Anyone have tips for making a cybord bounty hunter with high punching damage. See the character on my adversaries topic.

Aside from advice such as "be Force sensitive", "be a Warden", and "take Enhance", you'll obviously want a high Brawn and a high Brawl skill. As a cyborg, this should be fairly easy. Since he's a Bounty Hunter, you're basically already locked into using that career (not a bad thing!).

An Assassin might be surprisingly adept at punching. To make it work, you'd have to use vibroknucklers for the lower crit rating. +1 damage and Pierce 1 and Vicious 1 definitely help this build anyway. The extreme amount of Lethal Blows talents, plus Vicious, means that you're likely to cause really severe crits frequently. Precise Aim will help negate any Defensive weapons your opponent has and Dodge - as an out of turn incidental - will be indispensable as you can use all your maneuvers running towards a combat to get there in time and still make yourself harder to hit. Targeted Blows and Anatomy Lessons are useful if you'd like other skills (under Int or Agility) as you can leverage the increased stat into increased damage for a Brawl attack. Deadly Accuracy, if I recall, can be used with Brawl just fine and is a great way to buff up Brawl damage.

Gadgeteer is also a sneakily good choice for a Brawl Person. Defensive Stance is very useful when going toe to toe with a difficult enemy. Armor Master and AM [improved] will help you survive to get into combat (sometimes harder than it sounds). Jury Rigged can be used with, say, some vibroknucklers to make crits even easier or shock gloves to make Stun 3 a cakewalk to activate. Deadly Accuracy exists in this tree, as well, so that's a boon. Improved Stunning Blow and Crippling Blow are also really useful for Brawl characters as they give "crowd control" and even potential damage over time options.

You'll also want ways to either get to a fight quickly or survive getting there. Punching is great, but I've learned there's quite a difference between beginning a fight at Medium range and a fight at Long range... especially when the bad guys in question have high Ranged Heavy skills and Heavy Blaster Rifles! Good armor and defensive talents like Dodge will make this work better for you. A jet pack if you can afford one? I'm not really sure!

Since this IS the FaD forums, I'll add some advice assuming you're Force Sensitive.

Warden is great, obviously. Enhance is an easy, easy choice, especially since Force Leap can get you into combat really quickly. Influence is great, especially if you want to also specialize in Coercion, since it gives you a ranged attack option as you're running. So is Move, if you can manage to pull people close to you (and out of Engaged with their allies, allowing your ranged friends to shoot at the others with no chance of shooting you!).

Refined Cortosis Gauntlets with Weighted Head Attachment. If you have cyberarms you can (with GM permission) have the built-in if you like much as a droid could.

He's an NPC? Just give him ranks in Feral Strength.

Correct, he is an NPC.

high brawn + brawl and take the doctor specialization talent that lets you deal damage as strain while unarmed, ignoring the target's soak. Beat the players unconscious.

How is someone punching someone ever going to do damage. Should the mechanic be half soak for punching?

By been big and strong.

Nope by default fists are sh*tty weapons, your better off using anything else.

However if your willing to build around it fist can be some, if not THE most, effective weapons.

Brawn + Skill (deadly accuracy) + Medicine (pressure points also ignore ALL soak but does strain which is better) + feral strenght and you can also add force dice and frienzied attack to the skill check.

If the dice pool is decent enough then one-twoing them with Two Weapon Combat rules is another way to increase the damage output.

Two ways to do it really: big beefy brawn with ranks, or go the more technical guy thats more rounded.

The tech guy will probably have a brawn 2/3, ranks 3/5 in brawl/melee and will typically have a weapon modified with tinker to give stun plause or deliver toxins. A good well upgraded stun can hit for 5 strain ignoring soak that may be enough to overcome the difficulty of penetrating high soak; assuming they hit with two advantage.

Repulsor fist anyone?

Agree. This is one of the reasons I prefer fate core mechanics to edge, age, and f&d. There has to be some mechanic that punching will do damage.

Agree. This is one of the reasons I prefer fate core mechanics to edge, age, and f&d. There has to be some mechanic that punching will do damage.

An unarmed attack does do damage. Why do you believe it does not?

I know it deals damage. The problem is soak will make sure it does almost none or none.

That depends on the amount of successes, but normal folk punching big guys in armor really shouldn't be all that effective.

It's a matter of expectations, and how you approach it. A character with a Brawn of 1 and 0 ranks in Brawl is going to have trouble adequately bruising a banana, let along hurting someone barehanded. Any character that is intended to feasibly harm others by punching has to be built for it. A decent Brawn, a brawl weapon (most of which are chump change to purchase; NPCs don't even have to sweat it), and the right talents. If a character has the martial training of a water noodle, expect them to hit like one.

Exactly. An average human fighting an average human with no armor will deal a number of damage equal to the successes on the check. As better and better armor gets involved, this starts to slip.

Which in my opinion does a perfectly fine job of straddling realistic and cinematic fights.

Keep in mind, someone who is over their threshold for either wounds or strain is so beat up that they can't leave the area under their own power. Most barroom brawls don't get to that point; people get knocked dizzy and thrown around, but even though they're bloody and in a lot of pain, they can still walk away. That's someone losing by getting too close to a threshold for them to be comfortable continuing. And the weapon qualities of an unarmed strike, Disorient 1 and Knockdown, are great representations of what we often see in the movies (and sometimes see in real life).

Does armor apply to the face? Heavy clothing shoudent. I also like the mechanic, but the fact that a character can take no damage from an source at low xp is kind of weird.

Armor may not cover the face, but remember: your roll is not a single attack, it's a combat check, the sum result of all your attempts to hurt someone within the up-to-a-full-minute long period of time that is one round. Certainly you're hitting the guy in the face...if you can. But he's also trying to protect himself, which often involves protecting his face. If you want to try to get around that, well that's what the Aim maneuver is for. Aim and take some Setbacks and I'll let you ignore armor for your check, sure thing! Maybe even drop your Crit rating to 4 for the attack, too.

That's why wearing better armor makes sense: if he's wearing armor, you have fewer viable places to hurt him, and therefore need to get either a more powerful or better-placed strike in (i.e. more successes) in order to hurt him. If you're skilled at fighting (ranks in the Brawl skill), this is easier to do than if you aren't - your odds of more successes go up. If you're stronger than average, same thing.

But no one is invulnerable to being punched - our stock average human is capable of dealing 7 damage with an unarmed Brawl attack - you need to be a bodybuilder wearing at least moderate protection to shrug that of entirely.

What is the base punch damage? Can't find it.

"Unarmed Combat" in the combat chapter, under the "Additional Combat Modifiers" section.

Brawn + Success. It's in the combat chapter under the "Additional Combat Modifiers" sub heading. P218 of FaD core

Edit: zing! Beaten by the stealth bomber!

It's +0, so essentially your Brawn rating. It's in a weird place - not the equipment section with all the other weapons, it's in the Combat chapter under a heading that's something like "Fighting Unarmed."

I'm AFB ATM, so someone else'll need to get you a page reference.

EDIT: Oh, what, you guys are here the whole time and you just let me field this one until we get an easy question, then you jump in and steal my thunder ?

On the topic of aiming for a particular part of a target there is a specific mechanical way to do that, it's one of the options of the Aim maneuver. The effects of successfully hitting a specific part of a target are left up to the GM and Player to decide.

Generally I go with base damage (don't add success) and the "effects" of a suitable Easy critical. The target doesn't actually suffer a Critical, just whatever the effects would be. With Triumph that effect can be chosen from one of the Average Criticals.

For your example of a punch in the face would do the attackers Brawn worth of damage and the "Stunned" critical effect is a good choice. With a Triumph the "Head Ringer" or "Slightly Dazed" crit effects are a good choice.

Remember the rule of cool, if your PC looks cool doing it they will be happy, you on the other hand always have backup. Loosing a couple of your prized NPC's is never a problem. An NPC doing this to a PC is a very good way to send a message of "this guys a tough one".

Yeah, the thing to remember with Brawl attacks is that they have to be GOOD at it to be good at it. Just like any other weapon, though there is more leeway for guns in general.

A Base unarmed attack is damage equal to Brawn + Successes, and has Disorient 1 and Knockdown qualities. These are more useful than you'd think; while Brawling has never been too much of a thing in any of the groups I've ran, when it does come up, they use the hell out of those qualities. Damage might be low, but Disoriented enemies take a setback die for a number of rounds equal to the rating, and Knockdown, well, knocks them prone. Both are 2 advantage to activate, and while the check has to be successful, it does NOT have to deal damage to activate either of those abilities; in addition, there are other things you can do with advantages, such as place setbacks on enemies, boost dice on allies, etc. Keep in mind, this is just with a normal punch.

I'm pretty sure (though I'm away from book so can't guarantee) that Brawl weapons add to the normal qualities of an unarmed attack, and if they have a better rating, they then replace. Like, brass knuckles have a better disorient rating (2?), but don't have Knockdown, so it inherits Knockdown from your normal unarmed attack and uses the better of the 2 Disorient ratings. There are plenty of cool Brawl weapons, though keep in mind they cannot be used with the Pressure Point talent, which is a nuts ability. Since this is an NPC, there's no reason he can't just have that talent; they don't follow the same rules as PCs. It's located under the Doctor tree in Edge o the Empire, don't think it's been anywhere else. There are plenty of awesome brawler builds though, don't be too put off by the low damage. Damage isn't everything, especially when you're talking about an NPC; while they are assumed to have died when going below their Wounds, PCs don't die unless someone gets a crit result of 151+ (though they do take an auto-crit if their wounds fall below 0), so an adversary doing comparatively little Wound damage but constantly Knocking down, Disorienting, and Concussing (another good quality, not hard to get on a brawl weapon), all while slowly whittling them down by inflicting crits, is a pretty decent challenge. Also, while this is generally a better tactic against opponents than against PCs, the Stun quality (not Stun-Setting or Stun Damage, just Stun), costs 2 advantage on a successful check to deal it's rating in Strain, no soak allowed; plus, I'm pretty sure (most) Brawl weapons can choose to deal Stun Damage anyway (Stun Damage is still reduced by Soak, though), you can really reduce Strain fast. This is especially good if the PC is a force-user, because strain is already a precious commodity for them