I think that parry/reflect in Force and Destiny is one of the best systems in this game, allowing characters to spend Strain to avoid taking Wounds. This system IMO works extremely well to get your character out of getting destroyed by powerful attacks while still having a cost attached to it, so the character doesn't just become immune to damage. Any character that doesn't have access to these talents unfortunately only has access to pretty mediocre defensive moves. Dodge, Sidestep and Defensive Stance can be quite good, but Dodge is somewhat unreliable for what it costs to be good at it, and the other two can't be used as a reaction. The biggest stinkers in the defensive lineup are Taking Cover and Guarded Stance, both of which only add a single point of defense, which doesn't stack with any other defense.

So, I just wanted to throw an idea for an alternate mechanic out there that might give taking cover the power and importance it should have. It's written so it doesn't require any changes to the game other than simply replacing what taking cover does mechanically with this new rule.

Here is goes:

A character may use a maneuver to get into cover. Characters remain in cover until they are flushed out (typically by spending 3 advantage on an attack) or move somewhere else. Being in cover allows them to use the following ability:

When the character is targeted by a Ranged(Light), Ranged(Heavy), or Gunnery combat check (before the attack is rolled), he may take the Take Cover incidental. He suffers 3 strain and reduces the damage dealt by all hits from that attack by a number equal to 2 + Cunning.

This may only be used once per attack.

So, the point of this is to make taking cover actually a powerful option for reducing the amount of damage you're taking. Since it reduces damage by all hits it's a very powerful defense against autofire. The whole idea of using advantages to knock enemies out of cover, and having to spend maneuvers to get back into cover will also play much more heavily into fights, since being in cover isn't just a non-stacking bonus you can also just wear as armor, but a powerful defensive strategy.

I would've preferred they kept the whole notion simpler with cover providing a little boost to Soak and then a suggestion chart for types of cover.

I actually like the idea, but would let the GM just assign a value of the rank of cover and reduce damage by the rank when the take cover maneuver is taken.

And I like to remind that this change the character heavily as it becomes a cover game now. Something which is not inline with canon for the most part.

Actually, cover is canon. When characters don't bother with cover they get killed (unless they have script immunity like heroes do), or at the very least wounded. Watch Rogue One again. Or the Hoth battle in ESB. Caught in the open = dead. Unless by "not inline with canon" you mean that people in Star Wars don't bother taking cover. Which is just Star Wars saying (stupidly) that cover isn't heroic. Unless you have the Force, (or are Han Solo or two certain droids) not taking cover is suicide.

We already have a cover mechanic. And while I think more levels of cover than currently allowed would be better I think your suggestion is way to good.

I like the idea of it. Something I've toyed with using as a house rule is changing cover from defense to soak then adding Soft and Hard cover. with Soft cover being soak X, and Hard cover being soak Z (where Z is > X) and hard cover also giving a setback to attacks you make when you are in it. I haven't play tested it, and i'm not sure i am going to as i like to stay pretty close to RAW for myself and my group (shared universe setting with 2 GMs and 20 players atm, so staying close to RAW for consistency is a big thing for us).

Cover just kinda sticks in my craw a bit, 1 setback just doesn't really feel very meaty as i think cover should. I've also toyed with the idea of cover increasing or upgrading difficulty, however as above i haven't played tested it for the same reasons.

3 hours ago, 2P51 said:

I would've preferred they kept the whole notion simpler with cover providing a little boost to Soak and then a suggestion chart for types of cover.

I prefer having a cost attached to defensive maneuvers because it avoids stacking things to the point where simply nothing at all happens when you're under fire. I also think attaching a cost to it should be done so that it's not a "no brainer" move. A well written mechanic allows people to develop an intuition about when it is smart to invoke it. If there is no cost then the answer is "always" for this one, so there would be no decision making process involved.

I also don't think it's too complicated, since this happens internally to the target, so it's no more disruptive to the game than the player applying their soak. They just mark off some strain instead of wounds.

3 hours ago, SEApocalypse said:

I actually like the idea, but would let the GM just assign a value of the rank of cover and reduce damage by the rank when the take cover maneuver is taken.

And I like to remind that this change the character heavily as it becomes a cover game now. Something which is not inline with canon for the most part.

I thought about having grades of cover, but I felt like it would impede the players ability to tell their own story somehwat. One of the big things I like about this game is that the battlefield is extremely vaguely defined. You pretty much only have range bands and environmental factors, everything else is derived purely from the characters in play, so the players can tell the story of what they do without having to ask anything. You can simply go "Vasto flips over a table and takes cover behind it", you don't have to ask if there is a table that can be used as cover and how sturdy it is first.

It just seems odd to bill a PC Strain repeatedly for hiding behind a crate.

2 hours ago, Daeglan said:

We already have a cover mechanic. And while I think more levels of cover than currently allowed would be better I think your suggestion is way to good.

1 hour ago, Wisconsen said:

I like the idea of it. Something I've toyed with using as a house rule is changing cover from defense to soak then adding Soft and Hard cover. with Soft cover being soak X, and Hard cover being soak Z (where Z is > X) and hard cover also giving a setback to attacks you make when you are in it. I haven't play tested it, and i'm not sure i am going to as i like to stay pretty close to RAW for myself and my group (shared universe setting with 2 GMs and 20 players atm, so staying close to RAW for consistency is a big thing for us).

Cover just kinda sticks in my craw a bit, 1 setback just doesn't really feel very meaty as i think cover should. I've also toyed with the idea of cover increasing or upgrading difficulty, however as above i haven't played tested it for the same reasons.

In fact Cover need not only be 1 Setback.

Quote

Ducking behind a door jamb, crouching behind a crate, or peeking around a tree trunk: all of these allow the character to gain ranged defense 1 (and some cover can grant a ranged defense higher than 1, if particularly sturdy). AoR p. 214-215

The RAW do in fact provide for a GM to provide greater benefit to PCs for better cover.

So I think for those finding the cover rule too flacid simply adding a greater number of Setback for better cover is probably a better solution. This houserule seems more appropriate as a Talent and is too good for just the base PC to use imo.

We also have Prime Positions in the game which I think tends to support that getting better use of cover is something more suited to Talents rather than spiking the basic Maneuver.

I never saw that line about cover granting more than 1; I'll have to keep that in mind. It seemed funny that cover would provide one defense, and concealment would add up to three.

1 hour ago, 2P51 said:

It just seems odd to bill a PC Strain repeatedly for hiding behind a crate.

Strain is not just exhaustion, but also concentration, nerves and morale. Being reduced to cowering behind a crate is going to at the very least erode your morale, on top of it probably being pretty stressful.

From my perspective the most important thing also isn't realism, but having good systems. I think downgrading wounds to strain is a great system, because it allows you to have powerful defensive moves that give the players significant staying power without creating a situation where they aren't using any resources at all to stay in the fight.

I could go with a graduated system. Just an idea off the top of my head.

Basic cover, just like it's listed.
Heavy cover, 2 defense, but you suffer a setback to your attacks and must use a maneuver to extract yourself before you can move.
Full cover, 3 defense, but you may not attack. You can spend a maneuver to switch to Heavy cover in order to attack.

46 minutes ago, Ahrimon said:

I could go with a graduated system. Just an idea off the top of my head.

Basic cover, just like it's listed.
Heavy cover, 2 defense, but you suffer a setback to your attacks and must use a maneuver to extract yourself before you can move.
Full cover, 3 defense, but you may not attack. You can spend a maneuver to switch to Heavy cover in order to attack.

There is a rule for fortifications too. Which actually can offer even full immunity to getting hit unless the opponent is using a called shot (bunkers). Your full cover suggestion is actually equivalent to a well-build trench which comes with a range defense of 3. Not that this is particular good as a good shield offers the same range defense.

As the trench goes already up to defense 3, this suggests that even better cover should be actually be … well, better. The bunker mechanics offer a solid idea who this can be achieved.

I haven't read those books. I threw those together as an idea that could be used anywhere. Good to see that there are other options.

The problem is that the defense system isn't very good to begin with. Sources of defense are never meant to stack for example, so there are several items that would make standing in a trench redundant. At the same time if you do allow defense to stack there are a dozen ways to make the enemy roll a bucket of setbacks. Any system that just modifies your defense rating falls prey to how weak of a system defense is to begin with.

True, but it's easy enough to change that and allow the GM to make the call on what stacks and what doesn't on a case by case basis. Then it's on the group if combat boggs down too much.

[Edit] What if cover instead increased the difficulty of all ranged attacks by one, and heavy cover added an an additional setback but reured a maneuver to be able to move again or something like that.

It's not a bad idea but I'm not sure about the core concept of the strain for damage exchange. A character who is stressed out, aka taken a lot of strain damage, is naturally going to want to hide and take cover. Under this system it would be safer, from a strain point of view, to stand out in the open. I prefer keeping it simple in my group and just having cover grant some soak, but hey it's worth testing. I could see it being really useful in a low brawn group.

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.

I see two problems with it as written:

It's based on Cunning, which makes it far more useful for some characters than others. I'd ditch the stat-dependency so it isn't slanted toward specific character archetypes.

You have to spend a maneuver to be able to do this at all, so you're effectively being double-billed for the benefit. I'd drop the maneuver requirement OR keep it and the +1 Defense as per standard cover and allow the strain spending as an additional benefit. (This way cover also does something even if you don't have strain to spend.)

38 minutes ago, Garran said:

You have to spend a maneuver to be able to do this at all, so you're effectively being double-billed for the benefit. I'd drop the maneuver requirement OR keep it and the +1 Defense as per standard cover and allow the strain spending as an additional benefit. (This way cover also does something even if you don't have strain to spend.)

I'm a little confused about what the strain is suppose to represent. When dodging or parrying the strain is suppose to represent the effort of blocking a strike or diving out of the way. What about hunkering down behind cover justifies 3 strain? It just seems like a mechanical rule that doesn't make much sense from a flavor perspective.

A starting PC could easily have a 5 Soak and then with a 2 Cunning that's 10 Soak, so gonna be close to invulnerable to a lot of pistol fire. Plus what's good for the goose which means bad guys get this also, and you end up with combats taking forever unless everyone has HBRs.

If you really feel your players need a defensive boost, you might just allow them to buy defensive talents via Scars (Forged in Battle). That way they can pick the flavor of defense that works best for them, they are spending xp to get it so they aren't getting something for nothing and you're working with rules and mechanics that have been playtested.

14 hours ago, SladeWeston said:

It's not a bad idea but I'm not sure about the core concept of the strain for damage exchange. A character who is stressed out, aka taken a lot of strain damage, is naturally going to want to hide and take cover. Under this system it would be safer, from a strain point of view, to stand out in the open. I prefer keeping it simple in my group and just having cover grant some soak, but hey it's worth testing. I could see it being really useful in a low brawn group.

You're not required to take the strain when you're in cover, it gives you the option to take the strain.

12 hours ago, Garran said:

I see two problems with it as written:

It's based on Cunning, which makes it far more useful for some characters than others. I'd ditch the stat-dependency so it isn't slanted toward specific character archetypes.

You have to spend a maneuver to be able to do this at all, so you're effectively being double-billed for the benefit. I'd drop the maneuver requirement OR keep it and the +1 Defense as per standard cover and allow the strain spending as an additional benefit. (This way cover also does something even if you don't have strain to spend.)

It's based on Cunning because according to the book "Characters with high cunning are savvy, quickly pick up on social and environmental cues, and can more readily come up with short term plans and tactics". To me that suggests people with a high cunning skill should be exceptionally good at using their environment in a tactical way in combat. Cover is the only codified mechanic in the game that is a tactical use of the environment, so that's where cunning should help IMO. Since it's 2 + Cunning the ability is still useful as a 1 to 1 wounds to strain exchange even for characters with extremely low cunning.

You're not double billed for the benefit. The reason why you need a maneuver to access the ability is because you don't need to buy the ability as talent ranks. Parry or Reflect have a significant XP cost attached to them, and can only be used in conjunction with a very narrow range of specific equipment. Cover on the other hand is available to all characters immediately as it's provided by the environment, not special training or equipment. As a result you have to spend the maneuver to move into position to benefit from that feature of the environment. You can keep the +1 defense in there of course.

11 hours ago, 2P51 said:

A starting PC could easily have a 5 Soak and then with a 2 Cunning that's 10 Soak, so gonna be close to invulnerable to a lot of pistol fire. Plus what's good for the goose which means bad guys get this also, and you end up with combats taking forever unless everyone has HBRs.

Well, the strain cost stops the fights from getting completely out of hand. For example, a stormtrooper has 5 soak, 5 wounds and a cunning of 2, which means a stormtrooper squad in cover would negate 9 damage. However, since stormtroopers are minions and take damage as strain the second hit on any given stormtrooper takes them out, cover or not. If you awarded straight up soak for being in cover it would become futile to fire at stormtroopers in cover with most starter weapons.

There is also the possibility of using 3 advantages to flush someone out of cover, and then the rest of the party can shoot them up.

Also I'd probably rule that if you activate the blast quality on a weapon you can perform a hit with the blast rating as it's base damage that cannot be negated by cover, so that throwing grenades behind cover becomes a valid strategy.

Unless your PCs are using many kinds of pistols, they might not cause any damage at all, repeatedly. Plus you couple it with existing Talents in the game like Prime Position and Reflect and it just gets way out of hand quickly. Too good.

6 minutes ago, Aetrion said:

If you awarded straight up soak for being in cover it would become futile to fire at stormtroopers in cover with most starter weapons.

Depends how much you award. The main issue with the proposed rule, imo, is the quantity of soak being awarded. Awarding 1 or 2 is a lot different than 4 or 5.