So, one of my sort of problems with this system is NPCs; they aren't made the same as players, and even if it is mostly for the purposes of "simplified bookkeeping", even the better ones usually only have two, maybe three talents (Inquisitor Nemeses from F&D). Now, some of these might be stacked (has "one talent", but it is treated as if it was acquired three times, while still having one, or two, other talents, and they might get some of them, without the little stuff below "has Supreme Reflect", which is treated as Reflect, Improved Reflect, and Supreme Reflect, because anyone with the last one had the other two), but these are people who still need to be able to fight a group of players, with potentially dozen talents each, and still put up a good fight. As well, one occasionally can't just balance it out with limitless mooks; not every Nemesis is a Crime Lord, or an Imperial Moff, with disposable squads of redshirts/bucketheads; sometimes Darth Vader, Darth Nihilus, or Boba Fett just need to face a party, alone, and still crush them. The Jedi tried to kill Vader once. One of them got a cortosis sword, and they hoped to use it to disable his lightsaber, and ace him, but he saw what it did, and just pulled it to him, using it, and his superior dueling skills (even though lightsaber and melee are entirely different skills, remember?) and murdered the whole group of them. Why their impressive Force powers, which I don't think are affected by Adversary, didn't just defeat him by attrition, I don't know. One guy did beat a whole group of similarly capable, and far superior in number, foes.

Anyway, I've whined enough, and if you've gotten this far, this is where I'm actually asking for aide. I have two NPCs, and they work as a team. One is a bounty hunter, and the other is his spy.

Fin'l is a Feeorin bounty hunter. First of all, as an EU thing, I expect his race has yet to grace a book, but that's not too hard to adapt, from other things. If you don't know, Feeorins are big, towering, mountains of muscle, and rage. They live to fight, they live a long time doing it, and they don't get weaker as they age (not a thing in this system, but whatever). To many people, he's practically Boba Fett, except he might actually cost more, so you are more likely to see him, and not automatically be the target.

Jenna is my half-Zeltron spy. She basically goes into places, canvases them for intel, without the attracting the kind of attention a lumbering, heavy-armored Feeorin would, before sneaking away, and telling him what's up. Again, Zeltrons probably haven't been statted, yet, but that doesn't seem too hard. What I need are talents. If each of these NPCs is only likely to have two, or three, and some Adversary, what would be the best bang for their buck, so I don't just give them each seven, or eight?

Last thing, unrealted-ish. I don't have the book for Modifications, but could you take the tech for cybernetic limbs, like a pair of arms, and legs, and incorporate them into a suitable suit of armor, for the +2 Brawn boost? Some armor has been known to boost strength, in the past, and the tech exists here; you'd just lose the bonus without your armor. Are there rules for it, or how might it be done?

All right. Thanks for reading all that stuff, and any thoughts on the questions, particularly the talents for the pair of NPCs. Please have a good one.

Here are some things I said in a similar thread.

A few things that can improve your Nemesis in the face of ever powerful players.

- minion/rival groups: rarely should a Nemesis fight a group of players alone

- Enhanced Nemesis Combat: The GM should add an additional NPC slot at the end of the initiative order. the nemesis may take a second turn during the same round in this slot. Any effects that are suppose to end during his next turn end instead during his/her next turn in the following round. See Under a Black Sun page 38.

- Talents: Adversary is so good, and Durable. Also if you want to be a real jerk use the old version of the Durable talent (ignore the X "where X equals ranks in Durable" critical injuries suffered per day), See the beginners game Adversary list.

- Darkside Points: Flip those bad boys, upgrade the difficulty of players combat checks, change the scene to give your nemesis an unfair advantage, upgrade the nemesis combat checks!

- Stimpacks: like the pirate said! (NPCs can use them too)

For the Armor, there’s nothing really special to do for an NPC — just make it give them a boost to their attributes, and you might also want to make it gene-locked, so that no one else can use it.

Maybe it is powered by a micro-nuclear device that overloads if anyone fiddles with it. Maybe it just melts down, or maybe it actually explodes, but with vehicular scale damage so that there isn’t even a pink stain within miles of the detonation point.

The Battlement Power Armor (from Dangerous Covenants, page 51, see http://swrpg.viluppo.net/equipment/armor/318/) gives you +1 to your Brawn when worn and powered, so I could see a jury-rigged version giving you +2, but that would still be limited to a max of seven, if the person wearing it happened to have a normal non-cybernetic max of six Brawn.

As armor for an NPC, you don’t have to follow the same rules as you would for a regular PC.

Threat creation, minion groups, etc. are some of the most INGENIOUS rule sets in this system. They make GMing so much simpler and allow the GM limitless possibilities to craft bad guys that have the perfect amount of info and threat without getting bogged down book diving making a level 1 stormtrooper, a level 5 stormtrooper, a level 8 stormtrooper, etc. There are so many levels you can pull... would thresholds, number of bad guys, size of groups, equipment, talents, etc. that can be tweaked to make exactly the sort of threat you need.

Order 66 has a full podcast about how to craft NPC's... http://podbay.fm/show/276381727/e/1421646000

I personally find the rules wildly refreshing!

I won't argue with the sentiment, but sometimes, you get a bad guy who doesn't have a million million mooks around, able to suck up firepower for them. Like I said, sometimes Darth Vader might not have Stormtroopers/501st/worse in close availability, and only so many can stand around him, sucking up shots, before his Engaged range weapon can't reach through them, to the players, while people like Boba Fett SHOULDN'T have such things. He'd need good talents, or perhaps more control of the field (cover, timing, etc.) to take on a group of players.

If you aren't an Imperial Moff, or a similar Crime Lord character, being supported by all of Nar Shaddaa's minion-thugs, or sitting in an armored control center, belittling the players over a comm, while having stuff with them do the fighting, I'm not sure how you make it challenging. Short of Kenobi and Qui-Gon vs. Maul, or Ezra and Co. vs Vader, most of our sources of inspiration don't show an important NPC outnumbered to the degree a typical 4-6 member party will put the BBEG, and even then, Vader had it because he's considerably more powerful than the Rebels group. Usually, it's the heroes outnumbered, and then they get all the talents, fate points, and such, to make them the special case, and they win. Numbers do seem to matter here, though, and we've certainly seen Jedi Masters get punked by their Clones, so numbers DO matter, but I don't know how you'd get a single Nemesis to really threaten a party, the way I'm thinking. I'm not saying a Nemesis SHOULD be able to tank, and punk, a whole player party, every time they meet, but sometimes they should, and other editions did. Saga, for its failings, might have let Vader, being such higher level, have the defense to ignore many attacks, and the block/deflect to deal with the few that got through, even if each check becomes more difficult. Here, the Strain cost can mount quickly, even for him, and even Adversary 3 doesn't always save him (it didn't on my dice app, anyway, when I was testing), while he isn't wearing the heaviest armor.

I'm sure I'm looking too deeply into this, but I'm trying to figure out, in this system, how to let a lone NPC walk into the room, and own it, at least at first; scare the party into actually questioning if they want to fight him (and he's a huge, towering Feeorin bounty hunter, in this case; they should be initially intimidated), rather than just taking him down because they have more people, many more talents, and he doesn't employ a small army, and where hitting seems to have less to do with how tough he is, how good his gear is, and more to do with how good your dice roll. Certainly, three difficulty dice upgrades, and one, or two, Setback dice (armor and/or shields), seems like a hell of a lot of stuff thrown onto a roll against him, but I still don't know how he might stand against them, to "take one prisoner", or whatever the BBEG's shtick is. Even someone like Vader, I'm at least as certain they "did you run? No? You're hurt. Did you run? No? You died. TPK!" in the book I heard he's referenced in, rather than some loose stats because a decent group of players will still outdo it.

Maybe I'll just look in the core book, grab some good shooter, and bounty hunter, talents (2-3 of them), build a nice tank, as much as I think this system will allow, and hope for the best. I know someone will say he can use his brain (Feeorins, not so much, but not stupid), and there are ways he could separate the party, use cover, his jetpack, and all that, so maybe he doesn't need to be Dirge, able to just stand there, and shrug off an entire squad's worth of blaster fire (that DID hit), but it's still more the idea I had for his motif.

Of course, thank you all for your ideas. I'm sorry if I'm just being too picky, or looking for something that sort of doesn't work; as I've said, I'm still trying to wrap my brain around some of this game's differences, compared to other things I've played. Please have a good one.

The advantage to NPCs is precisely because they don’t have to be built like PCs.

And note that it’s the talents that really separate the wheat from the chaff in this game.

So, give your NPC whatever talents you think might be useful, and you don’t have to come up with any justification for why the have what they have, or how they got there.

But no NPC is going to survive going toe-to-toe with a group of PCs, no matter how outlandish you make them. So, don’t make that mistake.

Split the party up instead. Give them multiple objectives that all have to be achieved at the same time — they have to capture the Maguffin and also save the princess. They can’t just do one of those things.

If the party is really advanced, maybe they have n+1 or n+2 things they have to achieve at the same time, where “n” is the number of members of the party. They’re going to have to make a choice as to what gets dropped into the giant nuclear reactor at the center of the planet/ship, because it’s simply not possible to do them all.

Your Big Bad Evil Guy (BBEG) should probably only ever be visible from a distance, and always manage to escape — just like Count Dooku, General Grievous, and Darth Vader did in the movies.

Of course their luck may run out one of these days, but that should be in the far future. And you should be working up to that point over a long period of time.

One of the big things in this game is the use of Destiny Points. It's dynamic and completely story driven. A lot of the books (especially the bounty hunter series staring with The Mandalorian Armor) made Fett out to be 1 part Columbo, 1 part Sherlock Holmes, and 1 part Batman. There is NO WAY you can plan for the PCs like he does his targets in the books, so that is where Desinty Points come in!

Let's say that you have the PCs whittle down his distraction mobs, or catch him 1:1 in a bad position in the middle of an empty street. Thanks to the flip of 1 Destiny Point, your Feorin reveals that he had planned for it all along; that "empty street" was actually cleared by the local officials because of a gas leak, and the very air he now ignites into a fireball, causing the PCs to have to resist a hazardous environment each round in addition to having setback dice on all of their attacks because their optics weren't specifically prepared to compensate for the heat and glare like the Fin'l. Add into this the Adversary talent, second initiative slot, and a convenient flip of a second Destiny later to introduce his "second wave" of minions, and you have a fight that should more than intimidate the PCs.

You can keep them on their toes in this manner until the time is right - pay attention to the feel of the scenario, and the posture of the players. When the dice rolls start getting them on the edge of their seat and the stakes are highest, let the scene play out to a conclusion.