Now i understand getting up there with characters in XP amounts leads to rather fantastic abilities. Now my group can take on quite a bit. Except for Deserts, for some reason they almost die in any desert they go in. BUT anyways, they are 6 of them and they are all around 450 to 510 XP. Now i know that a main bad guy won't be able to take all of them on at once BUT if said bad guy uses force power against their force powers how do you guys handle that. It really seems when getting mastery say in Bind vs Harm Heal Mastery it's really going to come down to who gets their power off first really. I have never GM'd a group with this much XP and was just looking for any advice for as we call it "scenario movie battles" Two big guys vs two of the PC's big guys.

Well, a true Nemesis level NPC should be able to go toe to toe with your party. That's pretty much the definition of a Nemesis in this game system.

As to how, well, you can give the NPC any powers you want. I think, personally, the path to being a good Nemesis, starts with giving the NPC abilities/powers that counteract the abilities of your PCs. If they are very Force powerful, give the NPC the Suppress power, and a healthy force die pool to work with. Let the NPC commit a die to keep the effect running, insuring their ability to just Force-stomp him will be severely limited.

If they are combat heavy, give the Nemesis talents that help offset incoming damage, or apply penalties to incoming attacks. The Adversary talent is perfect for this. Whatever level of Adversary you give the NPC, you upgrade ALL combat checks coming in at them, from all sources of attack. That's pretty darn powerful by itself.

Make the location of the fight, be of the NPC's choosing, and have various environmental obstacles that hinder the players (tough terrain, inhospitable atmosphere, etc), and let that inflict setback dice to any actions in the area.

Since your party is apparently weak vs Deserts, have it be in a desert environment.

Basically, stack the deck in your NPC's favor, but not too much. The idea is for the NPC to be a challenge, not curbstomp your party for showing up to the dance.

Designing encounters around a single Nemesis to take on the whole group can be difficult to impossible at "high" XP levels. You can always load up your Nemesis with really high Soak and Durable, high WT/ST etc but unless the Nemesis totally outclasses the group (e.b., they're beginning characters and the Nemesis is totally tricked out) they'll go down fairly quickly.

I'd look to the squad rules in the AoR GM kit adventure to make them more survivable (the rules allow a Nemesis to sacrifice NPC minions to take hits instead).

If you want to make the Nemesis tougher in regards to Force Powers then make all Force Powers targeting him opposed rolls, probably opposed Discipline. Give the Nemesis Willpower 5 and Discipline 4 (or adjust to be the difficulty you want).

Also throw on lots of ranks of Adversary and Improved Parry/Improved Reflect for out-of-turn attacks.

You can also use the optional rule of giving the Nemesis a second initiative slot at the end of the initiative order (giving them 2 turns per round). It's not normally advised to combine this with Improved Parry/Improved Reflect but if you think you're group is tough enough...

Personally I'm not a big fan of the "One person who can fight the whole group" style of nemesis, because it just always comes off as cheesy somehow, so I prefer giving them a lot of minions, or a few loyal bodyguards or something along those lines. There are Nemesis powers that allow you to divert damage from the Nemesis to the minions, which essentially allows you to make them able to withstand a lot of firepower without having to utterly cheese their defenses.

15 hours ago, Aetrion said:

Personally I'm not a big fan of the "One person who can fight the whole group" style of nemesis, because it just always comes off as cheesy somehow, so I prefer giving them a lot of minions, or a few loyal bodyguards or something along those lines. There are Nemesis powers that allow you to divert damage from the Nemesis to the minions, which essentially allows you to make them able to withstand a lot of firepower without having to utterly cheese their defenses.

Yeah you can do that, but thematically, I think it's very appropriate for Star Wars. I mean, just look at Darth Vader. He's pretty much written to be the One Man Army, and is depicted as such very often in the material.

Sure, mechanically, it can make for a difficult balancing act, I'm not denying that. But if you are going big on the dramatic, thematic stuff, it's definitely fitting. You just have to do your homework on how to pull it off And also make stuff up on the fly.

But yeah, the "Big Bad + Minions" method works very well too. In my head though, that's like, phase 1 of a climactic battle scenario. You have the minions there for the party to fight, and mow down, while the Nemesis does his monologing, and then retreats through a door, to the final setpiece. THEN, they face him alone, or perhaps with a single Rival, like the Emperor and Vader.

It feels more cinematic and narrative enjoyable to me to do this, and it's been used a bajillion times in storytelling, so it must be doing something right. Doesn't mean you can't have the party plow through minion groups before hand. In fact, that's just about as ubiquitous in storytelling as the Final Fight with the solo Big Bad.

thank you for the advice everyone.

1 hour ago, KungFuFerret said:

Yeah you can do that, but thematically, I think it's very appropriate for Star Wars. I mean, just look at Darth Vader. He's pretty much written to be the One Man Army, and is depicted as such very often in the material.

Sure, mechanically, it can make for a difficult balancing act, I'm not denying that. But if you are going big on the dramatic, thematic stuff, it's definitely fitting. You just have to do your homework on how to pull it off And also make stuff up on the fly.

But yeah, the "Big Bad + Minions" method works very well too. In my head though, that's like, phase 1 of a climactic battle scenario. You have the minions there for the party to fight, and mow down, while the Nemesis does his monologing, and then retreats through a door, to the final setpiece. THEN, they face him alone, or perhaps with a single Rival, like the Emperor and Vader.

It feels more cinematic and narrative enjoyable to me to do this, and it's been used a bajillion times in storytelling, so it must be doing something right. Doesn't mean you can't have the party plow through minion groups before hand. In fact, that's just about as ubiquitous in storytelling as the Final Fight with the solo Big Bad.

I like the thematic scene of a party going up against a single powerful foe - I'm planning on doing it in my current game - but I think it has to be done very carefully and you have to pick a good villain where it makes sense. In the game I'm running I am actually going to be using Vader as a villain the PCs will face. You can pump up Vader with crazy defensive abilities because it's Vader, a unique character where that's expected. I also need to go into the encounter being fine if the PCs manage to defeat my "undefeatable" NPC (in my case I prefer Vader survives for the PCs to finally deal with at a later time). Also, using Vader, the players will have the expectation that they may not be able to defeat him so it won't seem arbitrarily tough if he's really really hard to defeat.

20 minutes ago, Jedi Ronin said:

I like the thematic scene of a party going up against a single powerful foe - I'm planning on doing it in my current game - but I think it has to be done very carefully and you have to pick a good villain where it makes sense.

Of course, I'm not saying do this for a minion group or something I'm assuming we're talking about the climactic final fight of a campaign. When talking about fighting a Nemesis, that's usually what I assume most people are talking about. Run-of-the-mill fights would be the realm of minions and rivals (in my book anyway). The Nemesis, should be deployed sparingly, to keep up an air of mystery. If the party has been regularly stomping the Nemesis every few encounters, then the Nemesis loses a lot of their threat.

In my experience, the party is better equipped to deal with a single massive target, than unending waves of minions. The setup I like for that challenge is an objective or task the PCs have to complete, like repairing their freighter to be able to take off, while wave after wave of stormtroopers assault them. If the PCs try to focus on killing mooks, they will eventually be overwhelmed. I played this out one session, and the PCs narrowly escaped, with the wookie having to dash back off the ship under fire to retrieve an unconscious comrade.