Hello everyone relatively new GM here and I’ve run 7 sessions with the Star Wars FFG system, mainly using Edge of the Empire and Force and Destiny, and I’ve been having some issues with the game so far. So I wanted to reach out to the community and ask if other people are dealing with the same problems.

My main issue so far has been trying to balance combat. The game gives no rules or guidelines as for what the party is suppose to fight against, and I’ve been trying my hardest to make my combat encounters interesting without just giving every enemy the “Adversary” talent. But so far the party has steamrolled everything I’ve thrown at them so far. Groups of minions, rivals, nemeses and of course combining them to have larger encounters of groups with a main bad guy. So I’ll just go ahead and describe the party composition so you know exactly what I’m working with.

My party consists of 4 players, 1 guy that so far has focused on combat talents and dumped all his exp in lightsaber skills (using the ancient saber) and makashi duelist talents, a bounty hunter gadgeteer that’s mostly about shooting people, a pilot with some skills in shooting and skullduggery, and a jedi Guardian that has been mostly focusing on knowledge, and medical skills, and some force powers. The party isn’t all about combat, the Jedi Guardian is very weak in combat, and usually opts out of attacking to do something else, and the three other characters has spread out their skills to some extend.

Even with a party where not everyone is completely focused on combat they have been steamrolling everything from session 1 and the problem is only becoming more and more apparent as we play, and at this point I feel like I could take anything from the core books and throw it at them in almost any quantity without it being a problem.

My big question is then. How do I fix this? How do I make combat more of a struggle without just arbitrarily making the enemies harder? I’ve also contemplated making my own enemies but again, I haven’t really found a guideline anywhere on how to do that so it would take up a lot of planning time and effort to come up with something that works. ( If that even is possible )

Bonus question: Is the disruptor rifle just broke or am I missing something? Don’t get me wrong I have nothing against my player characters being strong, but I feel like Darth Vader could show up and the bounty hunter gadgeteer would vaporize him in 1 shot with the modded disruptor rifle

TL;DR Combat is too easy, what do?

I assume you're properly applying Soak and defense rules?

Add one Setback die per defence, and subtract damage from Soak (though lightsabers ignore soak).

Also, on a hit, you take the damage of the weapon and add every uncancelled success dice (that is, don't count the successes that are cancelled by failures).

I assume you're doing all these things, just wanted to make sure since there are a couple mechanics at play here. Also, pay attention to when your enemies apply crits to the PCs.

If you are using adversaries that can be removed from the situation by a single player's round, then use more adversaries than players.

4 PC initiative slots vs. 6+ adversary initiative slots. Even if all 4 players go first, you'll still have some enemies.

Use triumphs on your checks and despairs on your players' checks to call in reinforcements, like having another minion squad show up.

Add more minions to each group of minions. 1 stormtrooper is generally a pushover. 6 in one group are scary, as they throw YYYGG with blaster rifle without any other modifications. Even after losing 1 or 2, they still throw at least YYY.

Don't be afraid to alter the classification (minion/rival/nemesis) as necessary to suit your story. If the party is fighting a bunch of stormtroopers, and you want a tense scene involving an E-Web repeating blaster, make the guy carrying the E-Web a nemesis (even if he's a regular stormtrooper) and assign him some regular stormtrooper minions to form a squad (AOR GM Kit contains squad rules). This allows the E-Web user to last a little while longer than if they were just a minion or lone rival.

Have your combats take place in a "rolling" environment. Don't let the group just stand, aim and shoot. Make the combat part of something larger, like, "You have 15 minutes to get to the landing platform before the mcguffin is loaded on the transport and that transport flies away." Have each combat round take 1 minute, or 30 seconds, or make it variable. That way, the goal isn't to kill all the bad guys, it's to get the mcguffin and escape before the bad guys overwhelm and annihilate the group. Remember, you are allowed to make combat encounters part of the larger narrative. You don't have to start an encounter with X bad guys, and end with 0 bad guys. Sometimes bad guys (like stormtroopers) should seem endless, with more showing up every couple of rounds or so. You don't have to run this like a dungeon crawl, where while the party fights monsters in room A, monsters in room B twiddle their thumbs until the party enters their room.

Sometimes, add in something extremely dangerous, with as much menace as you can muster, that forces the players to move beyond the, "Hit it until it stops moving," mentality.

As for disruptors, they are powerful. If you're worried about your BBEG getting one-shot by one, that's normal. Ranks of adversary can limit how many advantage the disruptor gets, limiting how many times you can stack up on a critical injury roll. Ranged defense can add more failures/threats. Ranks of the Durable talent on your BBEG will limit how debilitating each critical injury roll will be. Imperial Valor (an ability on most imperial officers) can be carbon copied onto most BBEG's to represent many different narrative reasons for why a minion got in the way and took the shot for them. Also, squad rules can help out in a similar manner.

I assume you're properly applying Soak and defense rules?

Add one Setback die per defence, and subtract damage from Soak (though lightsabers ignore soak).

Also, on a hit, you take the damage of the weapon and add every uncancelled success dice (that is, don't count the successes that are cancelled by failures).

I assume you're doing all these things, just wanted to make sure since there are a couple mechanics at play here. Also, pay attention to when your enemies apply crits to the PCs.

Yep, I've been doing all of those things!

If you are using adversaries that can be removed from the situation by a single player's round, then use more adversaries than players.

4 PC initiative slots vs. 6+ adversary initiative slots. Even if all 4 players go first, you'll still have some enemies.

Use triumphs on your checks and despairs on your players' checks to call in reinforcements, like having another minion squad show up.

Add more minions to each group of minions. 1 stormtrooper is generally a pushover. 6 in one group are scary, as they throw YYYGG with blaster rifle without any other modifications. Even after losing 1 or 2, they still throw at least YYY.

Don't be afraid to alter the classification (minion/rival/nemesis) as necessary to suit your story. If the party is fighting a bunch of stormtroopers, and you want a tense scene involving an E-Web repeating blaster, make the guy carrying the E-Web a nemesis (even if he's a regular stormtrooper) and assign him some regular stormtrooper minions to form a squad (AOR GM Kit contains squad rules). This allows the E-Web user to last a little while longer than if they were just a minion or lone rival.

Have your combats take place in a "rolling" environment. Don't let the group just stand, aim and shoot. Make the combat part of something larger, like, "You have 15 minutes to get to the landing platform before the mcguffin is loaded on the transport and that transport flies away." Have each combat round take 1 minute, or 30 seconds, or make it variable. That way, the goal isn't to kill all the bad guys, it's to get the mcguffin and escape before the bad guys overwhelm and annihilate the group. Remember, you are allowed to make combat encounters part of the larger narrative. You don't have to start an encounter with X bad guys, and end with 0 bad guys. Sometimes bad guys (like stormtroopers) should seem endless, with more showing up every couple of rounds or so. You don't have to run this like a dungeon crawl, where while the party fights monsters in room A, monsters in room B twiddle their thumbs until the party enters their room.

Sometimes, add in something extremely dangerous, with as much menace as you can muster, that forces the players to move beyond the, "Hit it until it stops moving," mentality.

As for disruptors, they are powerful. If you're worried about your BBEG getting one-shot by one, that's normal. Ranks of adversary can limit how many advantage the disruptor gets, limiting how many times you can stack up on a critical injury roll. Ranged defense can add more failures/threats. Ranks of the Durable talent on your BBEG will limit how debilitating each critical injury roll will be. Imperial Valor (an ability on most imperial officers) can be carbon copied onto most BBEG's to represent many different narrative reasons for why a minion got in the way and took the shot for them. Also, squad rules can help out in a similar manner.

Thanks for the ideas! This is basically the kind of advice I've been looking for and I'll keep them in mind for when I plan the next session. It's going to be nice having some tricks up my sleeve for when a fight breaks out next time!

Minion groups are terrifying if used properly, first off consider picking up the Age of Rebellion GM Screen, the book it comes with has not just an adventure but more importantly "Squad rules" which basically allow your big bad guy to throw minions he/she is commanding in front of themself to absorb hits (basically the imperial valor talent some NPC's have but far more expansive).

Consider situational modifiers, are they in a crowd and want to avoid hitting civilians? Throw 1-2 setback, maybe they get ambushed in an environment that's dark, has a sand storm, etc and the enemies just so happen to have specialized gear to overcome such conditions giving more setback to the players. Use advantages on minions rolls to give setback or boost their other allies attacks with boost dice or even more scary calling in more reinforcements perhaps even shoot the blaster out of a players hand and have it skitter across the ground. Use those dark side points to upgrade attacks of players who are particullarly scary in combat. Use the story ie give the enemies a hostage the players know for leverage or any other kind of alternate goal such as worrying about pursuing an enemy, disarming a bomb, etc so they can't all just focus fire. Also sometimes consider splitting up the party, maybe they have two things that need to be done at the same time, don't force them to split but if they don't they know something bad will happen do to failing the other goal this should put them in more manageable portions.
These are just some of the many many things you can do with the system, the most important thing is pay attention to what symbols their rolling, threat and despair can be spent in a ton of creative ways not just on running out of ammo or increasing the difficulty of checks but also getting separated by a closing blast door, dropping a weapon, hitting an ally, etc.

start with less than the party and slowly ramp up the difficulty until you find what your party can handle. Then you can tweak up or down to fit the scenario.

I had a similar problem within my group. Almost everyone was strong in combat, and had just made their lightsabers. After awhile of struggling to give them a decent fight that they couldn't just lightsaber in half. I came up with the idea of using "possessed" teenagers as enemies. Their goals where even to bring the missing children back home. Once they figured out what was going on they were scrambling to put away their lightsabers and pull out weak stun blasters. A well thrown stun grenade hit the main bad guy (who they didn't need alive) and a child enemy next to him. After that they thought it would be easier to continue to stun him too.

They went from axing and lightsabering to crit heaven to bringing everyone out of the fight alive. The extra xp for doing so might just have changed their minds about about their "no witnesses" policy.

I've been doubling or tripling the health of the enemies.

I've been doubling or tripling the health of the enemies.

That sounds like something is off. would probably help if we knew what kind of characters you have and what kind of encounters you are putting together... You shouldn't need to up their wounds.... Also what are you expecting out of combat? As the system is designed to allow you to handle it very very quickly.