Please bear with me, as I am completely new to the system, and have run a whole 2 nights worth of campaigns and may be missing something entirely in regards to combat.

Are there no opposed roles in regards to a weapon proficiency? IE NPC shoots with a blaster, and the player just takes the damage if it fails? Said player then spends passive parry/dodge to mitigate. Seems pretty unfair to anyone with any respectable training as a padawan/knight/jedi.

Here's the example posed to me by a one of my players...

If he ignores ALL talents, and dumps everything into be a hitpoint sponge/strain dumper....all he would need to do is outlast anyone in battle. He takes damage, strains to negation most or all of it. Then rolls to attack with a base weapon with 1-3 difficulty against, damages the opponent, etc etc. With all points dumped into HP and Strain resistance, you could just outlast an opponent with no real skills in anything else. We've looked at a regularly rolled force user vs a toon wielding a lightsaber, but all points dumped into strain conversion, and the dummy toon wins, every time.

Another example.... say with a carbine at med range, I roll against 2 difficulty each time...they eat 9+ dmg, no matter what, plus whatever mods my seeker in the group has...with an AGI of 4, she's a murder machine.

Now......am I missing anything in regards to an opposed role? Any sort of opposed defensive system?

Please, tell me I am missing a mechanic!

Any input would be greatly appreciated, as I think I am rolling the battle system ALL wrong...

in combat you have a fixed base difficulty. So to create your dice pool if the attacker is firing a ranged weapon at medium range has 4 AGI and ranged heavy skill of 2 . You start with the higher number (4) which is how many green ability dice you start with , these get upgraded by the lower number of characteristic and skill , in this case 2. So you remove two green ability dice and replace with 2 yellow proficiency dice (these have more success, more double results and can roll triumph. Certain other modifiers can upgrade or add more dice to the pool, for example situations might mean you add boost dice

Now onto the negative dice. this starts with the base difficulty, in this case medium range is 2 purple difficulty dice. So if there are no other factors then its 2 yellow, 2 green vs 2 purple.

http://game2.ca/eote/?montecarlo=100000#proficiency=2&ability=2&difficulty=2

Looking at this that means a likely result of 2 success (11 dmg with carbine) and 1 advantage. If the target had 5 soak then this means they took 6 damage.

That is at base difficulty, however certain things get to upgrade the check. For NPCs there is a simplified defensive skill that applies to all combat checks against them called adversary. For each rank that the NPC has this upgrades the check once. So adversary 3 would mean that those 2 purple are now red dice and they also get another purple added because of the third rank of adversary.

http://game2.ca/eote/?montecarlo=100000#proficiency=2&ability=2&challenge=2&difficulty=1

The chance to hit just dropped 20%, as well as meaning they have a higher chance of rolling threat and/or despair, which means that they could run out of ammo etc. or worse the weapon could break and the pc now has a hefty repair bill

That isnt all this defender could have armor or abilities that give them ranged defense (cover does this) so if they have 2 ranged defense you add 2 black setback dice. It also might be low light conditions which could add a further setback, and finally because of a previous successful roll from another npc they could have had yet another setback for a total of 4 setback.

http://game2.ca/eote/?montecarlo=100000#proficiency=2&ability=2&challenge=2&difficulty=1&setback=4

chance ro hit is now roughly 33 percent and since this guy adversary 3 he is likely to have a pretty good soak. ,lets be conservative and say 8 (hutts have more). So if they roll one success they will do a grand total of two damage. If this guy is also a lightsaber wielder with reflect he can choose to take the damage or can reflect for 3 strain and further reduce this dmg for 2/plus ranks in reflect. They can recover this strain by using advantage from their own checks. So to kill this guy with damage is going to take time, so sometimes its better to try and critical them to death /dismemberment or whatever, however for that you must roll at least one damage and enough advantage to crit (or a triumph) going by the above roll chances that will also take time.

If however your ranged combatant is firing at a bunch of minions, given a few rounds he should be able to take them all out easy enough (but if the minion group is big enough, not without taking some hits themselves). Healing isnt so easy in this game , each critical can take week to heal or more and each one adds 10 cumulative to the next crit roll, so if you are carrying 5 crits and the GM rolls a crit roll of 90 or more then its game over.

if you are using just base difficulty all the time for the checks then you are definitely doing it wrong!

edit you mention strain resistance, there is no such thing as strain resistance, unless you refer to a talent that some specializations have that allow to to reduce strain damage caused to you , this would not apply to reflect as it this is voluntarily spent and not damage. The strain cost can only be reduced by , at this time,taking supreme reflect which is only possible if you didn't make a combat check last turn and reduces the strain cost to 1 per reflect and only one specialization has it.

So you are paying 3 strain per hit to reflect , grit gives you +1 strain per rank and the most you will get per specialization is about 3 ranks. So if you master one specialization you may have 16 or 17 strain giving you 3 or 4 hits before reflecting starts to take you close to passing out, and if the opponent then changes tactic and switches to strain damage you will pass out quickly. Also some characters attack with words and you cannot parry or reflect a Scathing Tirade or 2, or fear checks, which also causes strain damage.

Rock / paper /scissors, you cant cover every base when it comes to defensiveness

on the subject of opposed rolls these are not used with combat skills as standard but when you match one skill against another. Example you match your perception against the stealth skill of an opponent. You take your perception skill check with any bonuses /upgrades and/or increases. Your opponent takes his stealth skill with any upgrades /increases and/or bonuses. Their dice are then swapped for negative dice and now form part of the pool for your perception check. Alternatively this can be done the other way round, where they roll the check with stealth as positive and perception as negative. Generally I have the active character roll, although there is a lot to said for letting the player in this case roll whether they are the sneaker or the hunter.

This is purely a personal house rule, but I do allow opposed rolls in combat if the PC/NPC is expending their action to oppose incoming attacks.

Most defensive talents cost maneuvers or strain to use, but never touch an action. If I have a player who wants to dodge using Coordination to oppose incoming fire and he expends his action to do so then I allow it. Or a lightsaber weilder may use their saber skill defensively (same with brawl or melee). Anything they can provide a reasonable explanation for I tend to allow, such as using Perception or Survival to find outstanding cover, or Stealth to blend into the environment/hide in plain sight, or Deception to look like a low priority target, and so on.

This can be a handy option particularly if a bad die roll leaves them unarmed in the middle of a battle.

We have a house-rule that uses "normal" difficulty rules for mooks,, but opposed rolls for important opponents. So when Bob the Jedi is swinging his lightsabre at a minion-group of stormtroopers, or an individual stormtrooper, he'll just roll against a couple of purple dice. If he's confronting Fourth-Sibling Inquisitor with a red lightsabre, however, they'll match lightsabre skills against each other. We've found that it makes for longer, more dramatic fights for the climactic end scenes, with both sides spending advantage and threat, triumph and despair, to push each other close to the edge of a catwalk, or acrobatically leap about, or use the Force to hurl small objects about, and so on.

Personally I would say using opposed rolls in combat is only going to make combat last longer, if you find your players having too easy a time and one or two more minions to each group and give the rivals and nemesis another rank of adversary. Also make sure there are plenty of targets and that they arent fighting in a vacuum (not a literal vacuum, but make sure there is environment, like rough terrain, obstacles, maybe even pedestrians, that the bad guys can use a shields (which also upgrades their checks and means they hit the wrong person when despair shows up, if they choose to fire back, which is going to heppen eventually if they do often enough)

That really; the main reason the rules are designed like this is that the action is meant to be progressive; something is meant to happen every round and by making it apposed checks takes away a lot of what make the defensive talents good. Why bother taking sidestep/dodge/sense/anything if you can just use your 5 rank lightsaber skill instead? I mean it's fine if thats what one is after and if it doesn't affect anything then that's fair and well, but I find that short snappy combats that can turn into chases more exciting.

Combat in this system is rapid and fairly brutal. I think that's partly to dissuade you from solving every problem with combat, and partly to encourage you to use Advantage and Triumphs creatively. Even a PC like an Armorer/Soresu Defender/Shien expert isn't going to tank damage like a MMO character or a D&D tank class.

The big difference between a really skilled combatant and a mook is in Advantage and Triumph generation, and the extra damage from additional successes. Sure, your gunslinger is as easy to hit as the stormtrooper he's facing down, but the gunslinger's tricked-out Nova Viper is going to hit harder, pierce armor, and crit more frequently.

If you're giving Rivals and Nemeses the Adversary Talent at appropriate levels, in addition to other appropriate defensive Talents and Powers and Gear, in my experience an opposed check is completely unnecessary.

12 hours ago, emsquared said:

If you're giving Rivals and Nemeses the Adversary Talent at appropriate levels, in addition to other appropriate defensive Talents and Powers and Gear, in my experience an opposed check is completely unnecessary.

This sort of thing is precisely why the Adversary talent was introduced in the EotE Beta, namely to make major opponents more difficult to be hit without bogging the GM down with tracking the existing defensive talents (Dodge, Defensive Stance, and Side Step).

Oddly enough, it appears that in earlier drafts of the EotE rules, Brawl and Melee checks were opposed, as the skill descriptions in the Beta rulebook had language noting them as opposed checks. Given that using opposed checks tended to really slow down combats across the board for a combat type that was already lacking in comparison to ranged combat, it's pretty easy to see why the notion of opposed checks for melee combat got deep-sixed.

A Nemesis with Adversary 3 and defense 1 presents a pretty daunting target for a lot of PCs to hit, since at a base difficulty of 2 purple (default for melee combat or Medium Range for ranged attackers) that's a difficulty pool of 2 challenge, 1 purple, and 1 setback, which for a PC that's not super-focused on combat skills is fairly daunting but not impossible to hit, and if the PC fails to hit there's still a decent chance they'll have advantages to spend.

58 minutes ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

A Nemesis with Adversary 3 and defense 1 presents a pretty daunting target for a lot of PCs to hit, since at a base difficulty of 2 purple (default for melee combat or Medium Range for ranged attackers) that's a difficulty pool of 2 challenge, 1 purple, and 1 setback, which for a PC that's not super-focused on combat skills is fairly daunting but not impossible to hit, and if the PC fails to hit there's still a decent chance they'll have advantages to spend.

But in that situation, isn't the fight likely to be over in the next round when the Nemesis NPC counter-attacks? The PC doesn't have Adversary 3 - yes, they'll have various talents, but they'd have to have some heavy investment in different trees to be able to upgrade their defences x3, wouldn't they?

5 hours ago, Daronil said:

But in that situation, isn't the fight likely to be over in the next round when the Nemesis NPC counter-attacks? The PC doesn't have Adversary 3 - yes, they'll have various talents, but they'd have to have some heavy investment in different trees to be able to upgrade their defences x3, wouldn't they?

The Nemesis is likely to be facing a group of PCs though. PCs can take 2 or 3 hits and even then whenthey exceed their WT they dont die, so for the nemesis to 'win' it takes a TPK and even then that is against the spirit of the game, I would say if that happened , next session you wake up badly wounded in a prison cell. cave..... wherever with your nemesis telling you his plan to rule the galaxy in a monologue like all good cinematic bad guys do.

Thing is , we have had the game over 4 years now and very few people complain that the combat is too lethal and needs changed. While it is dangerous its hard to die.

7 hours ago, Daronil said:

But in that situation, isn't the fight likely to be over in the next round when the Nemesis NPC counter-attacks? The PC doesn't have Adversary 3 - yes, they'll have various talents, but they'd have to have some heavy investment in different trees to be able to upgrade their defences x3, wouldn't they?

Syrath pretty much already answered this, as in a great many instances a Nemesis with Adversary 3 isn't going to have nearly the same degree of support that a party of PCs can provide to one another.

It's also going to depend on the PC and how they're built. I've got a PC in a friend's game that's a Shii-Cho Knight/Niman Disciple that's sitting at close to 600 XP and he can make mince-meat out of most Inquisitor builds without getting too badly hammered in return thanks to all the ranks in Parry he's got to counter Inquisitor lightsaber strikes and a dice pool of YYYGB base (3 Brawn, 4 Lightsaber, plus rank of Accurate) lets him hit far more often than not, and all he needs is one Advantage to trigger a crit on an opponent. Same campaign has a Bounty Hunter with a seriously beefed-up rifle that deals out even more raw damage, has multiple ranks of Pierce and a Ranged (Heavy) dice pool similar to my Knight's Lightsaber dice pool.

I've also seen a party of fairly inexperienced PCs (only 50 XP above starting, or 1/3rd of Knight Level with not nearly as many bonus credits) completely tear an Inquisitor Nemesis a new one in the opening round, simply through teamwork via Advantages to pass boost dice as well as maneuvers spent to assist the heavy hitter PCs as well as aiming for more boost dice, and not a lightsaber to be found amidst them. Reflect helped the Inquisitor survive the initial onslaught, but a Gunslinger with Paired Heavy Blaster Pistols and a Sharpshooter with a bog-standard blaster rifle certainly left their mark. Said Inquisitor only got two attacks in (and that's including the Enhanced Nemesis rules) before being rendered effectively helpless due to critical injuries (unable to willingly suffer strain followed by being staggered) before being dropped. It just all came down to the dice rolls being in the PCs favor, though one of them (Trandoshan Enforcer) did take a pretty nasty hit (plus crit) from the Inquisitor's double-bladed lightsaber, but he was able to walk away from the fight.

Further to that if the GM finds the players are having it too easy add a minion tp the group another rival to the fight or another rank of Adversary on the nemesis or if the fight is too difficult rein back on some of those or throw the PCs some reinforcements, or have the sector rangers arrive en force , and split the fight

Fair enough; I'll happily bow to your experience, guys - I've only run half a dozen or so sessions. The climactic lightsabre duel in ours ended up a one-on-one between the Jedi and the Inquisitor (one PC was smashed up and critted by the Inquisitor using Bind and Hurl right at the start, the other PC had tried to go into the chamber through another door and got stuck) - we all wanted the fight to last a long time, becoming a cinematic duel rather than a quick one or two strike fight. It did work using the opposing rolls, but I'm happy to admit that it may have just been a fluke of this particular scenario.

8 hours ago, Daronil said:

Fair enough; I'll happily bow to your experience, guys - I've only run half a dozen or so sessions. The climactic lightsabre duel in ours ended up a one-on-one between the Jedi and the Inquisitor (one PC was smashed up and critted by the Inquisitor using Bind and Hurl right at the start, the other PC had tried to go into the chamber through another door and got stuck) - we all wanted the fight to last a long time, becoming a cinematic duel rather than a quick one or two strike fight. It did work using the opposing rolls, but I'm happy to admit that it may have just been a fluke of this particular scenario.

oh, it definitely can work, social combat is opposed rolls, there is something to be said for fully playtested rules, why reinvent the wheel. If it works for you though, run with it if you want rule 0 have fun rule 1 GM has last say and can overrul the rules.

On 5/17/2017 at 3:54 PM, Daronil said:

Fair enough; I'll happily bow to your experience, guys - I've only run half a dozen or so sessions. The climactic lightsabre duel in ours ended up a one-on-one between the Jedi and the Inquisitor (one PC was smashed up and critted by the Inquisitor using Bind and Hurl right at the start, the other PC had tried to go into the chamber through another door and got stuck) - we all wanted the fight to last a long time, becoming a cinematic duel rather than a quick one or two strike fight. It did work using the opposing rolls, but I'm happy to admit that it may have just been a fluke of this particular scenario.

One roll/round is not one strike, one roll/round is one minute of exchanges representing aggregated effects over that timespan.

My 350xp Soresu (geared toward Defense, not Damaging) just went through a probably 4-5 round exchange with a Cortosis-armored Adversary 2 "Marauder" (though he had Parry) without either of us taking a Wound. The fight probably would have went for 2 or 3 more (the Marauder was nearly all outta Strain and I was fine and would have had him) if our Gunslinger hadn't finished killing everyone else, and got bored and killed him "for me".

The epic battle are not precluded by non-opposed checks. They're precluded by the GM not knowing the dials they have at their disposal to create them.

I'm becoming increasingly fond of one-roll resolution for some situations. I think it's really cool to sit there for 10-or-so minutes, telling a story, volleying moves and counter-moves back and forth between GM and PCs, then bring it to a climax, assign Boost and Setback dice in tune with the story and letting one roll determine the final disposition.

One person on the forums used to have a signature block with a quote from one of the developers to the effect that they wanted a system where a PC could leap off the balcony, grab the chandelier, swing across the room, and attack the musketeer standing there on the other side, and do it all with a single roll. My group and I are almost all lifelong D&D enthusiasts, so the amount of things that a PCs does, and can do, in a single round in this system is one of the hardest things for us to wrap our heads around.