I'm usually not one to employee house rules, but I just had to see what people thought about this one.

I'm aware that some people aren't particularly keen on Brawn adding to Soak values, and that there has been many people talking about house rules to remove it from Soak, my idea is almost the same. Remove Brawn from Soak but in order to mitigate how murderous that is for PC's, lets cut personal scale weapon damage in half (rounded up and lets not touch explosive damage, like grenades and missile tubes). This makes melee weapon damage dangerous still, but see as you have too run through weapons fire to get within melee range, that seems fair.

How this changes the dynamic of battle though is interesting. First it still allows those who focus elusively on Soak value from armor to gain benefit from it, but it also allows other players who want to not wear any to be far less squishy, as they can take a hit or two more (not to mention that this is more true to the movies). Also it allows lightsaber reflect and parry to be more true to their cinematic versions. Lightsabers become less likely to perform a one hit kill in most circumstances, while allowing grenades, thermo-detonators, and missile tubes to be the top of the food chain again.

Just an idea, I'm curious about what you all think.

I think it makes autofire about twice as powerful against everything but lightsabers with reflect, while surprisingly enough autofire against lightsabers becomes less powerful and reflect and parry in general become about twice as good.

It makes soak on armor twice as good as well, doubles the value of the endurance talent and makes brawn a nearly useless stat, which devalues the few lightsaber specs which actually use it. Furthermore you need to adjust the armor crafting rules as soak should naturally be now about twice as expensive.

I will not complain about reducing value of breach though and as I my character uses a pierce 6 weapon which should be now often as much as you need. In general defense dice, extra ht, etc become all a little more worth too.

Overall it would need a lot of math and playtesting to be sure if it is not a bad change and potentially a lot of rebalancing.

There's too many ways to dial up damage on weapons.

I think it would be easier to just bump up starting wounds than apply across the board rebalancing to weapons and talents.

I tend to try and think of wounds as they should be, scrapes, bruises, minor cuts, nothing serious, whereas the Critical Injuries are actual injuries.

I'm thinking of starting to look at it as that wounds themselves are more of a timer, counting away until the character gets injured with a Crit. It would make things like Lightsaber duels more cinematic, when the wounds suffered don't necessarily mean the character got hit by the saber but more that they are wearing out physically, maybe taking a punch or a kick here and there until they become too exhausted & take a Critical Injury, knocking them out of the combat. Any Criticals before the character is incapacitated are times where the attack actually connects with the character. Parry could be considered your training kicking in and stalling that Injury timer. It would allow one to explain why you can take a couple successful "hits" in a Lightsaber combat and not immediately get incapacitated, because the actual hit from the Lightsaber comes when you take a Crit or are Incapacitated.

It would also cover ranged combat pretty well too... Taking wounds isn't that you're getting actually "wounded" but you're getting closer to getting hit with that blaster fire. Critical Injuries that happen before a character gets Incapacitated just happen to be the lucky strikes that can happen, such as Leia getting shot in her arm on Endor or Luke getting shot in his prosthetic hand on Tatooine.

Exactly. Take Raiders , for example: Indy being dragged behind the truck, being punched by Nazis, bouncing off the hood and slamming into the grill? That's all wound damage. That Nazi sneaking around the truck and shooting Indy in the arm? That's a crit.

7 hours ago, SEApocalypse said:

I think it makes autofire about twice as powerful against everything but lightsabers with reflect, while surprisingly enough autofire against lightsabers becomes less powerful and reflect and parry in general become about twice as good.

While I agree in the right circumstances Autofire would scale more towards the more powerful end, though to be fair Autofire was always a powerful trait to have on a weapon, with damage being halved this should keep Autofire mostly in line. Realistically anyone who stands out in the middle of a firefight when Autofire weapons are being used against them deserves to suffer the consequences.

As for Reflect and Parry, I can't really argue with you, but this idea is partly to move those two abilities inline with what we see in the movies, I mean anyone else remember Qui'gon and Obi-wan on the trade federation ship being fired at by the destroyer droid and reflecting everything coming at them?

7 hours ago, SEApocalypse said:

It makes soak on armor twice as good as well, doubles the value of the endurance talent and makes brawn a nearly useless stat, which devalues the few lightsaber specs which actually use it. Furthermore you need to adjust the armor crafting rules as soak should naturally be now about twice as expensive.

Honestly I feel it brings Soak on armor right in line with what it should be, Armor. In several other role-playing games (not all mind you) armor is a form of damage reducer, and it didn't cost more because it did what it is supposed to do. What with the Soak values of most armors being 1 and 2 and with Superior 2 or 3 this means a standard blaster rifle (which by this HR will now do 6 damage on a success) will still do 5 - 3 damage on a hit, and a heavy plaster pistol will 3 - 1 damage (in all honesty these seem consistent with what they are doing before this HR).

As for the idea that it makes Brawn a useless stat, okay now that's a bit of a stretch. Sorry but even if we remove Brawn from Soak, Brawn is used for deriving you Wound Threshold, your Melee and Unarmed damage, and your Brawn skills, not to mention how much weight you can actually carry, with the sole exception of Willpower which is used for Willpower skills and Strain Threshold, Brawn is the most used stat.

7 hours ago, SEApocalypse said:

I will not complain about reducing value of breach though and as I my character uses a pierce 6 weapon which should be now often as much as you need. In general defense dice, extra ht, etc become all a little more worth too.

This is actually part of the problem I speak of about Brawn adding to Soak. Pierce isn't something that every player or enemy should have to have in order to have a hope of damaging there opponent.

Now I know I'm being hyperbolic when I say 'Every player or enemy' but in my group there is a single player whose Soak value is so high due to Brawn, armor, and talents that a standard blaster rifle on 3 success can't harm her, that's 12 points of damage totally ignored. True this is only one player, but when I have to make situations that can be challenging for her combat wise (because she loves to fight) these same enemies wreck everyone else. Now true I do place them in many other situations where her extreme tankiness aren't a big issue, but on the few occasions that it is, you can clearly see the other players grow worried for their lives (heh).

Honestly though SEApocalypse I agree with most of what you have to say, and yeah it definitely needs to be play tested, might just do that this weekend with my players (poor saps ).

Thanks for your input, I greatly appreciate it.

GroggyGolem and Desslok I completely agree with both of you, Critical Injuries are indeed actual body damage where as Wound Threshold is your characters endurance or fatigue.

Not arguing that, just my gripe with the way the system deals with damage mitigation.

Also, love the Raiders reference, great movie, even if it would have came to the same outcome regardless if Indiana was present or not .

Think about it and have your mind blowen.

9 hours ago, Desslok said:

Exactly. Take Raiders , for example: Indy being dragged behind the truck, being punched by Nazis, bouncing off the hood and slamming into the grill? That's all wound damage. That Nazi sneaking around the truck and shooting Indy in the arm? That's a crit.

Agreed, and why I'm not really a fan of the WT and ST incapacitation. I'd prefer a condition, like Disoriented or Staggered. One could argue that this could lead to more static combat, but the danger of hitting your WT is that each hit is an auto-crit and the pile-on effect remains.

16 hours ago, Azeraphin said:

Now I know I'm being hyperbolic when I say 'Every player or enemy' but in my group there is a single player whose Soak value is so high due to Brawn, armor, and talents that a standard blaster rifle on 3 success can't harm her, that's 12 points of damage totally ignored. True this is only one player, but when I have to make situations that can be challenging for her combat wise (because she loves to fight) these same enemies wreck everyone else. Now true I do place them in many other situations where her extreme tankiness aren't a big issue, but on the few occasions that it is, you can clearly see the other players grow worried for their lives (heh).

On the one hand, there are ways to deal with this problem — the bigger, badder enemies focus exclusively on the tank, and they’re happy to leave the lesser targets to others. They choose to watch and enjoy seeing the lesser targets get taken down by their allies that are weaker.

OTOH, there should be plenty of times when the fact that combat erupts means that the PCs have already lost. They’re in a tense social situation, but their quarry will scoot out the door the moment actual combat starts, and then their opportunity is gone.

However, all of that should be mediated by the fact that the player chose to build their PC this way, and that means that they should get opportunities to shine when doing the thing they’re best at. The key is to make sure that happens often enough, but not too often.

Trying to adjust rules for a PC intending to break the game is fruitless. A better way of dealing with that mentality is don't challenge them at all. Just make it pathetically easy so they get bored. When they ask why tell them they broke the game, made a no fun no win scenario for you and everyone else, and you're not going to bother trying to pivot each session around them combat wise.

4 minutes ago, 2P51 said:

Trying to adjust rules for a PC intending to break the game is fruitless. A better way of dealing with that mentality is don't challenge them at all. Just make it pathetically easy so they get bored. When they ask why tell them they broke the game, made a no fun no win scenario for you and everyone else, and you're not going to bother trying to pivot each session around them combat wise.

I like to think of scenarios like this being set up by a Thrawn-type of enemy, who is watching the PCs destroy the troopers and waltz through the scenario to grab some minor piece of a very large puzzle. And then he does it all over again with a slightly different scenario. All the while, he is watching them and monitoring their reactions, and seeing if/when they might start wondering if they are rats trapped in his maze.

But combat and fighting only leads you deeper into the maze.

I enjoy having the option of breaking someone's armor or gear with 2 Triumphs. Minion groups could even accomplish this, with their group skills often giving them skill ranks beyond what even a Rival has. " Target the big guy first! , one of the Stormtroopers yells, as all of them ready their E-11's and fire at will."

Or the minion group just procs a few crits until the big guy goes down. Or someone pulls a weapon with stun quality and ignores soak completely or has the talent or has pierce or has breach or … or … or … .

At what point the game becomes broken? And I am speaking from the perspective of the verpine pilot with soak 2 who usually goes down in round of shooting if he is silly enough to not hide behind the big guys in the group. Is the purpose of the big guy not exactly this, handling combat situation which are too dangerous for others and actually be the visible target and take most of the pain and damage, because he can deal with that? Use his bodyguard talent or circle of shelter talent to actually take hits for the group and shrug them of thanks to his soak and or reflect?

And is this breaking the game talk not out of place when the suggestions intentionally aims to make reflect twice as good and make the jedi guy with bodyguard now 4 times better than the big wookie marauder/bodyguard who actually stands in the way?

How is something like soak 13 broken?

Basically, nothing as written in the game is broken if your GM knows how to handle it.

We implemented a few house rules that seems to work pretty fine. All these changes pretend to "canonize" some elements.

- Brawn only adds half of it's value to Soak (rounded up your choice, we round up). Armor have higher values (up to double). The final results is above the same BUT you erradicate Soak-Muscle monsters and also add a really wide variety of armor options. Talents apply the same way.

- Armors can add from 0 to 3 Durable Talent based on its resistance/model (light/heavy or maybe just a good alloy).

Now other rules linked to those ones.

- Division of weapon/armor scale with Vehicle (or light armor) x5 and Starship (or heavy armor) x10. x5 and x10 respectively.

- Added "Immobilize and Stun" to "Stun" Weapons. Also Ions on space but its rarity is now 8+.

- Lighsabers have Breach X, ignore any non-energy based materials. (Exceptions: Zillo Beast and "magik" weapons).

- Cortosis feature disappears (at least as concept against lightsabers) .

Glad to help

1 hour ago, Josep Maria said:

We implemented a few house rules that seems to work pretty fine. All these changes pretend to "canonize" some elements.

- Brawn only adds half of it's value to Soak (rounded up your choice, we round up). Armor have higher values (up to double). The final results is above the same BUT you erradicate Soak-Muscle monsters and also add a really wide variety of armor options. Talents apply the same way.

- Armors can add from 0 to 3 Durable Talent based on its resistance/model (light/heavy or maybe just a good alloy).

Now other rules linked to those ones.

- Division of weapon/armor scale with Vehicle (or light armor) x5 and Starship (or heavy armor). x5 and x10 respectively.

- Added "Immobilize and Stun" to "Stun" Weapons. Also Ions on space but its rarity is now 8+.

- Lighsabers have Breach X, ingnore any non-energy based materials. (Exceptions: Zillo Beast and "magik" weapons).

- Cortosis feature disappears (at least as concept against lightsabers) .

Glad to help

Good to see ya back bud.

Same to you mate