Hello. I am starting a Char Gen session on Thursday, the first time i have GMed a full campaign of any system, and I have a couple of questions:

The background of these questions are pretty much about the gungan personal shield in the Nexus of Power books as one of the players wants it and I need to make sure both of us understand what he is getting for his credits.

Firstly, this item has defensive 2 and deflection 2. Now, the wording in the core rules for these qualities is garbage. Does the quality increase the defence BY it's rating or UP TO it's rating? Given that the former could result in defence ratings higher than a capital ship, i'm leaning towards the latter. Or does it work differently for each quality? (Defensive is by, deflection is up to).

Secondly, Defensive ratings don't stack at all, right? So if the gungan was not wearing any defensive armour and got staggered or disoriented (a condition which reduces the defensive quality to 0 for the G.Shield) he would have no melee defense, correct? But would still have a ranged defense of 2? If he was wearing an armour 1 or in cover, his melee defense would be 1 and his ranged would be 2? That sounds right but the defense boosting qualities have been a bit vague and confusing for me so far.

Thirdly, because this is a shield in the off-hand, and a weapon in the main hand, do all attacks while wearing the shield count as two weapon fighting attacks? In that case, I assume that Defensive and Deflection aren't qualities you need to trigger the off-hand weapon to use, right?

Thanks for anyone that can provide an opinion on these questions. I've been doing some reading myself but defence is...nebulous, to say the least.

Hrm, now I have to go look at the books again.

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Firstly, this item has defensive 2 and deflection 2. Now, the wording in the core rules for these qualities is garbage. Does the quality increase the defense BY it's rating or UP TO it's rating? Given that the former could result in defence ratings higher than a capital ship, i'm leaning towards the latter. Or does it work differently for each quality? (Defensive is by, deflection is up to).

If you look at the shield online HERE you can see it references both deflect (adds setback = to rating to ranged attacks against the target) and defense (adds setback = to rating to melee attacks against the target). That's pretty straightforward IMO...

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Thirdly, because this is a shield in the off-hand, and a weapon in the main hand, do all attacks while wearing the shield count as two weapon fighting attacks? In that case, I assume that Defensive and Deflection aren't qualities you need to trigger the off-hand weapon to use, right?

You are only attacking with 1 weapon so it would follow the rules of single weapon combat normally. You can choose to utilize the shield as a bashing weapon and make it a two weapon attack, but normally it would be considered a passive piece of equipment, hence the passive skills deflection and defensive.

54 minutes ago, Ender07 said:

Defense does stack. For example, if the wielder also has some armor that provides defense of +1, is in cover (+1), and has the shield (+2), then the attacker would add 4 setback to their ranged attack against that person. If that same player in my example was staggered or disoriented, he/she would add setback to their check, the attacker wouldn't be adding that to their pool at all.

Close.

The following was a question answered by Sam Stewart.

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Q: The rulebook states that different sources of defense don't stack. Is this referring to different sources of personal defense, such as multiple layers of armor, or to any sources of defense, such as armor and cover.

A: Unless a source of defense specifically states that it stacks with other sources of defense, then it does not stack. Armor and cover, for example, do not stack; a character can only benefit from one of these sources of defense at a time.

So in the original example, it would be 3 setback.

My general rule of thumb, if it says it increases your ranged or melee defense, then it stacks. Otherwise, you take whichever value is highest. The same goes for general Defense.

The Sam's ruling is to to mitigate large dice pools. So feel free to dispense with it and use your own judgement at your table.

53 minutes ago, Ender07 said:

Defense does stack.

You sure about that? It's a widely-discussed and debated topic but the devs keep coming back to say that no, it doesn't stack. Under duress, the players and GM pick the best defense rating and that's it. There are a limited number of Talents that say you can increase Defense but by and large, it's my understanding that these are few and far between.

Well crap, now I feel like a derp...lol...at least the rest of my post is right. (I hope?)

1 hour ago, Ender07 said:

Well crap, now I feel like a derp...lol...at least the rest of my post is right. (I hope?)

This is one of those rules that doesn't really make a lot of sense in play, so no derp required. Lots of house rules around this, and I'm inclined to follow suit. If a PC is in a suit of armor, behind a wall, and they have a personal shield, it makes sense that all three would have to be defeated to harm the character. Yeah, that does mean a lot of dice. It also means that I'm aiming at the wrong thing for that PC, as a GM. If I can't hurt them physicallly , I have to hurt them emotionally .

7 minutes ago, themensch said:

This is one of those rules that doesn't really make a lot of sense in play, so no derp required. Lots of house rules around this, and I'm inclined to follow suit. If a PC is in a suit of armor, behind a wall, and they have a personal shield, it makes sense that all three would have to be defeated to harm the character. Yeah, that does mean a lot of dice. It also means that I'm aiming at the wrong thing for that PC, as a GM. If I can't hurt them physicallly , I have to hurt them emotionally .

That's pretty much how I took it for the past 2+ years...we have about 10+ sets of dice at our table of 5 so we don't have a shortage when rolling larger dice pools. I was always under the impression that if someone had armor (+1), were behind a wall (+1), and had a shield still partially helping defend them (+2) that it would only make sense that you have to overcome all of those things before you can actually shoot the target...hence 4 setback because it's so much more difficult to try and shoot them since they are so well protected. I am probably going to keep running it like this because that makes the most sense IMO.

1 hour ago, Ender07 said:

I am probably going to keep running it like this because that makes the most sense IMO.

Me too. I can find ways where RAW makes sense, so I intend to do it case-by case. If someone's leaning out of cover to shoot, then sure, I can say we can nullify that cover somewhat. It's all in how it's narrated, after all.

The current RAW (as per last dev response on the topic other than "we're reviewing it") is that using a Gungan personal shield would give you Melee Defense 2 and Ranged Defense 2.

Personally, myself and a number of other GMs go the wording of the Defensive and Deflection qualities, and that the shield would give you a +2 to any existing Melee Defense or Ranged Defense you've got; so combine a shield with armored clothing gives a Melee and Ranged Defense of 3 each. But this is done with the caveat that multiple instances of Defensive don't stack with each other and that multiple instances of Deflection don't stack with each other, and you only get the best bonus provided. Thus, you couldn't carry two Gungan shields to get a +4 boost to Melee and Ranged Defense, nor could you combo a Gungan shield with a vibrosword to get +3 to Melee Defense.

21 hours ago, Ender07 said:

Well crap, now I feel like a derp...lol...at least the rest of my post is right. (I hope?)

Don't mind, we have so many conflicting dev posts on defense that the developers down right told us that they don't know how it is supposed to work. Which basically means that a table can pick his own poisen and stick to it.

As rule of thumb: 2 setback dice are roughly equal to one purple difficulty dice, shields get up to 3 defense, weapons up to iirc 3 or 4/3, armor up to 3 and talents can increase it further by one or two. So if you allow to stack all those sources you can get up to checks which have about 10 setback dice. Or basically 5 extra purple dice to whatever the base difficulty was. That is indeed quite the formidable defense, and it might become nearly impossible to hit, which is one of the reasons the defs did not allow defense to stack up.

So as GM you choose which sources stack, which don't or just down.right set a cap on defense dice, like RAW did for vehicle combat anyway, which caps out at 4 dice. Which is btw how we play it at our table, everything stacks, but the cap is 4, which works out for us just fine.

Here btw the roll statistics for a defense monster with 2 ranks of defensive stance and 10 defense in a melee fight against a a genius with 5/7 in melee and is protected by 2 ranks of bodyguard by his buddy who stands back to back with him.

That is basically as good as it gets: http://game2.ca/eote/?montecarlo=100000#proficiency=5&ability=2&boost=2&challenge=3&setback=10

edit: So you are picking as well how long fights should last and how often not landing a hit in a round of combat is acceptable.

On 2/28/2017 at 9:18 AM, eva02soul said:

Thirdly, because this is a shield in the off-hand, and a weapon in the main hand, do all attacks while wearing the shield count as two weapon fighting attacks? In that case, I assume that Defensive and Deflection aren't qualities you need to trigger the off-hand weapon to use, right?

No, it doesn't count as two weapon fighting unless you are trying to make an attack with both at the same time. Defensive and Deflection are passive qualities that are active just by having the object properly equipped.

The shield does use up a hand, so no using weapons that need two hands to operate (staffs, rifles, missile tubes..), but that's about it.