Hi there,

I have run a few games of Edge of the Empire now and my friends and I are having great fun! As a brand new GM, one of the main challenges I've found is making sure the encounters are challenging enough to create suspense for the PCs without being so tough that they lose interest. In combat I've noticed that my PCs are successfully making ranged and melee combat checks c.90-95% of the time which I am worried is too easy for them, particularly as in many cases they are able to cut through 3x5 minion groups with relative ease (there are 5 PCs in the party for reference).

I have tried to implement setback dice and tried to make sure that the combat takes place in an open space to increase the range (moving from short to at least medium range) but the hits keep on coming! Any advice on how to shape up combat to make it more challenging?

Apologies if this has been covered in another topic and happy to be redirected if possible.

Thanks in advance!

Give a Rival the Overwhelming Fire ability. As a maneuver the Rival can direct a minion group within medium (i think) to make a free combat check. This may not be correct but I rule that to mean the minion groups can make a free attack out of order and then make their normal attack when it is their turn. First time I used this on my players they kinda freaked and hunkered down for a round or two.

I've also begun to apply ranks of Adversary to the minion groups I pit my players against. The eventual Despairs make for some interesting effects and story telling.

On 2017-06-22 at 10:42 AM, IHaveAWookie said:

I have tried to implement setback dice and tried to make sure that the combat takes place in an open space to increase the range (moving from short to at least medium range)

Go further, to long and extreme. Have a sniper or two, and move them around. If you don't have the Adversary decks, pick up a few. Pair stormtrooper minion groups with a stormtrooper leader...I'm not sure if the leader has the same ability Oden Gebhac mentioned, but it's similar...the point being to move the pieces around more effectively. And don't be afraid to call in reinforcements.

There might come a time when you feel you've overdone it, and suddenly the party collapses and are all "killed". It's actually pretty hard to kill a PC in this game, so always be prepared for a reason to capture the PCs where they "wake up" in some detention facility. I've had a lot more fun running prison escapes and other breakouts than a lot of other scenarios.

Following on from whafrog's comment about snipers, a really good way to make combat more interesting is to have a variety of different NPC types. Brawlers, snipers, heavies, grenadiers, aerial troops, support characters, force-wielders, etc. It will force your PCs to approach combat with a measure of tactics, and the different NPCs can cover for each others' deficiencies.

Apart from mechanical considerations (Adversary talent, cool special abilities, weapons, terrain and so on), you can also try and approach this from the narrative side. Do not make every fight a straight last-man-standing / to-the-death type of situation. Give your players different objectives and "win conditions" than just "kill everybody". For example:

• The entire garrison is after them. They can fend off a wave or two, but they will be overrun if they cannot escape. Think fast!
• The bad guy is getting away. Killing his minions may be fun, but will allow him to escape. How to get past them?
• The PC might be monsters in combat, but the NPC they are pledged to protect and get from A to B is not. Cover him!
• The crime lord whose organization they are infiltrating wants to see how capable they are. How to be good enough without giving away too much?

And so on.

I recently learned how effective having a Stormtrooper Sergeant with a squad of stormtroopers is against my PCs. Up to this point, I too was having balancing issues in encounters, mostly because we have a crazy strong Wookiee Marauder and a very deadly assassin droid. So while my players were rescuing hostages, I sprung an ambush on them with the sergeant and his squad, and they quickly learned their normal tactic of letting the droid and the wookiee do all the fighting was not gunna cut it. They ended up abandoning the hostages to their doom and booking it out of there.

Hitting most of the time is normal, unless perhaps you're dealing with a complete noncombatant, and even then they'll hit more often than not. If the encounter is taking place at very long range then misses will crop up more often but the system doesn't expect most PCs to have Stormtrooper accuracy.

Powering up opponents is liable to turn things into an arms race as the players sink all of their resources into catching up to the opposition, whereupon you end up raising the power level further, making for even more attack optimization by the players, etc. Don't go that route. Minions are supposed to drop like flies and rivals aren't really meant to be movie-narrative "rivals", just one of a set of ordinary opponents.

Rather than worrying about the power level of the opposition, worry about the scenario in which the fight is taking place. Having a battle just to have one isn't terribly satisfying and this system really isn't written around it (unlike dungeon crawlers, which are); there should be something - not necessarily the same thing - that the PCs and/or bad guys are trying to accomplish (beyond 'mow down the opposition') and the firefight makes the job more complicated, but not so overwhelming that the actual task has to be ignored completely.

Use minion groups more sparingly; have more rivals in your encounters. A couple of ranks in a defensive talent like Dodge works good, so does Defence. And there's always Adversary. But most importantly, I think, is to realize that characters in this game (both PCs and NPCs) are supposed to get hit a few times in combat; that's why it takes a high-number Critical Injury to kill somone rather than just have them exceed their wound threshold. 4-5 soak and around 15-16 WT should keep your rivals in the fight long enough to make the players feel like they had to work for it. And in either case it's pretty rare to have a combat encounter last much past round 4 or 5, in my experience.

1 hour ago, Krieger22 said:

And in either case it's pretty rare to have a combat encounter last much past round 4 or 5, in my experience.

To flesh this out, in my games if the combat goes past round 3 I start making arrangements in my head to break it up. As others have noted, the combat should be *about something*. If the PCs are sneaking into a base, and it takes more than a round or two to incapacitate the guards, the base might go on alert or there will be some other complication that requires them to move on. If the PCs are running away, it's either because I've imposed a clock ("you have to make it to your ship and take off within X rounds or the blockade will be complete", or "you have to transmit the plans to the CR-90 above that is in battle, and if it takes more than X rounds it will probably be shot down"), or the opposition is clearly overwhelming. In these cases I prefer a few rounds of chasing (see the chase rules in the Core book) punctuated by a round or two of fighting.

Give them something to do that requires them to use non-combat skills and only introduce combat when it gives meaning to the story. Not as a time filler. If all you're giving your players is combat encounters, chances are, their XP is solely going into combat skills.