thing for strain costs. Would any of those do the trick?

The Niman, Makashi Duelist, and Shi-Cho trees have a talent called "defensive training" that adds setback dice to an attackers roll if you are using a lightsaber or melee weapon. There are other talents, like Dodge, that do the same thing for strain costs. Would any of those do the trick?

I think the idea is to make lightsaber combat basically universally more difficult, though I brought up those ideas as well!

The Niman, Makashi Duelist, and Shi-Cho trees have a talent called "defensive training" that adds setback dice to an attackers roll if you are using a lightsaber or melee weapon. There are other talents, like Dodge, that do the same thing for strain costs. Would any of those do the trick?

Edit: double post for some reason, sorry!

Another option would be (queue tinny b-movie horror music) to treat combat as an opposed contest. The designers specifically avoided this to facilitate speedier play, but if you really want lightsaber duels to be a direct measure of skill vs. skill, you build the pool as an opposed test.

There are so many ways to upgrade difficulty and add setback that it's really not needed. More XP for the PC's and NPC's designed for defence will change their attitudes quickly.

Opposed combat rolls only for some forms of combat introduced an unbalance into combat.

There are Talents and Force powers that represent the increased Difficulty both narratively and mechanically through upgrades to the pool and Setback dice.

Combat invariably involves potentially dozens of dice rolls. To have a constantly shifting set of difficulty pools would be chaos imo.

Hmm. I do kinda like the idea of contested lightsaber skills when a duel occurs. It'd be more cinematic at least. I may houserule this for all melee/brawl combat to add a bit of flair. Not gonna do opposed vs ranged attacks, they're traditionally moving to fast for you to try and dodge... unless you're force sensitive and then that's what the Sense bonus simulates.

That inevitably leads to people realizing they never want to engage in melee/brawl as ranged combat becomes vastly easier.

That inevitably leads to people realizing they never want to engage in melee/brawl as ranged combat becomes vastly easier.

Which would explain why 99% of the galaxy use blasters! In the films, TCW, and Rebels, you see very few people using melee weapons outside of Jedi/Sith or people planning to fight Jedi/Sith. Also I'd only use the opposed melee/brawl ratings for Nemisis/players. It's not worth calculating for minions or rivals.

Anyways, I'll toy with the idea and see if there's any hangups that will cause issues (initial thoughts are Sense and Adversaries upgrades could get really wierd).

As cool as duels are in the movies, the reality of gameplay is that you are (usually) playing with a group. Now if you are playing with a group and they are all willing to take a backseat to Buffy while they do their own sideline thing, that's great. But usually that nemesis is going to have to deal with more than one character. That's why I don't build them (Nemesis) for duels or worry about duels. Contested melee rolls were considered way back in the early EotE Beta, but most just defaulted to blasters since they were easier, therefore no one would bother with melee. I try to build encounters that will challenge the whole group. At best using the duel rules in Fly Casual before the plasma bolts get flying.

Guardians have the "Fated Duel" signature ability from the Keeping the Peace sourcebook. It isolates the character and NPC for 3 rounds as they're locked in combat. It doesn't change the dice pools, but in that context you could use the opposed dice while the duel is active.

That said, what your players are missing about those iconic duels is that there is an awful lot of Parry going on, in addition to committed Force dice in Sense and possibly Enhance. In mechanical terms, Strain is being spent to parry, and being recovered through Advantage, over and over until someone is exhausted. So the mechanics very much can represent how a lot of these battles seem to go: back and forth for a while with little effect, and then suddenly for one it all falls apart.

Another element about those iconic duels is that though they are taking place over several minutes, that doesn't mean said duels are taking place over several rounds.

Desslok had a pretty solid thread over in the FaD section of the forums breaking down many of the lightsaber fights from the films, and most of them only took a few rounds with only a small number of actual combat checks being rolled.

Looking at Luke and Vader's rematch in RotJ, a case could be made that they didn't make a lot of combat checks, but were instead were making social checks, with Vader using Coerce to try and break Luke's spirit, and Luke using Charm to try and reach the good that was buried deep in his father's own spirit. Vader got a Despair on his Coercion check when he suggested turning Luke's sister, which caused Luke to flip out and hammer Vader into the ground with his lightsaber. Luke however got a Triumph on his final successful Charm check while being electrocuted by the Emperor, which enabled Anakin to come to the fore and finally fulfill his destiny of destroying the Sith.

If you look at Anakin and Obi-Wan's duel on Mustafar, a lot of that is probably Athletics and Coordination checks to navigate the incredibly hostile battlefield they were in, with only the occasional Lightsaber combat check from one or the other.

As has been said above, there are a plethora of talents that can effect the base difficulty. Not to mention Parry. Every lightsaber tree has some talents related to defense and these are supposed to represent the added difficulty associated with the practitioners skill.

In this game, skills are basic understandings and abilities, but talents are where the true masters arise. Having 5 ranks of LS skill isn't nearly the same as having 2 or 3 ranks and an additional 5 LS talents.

Hmm. I do kinda like the idea of contested lightsaber skills when a duel occurs. It'd be more cinematic at least. I may houserule this for all melee/brawl combat to add a bit of flair. Not gonna do opposed vs ranged attacks, they're traditionally moving to fast for you to try and dodge... unless you're force sensitive and then that's what the Sense bonus simulates.

Realistically, at range, you can make yourself a more difficult target (position, timing, posture, speed, etc), but you can't literally dodge.

The question is whether one is worried about "realistically".

That inevitably leads to people realizing they never want to engage in melee/brawl as ranged combat becomes vastly easier.

Which would explain why 99% of the galaxy use blasters! In the films, TCW, and Rebels, you see very few people using melee weapons outside of Jedi/Sith or people planning to fight Jedi/Sith. Also I'd only use the opposed melee/brawl ratings for Nemisis/players. It's not worth calculating for minions or rivals.

Anyways, I'll toy with the idea and see if there's any hangups that will cause issues (initial thoughts are Sense and Adversaries upgrades could get really wierd).

It works out like this roughly, if you add attribute/skill to Difficulty for just brawl/melee, you've roughly made brawl/melee at least twice as hard, since all the other stuff from combat in general gets added in as well. Why wouldn't I just pull out a pistol and use Range(L) for a Difficulty of 2P for being engaged with a pistol, as opposed to a mountain of Reds and Purples in an opposed check?

I'm definitely taking the side of "the book knows best." It's tempting to have a mechanic that has the two individuals in a duel directly oppose each other, but there are a lot of minor issues that add up to major (albeit hard to see in the moment) problems. One example is that ability dice and difficulty dice aren't weighted the same when it comes to success/failure and advantage/threat. I believe it was an episode of the Order 66 podcast that pointed out an equal number of green and purple dice is more likely to result in success with threat than any other combination, since a difficulty die has one less failure than an ability die has successes, while the opposite is true for threat (one more on a difficulty die than there are advantages on its counterpart). The same goes for proficiency and challenge dice. So it's not fair to assume that the negative version of a character's lightsaber skill would, in such a roll, accurately reflect his ability to defend.

Also, if you're rolling as a contested check like that, does it matter who's attacking? What's the purpose of turn order if by virtue of a bad roll the so-called aggressor ends up taking damage from his enemy? Does a failure with Despair on a Jedi's turn mean the Inquisitor manages to give him a critical injury? And if that's the case, what's the point of the player spending XP on talents like Improved Parry? If I get to inflict damage on my opponent just by waiting for the Random Number Gods to turn on him, then it doesn't make sense for me to buy the talent, which might prevent me from getting access to other parts of my tree.

Such a house rule might make lightsaber duels more dangerous, but it also makes them less consistent. If a character were to attack the Inquisitor with Brawl, would she be wrong to demand the Inquisitor defend with Brawl instead of Lightsaber? And I feel like a player would also be right to demand that, in a firefight, they get to use their Agility in their own defense, since it's related to their ability to dodge. The end result would seem to be a migration away from the skill of the attacker -- their ability to land a hit -- to the skill of the defender and their ability to avoid damage. And from there, up is down, short is long, dogs and cats sleeping together, mass hysteria.

Honestly, it's hard to gauge the possible outcomes without trying it out, but I wouldn't trust a single session to decide whether this house rule fixes more problems than it creates. The cinematic feel of the universe would also take a hit.

I suppose you could go all the way and say that combat between two individuals is resolved by a single opposed dice roll, based on their skill of choice, and only rolling for themselves and not for the inherent difficulty of the task... but at that point, you're already playing FATE Core.

And from there, up is down, short is long, dogs and cats sleeping together, mass hysteria.

It works out like this roughly, if you add attribute/skill to Difficulty for just brawl/melee, you've roughly made brawl/melee at least twice as hard, since all the other stuff from combat in general gets added in as well. Why wouldn't I just pull out a pistol and use Range(L) for a Difficulty of 2P for being engaged with a pistol, as opposed to a mountain of Reds and Purples in an opposed check?

You did read my statement about applying it only to Nemesis and my concerns about the Adversary talent right!? So you're not rolling vs 2P regardless of what you choose to do.

What if you don't have a ranged weapon on you? Or the Inquisitor just used Move to pull it from your hand? Or perhaps you like the idea of forcing the Nemesis you're fighting to have to roll several red and purple die to hit you (better defense and activating imp parry)? I'm lucky that I have great players who would probably jump at the chance to holster their weapon for an up-close cinematic fight. Just like Luke put away his blaster to face Vader on Bespin. As for what you would do, you're not one of my players. So that doesn't really concern me.

I still think it's an interesting idea, but I wanna test it's balance a bit before I would consider implementing it. I'm pretty busy, so it'll have to wait till next weekend though. Some secondary thoughts, it drastically improves the players defenses vs the Nemesis.

Why does an opposed check with added dice equal cinematic and the standard dice pool not?

Once you factor in parry/reflect, adversary and all the things that come with PC's, combat will start to pick up talents and such to allow combat to be a longer affair. Issue is, the Lightsaber combat we see from the movies are clearly from 150 to 400 exp heros, most of them with a fair mastery of the lightsaber trees. A vast majority of duels are also fairly short in terms of the system; the fight with Maul probably only took about 4/5 rounds, most of the old trilogy battles only lasted about 3/4 rounds.

In essence, having dueling be a competitive check will make the duel's longer, but not necessarily more interesting. Usually most characters who expect to be in lightsaber fights should invest in a tree, otherwise they won't be doing much fighting either way.

I think at one point, prior to the EotE Beta, the rules for melee combat did use an opposed check, as there was text in the EotE Beta book under Brawl and Melee that referred to them as opposed checks (Lightsaber as a skill didn't really exist for PCs until the FaD Beta). I'm guessing that the designers and alpha-testers found said approach to be cumbersome and generally not worth the effort, for many of the reasons that 2P51 has already noted.

I think the main problem that GMs keep running into with duels is that the players rarely want to do anything more than simply make Lightsaber combat checks each round and treat the Nemesis in question as just another opponent to be wailed upon until demolished. The better solution would be to talk to the players that are to be involved in the duel, and see about getting their buy-in to have an encounter be a duel and not simply a series of combat checks, encouraging them to use skills other than Lightsaber, be it social checks to try and break the opponent's will to fight or things like Athletics/Coordination to deal with terrain hazards.

For instance, one of the most boring lightsaber battles in the films was Obi-Wan vs. Vader in ANH, as it was just a straight-forward hack-fest between an old man and a cripple on life support. In contrast, ESB's battle between Luke and Vader is often lauded because there was an emotional investment and Luke had legitimate beef with Vader (though maybe not quite as much as he'd thought going into the fight). RotJ's rematch between the two wasn't as good, but the emotional stakes were much higher now that Luke knew the truth and was teetering on the edge of being corrupted up until that final moment when he realized just how much like his father he was becoming.

And as flashy as the battle with Darth Maul on Naboo was in TPM, it lacked a lot of emotional weight until after Qui-Gon bought it, at which point the audience could root for Obi-Wan to avenge his fallen master, but it did change up the terrain after starting in a flat/boring hanger, going to a multi-level arena, and then finally a very enclosed space with a pit that was a threat to all of the combatants if they didn't watch their footing while moving around.

It looks like another "return of the living dead" thread
Every few weeks, somebody else starts a new thread about having opposed checks for Lightsaber fights to make it more cinematic.

Sorry to be a party pooper here, but you can find all the thoughts on this subject if you just take a look at the other multiple pages threads on the subject.

Here's a beatdown of what you will find out....

- Combat proficiency doesn't equal skill only, it's a combination of skills and talents... So to be good at evading attacks, you need lots of talents. Dodge, Defensive Stance, Defensive Training, Adversary, Parry and Reflect will vastly change the outcome of "who strikes first wins".

- Some people tried having opposed checks for "more cinematic duels" but after playtesting, they realised it only added length to their fights, not more fun nor cinematic play.

- You can have opposed checks if you want, there is a sidebar telling you how to shortcut a fight with only one opposed check to narrate how the fights ends.

Anyway, it's your table so you're free to do as you like.

I'm surprised you didn't get more comments on your thread since it was first started... maybe some people are tired of repeating themselves on the same subject over and over again.

You should really go look at the other threads about this stuff, plenty to find around if you take the time to look for them, you'll have a lot more input to judge how to advocate that rule.

Kudos