So a nagging question I've had in my head and wanted to see if everyone had the same opinion.

Reflect:

When hit with a ranged attack suffer 3 strain to reduce damage by 2 plus ranks in reflect.

Now does the reflect talents cover each individual hit triggered by autofire/linked or must you spend 3 strain for each additional hit?

Spend 3 strain for each additional hit.

It would only apply against a single hit, though I'd be perfectly fine with allowing it to be triggered once per hit (don't have the book on me at the moment but I think this may or may not be RAW but it is certainly RAI)

I've always understood it to only work once per hit. It's an out-of-turn incidental, so there's nothing stopping you from activating it on every hit (well, nothing but your Strain Threshold of course).

I've been toying with the idea of allowing Reflect/Parry to be activated multiple times per hit, so as to completely reduce the attack to 0 damage, if your strain threshold can keep up, of course.

The only obvious issue I can see is with the Supreme versions. With the reduced cost it would make people near untouchable, although they're not attacking so their opportunity to recover strain would be minimal...

Meh, that's why I said I'm toying with the idea .

Bind and Heal/Harm are not combat checks (Unleash and Move are) so they can be used to still cause damage without making an attack, Scathing Tirade is another option.

I have to admit that Supreme Reflect vs Auto-Fire would be an awesome move to pull, it seems to me like a great way for GM's to let certain PC's shine.

Im also definitely in the camp of requiring a new activation for each hit.

Actually there is an artifact Light saber that reduces the strain cost of reflect and parry by 1 strain...

To make it even more hilarious its made out of super hard wood.

Yeah, you have to pay for each hit. It would be very overpowered otherwise. It might not seem like that at first glance, but factor in the improved versions. You get hit and he gets a despair. This would mean you can reflect all hits for 3 strain (and maybe not get damaged at all). This makes supreme versions much more useful too, wich I think is good considering the price.

Also it makes no sense that it takes the same effort to parry 7 shots than just the one. Or that 2 shots from one enemy costs half compared to 2 enemies shooting one shot each.

Very true it's what I assumed. However I did need to make sure I wasn't the only one thinking that way. The roll is considered one attack but there are multiple hits but it can still be interpreted a certain way.

Yes, you rolled once. But the target is expected to soak each hit separately. And in that regard, it's clearly multiple bolts that need to be reflected individually.

My problem with Reflect in general, is the fact that it hurts you to use it. Where has that ever been a thing in Star Wars?

Playing through the Jedi Knight video games, you start out a Han Solo type character with blasters and stuff. But once you get a Lightsaber, I never touched a blaster again. I would just pump points into Saber Defense and reflect shots back at people. Every guy trying to kill me, was helping me kill his buddies. I could walk into a room full of Stormtroopers, and let them kill themselves without breaking a sweat. At no point did I mysteriously fall down dead b/c I'd Strained myself too much with all that reflecting.

Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan were standing outside the bridge blast door, surrounded by Destroyer droids rapid firing blasters. And they were reflecting those shots without a problem. The only reason they ran was b/c the droid shields prevented them from sending the bolts back and killing the droids. And there was too much fire for them to stop reflecting and attack. But they didn't dash to the end of the hallway and then promptly pass out.

Reflecting blaster bolts is pretty much the most iconic use of a Lightsaber. And we can barely do it a couple times before we kill ourselves, trying not to get killed by others. =)

Well strain can be recovered with advantage which is why you have to make a choice of what you want to do with it. I've been able to run skills without a problem long as I keep track of using my advantages, sometimes that extra auto fire on my pistol might be a better choice depending on the situation.

Yes, you rolled once. But the target is expected to soak each hit separately. And in that regard, it's clearly multiple bolts that need to be reflected individually.

My problem with Reflect in general, is the fact that it hurts you to use it. Where has that ever been a thing in Star Wars?

Playing through the Jedi Knight video games, you start out a Han Solo type character with blasters and stuff. But once you get a Lightsaber, I never touched a blaster again. I would just pump points into Saber Defense and reflect shots back at people. Every guy trying to kill me, was helping me kill his buddies. I could walk into a room full of Stormtroopers, and let them kill themselves without breaking a sweat. At no point did I mysteriously fall down dead b/c I'd Strained myself too much with all that reflecting.

Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan were standing outside the bridge blast door, surrounded by Destroyer droids rapid firing blasters. And they were reflecting those shots without a problem. The only reason they ran was b/c the droid shields prevented them from sending the bolts back and killing the droids. And there was too much fire for them to stop reflecting and attack. But they didn't dash to the end of the hallway and then promptly pass out.

Reflecting blaster bolts is pretty much the most iconic use of a Lightsaber. And we can barely do it a couple times before we kill ourselves, trying not to get killed by others. =)

-One the game needs to be balanced, making you utterly immune to blaster shots is ridiculous and it's reasonable that even Jedi would get tired after swinging their sabers around reflecting blaster shots.

-As for the prequels you're not them, that would be a character who trained from youth is lots and lots of experience spent and thus lots more strain.

-As for mechanics a single roll is not single shot as a round can span even an entire minute. Auto fire just reflects larger bursts during that time while non-auto fire still suggests you exchanging many shots (thus why you can kill a group of minions with one roll).

-Strain can be recovered, if you're never spending your advantage to do so then that's basically just the equivalent of running non stop till you kill over never stopping to take a breather.

1) Instead of making you utterly immune, you could just count Reflect as some measure of additional Ranged Defense or something. Especially since most of the times we see Jedi reflecting shots, it doesn't look like it takes too much exertion. Most of the time they're basically bunting the shots.

2) True, the characters in the prequels are generally more powerful than SWRPG PCs. However, Ep 1 Obi-Wan is still very much a Padawan. Which is not going to put him much above PCs, and yet he was seen reflecting plenty of shots without issue.

3) A single roll is not a single shot, but it is a single hit which applies damage. Auto fire applies damage several times, each of which has to be accounted for individually. And by that token, each use of Reflect may not be parrying a single shot, but it is only accounting for a single application of damage.

1) Instead of making you utterly immune, you could just count Reflect as some measure of additional Ranged Defense or something. Especially since most of the times we see Jedi reflecting shots, it doesn't look like it takes too much exertion. Most of the time they're basically bunting the shots.

2) True, the characters in the prequels are generally more powerful than SWRPG PCs. However, Ep 1 Obi-Wan is still very much a Padawan. Which is not going to put him much above PCs, and yet he was seen reflecting plenty of shots without issue.

3) A single roll is not a single shot, but it is a single hit which applies damage. Auto fire applies damage several times, each of which has to be accounted for individually. And by that token, each use of Reflect may not be parrying a single shot, but it is only accounting for a single application of damage.

1) Except that's what reflect does you get guaranteed failures per damage mitigated effectively and aren't always required to do it. The problem with extra defense is then pushing the dice pool far past anything every other class can achieve and having to deal with lots more generated threat as a result.

2) Padawan Obi-wan is exceptionally more powerful than a starting PC with 0 exp. First off he's at least 16 and that's being generous on the early year side, that means at least 10 years of training under master Jedi where as the PC's have 0 years of training and are basically just teaching themselves through trial and error.

3) Yes we agree there, the point was in terms of narrative aspect we can see a single application of parry showing similar things to the films where a flurry of blaster fire is reflected. Obviously they can't just sit there and reflect shots forever even at their level or they'd never run or be nervous around droids yet we repeatedly see they are, they just happen to be very good which one would expect someone with that many years of training under there belt to be.

Ultimately though game balance is key here. The current mechanic allows a player to decide once they're hit if they want to spend the strain to mitigate some damage, that itself is quite a bit of power unlike things such as dodge which require an expenditure of strain before you even know if you're hit but those in turn increase the difficulty to hit, so effectively you'd either be asking for a huge dice pool of setback which would generate a ton of threat that would cause issues or for a replica of the dodge talent at which point why not just call it dodge?

Ultimately strain is a good resource, it shows that quickly swinging around your light-saber would reasonably tire you out if you did it a ton constantly and the cost for doing so is very good in that you spend less recovery time after. To add to this strain is not even remotely difficult to recover, you get some back after EVERY encounter, you fully restore it after a rest, you can restore it with a medicine check or even simply by spending advantage on literally any roll you make. I could see this being more of a problem if you're GM was just handing it out constantly for every threat you rolled but that would be the GM's misdoing as threat should be spent on tons of different things from setback, to dropping your weapon, etc.

Meh, like I said before. It's just something that's always bugged me, conceptually. I get all the game balance and such, it just seems to go against the cinematic feel of a Lightsaber wielding Jedi. If you're a Stormtrooper, trying to line up your next shot. And you see a Jedi with their Lightsaber in hand, or you see some random X-Wing pilot standing there with a blaster in hand... who do you think you're more likely to hit? You've seen the Imperial Historical Archives, where Jedi keep killing people with their own blaster bolts. Do you want to be part of that statistic, or do you want to shoot the random pilot instead?

Should Jedi have " extra defense pushing the dice pool far past anything every other class can achieve"? For game balance, no they shouldn't. But thematically, when it comes to space wizards toting laser swords, of course they should. Except then there's less motivation to play EoE and AoR, unless you still went Exile / Emergent.

Meh, like I said before. It's just something that's always bugged me, conceptually. I get all the game balance and such, it just seems to go against the cinematic feel of a Lightsaber wielding Jedi. If you're a Stormtrooper, trying to line up your next shot. And you see a Jedi with their Lightsaber in hand, or you see some random X-Wing pilot standing there with a blaster in hand... who do you think you're more likely to hit? You've seen the Imperial Historical Archives, where Jedi keep killing people with their own blaster bolts. Do you want to be part of that statistic, or do you want to shoot the random pilot instead?

Should Jedi have " extra defense pushing the dice pool far past anything every other class can achieve"? For game balance, no they shouldn't. But thematically, when it comes to space wizards toting laser swords, of course they should. Except then there's less motivation to play EoE and AoR, unless you still went Exile / Emergent.

I get that but a few problems there one we did see jedi fail plenty to block deflector blasts in Order 66, the only time we really see them deflecting like crazy is against sh*tty incompetant droids that couldn't even pose a threat to a small armada of Gungun's. When faced with well trained troopers however suddenly that seemed to become much more difficult. Similarly I again must press that you're using the prequels as a measuring tool when players are, at best, Luke, who we don't see doing much if any of that kind of fancy deflection especially on the scale we saw in the prequels who where, again, super well trained jedi.

If you want to be clone war era Jedi that's fine, it's what we have knight level for just start your players off with extra exp and you have Jedi fully capable of deflecting a ton of laser shots with relative ease just like in the prequels. They have higher strain, more ranks of parry, and more methods to restore strain with. I'm just not seeing in the prequels where it ever insinuated that the Jedi could never get tired, sure we don't see them pass out while deflecting shots... but we don't see them pass out at all period it doesn't mean they have infinite stamina.

If I where to break it down into game mechanics it'd be something as simple as the enemy firing, the jedi taking a few strain and occasionally activating improved reflect, then attacking and using advantage (something not difficult for a knight level player vs a group of basic b1 battle droids to do) to recover strain. Walla, scenes from the prequels replicated within the system.

Keep it civil folks. The question has been answered well enough by now and for the sake of discussion reflect can mean anything to a Gm when it comes to how powerful you want it but narratively when a nice misuses your character it is probably a given that with a lightsabers out he/she is bouncing bolts away. A npc's success is getting through your defenses as a result of combat round since each action in game spans a few seconds.

@Tass

We are being civil. We're just having a conversation about game mechanics. =)

@Bunny

I think you made a good point, which illustrates why so many complain about how the system behaves. We're led to believe that Padawan Obi-Wan is basically how a new PC would feel. He's out on what appears to be his first mission with his Master. And yet he's still fully capable of performing amazing Force feats. But as you said, that's after presumably 10 years of training since childhood. He's still a Padawan, not even a Knight, after 10 years. So what does that say about our PCs, except that after 10 years of playing, maybe you'll be about as good as a Padawan.

@Tass

We are being civil. We're just having a conversation about game mechanics. =)

@Bunny

I think you made a good point, which illustrates why so many complain about how the system behaves. We're led to believe that Padawan Obi-Wan is basically how a new PC would feel. He's out on what appears to be his first mission with his Master. And yet he's still fully capable of performing amazing Force feats. But as you said, that's after presumably 10 years of training since childhood. He's still a Padawan, not even a Knight, after 10 years. So what does that say about our PCs, except that after 10 years of playing, maybe you'll be about as good as a Padawan.

Force sense power has been awesome in game it's cheap for investment it covers a whole blanket of attacks as well the final upgrade in that half of the tree is a huge way to upgrade your dice pool.

Force sense power has been awesome in game it's cheap for investment it covers a whole blanket of attacks as well the final upgrade in that half of the tree is a huge way to upgrade your dice pool.

DELETE

Force sense power has been awesome in game it's cheap for investment it covers a whole blanket of attacks as well the final upgrade in that half of the tree is a huge way to upgrade your dice pool.

Yep and it's great if you want to be more tanky as you only really need 1 force rating to make it effective

yeah i generated plenty of despair last game i played....wait till i put a few points into dodge.

Sense is fantastic for getting that Improved Parry/Reflect to trigger, especially with the 2 upgrades and combined with a high defence. Dodge/Side Step/ Defensive Stance are good, but the strain cost is prohibitive.

Sense is fantastic for getting that Improved Parry/Reflect to trigger, especially with the 2 upgrades and combined with a high defence. Dodge/Side Step/ Defensive Stance are good, but the strain cost is prohibitive.

As well they should be lest they be spammed all the time and a player feel they can safely be next to untouchable. The key is the vastly extend your durability in combat by transfering damage that would normally be in wounds and crits into recoverable strain.