I had a session tonight and my players ran into their first Nemesis, an assassin droid out of the book. The upgrades freaked them out and they were trying figure out why this foe was so much harder to hit compared to everything, and honestly I didn't have a good answer.

In hindsight as a droid, I should have just said better plating but it raised a valid question that I need to prepare for.

How do you describe how foes with Adversary are so much harder to hit? Only so many of them will experts of predictive dodging, skillful parrying and armor plated. What about the officers and scientists who just have that touch of plot armor?

Non-combat nemeses only have 1 rank of Adversary typically, sometimes none, so it shouldn't be a big deal.

On a mechanical level, the Adversary talent was created specifically to help the GM run combat. There are plenty of talents that provide certain defensive benefits, but they can be hard to remember and cumbersome to apply while the GM is trying to run literally everything else in the game

So, Adversary kind of functions as an amalgamation of all those defensive talents. Also, it can help as an easy "power level" indicator when browsing your catalog of enemies

On a narrative level, you could describe the enemy as particularly well-trained, wily, or dangerous.

On a cinematic level, you could describe Adversary as a small amount of plot-protection for more important "adversaries." It's not undefeatable by any means, but things just tend to go wrong more often when fighting this type of enemy. This is a well established trope of many film & TV genres.

I don't think that "plot-armor", while true, is a very compelling reason to already "freaked out" pcs. That would make me roll my eyes and disengage a little from the story if a gm told me that. As I see it, the job of a gm is to explain abilities like Adversary in a compelling manner. You are halfway there already, every idea you put down is a decent explanation. If you have difficulty coming up with an explanation on the fly, take a look at all the nemeses you might use and try to come up with an explanation as part of session prep.

Non-combat nemeses are the most difficult to interpret adversary upgrades for, as has been implied, but you can use reasons like secret armor, limited use personal shields (or unlimited use if you don't mind your pc's picking it up afterwards), combat training, bodyguards deflecting the shot/hit if the nemesis has bodyguards (most do, right?), the Force (obvious for Force-sensitive nemeses), uncanny luck (Star Wars does a have a bit of silliness to it, try to make your players laugh with this one), a batman-like sense of tactics or body mechanics (a highly intelligent/cunning character may not know how to fight as well as the pc's, but may be able to predict where their strikes and hits would land), the nemesis showing unexpected strength through willpower (like Kylo Ren getting hit with a bowcaster), etc...

All that may not be necessary if you describe the nemesis in a way that makes it clear that s/he is a total badass. They went through their first combat with one already, so part of them knows what to expect. If you spend considerable more time narrating your depiction of this character than you do other NPC's, playing up the traits that make him/her formidable and unique (an unforgiving grimace, a sense of cold foreboding around him/her, an unwavering stare, describing a look that seems to calculate the pc's every move, a Persian cat on his lap), they should pick up on the fact that this character has "plot armor" without you ever needing to break the 4th wall.

5 hours ago, bloody malth said:

All that may not be necessary if you describe the nemesis in a way that makes it clear that s/he is a total badass. They went through their first combat with one already, so part of them knows what to expect. If you spend considerable more time narrating your depiction of this character than you do other NPC's, playing up the traits that make him/her formidable and unique (an unforgiving grimace, a sense of cold foreboding around him/her, an unwavering stare, describing a look that seems to calculate the pc's every move, a Persian cat on his lap), they should pick up on the fact that this character has "plot armor" without you ever needing to break the 4th wall.

Also, that may be overkill. Don't forget that the PC's don't know that their difficulty was raised to a red. That is player knowledge. If they get "freaked out" about an upgrade, it should just be a warning that this is someone who isn't a faceless goon. Not necessarily someone to be deathly afraid of. Now when they run across someone with adversary 3 or higher, make sure the describe the badassery. After all Adversary 3 is limited to people like "Black Sun Vigo" and "Emporer's Hand". They should be scared of those people. And as they did in Rescue at Glare Peak, you don't have to stat every enemy. Just make sure they know that if they stop to fight Vader, they will lose.

Well this wasn't the topic I thought it would be.

Now that you know that this is an issue and may become a question in the future, AND you're having trouble figuring this out on the fly, try to figure out before the session what abilities this Adversary has. Are they an adept force user who deflect blows with their light saber? A nimble guy quick on his toes? A robot with high evasive programming? Armor?

Now to the question that I thought was being asked.

When describing Adversaries I recommend from head to toe. The internet also has lots of Star Wars pictures. Our GM will collect useful pictures of people and space ships so that we can immerse ourselves into the game more easily.

Also, if the players are freaked out by this it gives you a good opportunity to include a fear check as this clearly had an impact on the characters, such as "holy #*#*, that is one tough assassin droid and we might get our butts handed to us. Ok guys, let's run away!"

Also, why is it tough? It's an assassin droid!!

It was more 'why are we missing so much more?'