Hello, my players and GM were wondering about melee combat. One of the players thought it made more sense to have melee combat be an opposed check where the badguy lent his skill ranks and ability ranks as difficulty and challenge dice.

We were wondering if that was appropriate. The GM said if we wanted to play it that way then if the player loses the roll he takes damage, if the player wins the roll the badguy takes damage.

Most of the players, the GM and I feel it is inappropriate to make melee an opposed check like that but this 1 player feels it makes more sense. I wanted to get the communities feedback.

There are several problems with the opposed check system that one player proposes, for one Improved parry is now rendered useless as a talent because everyone has it. Second Inquisitors go from hard to beat for a middling party to impossible, inquisitors all have adversary 3 meaning in combat checks made against them are upgraded thrice so the pool would be two challenges and a difficulty, however if you use the inquisitors skill in a Lightsaber if that's their primary form of attack will most likely be a 4 Challenge 1 Difficulty check which is absurd, if in this opposed combat system you still use adversary ranks then that difficulty is 6 Challenge die. The system isn't made for this in my opinion, and since it seems most of your party and your GM agrees just roll combat normally.

An interesting thought, but ultimately I think it'd be a de-buff of melee which is already arguably sub-optimal.

I would review the Defensive Stance, Dodge, Parry, and Adversary talents. These all replicate the things that that player is thinking.

This game does things differently than what most people expect, so it takes some getting used to.

thanks for the replies guys. I'll talk this over with the group.

The system is designed to favour offence to keep things moving. If you go with opposed checks you'll find that combat becomes a grind. If you then pile on all the various ways to improve the negative dice available to NPCs and PCs, nobody will hit anything.

As noted, the players can do a lot of things to improve their survivability...since you're asking this on the F&D forum, your players probably have Force Sensitive characters, and they should be looking at the Sense power.

Keep in mind too that the Adversary talent for NPCs effectively does the same thing. Adversary 3 turns PP into RRP. You wouldn't want to stack Adversary on top of an Inquisitor's Lightsaber skill when fighting against him...

Edit: "wouldn't"

This is an old argument that crops up with new GMs/players.

Back when EotE was still in Beta, the skill descriptions for Brawl and Melee had text that alluded to those having been opposed checks during the initial playtesting, with that text being removed fairly early in the Beta updates. Some folks tried it out anyway, and with opponents of equal skill, fighting it out with melee weapons took a heck of a long time, as you either succeeded with threat, or failed with advantage, as opposed to a character with high ranks in said combat skill having better chances of succeeding with advantage.

Primary reason is that if Brawl and Melee (and by extension) Lightsaber were opposed checks, then it would slow melee combat down to a grind and make it even less effective in comparison to ranged combat than it already is. Blasters pretty much already rule the roost when it comes to combat options since they have range and for most PCs will deal far more damage than they could with a melee weapon; lightsabers are the exception, and even they have drawbacks (namely, needing a unique skill and still needing to get engaged with your target) while picking up Ranged (Light) or Ranged (Heavy) as a career skill is generally a lot easier and using a blaster in combat generally draws far less attention or is far less memorable to your opponents than using a lightsaber.

As Blackbird888 noted, if you're looking for defensive boosts in melee combat, then you're looking at talents. The closest that Brawl/Melee/Lightsaber gets to affecting your ability to avoid being hit is that a high skill rank offsets the setback die incurred from using Guarded Stance (spend a maneuver, gain +1 to melee defense to end of your next turn, add setback die to all melee-based combat checks until the end of your next turn).

Unlike a number of other RPGs, your ranks in a combat skill simply reflect how good you are at attacking with the weapon, with talents generally covering the defensive side of things.

If the players are worried about getting smacked around in melee combat, an easy investment is the Sense power (which is handy to have anyway) and the Control upgrade that lets you upgrade the difficulty of an enemy's attack against you. 40 XP gets you the base power, the Control upgrade, a Duration upgrade so that you can use it twice per round, and a Strength Upgrade to let you upgrade the difficulty twice.