If you could make just one change to the mechanics, what would it be? Why

While many know I do use counters-on-map movement, it's not the one change I'd make.

My one change, which is too much a pain to implement as a house rule, would be to have multiple scales, not just personal & ship.

I find personal vehicles to fall flat because the scaling being only 2.5 scales (counting ships with Massive to be almost a new scale, but not really)... the Sil 2 & 3 vehicle space is just not diverse enough, because of the lack of an intermediate scale.

Also, we have 3 sil range for personal scale beings - 0, 1, & 2. (The largest personal scale critters are Sil 2)
we have 8+ sil of vehicles (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, & 9)...
I'd put vehicle scale with Sil 2,3,4, and damage/armor at × 3 vs personal, and ship at × 3 vs vehicle.
And for completeness, standard ships at Sil 4-6, cap ships at Sil 6-9...

Making defence work

My change would be to drop brawn from soak, perhaps increase its contribution to WT to compensate, perhaps not. And then to increase the amount of soak from armor. Right now the difference between heavy battle armor and a leather jacket is only one point. It should much higher.

A wookie should be tough because of his high WT, not because blasters can't penetrate his fur...

tossing the whole vehicle system and starting over.

Second edition? Thats just one rule change right?

Seriously tho, getting rid of wounds is probably what I would want. I dont like hit points in any form. Making it more like the old WEG system, but with crits would be my choice, but I havent figured out a good way to do it.

Scrapping armor defense value, and only giving armor a Soak value.

10 hours ago, Random Bystander said:

Making defence work

That's actually pretty easy - I can see some easy ways of doing making defense work MUCH better.

• Add Defense to Soak/AV in addition to adding black dice to the to-hit
• Defense adds Failure Symbols instead of black dice
• Defense adds failure symbols and is added to soak/AV, but adds no black dice.
• Defense adds black dice, and 2 threat can be spent to add defense to Soak/AV

The problem is that defense working really well is that it also makes combats longer and more whiffy.

Stun Damage & the Ion quality should not be reduced by Soak. It fits more with the nature of Star Wars, where Stun settings can knock a character out in 1 hit or a few ion torpedoes can shut down a Star Destroyer. It would create a small imbalance in combat regarding stun damage but that's where defense rating & talents which make it harder to be hit or reduce damage come in to potentially save you from being incapacitated. The effect would have to outweigh the strain cost to activate, however.

11 hours ago, korjik said:

tossing the whole vehicle system and starting over.

Second edition? Thats just one rule change right?

Seriously tho, getting rid of wounds is probably what I would want. I dont like hit points in any form. Making it more like the old WEG system, but with crits would be my choice, but I havent figured out a good way to do it.

If you like personal combat you should realize vehicle combat is just personal combat with a couple tweaks. When you realize that it is much better.

28 minutes ago, Daeglan said:

If you like personal combat you should realize vehicle combat is just personal combat with a couple tweaks. When you realize that it is much better.

I know exactly what it is,and that is part of the problem. Besides, I never said I liked personal combat

11 hours ago, korjik said:

Seriously tho, getting rid of wounds is probably what I would want. I dont like hit points in any form. Making it more like the old WEG system, but with crits would be my choice, but I havent figured out a good way to do it.

So, basically Savage Worlds wounds system.

Damage - Soak between 0-3, character is stunned for a round (yes, that means damage that equals soak stuns the character)

Damage - Soak between 4-7, character takes a wound and is stunned for a round

Damage - Soak between 8-11, character takes 2 wounds and is stunned for a round

Once a character has taken 3 wounds, any further wounds are critical hits.

In this context stunned means "can only do free actions on their turn"

4 hours ago, Kallabecca said:

So, basically Savage Worlds wounds system.

Damage - Soak between 0-3, character is stunned for a round (yes, that means damage that equals soak stuns the character)

Damage - Soak between 4-7, character takes a wound and is stunned for a round

Damage - Soak between 8-11, character takes 2 wounds and is stunned for a round

Once a character has taken 3 wounds, any further wounds are critical hits.

In this context stunned means "can only do free actions on their turn"

Doesn't that mean it is very easy for a melee character can easily be permanently stunned?

Melee does kinda suck in Savage Worlds.

While I like the idea of auto-failures for defense, that also would mean that threat would not generate as often. Several defensive trees use that threat to their advantage.

As is, defense increases the chances of both failures and threat. A roll could generate both, or it could generate none. I like it this way as it means no one is invincible, no matter how good their armor.

And to be clear, I'm not disagreeing with any of the suggestions for altering defense, just that I like the uncertainty of survival as is. My table still adds defensive/Deflection to defense, but even so survival is not a sure thing. Always best to avoid combat if you want to ensure survival.

Overall I would reword "once per session" to refelct a three/four hour session.

F&D specifically I would change the morality system since for my party it just doesn't work. I just don't have enough moral choices to fit in a three hour session to warrant a roll and my pc's shoot up to light side paragon super fast. I would probably have them roll at morality choices so as to reflect immediate changes in morality. Now as it is it feels too abstract.

1 hour ago, DanteRotterdam said:

Overall I would reword "once per session" to refelct a three/four hour session.

F&D specifically I would change the morality system since for my party it just doesn't work. I just don't have enough moral choices to fit in a three hour session to warrant a roll and my pc's shoot up to light side paragon super fast. I would probably have them roll at morality choices so as to reflect immediate changes in morality. Now as it is it feels too abstract.

You could always switch the die to a d6. That should slow things down a bit.

4 hours ago, DanteRotterdam said:

Overall I would reword "once per session" to refelct a three/four hour session.

F&D specifically I would change the morality system since for my party it just doesn't work. I just don't have enough moral choices to fit in a three hour session to warrant a roll and my pc's shoot up to light side paragon super fast. I would probably have them roll at morality choices so as to reflect immediate changes in morality. Now as it is it feels too abstract.

That is actually already in the morality rules, on short sessions you can delay the roll simply, completely up the GM. Besides, imo giving choices is easy, just don't kill every minion the PCs shoot down, and inform the PCs that those guys are down for now, but could bite them later. It's fun to let those surviving henchmen fall into the PCs backs later on IF they don't kill them or hand out conflict if they kill them. Works best when the PCs are in a hurry, which they usually are.

Moral choices do not need to be the big choices, the small stuff works just fine for the system. It does not need to be always a terrorist threatening to kill everyone later UNLESS a cold-blooded killer stops him.

I would make the GM show the stats of opposing enemies before battling (assuming they aren't hiding weapons). This would allow the PCs to realize how tough an opponent is.

I've found that intimidating a group is difficult until they find out the actual stats. The groups that I’ve GM’d with tend to have a hard time sizing up an enemy, maybe that’s the GM’s fault, but regardless I see no harm in showing them stats.

15 hours ago, SEApocalypse said:

That is actually already in the morality rules, on short sessions you can delay the roll simply, completely up the GM. Besides, imo giving choices is easy, just don't kill every minion the PCs shoot down, and inform the PCs that those guys are down for now, but could bite them later. It's fun to let those surviving henchmen fall into the PCs backs later on IF they don't kill them or hand out conflict if they kill them. Works best when the PCs are in a hurry, which they usually are.

Moral choices do not need to be the big choices, the small stuff works just fine for the system. It does not need to be always a terrorist threatening to kill everyone later UNLESS a cold-blooded killer stops him.

I was unaware we were going to tell people the things they were asked to list were wrong.

Trying to use narrative dice with force powers?