Yea, but you can design an encounter where the enemies are tougher to take down or call in reinforcements without spending their advantages on recovery.

Like, how about throwing in a Rival NPC who's a medic who goes around poking stimpacks into minions or rolling medicine checks on them? That would give the players some pause, but it would give them the possibility of targeting the medic.

Another big factor here is simply that for your average minion if you inflict 5-6 damage or a crit a minion is simply dead, and no amount of recovery would bring them back to life. So spending advantages to regain health really wouldn't do much to protect minions. It might save a minion who was hit for so little damage that he's at half health survive another minor hit, but in all likelihood that minion just goes down with the next hit either way.

Since when does the GM need to spend Advantages to have reinforcements show up? That's a total waste of Advantages which could instead be spent to make the combat more exciting.

45 minutes ago, Stan Fresh said:

Since when does the GM need to spend Advantages to have reinforcements show up? That's a total waste of Advantages which could instead be spent to make the combat more exciting.

They don't. But it's apples and oranges. When the GM brings in reinforcement there's nothing the players can really do about it. They just know that the GM is going to drop reinforcements on them until he or she feels like the players have had enough or some other event occurs. With the advantage method the players know that it's the minions themselves that are bringing themselves back to full strength, which puts the onus on the players to eliminate the group so that they can't keep getting reinforced to full strength.

It's not apples and oranges, it's just two kinds of apple, since the GM is the one choosing to spend Advantages on recovery.

And of course the players can do something about the GM's reinforcements. They can affect the scenery to bar additional minions from entering, they can move the action to another location, etc.

Yea, I don't really get why the GM should have to roll and spend for those sorts of things. The GMs job is to just tell a good story. Stories include parts where you just have to run and hide, and in those parts there absolutely should be infinite reinforcements, and they include parts where you defeat the enemies, and in those parts there don't need to be any reinforcements.

There are games where this is a mechanic - my beloved Marvel Heroic RPG does something like this - but FFG SW isn't.