2 hours ago, Aetrion said:

Because your constant complaining about "muh concerns" simply doesn't mean anything, your concerns are subjective. It's an alternate mechanic for people who want cover to be a very strong tactical option that can counter ranged attacks extremely well if it isn't circumvented in some way , if you aren't one of those people then this isn't for you, pure and simple.

I mean why are you complaining? Because you want me to change it? When it comes to houserules and alternate mechanics there is an unlimited possible number, so there is no reason to change it. Just create your own that you're happy with instead.

Complaining that it's too easily accessible or provides too much damage reduction is entirely a subjective opinion. My whole reason for proposing it is that I think there should be a powerful damage reduction mechanic that everyone can use. That's also a matter of taste entirely, but then I'm not trying to tell people who prefer it the way it is that they need to change their minds because I have concerns about the system as it is originally written.

Complaining that it slows down the game is also subjective. Slower simply isn't always bad. If a conflict resolves in a single turn and initiative winds up deciding who wins then it's definitely going too fast. The fact that all good defenses are gated behind serious XP investment and so many of them can reduce attacks to zero damage makes this game extremely prone to having such vastly divergent survivability from one character to the next that it becomes a real burden for the GM to create encounters that are neither too long nor too short.

Making house rules to tilt the system towards you and your groups preferred style of play is exactly what house rules are for and I can respect that. I think this post got a lot of negative responses because you presented your house rule as an improvement to the current system rather than a niche options for people who wanted longer, more tactical combat cover mechanics. In my experience, the folks around here tend to be pretty protective of this system because of how well designed and balanced it is. Anyone suggesting that they've found a way to improve it had better come with some really well thought out and balanced stuff.

But hey, lots of people like myself were at fault here too. For me personally, I fancy myself a bit of a amateur game designer, and am often overly critical of rules that I don't see as good design. I should have been more open minded to the idea that just because a rule isn't right for everyone doesn't mean that someone won't find it right for their group. Honestly, you obviously put a lot of thought into the rule and posted it in hopes of maybe helping others who felt the same way. You didn't have to do that and me responding with negativity only hurt the community by discouraging others from posting in the future. Please except my apology. I don't think your rule will every be right for me and my group but I appreciate that you decided to share your idea.

On 4/7/2017 at 2:28 PM, Aetrion said:

I find all these arguments kind of silly because this mechanic already exists for the most part if you're playing F&D and it's more balanced than any other defensive mechanic in the game as far as I'm concerned. I don't see anyone going on and on about how broken Soresu Defenders are.

I don't see your point about stun weapons, you get the same damage reduction at the same cost. It's the exact same as Parry/Reflect against stun, which again, nobody is complaining about.

So why post it here then? You act like we robbed you when we didnt go yay this is awesome. It is not awesome. it is problematic. For all the reasons you have ignored.

1 hour ago, SladeWeston said:

Making house rules to tilt the system towards you and your groups preferred style of play is exactly what house rules are for and I can respect that. I think this post got a lot of negative responses because you presented your house rule as an improvement to the current system rather than a niche options for people who wanted longer, more tactical combat cover mechanics. In my experience, the folks around here tend to be pretty protective of this system because of how well designed and balanced it is. Anyone suggesting that they've found a way to improve it had better come with some really well thought out and balanced stuff.

But hey, lots of people like myself were at fault here too. For me personally, I fancy myself a bit of a amateur game designer, and am often overly critical of rules that I don't see as good design. I should have been more open minded to the idea that just because a rule isn't right for everyone doesn't mean that someone won't find it right for their group. Honestly, you obviously put a lot of thought into the rule and posted it in hopes of maybe helping others who felt the same way. You didn't have to do that and me responding with negativity only hurt the community by discouraging others from posting in the future. Please except my apology. I don't think your rule will every be right for me and my group but I appreciate that you decided to share your idea.

As far as I'm concerned it is an improvement over the current system.

I don't think you need to apologize, you made your points and I think they are valid if you want to play a certain style of game. What annoyed me is this insistence that I have to "address them" like if I don't agree with them I'm not acknowledging they even exist.

From my personal perspective this game has a big problem with the way you can push characters to have utterly disproportional amounts of firepower or survivability, because it creates groups that just no longer work together. When someone comes in with the 7 brawn, subdermal armor cyberneticist+gadgeteer rocking 12 or more soak the game is simply screwed up. Same goes for someone who lugs in a jury rigged autofiring bowcaster. There is no way for the GM to design a good combat encounter where those kinds of characters can stand side by side with a diplomat who wields a blaster pistol.

Because there are no freely available defensive moves and no straight up level ups or anything like that that non-combat characters become completely useless, especially when you're playing with some people who are obsessed with the Star Wars aesthetic and go for that Han Solo look of heavy clothing and a blaster pistol, and some people play for effect. That isn't even necessarily bad roleplaying, after all, the character has to react to the story as it unfolds, and if the guy with the blaster pistol flounders while the guy with the autofire rifle dominates every single encounter what excuse do you still have to lug the worthless popgun around?

This game does develop a significant issue with relative strength of characters diverging so absurdly as they gain XP that fights just stop being fun. I can throw in a super tough enemy that only the combat characters have any hope of even damaging or surviving a single round of combat with, and all the non combat characters stand around uselessly, or I can throw in enemies that everyone can damage and survive, and autofire tank man will just kill them all in one round, unless they win initiative, in which case he gets a mild chuckle out of their damage before killing them all.

I mean sure, you can have a good mix of encounters suited to each character's strengths in the story, but the fact still remains that as your characters gain in power they oftentimes turn into specialists where it's just one person tackling whatever they are best at while everyone else isn't involved anymore. Combat is the absolute worst time for that to happen, because those are supposed to be the high tension life or death moments where it's everyone on deck.

In order to really fix this problem some of the fundamentals of the game would have to be changed, like the way Soak works for example is just bad, because having extreme soak makes you literally immune to most attacks, especially if you can get cortosis in there somehow to negate those pesky breach weapons. Total immunity should simply never happen.

The fact that brawn grants you soak is also just broken. No other stat in the game grants you immensely powerful secondary stats. Are agility based characters harder to hit? Nope. You need to use talents that cost strain to be harder to hit. A non-brawn character is always going to be at least 2-5 soak behind a brawn character, and that's enough of a difference to go from getting turned into minced meat by a heavy blaster rifle to getting a sensual massage from one.

Armor isn't actually very good unless you have crafted it yourself and sewed the "superior" patch onto it, and are a trained armor wearer. Military gear? Pish posh, look at this snuggie I made from 250 credits worth crusty socks, that's 50% more armor right there.

Bottom line is, soak should be a lot more normalized across different characters than it is. No character should ever be flat out immune to weapons fire. No character should ever be 3 or 4 times harder to hurt than another character. Light blaster pistols should never simply stop being threatening all together, because someone would have to roll 7 successes to do a single point of damage. Having damage reduction dialed in so that it's not possible to ever become completely immune to damage should be kind of a no brainer in a well designed system, but in SWRP that's not just easy to do, but a go-to strategy with a combat oriented character.

Likewise damage should be a lot more normalized where the damage output of some weapons isn't literally an order of magnitude higher than others. There is simply no place for blaster pistols in the system outside aesthetics, and if you build your enemies around aesthetics they simply can't provide a reasonable challenge to players. It's trivially easy as is to build a character who can kill an entire 5 man squad of stormtroopers in a single round while also being essentially immune to their attacks.

Maybe you could have another rule that puts soak in its place a bit, like, maybe, all bonus damage gained from extra successes ignores soak, as it's assumed that it's hitting weakpoints in the armor. That way at the high end it matters more how skilled you are than what equipment you have, so your Han Solos aren't just scrubs who didn't buy the right equipment to dominate.

41 minutes ago, Aetrion said:

As far as I'm concerned it is an improvement over the current system.

I don't think you need to apologize, you made your points and I think they are valid if you want to play a certain style of game. What annoyed me is this insistence that I have to "address them" like if I don't agree with them I'm not acknowledging they even exist.

From my personal perspective this game has a big problem with the way you can push characters to have utterly disproportional amounts of firepower or survivability, because it creates groups that just no longer work together. When someone comes in with the 7 brawn, subdermal armor cyberneticist+gadgeteer rocking 12 or more soak the game is simply screwed up. Same goes for someone who lugs in a jury rigged autofiring bowcaster. There is no way for the GM to design a good combat encounter where those kinds of characters can stand side by side with a diplomat who wields a blaster pistol.

Because there are no freely available defensive moves and no straight up level ups or anything like that that non-combat characters become completely useless, especially when you're playing with some people who are obsessed with the Star Wars aesthetic and go for that Han Solo look of heavy clothing and a blaster pistol, and some people play for effect. That isn't even necessarily bad roleplaying, after all, the character has to react to the story as it unfolds, and if the guy with the blaster pistol flounders while the guy with the autofire rifle dominates every single encounter what excuse do you still have to lug the worthless popgun around?

This game does develop a significant issue with relative strength of characters diverging so absurdly as they gain XP that fights just stop being fun. I can throw in a super tough enemy that only the combat characters have any hope of even damaging or surviving a single round of combat with, and all the non combat characters stand around uselessly, or I can throw in enemies that everyone can damage and survive, and autofire tank man will just kill them all in one round, unless they win initiative, in which case he gets a mild chuckle out of their damage before killing them all.

I mean sure, you can have a good mix of encounters suited to each character's strengths in the story, but the fact still remains that as your characters gain in power they oftentimes turn into specialists where it's just one person tackling whatever they are best at while everyone else isn't involved anymore. Combat is the absolute worst time for that to happen, because those are supposed to be the high tension life or death moments where it's everyone on deck.

In order to really fix this problem some of the fundamentals of the game would have to be changed, like the way Soak works for example is just bad, because having extreme soak makes you literally immune to most attacks, especially if you can get cortosis in there somehow to negate those pesky breach weapons. Total immunity should simply never happen.

The fact that brawn grants you soak is also just broken. No other stat in the game grants you immensely powerful secondary stats. Are agility based characters harder to hit? Nope. You need to use talents that cost strain to be harder to hit. A non-brawn character is always going to be at least 2-5 soak behind a brawn character, and that's enough of a difference to go from getting turned into minced meat by a heavy blaster rifle to getting a sensual massage from one.

Armor isn't actually very good unless you have crafted it yourself and sewed the "superior" patch onto it, and are a trained armor wearer. Military gear? Pish posh, look at this snuggie I made from 250 credits worth crusty socks, that's 50% more armor right there.

Bottom line is, soak should be a lot more normalized across different characters than it is. No character should ever be flat out immune to weapons fire. No character should ever be 3 or 4 times harder to hurt than another character. Light blaster pistols should never simply stop being threatening all together, because someone would have to roll 7 successes to do a single point of damage. Having damage reduction dialed in so that it's not possible to ever become completely immune to damage should be kind of a no brainer in a well designed system, but in SWRP that's not just easy to do, but a go-to strategy with a combat oriented character.

Likewise damage should be a lot more normalized where the damage output of some weapons isn't literally an order of magnitude higher than others. There is simply no place for blaster pistols in the system outside aesthetics, and if you build your enemies around aesthetics they simply can't provide a reasonable challenge to players. It's trivially easy as is to build a character who can kill an entire 5 man squad of stormtroopers in a single round while also being essentially immune to their attacks.

Maybe you could have another rule that puts soak in its place a bit, like, maybe, all bonus damage gained from extra successes ignores soak, as it's assumed that it's hitting weakpoints in the armor. That way at the high end it matters more how skilled you are than what equipment you have, so your Han Solos aren't just scrubs who didn't buy the right equipment to dominate.

So your solution was to create a new way to create a character with disproportionate soak? That is your solution? And armor works the way it does because unless you are an armor wearing character in star wars you dont wear armor. So they made armor behave like that.

Sounds like your complaint is soak is a problem so you made it worse... which makes no sense. The better fix would be to assign more set back for cover which by the way is raw. And would behave more like cover does in that it makes you harder to hit. Which is how cover works in real life. Cover does not give you more soak. It makes you harder to hit.

This isn't a solution to the issue of soak getting too high in general, this is merely an easy way to pull all characters up a few points to make the gap more manageable while introducing a cost to doing so that makes this increase have diminishing returns at the high end. Fixing the problem completely would require a much more extensive rewrite of the system.

Making things harder to hit when they can still be obliterated in a single turn or take zero damage isn't a solution either. Under ideal circumstances it should be fairly easy to hit a target, but it should take multiple rounds to defeat it. It's normalizing the random element by increasing the sample size. The issue this game has is that how many rounds it takes to defeat a target very easily goes to one or never, when it should be sitting at around 3-4.

People shouldn't feel like the dice rolls are the most important thing in the game, they should feel like their decisions are the most important thing in the game. That means an interesting interplay of plays and counterplays, spanning a number of turns so that there is a back and forth, with dice rolls that are likely enough to go through that your abilities feel reliable, but with enough of a chance of failure for no plan to ever be perfect.

You make some interesting points.

Personally, I wish they hadn't tied soak to the Brawn characteristic. That, in turn, would have allowed them to be more aggressive about how much soak/defense they granted with their armor and defensive abilities. High brawn characters would still gain a benefit from having more WT and encumbrance to wear heavier armors, but, as a GM, you could still arrange situations where the group was vulnerable. It would also avoid situations where a human in full battle armor has half the soak as a naked wookiee.

One house rule I've been considering to address your concerns is the idea of having cover increase the difficulty of the incoming attacks (by say 1 purple for light cover and 2 for heavy) rather than adding soak? Something like that might prevent players from reaching a critical mass of soak while still providing a substantial cover benefit. It also makes a certain amount of sense from a flavor perspective to have people with less of their body exposed be harder to hit.

As for your particular house rule. Can you provide some additional insights about why you picked Cunning? Was the idea to boost the defensive capabilities for high Cunning/Willpower characters?

I agree that decoupling soak from brawn would go a long way toward making the game more balanced. The armor system in general could use an overhaul. Defense is also just kind of a weak system because of there being so many sources of defense that if you allow stacking it makes hitting people with stacked defense nearly impossible. The personal deflector shield, which the game makes out to be this incredibly powerful item that costs a heap of money and gives off radiation that makes people not want to run it permanently and the GM can make it run of energy is pretty much never actually used because the actual effect is so weak. Same with starship shields. In the movies they make them out to be this big deal and actually show laser blasts dissipate in a bright flash of light near the ship as the bolts are torn apart by powerful magnetic eddies, but in this game, meh, just a tiny weeny black die that doesn't bother a veteran gunner at all.

The problem with Soak is that it's allowed to exceed the total amount of damage inflicted. That should simply never happen. Every weapon in the game should be dangerous to every character, because if that's not provided you wind up with different characters in the party inhabiting an entire different number space for reasonable combat encounters. That makes things difficult for the DM and frustrating for the players. 10 stormtroopers shouldn't be "whatever, they can't hurt me at all and I can kill them all in one action with autofire" to some characters and "I can kill one or two of them per turn and they will take me down in two good hits" for others. That's simply not a healthy proportion of difference between two characters who might very easily be playing in the same game. What's worse, since this difference is largely based on equipment that's the kind of dynamic you'd be seeing between Baze Malbus and Jyn Erso if you statted out the Rogue One team, because one was a heavy armor autofire character and the other was a light armor blaster pistol character.

I'm not sure if difficulty increases from cover solve the problem. Basically when you're designing a combat system you want to have the outcomes be somewhat predictable, so that people can make good choices and clever plans but not so predictable that you can calculate the outcome before it happens, and there is no more difference between plan and action. Usually the way you accomplish that is through multiple contests, essentially using multiple samples of the random outcome.

Basically, if you had two characters, and the chances to win a fight were weighted 40/60, then you could roll a die once, and determine the victor right on the spot. But that would mean that 40% of the time character 1 would destroy character 2 with a flawless victory, despite the fact that he's actually 50% less powerful. That doesn't make a lot of sense. So you could roll 1000 conflicts between the two, determine the victor by whoever won the most, but deal damage to them according to how much their opponent won. If you rolled 1000 times though you'd very predictably end up with character 2 winning while taking 40% damage, because in such a large sample size the outcome eventually starts to very closely resemble the chances. But what if you rolled, let's say, 5 times. That would still leave you with a small chance of both characters scoring a flawless victory, it would leave you with a decent enough chance of character 1 winning that character 2 it isn't a sure bet, and it has a decent chance of character 2 taking at least some damage in the fight. Now you got an outcome that's predictable enough to make plans around character 2 winning, without guaranteeing the win, and enough contests that character 2 probably won't walk away unharmed.

Sample size matters in good combat systems. If you don't have enough samples the outcome swings all the way one way or all the way the other in an instant, with no predictive capabilities outside of just naming the odds. If you have too much of a sample size the outcome becomes entirely predictable, and you'll know pretty much exactly what will happen before even rolling it. You need a sample size that strikes a good balance, leaves room for an upset but doesn't consist entirely of one sided victories, leaves you sure enough to make plans, but never certain. This is why hitpoints exist in games like this, because they organically enforce that the conflict will run for a number of rounds, giving us that sample size we need for the fights to give interesting and nuanced outcomes. You could just calculate the odds and throw a single die, but that wouldn't be entertaining, or you could calculate the odds and name a victor as though you had rolled infinite samples, but that wouldn't be entertaining either. Kicking those odds back and forth 3, 4, 5, 6 times however, a small sample with a good chance of error, makes for interesting results.

That's why there is a problem in this game with characters who can end fights in a single turn, or soak incoming damage indefinitely. They break the sample size of contests required for a nuanced outcome. Now, changing the difficulty of rolls against people in cover tweaks the chances, but it doesn't fix the sample size.

Cunning because it's the stat specifically described as allowing characters rapid insight and forming of plans, but it has absolutely zero utility in combat, which I think is a failing of the system. Being a clever tactician should be a thing, but the only ways in which the system incorporates tacticians is through rolling Leadership or Knowledge Warfare, Cunning never plays into it at all, even though that is supposedly the stat that makes people innately able to comprehend what's going on around them and quickly come up with a plan to deal with it.

1 hour ago, Aetrion said:

I agree that decoupling soak from brawn would go a long way toward making the game more balanced. The armor system in general could use an overhaul. Defense is also just kind of a weak system because of there being so many sources of defense that if you allow stacking it makes hitting people with stacked defense nearly impossible. The personal deflector shield, which the game makes out to be this incredibly powerful item that costs a heap of money and gives off radiation that makes people not want to run it permanently and the GM can make it run of energy is pretty much never actually used because the actual effect is so weak. Same with starship shields. In the movies they make them out to be this big deal and actually show laser blasts dissipate in a bright flash of light near the ship as the bolts are torn apart by powerful magnetic eddies, but in this game, meh, just a tiny weeny black die that doesn't bother a veteran gunner at all.

The problem with Soak is that it's allowed to exceed the total amount of damage inflicted. That should simply never happen. Every weapon in the game should be dangerous to every character, because if that's not provided you wind up with different characters in the party inhabiting an entire different number space for reasonable combat encounters. That makes things difficult for the DM and frustrating for the players. 10 stormtroopers shouldn't be "whatever, they can't hurt me at all and I can kill them all in one action with autofire" to some characters and "I can kill one or two of them per turn and they will take me down in two good hits" for others. That's simply not a healthy proportion of difference between two characters who might very easily be playing in the same game. What's worse, since this difference is largely based on equipment that's the kind of dynamic you'd be seeing between Baze Malbus and Jyn Erso if you statted out the Rogue One team, because one was a heavy armor autofire character and the other was a light armor blaster pistol character.

I'm not sure if difficulty increases from cover solve the problem. Basically when you're designing a combat system you want to have the outcomes be somewhat predictable, so that people can make good choices and clever plans but not so predictable that you can calculate the outcome before it happens, and there is no more difference between plan and action. Usually the way you accomplish that is through multiple contests, essentially using multiple samples of the random outcome.

Basically, if you had two characters, and the chances to win a fight were weighted 40/60, then you could roll a die once, and determine the victor right on the spot. But that would mean that 40% of the time character 1 would destroy character 2 with a flawless victory, despite the fact that he's actually 50% less powerful. That doesn't make a lot of sense. So you could roll 1000 conflicts between the two, determine the victor by whoever won the most, but deal damage to them according to how much their opponent won. If you rolled 1000 times though you'd very predictably end up with character 2 winning while taking 40% damage, because in such a large sample size the outcome eventually starts to very closely resemble the chances. But what if you rolled, let's say, 5 times. That would still leave you with a small chance of both characters scoring a flawless victory, it would leave you with a decent enough chance of character 1 winning that character 2 it isn't a sure bet, and it has a decent chance of character 2 taking at least some damage in the fight. Now you got an outcome that's predictable enough to make plans around character 2 winning, without guaranteeing the win, and enough contests that character 2 probably won't walk away unharmed. Sample size matters in good combat systems.

That's why there is a problem in this game with characters who can end fights in a single turn, or soak incoming damage indefinitely. They break the sample size of contests required for a nuanced outcome. Now, changing the difficulty of rolls against people in cover tweaks the chances, but it doesn't fix the sample size.

Cunning because it's the stat specifically described as allowing characters rapid insight and forming of plans, but it has absolutely zero utility in combat, which I think is a failing of the system. Being a clever tactician should be a thing, but the only ways in which the system incorporates tacticians is through rolling Leadership or Knowledge Warfare, Cunning never plays into it at all, even though that is supposedly the stat that makes people innately able to comprehend what's going on around them and quickly come up with a plan to deal with it.

While I agree with some of what you are saying, in the 4-5 campaigns I've GM'ed and about twice that I've played in I haven't experienced anything as extreme as that. Perhaps it's because I tend to play with a more mature/older group of gamers but I've never had a character who was undamageable. Of course, I had the wookiee with 10 soak and the x2 18dmg autofire attacks round one, but I never really felt that was too difficult to overcome. High soak characters are almost always vulnerable to strain threshold reduction which I almost always work into my combat via opposing commanders threatening the PC's or Stun dmg weapons. It's also worth mentioning that combat encounters only account for about a 5th of a typicals sessions encounters. Players who decided to become hyperfocused combat monsters either find they spend the majority of the session twiddling their thumbs or they cross spec into non-combat careers.

I suggested the alternate cover rule because it accomplishes much of what your rule does. Someone is cover is going to take 1-2 less damage an attack while avoiding damage completely a small percentage of the time. No, I suppose it doesn't prevent someone from getting 1-shot but again, I have simply not seen this in my games. Do you find that players regularly go down within the first round of your game or is this more a concern about NPCs?

I will also say that I totally disagree with the idea that damage should never to 100% soaked. How many times have we seen scenes in movies where someone throws a punch and it tough guy getting just smirks. Or soldiers firing frantically at advancing droids unable to do any damage as their shots bounce off. I'm fine that situations like those can occur as long as they occur in an appropriately small percentage of the games.

Like you, I do feel Cunning should have a greater effect on combat. In my games, to combat this, I will often have my players make Survival or Streetwise rolls prior to combat to represent tactical advantage or penalties due to the battlefield. Normally this just amounts to boost or setback for one side or the other. Although admittedly that doesn't leave the Cunning character much to do once the combat starts.

I like the idea of dropping soak from brawn and expanding the amount of soak that you can get from around.

As far as cover adding to soak goes I can see both sides of the argument. On one hand you are either hit or you aren't so cover makes no difference. Low success means a glancing blow while high successes equal a solid hit. On the other hand powerful weapons can shoot right through many types of cover and ignore them entirely. In order to model this it may be worth exploring how features like piercing and breach could ignore the difficulty upgrades from defense and cover. That way an armor piercing blast/bullet is still dangerous to a high armor (defense) character while still having the damage reduced some by the armor (soak).

Unfortunately the system is built around soak being the primary method of defense rather than the difficulty to hit something. I don't know where the sweet spot is between the two, but it is a fun thought experiment.

2 hours ago, SladeWeston said:

I will also say that I totally disagree with the idea that damage should never to 100% soaked. How many times have we seen scenes in movies where someone throws a punch and it tough guy getting just smirks. Or soldiers firing frantically at advancing droids unable to do any damage as their shots bounce off. I'm fine that situations like those can occur as long as they occur in an appropriately small percentage of the games.

I understand that it makes sense from a thematic standpoint for this to happen sometimes, but from a gameplay standpoint it's terrible. For one, in all of those movie scenes where someone is shown to be invincible to a direct attack they are usually just upping the stakes by forcing the protagonists to find a more clever way to take out their enemies. If you're the GM and you're weaving a narrative solution into taking down an opponent who is immune to regular weapons that's fine, in fact, that can be very entertaining to the players. When I make them fight AT-STs or something like that I pretty much always go into a narrative mode where they can take it down through some clever ruse, like making it slip on a repulsor dolly or crushing it with a blast door or dropping a cargo container on it.

The issue is if your protagonist is the one who's completely immune to damage. That doesn't up the stakes, that decreases them. People are also not going to think you're telling a cool story if you defeat that character through a clever solution, they are going to be pissed that you contrived some sort of narrative effect that kills their character.

I think the 10 soak autofire wookie is a problem because it flies in the face of the aesthetic of the films as well if Chewbacca is a a one man army and Han solo would have to roll 4 successes on an attack to kill a single Stormtrooper. Guns are supposed to be the great equalizer, but in this game the biggest and strongest character still dominates just for being able to have more armor and a bigger gun.

9 minutes ago, Aetrion said:

I understand that it makes sense from a thematic standpoint for this to happen sometimes, but from a gameplay standpoint it's terrible. For one, in all of those movie scenes where someone is shown to be invincible to a direct attack they are usually just upping the stakes by forcing the protagonists to find a more clever way to take out their enemies. If you're the GM and you're weaving a narrative solution into taking down an opponent who is immune to regular weapons that's fine, in fact, that can be very entertaining to the players. When I make them fight AT-STs or something like that I pretty much always go into a narrative mode where they can take it down through some clever ruse, like making it slip on a repulsor dolly or crushing it with a blast door or dropping a cargo container on it.

The issue is if your protagonist is the one who's completely immune to damage. That doesn't up the stakes, that decreases them. People are also not going to think you're telling a cool story if you defeat that character through a clever solution, they are going to be pissed that you contrived some sort of narrative effect that kills their character.

I think the 10 soak autofire wookie is a problem because it flies in the face of the aesthetic of the films as well if Chewbacca is a a one man army and Han solo would have to roll 4 successes on an attack to kill a single Stormtrooper. Guns are supposed to be the great equalizer, but in this game the biggest and strongest character still dominates just for being able to have more armor and a bigger gun.

So use peirce, or stun, or... the list goes on. I don't see how making more people have high soak fixes your problem...

5 minutes ago, Aetrion said:

I think the 10 soak autofire wookie is a problem because it flies in the face of the aesthetic of the films as well if Chewbacca is a a one man army and Han solo would have to roll 4 successes on an attack to kill a single Stormtrooper. Guns are supposed to be the great equalizer, but in this game the biggest and strongest character still dominates just for being able to have more armor and a bigger gun.

I don't disagree that high brawn characters can be a challenge narratively but I honestly have never had an issue with them in my games. In my current game we have a 9 soak warden and in the one before that an 11 soak marauder and while both require some combat encounter design concessions, our games run fine. If you are interested, the main things I do to handle high brawn characters are:

1) Include strong social NPC's in any encounter that makes sense. Their job is to threaten, intimidate, mock and otherwise annoy my high brawn characters. I do this because I have found that most high brawn characters have mediocre willpower/Strain Thresholds. Even without Scathing Tirade, a NPC with a strong intimidation check can do 3-4 strain a turn.

2) I reduce the frequency of strain recovery in back to back battles. Basically, even if an encounter ends I often won't allow strain recover unless they truely have a moment to take a breather. In a running, fast paced series of scenes that may be a while. This ensure that the characters stay stressed in situations that should be stressful.

3) I make sure that most fights have a mixture of stun and non-stun damage. This gives me the flexibility to dial up or down the danger by targeting players based on the ST and WT of party members. This is of course behinds the scene stuff that is blatant GM cheating but it helps to keep things balanced. By having a mix of options, for example, I can target my low strain high brawn character and my wounded but high strain low brawn characters with stun attacks. This is simultaneously more dangerous to the Wookiee Marauder while being less dangerous to the high strain threshold characters.

4) I will often include environmental damage that is hard for a high brawn character to avoid. "Each round everyone has to make a vigilance check to avoid incoming debris or take 2 strain."

I don't include all of those every encounter of course, but I do always try to have at least one or two. By aggressively mixing in strain you can really do a lot to keep high brawn characters afraid. This is particularly true with a lot of the high brawn melee specializations who tend to heavily leverage strain to power their abilities. "Yess... Frenzied Attack all you want big guy, and when the twi'lek dancer exhausts you with a few mean comments you only have yourself to blame."

Most strain damage can still be soaked, though yes, there are a variety of attacks that circumvent soak completely that you can throw at them. The issue is that it gets somewhat predictable, and running pre written adventures often requires a lot of rewrites to make them work.

I personally think something like sand people sniping from a ridge shouldn't ever just be "Oh well, Slug throwers can't hurt me". How are you going to make them circumvent soak in that case?

It's not that there aren't weapons that can deal with high soak characters it, it's that they are all non-standard equipment and the game just gets silly if getting attacked by thugs or sand people or stormtroopers just isn't threatening. It's not that it's impossible for me to make up an enemy that can deal with whatever the players do, it's whether or not we're still playing Star Wars if every stormtrooper now has an under-barrel grenade launcher with shaped thermals that's the problem.

pretty much every blaster has a stun setting... So equipment to deal with them is not unusual. it is in fact pretty common. And slug throwers can always hurt you. especially if you use minion rules.

19 minutes ago, Aetrion said:

Most strain damage can still be soaked, though yes, there are a variety of attacks that circumvent soak completely that you can throw at them. The issue is that it gets somewhat predictable, and running pre written adventures often requires a lot of rewrites to make them work.

I personally think something like sand people sniping from a ridge shouldn't ever just be "Oh well, Slug throwers can't hurt me". How are you going to make them circumvent soak in that case?

It's not that there aren't weapons that can deal with high soak characters it, it's that they are all non-standard equipment and the game just gets silly if getting attacked by thugs or sand people or stormtroopers just isn't threatening. It's not that it's impossible for me to make up an enemy that can deal with whatever the players do, it's whether or not we're still playing Star Wars if every stormtrooper now has an under-barrel grenade launcher with shaped thermals that's the problem.

True most stun damage from weapons is soakable. It is also, my experience, that the typical high brawn character has a ST of about 12 while their WT is often over 20. Add to that the fact that they are often taking strain voluntarily and it has been my experience that you seldom have to do more than 7-8 strain to a high brawn character. So, all things being equal, that is half to a third the damage you have to worry about getting through their high soak.

Now combine that with other sources of unsoakable strain like Fear, Environmental Condition, Coercion checks, Stun Damage (triggered), etc. And I have never found myself lacking for options. I will admit that straight out of the box, most of the premade adventures don't adequately include enough strain to properly threaten high brawn characters. That being said, if a GM isn't tweaking their encounters to fit their players then they are going to reap what they sow. It's is truly a rare adventure that can works, without tweaking, for every group without as least a little customization. I think that's true pretty much regardless of the system.

Sure, but if you play, let's say, Pathfinder or D&D 5th you can be decently sure that all characters are at least somewhat in the same range of numbers for their level, so while there is something to be said for custom encounters, you can usually rely on challenge ratings. Those games also don't have iconic enemies like stromtroopers that you don't want to change, but that shouldn't be completely useless either.

I think the best way to deal with soak would probably be to have it not soak any damage inflicted by successes rolled, and any excess soak beyond the base damage of the weapon instead has to be payed off with advantages to be allowed to activate a crit or damage required weapon quality. That way soak is still extremely good to keep you safe from crits and heavy hits, but if you want to truly minimize the damage you take you need to rely on difficulty upgrades and defense to minimize successes/advantages rolled as well. It would create a point of diminishing returns on soak stacking because you might be able to eliminate the ability for small weapons to crit you, but you can never eliminate all damage.

Then why are you pushing an idea that creates more high soak characters?

On 4/7/2017 at 9:12 AM, SEApocalypse said:

As always at this point I will mention our house-rule:

Defense stacks up to a cap of 4, just like it does in space combat.

So even a trench with amor makes sense, but heavy defensive armor with big shield does not profit from extra defense from a trench, but still profits from the ability to move out of line of sight. Which is btw a great thing to remember when hiding behind any kind of cover and totally within raw.

We also cap Defense at 4.

In addition, Armor/Weapons/Personal Fields simply provide Defense, Parry/Reflect mitigates Damage, Cover reduces Vicious (ie: Cover Defense 1 reduces Vicious -1, to a minimum of 1). Even so, my players never use cover. Don't know why...maybe they're masochists. They move to get closer, but not into cover. They come out from behind cover to engage in melee/brawling when I've indicated certain cover types would benefit them at least for the purposes of having some Defense instead of none.

Yep, definitely masochists.