Hey Everyone,

simple question about combat...

does a characters actual combat skill (brawl, melee) not play into his ability to defend?

Example being, if I have a Melee of 5 and my opponent is hitting me with a melee of 1, my defence is still only based on what armour I am wearing and if I am in cover?

seems a little silly that I am 5x better at melee then my opponent, yet I can't defend against him unless I am in armour. same applies with brawl

Thanks for any assistance that can be provided

Fist

As another way of looking at this question... other skill rolls are contested between the player and the GM/npc's, while combat skill rolls aren't. Why does my perception help me to spot someone who is using a skill to hide, but my brawl doesn't help me to defend against getting punched?

Mostly looking to see if my group and I are totally missing something as far as combat goes.

Thanks for any help.

This is covered by your soak value which is your brawn value plus any armour you're wearing.

It's also covered by the parry and reflect talents available in the talent trees

Talents are what you're looking for for your personal defense, things like Dodge, Side Step, etc. Or in the case of Force and Destiny/Force Sensitives in general the Sense power.

As others have said, the reasoning is two-fold. Your talents (which also represent your training and dedication to the arts martial) covers your defensive abilities, You can get better at swinging a sword or throwing a punch, but a marauder who had most of their tree filled out actually spent the time truly learning the art of martial combat and how best to defend as well as attack.

The second reason is more metagame. Opposed combat checks can really slow down combat and turn a quick 10-minute fight into a 2-hour drag reminiscent of 4e D&D.

Mostly, the reason that a PC's ranks in a given combat skill don't have a direct influence on their ability to defend themselves is what kaosoe posted, with the second one being the primary reason as combats in this system are meant to be fairly quick and not devour most of a group's play time.

That being said, there is the Guarded Stance maneuver for melee combat, which lets you increase your melee defense by 1, but at the trade-off of adding a setback die to your own checks. For a PC with a high enough skill rank in a melee combat skill, that setback die to their own attacks can be trivial, allowing them to use their superior combat prowess to protect themselves a bit.

Remember, if your skill in combat could factor into your defense, the same could be said for your opponents. Which is another reason why it's not there. It's another layer of math to the system that is, by design, meant to be crunch-light, and thematic. With your system, everything would be harder to hit, by orders of magnitude probably (that might be hyperbole, since I'm theorizing about a non-existent mechanic, but harder none the less!).

As others have said, there are plenty of ways for you to show that you are a harder target to hit, by getting various talents that would make you a harder target to hit. That would be the reflection of your "skill as a warrior" making you harder to hit.

perfect, thanks for the replies everyone.

My gaming group and I are relatively new to this system (obviously) and just wanted to make sure we weren't missing something.

We figured the game designers incorporated the "crunchy" aspect of adding specific talents that players have to learn to make it appealing to more of the Pathfinder/D&D crowd, while trying to speed combat up by not having opposed rolling. we understand the intent was to make it less crunchy, but the talents really do slow things back down...for us anyways. replacing opposed combat checks with talent checks hasn't really sped things up for us.

Working on modifying the system to be a little less Pathfinder 'ish and a little more storytelling 'ish. Narrative combat has always been more appealing as rpg fights for us have been way more intense and thematic when they are only 10mins of gaming time long.

Thanks for all the responses! really clears things up and confirms our noob reading of the rules.

Given that back in the EotE Beta, the melee combat skills had in their description text to indicate they were at one point opposed checks, I'm guessing that there was intent in the early playtesting (pre-Beta release) to have the difficulty for melee combat be determined by the other guy's skill, but it was determined to bog things down too much, especially as most melee weapons are sub-par in terms of damage output when compared to blasters. Lightsabers are the big exception, but for EotE at least they're supposed to incredibly rare, and an EotE group finding one of those is akin to a normal person winning the lottery.

perfect, thanks for the replies everyone.

My gaming group and I are relatively new to this system (obviously) and just wanted to make sure we weren't missing something.

We figured the game designers incorporated the "crunchy" aspect of adding specific talents that players have to learn to make it appealing to more of the Pathfinder/D&D crowd, while trying to speed combat up by not having opposed rolling. we understand the intent was to make it less crunchy, but the talents really do slow things back down...for us anyways. replacing opposed combat checks with talent checks hasn't really sped things up for us.

Working on modifying the system to be a little less Pathfinder 'ish and a little more storytelling 'ish. Narrative combat has always been more appealing as rpg fights for us have been way more intense and thematic when they are only 10mins of gaming time long.

Thanks for all the responses! really clears things up and confirms our noob reading of the rules.

How is the system slowing down your game? Most of the talents, at least at first, do things like "Provide a boost die on combat checks" or "remove setback die from combat checks" etc etc. That's a pretty quick thing there, as you're just adding/subtracting a dice or 2 from the pool you were going to be rolling anyway.

I'm curious how you feel the system is "pathfinderish" when to me, it's so far removed from pathfinder that it might be..well, in a galaxy far far away by comparison.

Can you give examples of how you feel the system is slowing down your playstyle? Because I really am curious, given my own experience with the system being very quick, clean, and to the point. It might be that you guys are simply misreading the rules? And making the checks more time consuming than they should be.

Hey KungFuFerret,

I appreciate the questions, I should have explained my comparison to pathfinder and why I feel the talents part of combat slows things down.

For us, the talents slow things down as they are based on a characters careers and then specialization trees, which you can easily have multiple of. So you need to memorize/clearly write out your talents, which in our group of 5 (including GM) we have say 15-20 different talents that can be in play at any one time. So the GM has to be familiar with all of these on some level. The individual talents require a series of dice boosts, decreases or changes depending on which talents and how many will be used. That, combined with the actual combat maneuvers, special abilities, environmental effects and the normal stages of combat etc... all add up to a good chunk of time to work out exactly what type of dice and how many need to be rolled and then calculate the results. For us this feels very Pathfinder'ish,. I can't argue with how you feel this system is far removed from pathfinder, just my groups impressions of it.

very possible we are misreading the rules, lol no doubt about that. The advantage/disadvantage part of the game I will certainly agree is not Pathfinder 'ish.

so now that our group has determined we aren't happy with some of the systems that are in place, we are working on ways to make it more our play style. The biggest issue was with combat (as discussed above) and how we don't feel your "skill" in combat is reflected in the actual combat system. With the additional purchasing of talents (very specific aspects of combat skill) players can now defend themselves (as discussed above), which we just found odd that defence wasn't part of the combat skill, so how do we make changes to the system... good question lol. still working on that.

thanks again for the input, all comments/criticism are appreciated.

Hey KungFuFerret,

I appreciate the questions, I should have explained my comparison to pathfinder and why I feel the talents part of combat slows things down.

For us, the talents slow things down as they are based on a characters careers and then specialization trees, which you can easily have multiple of. So you need to memorize/clearly write out your talents, which in our group of 5 (including GM) we have say 15-20 different talents that can be in play at any one time. So the GM has to be familiar with all of these on some level. The individual talents require a series of dice boosts, decreases or changes depending on which talents and how many will be used. That, combined with the actual combat maneuvers, special abilities, environmental effects and the normal stages of combat etc... all add up to a good chunk of time to work out exactly what type of dice and how many need to be rolled and then calculate the results. For us this feels very Pathfinder'ish,. I can't argue with how you feel this system is far removed from pathfinder, just my groups impressions of it.

very possible we are misreading the rules, lol no doubt about that. The advantage/disadvantage part of the game I will certainly agree is not Pathfinder 'ish.

so now that our group has determined we aren't happy with some of the systems that are in place, we are working on ways to make it more our play style. The biggest issue was with combat (as discussed above) and how we don't feel your "skill" in combat is reflected in the actual combat system. With the additional purchasing of talents (very specific aspects of combat skill) players can now defend themselves (as discussed above), which we just found odd that defence wasn't part of the combat skill, so how do we make changes to the system... good question lol. still working on that.

thanks again for the input, all comments/criticism are appreciated.

Ok so, couple options since the first issue you mentioned was basically "the multitude of talents bogs things down, keeping track of them".

1. I'm not sure how this is any different from the multiple stat modifiers you have to track in D20 systems, some being situational, others being "always on". But most of those games have a sheet creator that allows you to pre-build those modifiers for easy reference. Well good news! So does this system!

There is a person online, who has made a sheet creator for FFG Star Wars, and the format pre-builds all that stuff for you. First thing, if you gain automatic boost die, or negate setback die for various skills, it will print that on the sheet, right next to your skill name and dicepool. It's very handy. Also, regarding talents, the sheets printed, only list the talents you've actually purchased, so you don't have to worry about skimming the entire tree.

If you aren't using that to make your sheets, I highly recommend it. I forget his name, but I'm sure someone else on this thread will be able to provide the link.

2. I wouldn't worry about being the GM and being familiar with all of your players Talents. That's their job. Maybe have a basic overview sure "This player has a lot of talents that help with social stuff" "this guy is pure combat monkey with Ranged Light" etc. But knowing the detailed writeup for each one? Pssh, nah, Don't even sweat that. Trust me, the players will remind you if they have a talent that applies.

As to the various modifiers, it basically boils down to Setback die, or Boost die. If you are including situational modifiers that are making the action harder, it's a setback die. No matter what you call it. "Unbearable cold, sapping your strength" "A thick, choking cloud of smoke, making it hard to see" "strobeing lights on the dance floor, making the crowd seem to shift in and out of place disjointedly" all of that....is a setback die. The way you describe it is simply flavor text. Don't worry too much about the fine details of that stuff. Just assign a basic difficulty of purple dice for how hard you think it should be, and then add pro/con effects in the form of blue/black dice. GM Chris had a good bit of advice on a podcast a while ago "If you think the check should be really hard, don't make it a 3 purple dice check, make it a 2 purple dice check, with 1-2 setback dice." For one thing, the player might be able to offset those setback dice, due to those delicious talents (and seriously, if you know players will negate your setback dice, add them anyway. My players are always VERY happy to be able to go "Nope, those 2 setback die are negated, I've got *insert talent* !!" Let them see the tangible benefit of those talents right there.

I think a lot of your issues, might simply be due to being new to the system. I'm still new to it myself, as a player and GM, but for the most part I just wing it when it comes to encounters and dice pools. If you have specific mechanics that keep coming up, like the sniper guy keeps using aim on his shots for boosts, then sure, read up on those and become super familiar with those, but for th emost part, to me anyway, it sort of builds itself as you go.

"You want to do this reasonably doable action? And there aren't really any outside modifiers to make this harder? Eh, 2 purple" "You want to do the same action, and it's night time, and there is rain? And you have howler monkies dancing around your head, screaming at you?" Well, the action itself is still the same, but now you have outside factors. "2 purple, 2 black for all those influences".

I honestly think you will find the system pretty flexible with more time.

There is a person online, who has made a sheet creator for FFG Star Wars, and the format pre-builds all that stuff for you. First thing, if you gain automatic boost die, or negate setback die for various skills, it will print that on the sheet, right next to your skill name and dicepool. It's very handy. Also, regarding talents, the sheets printed, only list the talents you've actually purchased, so you don't have to worry about skimming the entire tree.

OggDude of OggDude's Character Generator . I was going to suggest it to fist if no one else did. It is truly exceptional, especially in the field of "fan-made character generators." The attention to detail and continued support of that thing is just unparalleled.

Thanks again Ferret for taking the time to give such a thorough response.

1. I completely agree that this game reminds me of D20 games (Pathfinder, D&D etc...), our gaming group has been rpg'ing together for the past 25+ years and we have tried our fair share of game systems. Generally the D20 games we have enjoyed the least. whereas the Storytelling type games we enjoy the most. We are probably just old crusty bastards who are set in our ways lol.

I will definitely download the sheets you suggested, and thanks Flasbackjon for the links!

2. I and the other GM's in our group have definitely always found that it is important in games like this where learning talents is such an important part of the game that the GM should be familiar with the talents each player has so that their characters abilities can be fully utilized.

Agreed about being new to the system, lots of winging it going on here!

We have always adopted the principle that storytelling trumps dice rolling and numbers on a piece of paper, so we will continue on with that with this system.

I suppose the original intention of this post was to confirm that we were doing combat correctly (combat skills not playing a direct roll in the defence rolls) and I certainly appreciate all the clarification we have gotten.

I've found that a simple flash card goes a long way to keeping up with combat bonuses. Also FFG makes card decks for the various classes that some people find helpful. Though I prefer to save money and just make a flash card that has all relevant combat details on it.

However I do agree that there are a lot of mechanics and this system kinda sorta assumes that the players will assume some of the burden by being mindful of their own abilities so that they can remind the GM. It's both the player and the GM's responsibility to make full use of a characters skills and talents, but because the GM has to keep the bigger picture in mind the player should keep the smaller one in mind and be more mindful of what he can do and remind the GM. As a GM I keep copies of player sheets so that when planning adventures I can double check sheets but during play I leave it to the players to speak up.

This leads to the occasional moment where a player forgets that he had an abilitiy that solved a situation but as time goes on and people become more familiar with what their character can do I've found they forget less and less.

I've found that a simple flash card goes a long way to keeping up with combat bonuses. Also FFG makes card decks for the various classes that some people find helpful. Though I prefer to save money and just make a flash card that has all relevant combat details on it.

However I do agree that there are a lot of mechanics and this system kinda sorta assumes that the players will assume some of the burden by being mindful of their own abilities so that they can remind the GM. It's both the player and the GM's responsibility to make full use of a characters skills and talents, but because the GM has to keep the bigger picture in mind the player should keep the smaller one in mind and be more mindful of what he can do and remind the GM. As a GM I keep copies of player sheets so that when planning adventures I can double check sheets but during play I leave it to the players to speak up.

This leads to the occasional moment where a player forgets that he had an abilitiy that solved a situation but as time goes on and people become more familiar with what their character can do I've found they forget less and less.

Yeah, I technically have sheets of my 2 players as well, but honestly, I never really reference them. My 2 guys at least are good about tracking their own stuff for the most part, so it's really just a fallback in case of some glaring oversight.

there are a couple of tips i can give for speeding up combat:

1. Pre-roll all NPC initiative checks that your planing to use in a session, your Players need to become comfortable with this but its worth it.
2. Encourage your players to be pre-building dice pools when they are not the Active player having a turn. Then when it is their turn they can declare what they intend to do, you can have a quick glance at the dice pool to make any minor adjustments, then they roll. It should be 15-20 seconds of time, not 2-3 minutes.
3. Have a nominated player be the Initiative tracker.
4. If your playing a planed encounter with interesting environments have a little list of ways to spend A/T/T/D
5. NPC's don't usually fight to the death, in fact that should be so uncommon as to be surprising and interesting to the players when it does. so that can cut a round or 2 off the end of a combat easily.

Its not going to change the world for you in structured play, but combined with everyone getting used to reading the dice it will make a difference. Time will definitely help too, as everyone gets comfortable with the values of each A/T/T/D and the things they use them for.

As to the Combat skill not having anything to do with how hard you are to hit i call baloney. One of the major uses of Advantage is to pass a setback dice to the NPC in front of them, effectively making the character harder to hit. Then with Triumph your able to Upgrade the attack coming at you from your enemy. This is again making you much harder to hit, and adding the chance of them rolling a Despair. So your skill doesn't directly make you a harder target, its your application of your skill that makes you harder. You have to decide to be harder to hit, instead of putting all your energy into dealing damage.

Then add all the strain using talents; Dodge, Sidestep, and Defensive Stance. they are the specialist "training" you need to not be hit. and finally you have the Guarded Stance maneuver, which anyone can do, to increase your defence by 1 (and suffer 1 setback on all of your own combat checks)

^{Great Ideas Richard., will definitely make use of some of the 1-5 suggestions you made, thanks!}

^{as far as the baloney goes... the passing of setback dice through advantage is something that we had explored but ran into a few issues... first it requires the PC to have the imitative, and second if facing more then 1 npc it requires several points of advantage to be dispersed. Triumph points... well they have been so rare, as they should be, that we can't really consider them as a consist ant way to make a player better at defending.}

^{Adding in the numerous talents, maneuvers, armour and environmental effects definitely makes defending an easier thing, no argument from me there}

Actually, with the spending of advantage, one option that Richard left out was that you can spend 3 advantage (or Triumph) to increase your melee defense or ranged defense by 1 until the start of your next turn, though only once per roll. While it can be awfully tempting to spend those advantage to trigger a critical injury, the option is there to give a round-long boost to one of your defenses instead.

And since it's an increase , it'd stack with any existing melee or ranged defense you've got. So if you're huddled behind really good cover (ranged defense 2), you could spend 3 advantage for a +1 to your ranged defense, giving you a final ranged defense of 3 until the start of your next turn.

^{Great Ideas Richard., will definitely make use of some of the 1-5 suggestions you made, thanks!}

^{as far as the baloney goes... the passing of setback dice through advantage is something that we had explored but ran into a few issues... first it requires the PC to have the imitative, and second if facing more then 1 npc it requires several points of advantage to be dispersed. Triumph points... well they have been so rare, as they should be, that we can't really consider them as a consist ant way to make a player better at defending.}

^{Adding in the numerous talents, maneuvers, armour and environmental effects definitely makes defending an easier thing, no argument from me there}

Ok so, you mention initiative, so one thing to clarify that I think you guys might be missing. The passing of boost/setback dice isn't initiative dependent really, it's usually worded as "next ally to act" or "next enemy to act". So there is nothing stopping the guy at the end of the initiative track to pass it up the line to the first NPC to go in round 2. Also, since initiative isn't character specific, everyone doesn't have to go on their result. Usually, and others can confirm/deny this. But usually, only one of your party needs to have a kick sass initiative skill in order for your party to go first. Anyone can go at any initiative mark, as long as it's ally. So even if the dexterous monkey is the one that rolled the #1 slot in initiative this encounter, if someone else in the party thinks up a cool thing to do, as long as the party is on board, they can totally go first. So you can have the player most likely to kick butt, take the slot of the player most likely to get first go, and he can dump tons of modifiers down the initiative chain to effect the outcome of the fight. Or heck, even if he's last in line, it will effect the next round. So the player doesn't have to have initiative as you put it. Or at least not the specific person. The wording for these things usually implies "beginning of next turn" or "next PC action" or "next NPC action", which is very flexible.

The flexible initiative system is something a lot of people either miss or undervalue. It allows for a much more complex plan by the party, with everyone doing the thing they are good at when it matters. It actually creates the opportunity for characters who are terrible at combat to have a massive impact on the outcome, a high Willpower, high Presence character can become the Initiative guy, getting that top spot for the party to use no matter the situation.

Interesting stuff with the play on initiative.

The setback dice would only apply against the person who has put them on the bad guy though right? ( signifying my character shot gunned 4 red bulls and due to being all hopped up on caffeine he is extra hard for the bad guy to hit this combat?). That was our understanding, that the setback dice doesn't work for everyone who would be attacking the bad guy, just the one who actually applied it.

Or do setback dice apply for all people attacking the target? I guess this question doesn't just have o be about combat, same would apply for all skill checks that might have multiple involved people

Interesting stuff with the play on initiative.

The setback dice would only apply against the person who has put them on the bad guy though right? ( signifying my character shot gunned 4 red bulls and due to being all hopped up on caffeine he is extra hard for the bad guy to hit this combat?). That was our understanding, that the setback dice doesn't work for everyone who would be attacking the bad guy, just the one who actually applied it.

Or do setback dice apply for all people attacking the target? I guess this question doesn't just have o be about combat, same would apply for all skill checks that might have multiple involved people

Depends, but usually giving the bad guy a set back dice due to spent advantage implies you did something that effected them rather than something your character has done to give himself the advantage. So no, the set back dice would apply to any character that enemy tries to attack (unless the set back dice is from raising your defense for the round). For instance, if the sniper takes a shot and fails but gets 3 advantage they could chose to give the next player a blue dice (perhaps the enemy dodged it but is now off balance making it easier to line up a shot or the shot hit a circuit breaker and for a brief moment all the enemies flinch away from the resulting sparks) and for the targeted enemy to gain a set back dice (since they are being fired at, maybe they are keeping their head down and can't aim as well or perhaps were unnerved by super heated plasma flying two inches from their face. Doesn't really matter who they aim at, they are still scared).

Narratively it is up to you and the players to reason out what happened, but the set back/ boost dice get added regardless of who the recipient targets.

Good reasoning on that, Headbutt.

This thread has been great for giving my group and I some ideas on how others r working combat.

Thanks again

Fist