If you want to give the minions a bit of an edge against powerful characters without rewriting rules, consider giving them Linked.

Isn't it easier to just give the badguys good equipment and use tactics than introduce extra rules? Just asking. I always consider if there's a way to do things better within the rules before going to houserule.

Hard to loot an ability.

Then you clearly haven't maxxed out your looting skill. I once looted a guy's sense of wonder and whimsy, and sold it to the local shopkeep for 5 silver pieces. True story.

If you want to give the minions a bit of an edge against powerful characters without rewriting rules, consider giving them Linked.

Isn't it easier to just give the badguys good equipment and use tactics than introduce extra rules? Just asking. I always consider if there's a way to do things better within the rules before going to houserule.

Hard to loot an ability.

Gene Lock is there for a reason...

Also, time constraints.

"Oh, you stop to take their loot? More adversaries spot you and prepare to attack. What do you do?"

"You stop to loot them? I mean that's fine but it's going to use up one of the 3 rounds you have to make it out of there unscathed."

"While you go to loot the man you knocked out instead of hiding his unconscious body, guards spot you and warn the base on the comms. The alarm is blaring, the blast doors begin to seal, all doors lock and you can hear off in the distance the clank clank clank of Stormtroopers."

"As you glare at the loot of the fallen enemies, their leader begins to make an escape. What do you do?"

Personally, I think it makes the game more challenging if you do limit damage to just one minion per combat check. It also makes things like blast, and auto-fire more powerful and desirable in my opinion. But to answer the question, according to RAW you deal damage to a "minion group" not an individual minion.

That said, you can't apply multiple crits to take out multiple minions.

Id have to disagree , while you might be erring on the side of realism, and also following the one attack per combat check mind set, the characters are supposed to be cinematic heroes. How many mooks does Jackie Chan or Jet Li take out in one round of fighting, Stallone, Arnie, or any other 80s action hero you care to mention. This is what we aim for and one of the first rules of an action film is that reality goes out the window, when you shoot someone they fly through the open window (Newtons Laws say the same thing should happen to you in the opposite direction, a bullet or laser blast does carry enough kinetic energy to do this).

While Newtons Law goes flying through the window, in comes the Law of the Inverse Ninja (or stormtrooper) which states that the effectiveness, intelligence and strength of an oppoent goes up or down in inverse proportion to the number of them there are. In the Arrow TV series when the arrow faces one or two League of Assassin members he will have a hard time, face 20 and each will have the intelligence and sense of fairness to attack one at a time and with the effectiveness of a four letter insect with the letter g and ending in nat.

It isn't even about realism, it just about making the game more challenging for the PCs. I will say it does cut down on the cinematic flavor that this game does a great job of portraying. I don't always do it, I've run both with RAW and with the "one minion per check", and the latter is much more dramatic and really forces the players to plan their tactics better. I'm also the kind of GM who will, say that if there is only half a minion group left in an encounter, they give up and run away. No sense in dragging the game down just to clean up a few minions.

It can drag down both ways though. If your minions have say 2 soak and 2 wounds, then a well-rolled hit could drop several of them. But if you make it so that it can't then all that means is that when a player deals 8 damage, half of it just poofs away. This doesn't really make it harder, it makes it longer. Taking more time can increase challenge, but only when there is a time constraint, why not simply throw more minions at them? Or better minions? Or full-blown individual NPCs? More challenge typically results from more challenging obstacles. Things that are harder to hit, hit harder or fight smarter. Challenge rarely results from consuming more time.

It is funny you mention the time thing, because I don't normally like combat to bog things down, even if I do restrict it to just 1 minion per check. Normally combat with my group doesn't go more than 3 or 4 rounds, even with the rule, and a Nemesis running around, which is the way I like it. I feel like if one combat encounter last for 5 or 6 rounds it starts to get taxing and loses the fun. If I do one of those, it is normally a big boss fight or end of a campaign type of deal.

And again, I don't always go with that. I'm fine to run the game either way. If my players feel like they are getting a less cinematic experience and want to go with the rules as written I am fine to run with that. If they want a bit more challenge then I think the limitation isn't that harsh but does add a bit more drama to those encounters.

Also for the other people who made suggestions on adding more challenge to combat, I will look into those and thank you for the suggesting them.

The way I play it (which is RAW, I believe) is that for every time your damage surpasses the minion groups wounds, one minion dies.
If the wounds are surpassed multiple times in one damage roll, more than one minion dies.

Or rather, one minion "goes down", since it's not always fatal, but they're definately out of the combat.

In the EotE beginner adventure, I had a big-game hunter that used one of those rather massive (but slow firing) sniper slug rifles. (the ones who actually count ammo)
They ran into two Stormtrooper patrols, and got nearly annihilated.
They managed to slip away and run into an alley, where they set up an ambush.

First combat roll for the big-game hunter did enough damage to take out three minions.

The way I played it out for the players was that four stormtroopers ran into the alley, and the big-game hunter took his shot.
The shot went through two of the stormtroopers and into the third one.
The fourth one (sensibly enough) ran back into cover.

The players loved it and even though it was a massive win against stormtroopers, the whooping they had gotten from them before that was enough to make them realize that it was pure luck and they turned tail and ran when that stormtrooper ran for cover.

Now, if he had been using a regular blaster and gotten that result, I'd have played it something like this:

How does my melee guy stab someone so well that a stormie at medium range dies from it?

I'm being facetious. I'm curious about minions and range, and how to map it. I get that each threshold kills another minion, but unless minions are just nebulous groups in a range band, I don't get it.

On 4/4/2020 at 9:03 AM, kapmando said:

How does my melee guy stab someone so well that a stormie at medium range dies from it?

I'm being facetious. I'm curious about minions and range, and how to map it. I get that each threshold kills another minion, but unless minions are just nebulous groups in a range band, I don't get it.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but I think you're asking if minions can be spread out across the map.

Technically, yeah they can be. As a general rule though, they should be fairly close together. In the above example, the GM probably shouldn't group them, especially as they would have different difficulties for the combat check, and thus should be ineligible to group, in my opinion. Take it a step further: You've got stormtroopers using vibroknives for whatever reason. One is engaged with you, 5 are back at Extreme range. The GM shouldn't group them together, as those 5 can't contribute. Rather than a pool of YYYGG, the attacker should have a pool of GGG.

As a general rule of thumb, at the farthest, I have each minion engaged with another minion in the group. This doesn't necessarily mean that they are all engaged with the others, but it keeps them pretty close. This would be a "skirmishing line" of sorts where they are trying to minimize grenade effectiveness (I know this doesn't correspond to the real world well, this is only in the context of the game). Most of the time, however, I just assume that they are all within engaged range of each other.

On 4/4/2020 at 3:03 PM, kapmando said:

How does my melee guy stab someone so well that a stormie at medium range dies from it?

I'm being facetious. I'm curious about minions and range, and how to map it. I get that each threshold kills another minion, but unless minions are just nebulous groups in a range band, I don't get it.

Minions don't die from damage. They are "defeated", which generally does mean murderised, but in this case can just mean the Stormtrooper becomes completely demoralised by seeing his buddy eviscerated and surrenders or panicks and runs away, removing him from combat.

On 4/7/2020 at 11:45 AM, P-47 Thunderbolt said:

I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but I think you're asking if minions can be spread out across the map.

Technically, yeah they can be. As a general rule though, they should be fairly close together. In the above example, the GM probably shouldn't group them, especially as they would have different difficulties for the combat check, and thus should be ineligible to group, in my opinion. Take it a step further: You've got stormtroopers using vibroknives for whatever reason. One is engaged with you, 5 are back at Extreme range. The GM shouldn't group them together, as those 5 can't contribute. Rather than a pool of YYYGG, the attacker should have a pool of GGG.

As a general rule of thumb, at the farthest, I have each minion engaged with another minion in the group. This doesn't necessarily mean that they are all engaged with the others, but it keeps them pretty close. This would be a "skirmishing line" of sorts where they are trying to minimize grenade effectiveness (I know this doesn't correspond to the real world well, this is only in the context of the game). Most of the time, however, I just assume that they are all within engaged range of each other.

That makes sense. I do like the idea of a skirmishing line.