background: our gm was using saga for me and a friend but stopped that game awhile go. recently we were going to start it with the whole group we have at level 12 (we didnt want to play a low level game, we wanted higher play and characters actual being vary skilled).

after one session at level 12 in saga are gm said he wanted to swtich the system to starwars FFG edition. we all talked and agreed. so we (more i) went looking what would be equal to level 12 saga characters. which ended up being 600 exp (50exp per level).

we made all the changes everyone was happy with their character. (one player min maxed the hell out of his character) and we had are first session. in most cases the gm made the difficult avg to hard (more avg than hard) and did use destiny points against us (he started with all of them in the beginning basically). he didnt use black dice at all (even through i feel a couple of cases should have included them) and we mostly blew through a mission that he expected we fail.

he doesnt think he can challenge us at such a high exp and will only be giving us 5 exp per session if we stay at 600exp (plus race exp).

i dont think we cant be challenged more he just went to easy at first. has anyone experience this problem at a time your players have earned 600xp? if so what did you do?

ill also give info on our party (600xp 20,000 credits+ 2,500 becuase of the bouns credit option) (jedis had to pay for their lightsabers for 8,000)
campagin theme is criminal and smuggling. currently working for a hutt while darth krate has just destroyed all the jedis besides one hidden temple.

zeltron smuggler: his brawn is 7 (idk how) and he did a mock battle against a rankor and soloed it he says. his social skills are 2 yellows 1 green and was able to social get him self through a whole imperial base (with talents to help i think). with his brawn we know he can carry a banta tank on his own. (this is the player who min maxed but he does it in every game because he can look at the system and understand it after a day or 2).

a human ex jedi: he is a hacker and mechanics. from what we see he was able to get the highest clearance (or the highest he could access) in the same imperial base changing cargo info, srcubbing info, giving high clearcane to the whole party. we havent seen him in combat and we didnt see him in sneaking or in social situations.

twi'lek ex jedi: most of my skills (yes me) are 2 yellows 1 green or lower with 3 specializations in artaru striker (jedi duh), starfighter (im the pilot) and shadow (need to hide when darth krate is around). my pilot, astrogation, stealth and lightsaber skills have either boost or minus black dice but besides that my skills are the avg. my characteriscs are all below 1-3s (mostly 2s). i only have basic from of sense and force rating is 1.

a lizard guy (sorry forgot the name): he is suppose to be a demolitions expert but with only 1 session that was stealthly steathly it wasnt his type of mission and over all was in impressive in his results. need to see more before understanding how good he is.

zabrak mandalrioan: she was able to one shot a stromtrooper with a light pistiol. she is her crews gunner and was a stealth ninja. she is suppose to be a sinper but we didnt see that during the session. we just saw a one shot from her pistol and epic stealth.

id suggested to our gm before saying restart (for a thrid time) is to use the black dice and make most skill checks against hard not avg. giving it a session or 2 and see what he can do. what would you do with this group?

(sorry for any miss spellings, character or race names wrong, and any other mistakes)

600 XP characters will be very tough. But I have a campaign where the players have 1000XP each, and it still works fine. What it comes down to is they can succeed on crazy, epic things, and my story line simply needs to take that into account. They aren't just 'hacking' into a computer. They are hacking into the Imperial Supply Corp, and re-routing 100,000 tons of military supplies from the siege of [Fill in Planet X] to planet [secret Rebel staging area]. Basically, the GM should offer up epic things for them to do, but also the players should think big. If the players keep trying to just do little 1 purple or 2 purple things, things will get boring quickly.

You are also correct, the GM MUST assign lots of black dice to checks. It makes those talents that remove black dice actually matter. There should almost always be black dice for some reason or another (time, environment, stressful situation, threat from previous rolls, etc). Players in general should not fight these additions from the GM. Skill checks also need to be in the three or four purple dice range for what the PCs are trying to do, and in some cases, 5 purple. Sneaking into an Imperial Facility should be hard to do. Lots of passive and remote sensors, to say nothing of the sentient troops around. Computer systems are hardened against hacking attempts, can easily be represented by black dice and or automatic upgrades to skill checks (before using destiny points).

PCs will be equally as impressive in combat, especially if they have min/max or optimized for it. Your standard adversaries out of the book will not be able to stand up against them. The best measuring stick is that Nemesis level characters should have similar attributes and skill levels of the PCs if they are to be a challenge (but not every combat needs to be a challenge). Be careful on equipment though; anything you give to the NPCs for equipment generally ends up in the hands of the PCs.

GMing this game, especially at higher XP, need to stop playing the traditional RPG way. Larger stories, more involved issues, etc. It's easy to make the game feel epic by making the planet feel larger with multiple cities, or take it to a sector with multiple planets. At 600+xp, you can throw larger groups (like 5-8 minions per player) and they should feel challenged and satisfied, but that is barring non-combat players. But you also can easily inject situations for the non-combaters to do something in a fight. Vehicles are also very deadly to players, even if it's just them in a starfighter. Focus on the narrative side of the game, not the structured side.

Everyone else has covered things pretty well, so I'll just address how the Zeltron Smuggler may have gotten to 7 Brawn.

The max you can have in a characteristic at character creation (no matter what xp level you start at) is 5. From there, one can install Cybernetic Limbs that enhance Brawn or Agility at the rate of +1 for an arm (2 arms do not stack and have to be the same type, IE two brawn or two agility arms) and +1 Brawn/Agility for 2 and only 2, 1 provides no benefit, legs.

Another possibility is that the player bought talents in Specialization trees to reach the Dedication talent once and used cybernetics to get past the limit of 6* characteristics.

There are armors and attachments for armors that can up your Brawn 1 more time, maxing out with everything with 8 Brawn but that is only when wearing the armor.

*note that the game's characteristic cap is 6 & skill ranks at 5; cybernetics allow you to go 1 and only 1 higher than the limit in characteristics/skills.*

Almost every combat encounter should have rivals, not minions. If the GM needs to have minions, make sure there is a rival leader with the Overwhelming Fire ability. Have the minions use squad maneuvers found in the AoR GM kit. Give the minions 1 Ranged and 1 Melee defense. Bump soak up a point or two, same with wounds. Be tactical! If there is cover available, minions should get into cover and perform the Dug In squad maneuver to gain an additional black die that stacks with cover. Give the minions upgraded weapons.

Large numbers of minion groups, each of which is itself a large group, can still be very challenging in combat, especially with the squad rules.

Ten minion groups of ten minions per group, with a Rival sergeant (as above) would be challenging, even for Anakin.

But maybe don’t throw personal combat at them very frequently. Maybe tend to throw them into social situations where you automatically lose the objective if there are any weapons drawn. Or throw them into vehicle combat. Or use the Mass Combat rules, where they are helping to direct entire fleets or armies.

I think the biggest challenge to high level parties is having to make hard decisions more than having to make hard skill rolls. Just make enemies act like they would if they were intelligently dealing with a party of nearly unbeatable heroes. They wouldn't throw their life away by fighting, they would look for another way to hurt them, such as tracking down their starship and destroying it so they can't leave until reinforcements arrive, or taking hostages to get some leverage.

The primary skill in a roleplaying game is always making good decisions, not rolling a lot of dice. A good adventure is a challenge because it requires good decisions, not because it requires good rolls.

Bit of a digression, but 600 XP actually seems pretty stingy to reproduce level-12 Saga characters. In Saga Edition, Level 12 is pretty close to invulnerable against "non-heroic" opponents (which I take to be the Saga equivalent of minions and lesser rivals). You have to have about 1,000 XP in the FFG system to gain that kind of combat power, especially for Force users who advance more slowly.

More generally, I'm not sure there's a linear relationship between level in Saga and XP in FFG. For the first few levels, I agree that 50 points per level is about right. I'd say a level 3 Saga PC is about equal to a 150 XP FFG character. But a level 10 Saga PC is more like 800 XP in FFG terms. At least in a combat class.

ETA: To see why the relationship between Saga levels and FFG XP isn't linear, compare attack bonus in Saga with weapon skills in FFG.

If you're a Saga edition soldier or Jedi, you get +1 attack bonus per level. So your ability to hit opponents grows by an equal amount with every level (an extra 5% chance to hit). But in FFG, you pay 5 times more XP for your fifth level of Ranged (Heavy) than you do for your first level of Ranged(Heavy). This means that your "attack bonus" grows more slowly at "higher levels" in FFG.

The same goes for skill bonuses, defense bonuses, hit points... every basic stat in Saga advances linearly, growing the same amount with every level. But in FFG, the only thing that advances this way is Force powers. Skills become much more expensive as ranks get higher. The cost of Talents doesn't get steep as fast, but it does grow as the cost of additional Specializations grows. So at higher Saga levels, you need more FFG XP to equal one Saga level.

I've found that XP is actually a really poor measure of how powerful a character is in combat, because there are so many ways to spend it that don't add up to just walking through fights unscathed. By far the biggest factors that decide how powerful a character really is in a fight are the total amount of damage mitigation you can produce, the chance you have that your attack will neutralize one or multiple enemies in a single turn, and how many dice you roll for initiative, because who goes first often makes all the difference in this system. (In fact I'd argue that the main reason standard enemies often fail to be dangerous is because they have terrible initiative.)

It's pretty easy to make a character that can de-claw most combat encounters in a single turn with only about 200-300 XP, if that's what the character is focused on. It's also pretty easy to make a character who has 1000 XP but would be considered fragile even for a starting character, and is going to be extremely screwed every single time an adventure concludes with a fight you can't avoid.

Well, and gear can make a huge contribution to a character's combat power in this game unless the GM takes steps to prevent that. As GM I charge XP if players want to modify their weapons and strongly encourage Jedi to stick with basic lightsabers. A character whose combat strength is tied to what crystal they use does not feel like Star Wars to me

I think one of the major things you can do as GM to control equipment is to start moving the adventure closer and closer to the galactic core as your PCs get more powerful. If you're in the outer rim you might be able to get away with lugging around a heavy blaster rifle and battle armor, but in the core words you wouldn't even get out of the starport with that kind of gear on. Downgrading to a light blaster that can be legally carried suddenly might sound like a good idea, and igniting a lightsaber is also something you'll think about twice when you're in the heart of the Empire.

Also, yea, the crystal thing is a bit weird, but it does give some variety to lightsabers, which are kind of one sided otherwise. F&D characters get pushed really hard toward using a lightsaber, because any stat can be used as your combat stat as long as you use lightsabers, so unless your character happened to be agility based to begin with there is simply no way you'll ever reach the potential you have with a lightsaber with a more conventional weapon. Since a wide variety of characters is best served by using lightsabers I think having a good variety of lightsabers is important to keep things interesting.

I think one of the major things you can do as GM to control equipment is to start moving the adventure closer and closer to the galactic core as your PCs get more powerful. If you're in the outer rim you might be able to get away with lugging around a heavy blaster rifle and battle armor, but in the core words you wouldn't even get out of the starport with that kind of gear on. Downgrading to a light blaster that can be legally carried suddenly might sound like a good idea, and igniting a lightsaber is also something you'll think about twice when you're in the heart of the Empire.

Also, yea, the crystal thing is a bit weird, but it does give some variety to lightsabers, which are kind of one sided otherwise. F&D characters get pushed really hard toward using a lightsaber, because any stat can be used as your combat stat as long as you use lightsabers, so unless your character happened to be agility based to begin with there is simply no way you'll ever reach the potential you have with a lightsaber with a more conventional weapon. Since a wide variety of characters is best served by using lightsabers I think having a good variety of lightsabers is important to keep things interesting.

Besides getting the crystal the player wants may be a good story for a high level adventure: you may start thinking about slaying a Krayt Dragon on Tatooine, for the pearl (and saving a village - good story for guardians).; or you want a sorian, or Dantari crystal who is in a museum in the core, so you need to get closer to the empire than ever before. (or you can invent stats for the Corusca Gem and run a high level Jewel of Yavin). Maybe the go to Duxn to explore the tomb of Freedon Nadd and find some very rare crystal, but who knows what happens inside the tomb of a Dark Lord od the Sith? Or send them to find Tython and recover something there....after they navigate through absurd gravity well and infiltrate the most secure part of the galaxy.

Little late to the game here but your GMs biggest problem is jumping in to running the system for advanced PCs. If you all had restarted with fresh PCs and played organically to this level, he likely would have no problems doing it cuz he'd be familiar with the ins and outs of the system.

Little late to the game here but your GMs biggest problem is jumping in to running the system for advanced PCs. If you all had restarted with fresh PCs and played organically to this level, he likely would have no problems doing it cuz he'd be familiar with the ins and outs of the system.

I agree, and to solve the problem i would suggest you and your group forget SAGA and redo your charcters at knight level (150 xp) or maybe even a bit higher (200-220xp) that would let you have capable characters that your GM can challenge more easily, while still having a long enough road to acquire xp. This game is different enough from SAGA that the two systems can't be compared so determining how many xp is a lvl 12 it's useless. Also, minions and rvials are supposed to be dangerous even at high xp levels, there isn't any mechanical immunity like in SAGA.

That's a tough thing to say to somebody who's put enough work into a PC to reach level 12 in a d20 system, though. Lots of blood sweat and tears down the drain to reduce that character so far below the abilities they'd attained.

Maybe the GM could run a brief one-shot side game to familiarize with the system before diving in at high level, or learn by reading through some PVPs?

I think one of the major things you can do as GM to control equipment is to start moving the adventure closer and closer to the galactic core as your PCs get more powerful. If you're in the outer rim you might be able to get away with lugging around a heavy blaster rifle and battle armor, but in the core words you wouldn't even get out of the starport with that kind of gear on. Downgrading to a light blaster that can be legally carried suddenly might sound like a good idea, and igniting a lightsaber is also something you'll think about twice when you're in the heart of the Empire.

Also, yea, the crystal thing is a bit weird, but it does give some variety to lightsabers, which are kind of one sided otherwise. F&D characters get pushed really hard toward using a lightsaber, because any stat can be used as your combat stat as long as you use lightsabers, so unless your character happened to be agility based to begin with there is simply no way you'll ever reach the potential you have with a lightsaber with a more conventional weapon. Since a wide variety of characters is best served by using lightsabers I think having a good variety of lightsabers is important to keep things interesting.

Yeah, I see your point. I guess from my perspective (so just one man's personal preference here), it didn't make things less interesting to have Vader, Obi-Wan and Luke all use basically the same variety of lightsaber. And in the game, the different lightsaber forms give a lot of variety in how the exact same lightsaber will perform in a different character's hands. That's how Star Wars has always felt to me: for Jedi, it's about the skills and powers, not the equipment. (I can see the argument that equipment should make a bigger difference for other types of characters like bounty hunters, because that's the flavor they were given in the movies.)

But I'm super anal about making sure that the games I GM have (my own particular version of) the Star Wars feel. For example, it doesn't feel Star Wars-y to me to have characters sticking stimpacks in their legs all the time. So instead of stimpacks, I give my players a "recover" maneuver five times a day which follows the same rules as a stimpack, but which they're supposed to think of as the equivalent of the Second Wind ability from Saga.

Yea, the idea of the Jedi as an ascetic order that foregoes expensive equipment was kind of destroyed when lightsabers were sort of retroactively declared to be more rare and powerful than blasters. In the original 3 movies they are more portrayed as an archaic weapon that is in every way surpassed by blasters and as such only usable by people with Jedi-reflexes, similarly to how theoretically you'd be able to block bullets with a steel sword, it's just you'd have to be some kind of magician to do it. Then lightsabers turned into armor shredding, blast door melting, mystical weapons made from living force crystals that choose their wielder that can't be used by non-Jedis effectively at all, so that kind of throws the whole idea of the Jedi who eschews expensive and exotic equipment in lieu of a simple sword out the window.

As for stimpacks, yeaaa, personally I don't like it when RPGs use healthpoints as a counter of how injured you are at all, I prefer systems that run on morale and then crits that are actual wounds with mechanical effects for actual hits. They tend to make a lot more sense because they just make social characters that keep everyone's spirits high into the healers, so you don't need to go the bizarre extra mile inventing a bunch of (usually magical) things that can close wounds in seconds to have a game where there is a limited resource governing how many attacks you can resist. People wind up treating HP more like morale anyways, because it's just too abstract to assume you're literally losing chunks of flesh and someone is putting them back.

Yea, the idea of the Jedi as an ascetic order that foregoes expensive equipment was kind of destroyed when lightsabers were sort of retroactively declared to be more rare and powerful than blasters. In the original 3 movies they are more portrayed as an archaic weapon that is in every way surpassed by blasters and as such only usable by people with Jedi-reflexes, similarly to how theoretically you'd be able to block bullets with a steel sword, it's just you'd have to be some kind of magician to do it. Then lightsabers turned into armor shredding, blast door melting, mystical weapons made from living force crystals that choose their wielder that can't be used by non-Jedis effectively at all, so that kind of throws the whole idea of the Jedi who eschews expensive and exotic equipment in lieu of a simple sword out the window.

I disagree with most of that. What is shown in the prequels is already there from the original movies. In the original trilogy Luke slices both Boba's blaster and a speederbike stabilizers with his lightsaber (also Vader's hand, which was presumably armored) so it's already shown that it is capable of slicing through almost anything. What you see in the prequels is simply an expnasion of that: it's obvious that it cuts through armored doors since it's already established it can cut through metal easily.

As for the not being able to be used effictively at all by non force sensistives it's simply not true: melee training lets you do use the lightsaber just as well as any other melee weapon, what you can't do is reflect blaster bolts because you need force enhanced reflexes for that, but fencing is perfectly doable. Look at how Finn is able to hold his own for a time against both the stormtrooper and Kylo Ren, all that is due to his standard melee training.

And Lightsabers are not expensive per se, they are expensive because nobody is making them anymore because very few people can use them effectively. Without a jedi a lightsaber is an archaic weapon and quite inferior to a blaster, so people use blasters instead. The lightsaber is a very simple sword for the jedi, and one fo their few possession so everything portrayed in the original films is supported by the prequels.

I disagree with most of that. What is shown in the prequels is already there from the original movies. In the original trilogy Luke slices both Boba's blaster and a speederbike stabilizers with his lightsaber (also Vader's hand, which was presumably armored) so it's already shown that it is capable of slicing through almost anything. What you see in the prequels is simply an expnasion of that: it's obvious that it cuts through armored doors since it's already established it can cut through metal easily.

Episode 4 also show a regular stormtrooper blaster put a man-sized hole through a metal grate on the death star, blow cameras and alarm buttons to pieces, cook people in their seat, and so on. It's not exactly like they go out of their way to show that lightsabers are way stronger than blasters. The one definitive description we get of the difference is: "Not as clumsy or random, a weapon for a more civilized time". That implies that it's an old style of weapon that the galaxy largely forgot to use more devastating and easy to use blasters, not that it's a specialized Jedi weapon that supersedes all similar sized weapons in raw destructive potential.

I disagree with most of that. What is shown in the prequels is already there from the original movies. In the original trilogy Luke slices both Boba's blaster and a speederbike stabilizers with his lightsaber (also Vader's hand, which was presumably armored) so it's already shown that it is capable of slicing through almost anything. What you see in the prequels is simply an expnasion of that: it's obvious that it cuts through armored doors since it's already established it can cut through metal easily.

Don't forget Luke cutting into an AT-AT with a single swing during the Battle of Hoth.

Don't forget Luke cutting into an AT-AT with a single swing during the Battle of Hoth.

Cutting open an access hatch and then having to toss a grenade inside to do any real damage. With Clone Wars power lightsabers he could have just cut the legs off the thing.

Don't forget Luke cutting into an AT-AT with a single swing during the Battle of Hoth.

Cutting open an access hatch and then having to toss a grenade inside to do any real damage. With Clone Wars power lightsabers he could have just cut the legs off the thing.

I actually did that back in a D6 campaign way back well before the Prequels even existed. My character, Korath, sliced through both ankles along one side of an ATAT, while running past it, causing it to fall sideways.

Don't forget Luke cutting into an AT-AT with a single swing during the Battle of Hoth.

Cutting open an access hatch and then having to toss a grenade inside to do any real damage. With Clone Wars power lightsabers he could have just cut the legs off the thing.

I actually did that back in a D6 campaign way back well before the Prequels even existed. My character, Korath, sliced through both ankles along one side of an ATAT, while running past it, causing it to fall sideways.

My only problem with that is the scale of the leg. When a foot easily crushes a snowspeeder, your lightsaber won't cut all the way through. I knew a guy (real life), who almost killed himself because he tried to cut down a 5 or 6 foot diameter tree using a 48" chainsaw but walking around the tree in a circle cutting it. It almost fell on him.

Don't forget Luke cutting into an AT-AT with a single swing during the Battle of Hoth.

Cutting open an access hatch and then having to toss a grenade inside to do any real damage. With Clone Wars power lightsabers he could have just cut the legs off the thing.

I actually did that back in a D6 campaign way back well before the Prequels even existed. My character, Korath, sliced through both ankles along one side of an ATAT, while running past it, causing it to fall sideways.

My only problem with that is the scale of the leg. When a foot easily crushes a snowspeeder, your lightsaber won't cut all the way through. I knew a guy (real life), who almost killed himself because he tried to cut down a 5 or 6 foot diameter tree using a 48" chainsaw but walking around the tree in a circle cutting it. It almost fell on him.

Which is why you cut a nice big triangular notch into one side of the tree before cutting around the other side.

Its not as cool as cutting through an AT-AT leg on a run by, but you could theoretically notch the leg and then cut it down on a back-swing.

Add a little ninja-force-leap action into the narrative and you could even get some cool back.

Don't forget Luke cutting into an AT-AT with a single swing during the Battle of Hoth.

Cutting open an access hatch and then having to toss a grenade inside to do any real damage. With Clone Wars power lightsabers he could have just cut the legs off the thing.

I actually did that back in a D6 campaign way back well before the Prequels even existed. My character, Korath, sliced through both ankles along one side of an ATAT, while running past it, causing it to fall sideways.

My only problem with that is the scale of the leg. When a foot easily crushes a snowspeeder, your lightsaber won't cut all the way through. I knew a guy (real life), who almost killed himself because he tried to cut down a 5 or 6 foot diameter tree using a 48" chainsaw but walking around the tree in a circle cutting it. It almost fell on him.

The actual metal that makes up the U shaped ankle struts aren't that thick, however. That is what I cut through. That was the trick. We see Kanaan do the same thing in Rebels too.

Look at this picture, and you'l see what I mean about the struts:

At the most, the metal that makes up the ankle struts is about 24"-36" thick.