Hello everyone, we recently had an issue come up in one of our sessions where i wanted to disable a parked speeder bike. Our GM had me roll a mechanics check which was fine but he set the difficulty at 3, because i am not a mechanic, with a setback because it was in combat. Now i felt like this was really high difficulty as i am not a mechanic and real life but i know i could disable a motorcycle very quickly if i walked up to one simply by pulling electrical wires or a fuel line. Later the issue came up again when i snuck onto a hwk-290 and got into the engine room and had about an hour to look through the engine room to find the best way to quickly disable the engines once in flight, once we takeoff i go to disable the engines and again its 3 difficulty and a setback he pops a destiny so 2 green 1 yellow and a black i had my 2 yellows and boost dice for my hour of preperation, again i feel this is high difficulty for being alone in an engine room with plenty of set up time. This also brings up the issue of it being probably better for me to try to fix the engine so that i fail that check and end up disabling it, this may just be a natural hole in most rpg rule. How do you guys handle sabotages like this, am i wrong in thinking the difficulty is too high, would you let a PC use their skulduggery instead? thanks in advance and sorry for wall of text.

Hello everyone, we recently had an issue come up in one of our sessions where i wanted to disable a parked speeder bike. Our GM had me roll a mechanics check which was fine but he set the difficulty at 3, because i am not a mechanic, with a setback because it was in combat.

Yeah, that's a load of crap. Penalizing someone with an increased difficulty because they're not a mechanic is not how this Game Engine is suppose to play out. Give 'em a black die for not knowing their way around an engine? Eh, perhaps. The black for mid-combat? absolutely. But bumping up the difficulty? Nope.

would you let a PC use their skulduggery instead?

Yeah, no. You never increase the difficulty simply because the person performing the check isn't good at the necessary skill. The difficulty is based off of the how hard the task is, not how hard it is relative to the player. If I were GM in that instance, I would have set the difficulty at 2 with a setback for combat. Personally, I don't even think it'd be a mechanics check, but rather skullduggery. Otherwise, you could make the argument that no checks require skullduggery.

Player: "I want to pick this lock." GM: "Well, that requires mechanical know-how, so mechanics check."

Player: "I want to pick this guy's pocket." GM: "Since you're trying to be discreet, make it a stealth check."

Player: "I want to find weaknesses in this security system." GM: "Well, that would be a computers check since you're using a computer."

You see? If you just look at the literal physical thing you're doing, it'd be hard to ever justify a skullduggery check. So, back to your question; I would have done a skullduggery check with the aforementioned difficulty.

I agree with the above. The TASK has a difficulty. The conditions may contribute to that in the form of Setbacks. But the skill level of the person trying it doesn't affect how difficult the task is. It's built-in because the player would roll less dice and 8 siders instead of 12.

It might not be entirely realistic so wouldn't use the, "I'm not a X but I can do y." argument one way or the other. What I would say is that Star Wars seems to be a setting where everyone can have a decent chance to do just about everything.

Princesses perform mechanical jobs on old freighters and provide medical help to amputees while farm boys are given super starfighters to use in a major fight because of their rat killing experience and are called on to lead the last group into the final attack run before the rebellion's main base is blown to atoms! That's reason enough to let you do stuff that real life people wouldn't get to try.

Agreeing with everyone above. You are the HERO, you get to do cool stuff!

For your first example I would have allowed the use of any of the following with sufficient convincing by the player:

For your second example i would have given you 2 boost dice for the check due to the time you had to familiarise yourself with the room, so:

Breaking things is always easier than fixing them. Your GM is borked.

Breaking things is always easier than fixing them. Your GM is borked.

So, good luck fixing your GM.

Remember kids, always spay and neuter your GMs!

(A cat saying "What do you mean I need to get fixed? I''m not broken!")

Lol at cat... I had that exact conversation with my parents. Not about me! About our cat!! I had never heard that expression before and I still don't get it!

Taking something that isn't broken and making it so it doesn't work is the OPPOSITE of fixing!! Uness you mean fixing the screamy cat so it stopped screaming. Maybe I just figured it out!

While it is the GM's mistake, I can understand where he comes from. Nearly every other RPG ever made either flat out prevents you from doing something that you do not have a skill in or provides a hefty Unskilled penalty to the task. So him assigning the difficulty increase is very understandable and nearly reflexive.

However, what he did not realize (and what many people do not), is that the system assumes that you have a basic "user" level knowledge with the universe, and that the unskilled penalty is actually nothing more then not being able to get critical successes (aka Triumph results) on the roll, nothing more.

Agreeing to everbody else I presume, my tuppence then:

In situations as this I, normally, ask the player specifications: How subtle are you trying to be? How well are you concealing the defect? How difficult and extensive shall the correction of the sabotage be? etc.

Based on their answers and their abilities (e.g. is there a bottleneck skill), I will present them with a few options and set the difficulty for a single roll.

In some instances I would even consider skipping the roll, just assuming success, postponing it to when the opposition is trying to fix it; then doing an opposed roll.

Oooh, opposed roll! Pappa like!