So true. If the dice were created equal (as far as number of success versus failure symbols goes) only having more dice would mean a greater chance of success. Now people can give it a shot to try and roll when their ability dice number does not equal the difficulty number (and as such the number of purple difficulty dice). The same applies to setback and boosts, and even a very slight difference between proficiency dice and challenge dice.

But it does make everybody seem more capable, as the success ratio is slightly higher than the failure ration. And that translates to highly skilled characters even seeming, or simply becoming, more capable.

You haven't really told us about the characters in question. In my experience, characters become overpowered because:

a) you've given them hundreds or thousands of XP and they used it to min/max rather than build well-rounded characters

b) you've given them hugely high stats to start with or let them spend XP on raising stats, hopelessly unbalancing the game

c) you've ignored the economy rules and given them disruptors, lightsabers, power-armour etc without enforcing that all that stuff is illegal as anything

d) they've min-maxed at low XP by building Droid Marauders or something cheesy and you're not hitting them on their weak spots

e) they have crazy levels of Force powers

f) you're somehow interpreting the rules wrong

As whafrog says, you should be flipping Destiny points as a matter of course - any time you make a roll, think to yourself 'could something really bad happen here?' If there's ever a potential 'oh s**t' moment, that's your cue to flip a DP and upgrade a purple to red. This is necessary for the flow of the Destiny points and encourages both sides to use them liberally -this is meant to be a heroic game after all.

I wouldn't worry about them slaughtering stormtroopers or other minions; you're supposed to mow these guys down by the truck-load. That's why they are there in the first place.

Another reason the characters may feel overpowered is the types of encounters and challenges you're putting in front of them. If all the characters are combat-specialists and you keep putting them in combats, then of course they're always going to do very well. If a specific character is specced with high Perception and awareness, encounters that involve investigation aren't going to be much of a challenge.

A pro Slicer needs a specially designed encounter to make slicing challenging, and a pilot needs more than empty space or else they'll fly circles around the enemies (I recommend an asteroid field to challenge the ace pilot character ).

It's all about the type of challenges vs. the specialties of the characters. Put them in different situations, and you'll see how the terrain changes based on how suited to the challenges the characters are.

We've probably screwed the rules up somewhere, if I had to guess. None of the characters are overpowered, and it feels like I've barely given them any XP or duty. They all use blaster pistols and padded armor is the best anyone has. They might have 1 or 2 skills with a second rank, and most have nothing. They've received a total of maybe 30 xp spread across about 10 sessions(3 hours each)

I know we don't use the destiny points much at all. They almost never need them to succeed on even 5 difficulty dice. As a for instance, one character tried to convince some guards that he'd rushed into the base because of the riot outside. He used a destiny point to give himself 1 green and 1 yellow against the guards' 3 red. He had 2 successes, one of which was a Triumph.

It may be that they're a very well organized team, only one of which is a combat character, but the weapons just do SO much damage they can kill droves of guys in seconds.

That's why I think I've screwed up a rule somewhere. If a player shoots at a group of 4 troopers and does enough damage after soak is removed to kill 2, does he in fact kill 2, or can he only ever kill 1 person per attack?

That's a bit odd. What are their characteristic levels? If they're only at +30 over starting xp, I can't imagine they have more than a 4 in their primary combat characteristic, and even then that'd leave them with mostly 2s in everything else. And if they barely have any skill ranks to boot, they should NOT be easily succeeding on Formidable checks, even with no Setbacks or upgrades.

My party is at +800 xp earned, has a fair number of 3s in their characteristics and still have trouble succeeding at checks of Daunting or higher, and that's with talents to remove the ubiquitous Setbacks.

I've said this in so many similar threads now that the veterans here are probably sick to death of reading it, but I'll repeat my sage advice (ahem) for the benefit of the newcomers:

1. Stop using minions. Use rivals or nemeses instead, and make sure there's an equal number of NPCs as there are PCs (or more). That way the action economy - how many actions each side gets in a round respective of each other - doesn't get out of whack.

2. Once you're using rivals/nemeses instead of minions you can give them talents. Defensive stuff, like Side Step, Defensive Stance, Dodge, Adversary and so on. A few upgrades and some setback dice from Defence does wonders for the survivability of the NPCs.

3. Give the NPCs healing capabilities. The Military Belt Pouch from Dangerous Covenants holds 2 stimpacks and lets the wearer draw them as an incidental. It costs 10 credits or something, and has a rarity of 0. There's no reason for anyone not to have this. Also, throw in a medic-type character with the NPCs and give them a medpac and some ranks in Surgeon.

4. Are your NPCs doing enough damage? You can give them bigger guns, or add talents like Deadly Accuracy or Soft Spot/Anatomy Lesson/Targeted Blow. If you do the latter you can even choose when to flip a Destiny point and add damage - the tank PC with high soak gets hit harder without you having to worry about slaughtering the squishies.

17 hours ago, wanderlust2 said:

He used a destiny point to give himself 1 green and 1 yellow against the guards' 3 red. He had 2 successes, one of which was a Triumph.

but the weapons just do SO much damage they can kill droves of guys in seconds.

Why would the guard have three Reds? You only Upgrade difficulty using Destiny Points or if a particular ability like Adversary or Nobody's Fool comes into play (unless it's an opposed check, in which it sounds pretty tough for just a guard)

And how do their weapons do 'SO much damage' if they are only regular blaster pistols? If they have disruptor weapons or tricked-out lightsabers/heavy blasters then that's your problem right there.

I honestly don't want to be patronising, but it sounds like you're doing something wrong if starting characters are one-shotting rancors or the like. It may be a rules problem.

As it's a combat issue, please tell us the character's baseline stats, the skills they are using and the weapons they have (including mods). If you give us more information, we can help you more accurately.

18 hours ago, wanderlust2 said:

That's why I think I've screwed up a rule somewhere. If a player shoots at a group of 4 troopers and does enough damage after soak is removed to kill 2, does he in fact kill 2, or can he only ever kill 1 person per attack?

It sounds to me like you're calculating successes incorrectly, either that or they are the luckiest players ever. Let's say that have four dice in their attack pool, even if the negative dice are blank, they'd be lucky to get 4 successes. A blaster pistol does 6 damage, so 10 total. I'm AFB, but Soak on a trooper is probably 5, and they have a WT of 5ish, so 10 damage may not be enough to even take out one. That's on a lucky shot with no failures cancelling successes.

Maybe you're allowing them to count all their successes if they have a net of one?

On 18/10/2017 at 9:15 PM, Xcapobl said:

So true. If the dice were created equal (as far as number of success versus failure symbols goes) only having more dice would mean a greater chance of success. Now people can give it a shot to try and roll when their ability dice number does not equal the difficulty number (and as such the number of purple difficulty dice). The same applies to setback and boosts, and even a very slight difference between proficiency dice and challenge dice.

But it does make everybody seem more capable, as the success ratio is slightly higher than the failure ration. And that translates to highly skilled characters even seeming, or simply becoming, more capable.

Actually you are more likely to fail an equal check its only when you reach 4gv4p does the chance of success start to equal 50% although having 1 proficiency dice is actual a very good balancer so 1y1g v 2p gives approx 50% as does 1y2gv3p.

I'm seconding (thirding? Fourthing? That just sounds dirty, for some reason...) the request for your characters' stats, and perhaps some examples. If we can get the numbers you're using and the dice you're rolling, we can pinpoint where the rules issue is, because from the sound of it, something is wrong, but it's hard to know what.

As it might help, here are a half-dozen sample rolls of a character with four Agility and 2 ranks in Ranged: Light shooting a Heavy Blaster Pistol (base damage 7, Crit 3) at a squad of Stormtroopers at Medium range behind cover (Soak 5, Defense 1). We'll see how it generally goes:

Shooting the Stormtroopers : 2eP+2eA+2eD+1eS 2 successes, 1 advantage

So, with this roll, the character deals 9 - 5 = 4 Wounds to the squad of Troopers, meaning none of them have been defeated. The one advantage is not useful for inflicting a crit, but the character can heal a strain or pass the next character to act a Boost die.

Shooting the Stormtroopers : 2eP+2eA+2eD+1eS 2 successes, 1 advantage, 1 Triumph

This time, we get somewhere! The character inflicts 9 - 5 = 4 wounds, spends the Triumph for a crit which inflicts an additional free 5 wounds (the troopers' threshold), for a total of 9 wounds inflicted. One trooper down, another weakened. One again, a single advantage to heal some strain or pass a boost, or (an option that is terminally underused) notice something of import in the scene.

Shooting the Stormtroopers : 2eP+2eA+2eD+1eS 0 successes

Here is...a total wash. The player had the advantage, both in number of dice and size of dice, but this still happens occasionally. No troopers even injured, and the player doesn't even get any advantage to spend as a consolation prize.

Shooting the Stormtrooper : 2eP+2eA+2eD+1eS 6 successes, 2 threat

Oh boy. This is probably the most successful check that this particular character will ever have: 6 successes! Let's see, so they inflict 13 - 5 = 8 wounds. Which is enough to kill a single trooper and start to work on the next, but that's still only a single trooper down (unless the squad had at least 3 existing wounds already), but the character also has to deal with the 2 Threat. Don't just inflict 2 strain here, but do something else. Give the troopers (or maybe their commander, or the Nemesis they're escorting) an free maneuver! Add a Setback to a character's check, or give the Troopers a Boost on their attack as they buckle down when they see their beloved squad-mates dying! Once again, this is an awesome result, but it's still only a trooper and a half killed, at that a cost.

Shooting the Stormtroopers : 2eP+2eA+2eD+1eS 2 successes, 1 threat, 1 Triumph

Oh, another Triumph! Once again, assuming it's used for a crit, that's 9 + 5 - 5 = 9 wounds inflicted to the troopers, which is still only 1 trooper killed if it's the first hit. And the character has to deal with a Threat. 1 strain is the common one, but if the character is in cover, you can negate their cover! If they're Side Stepping, you can stop them from Side Stepping, allowing the troopers to fire back without the additional upgrade. Even with the damage, the character is facing some opposition.

Shooting the Stormtroopers : 2eP+2eA+2eD+1eS 1 success, 1 advantage

For our last test, we deal 8 - 5 = 3 wounds, not even enough to kill a single trooper. We get an advantage, but it's still just one, not enough to swing the tide of the conflict.

As you can see, this is the character against a single squad of Stormtroopers (I usually do them in squads of eight, so that they can take a few hits before their functionality starts decreasing), and even in the best case scenarios, they killed at most two on a single attack. But more than half of our tests didn't kill a single trooper, and if there are three squads in the combat with a Sergeant commanding them, and they're acting tactically (taking cover, not advancing unless players roll threat to take a free maneuver to advance), a group of four players with similar stats and weapons should be overwhelmed by them. And that's with these troopers having no ranks in Adversary, which is a bunch of free upgrades to their defense and introduces the possibility of Despair. Sure, the characters weren't using Destiny Points or aiming or anything, but that's not going to swing the balance here too much.

1 hour ago, Absol197 said:

That just sounds dirty, for some reason...

But... well said.

And they say girls struggle with the math part of role-playing...!

2 minutes ago, Maelora said:

But... well said.

And they say girls struggle with the math part of role-playing...!

Who says that? I'll math them so hard they forget what a numeral is!

I'm actually okay with rules and dice (I've literally been doing this stuff all my life so I should be!), although my writing and table-top skills are what makes me awesome

But that's one of those frequently-proved-wrong myths about us; that we're good at fanfiction but not the menz stuff like numbers and tricky rules.

And you're the living proof that's not so

Yay! Living proof! Like a sasquatch! Or...wait, no...hmm...

So there's a lot to respond to here, so I'll try to cover it all as best as I can.

I have 3 players in the group. 1 has 3 agility, uses a heavy blaster pistol with an +1 damage module upgrade(so 8 damage). He has NO ranks in the skill. With a single success, required to hit, he'll all but kill a single trooper. He often aims, giving him a boost die, and 2 successes is not difficult at all at medium or short range. That's a single trooper easily killed.

The combat focused player uses a vibro-ax and has a brawn of 5(he's a Trandoshan). He also has 2 ranks in Melee, so is rolling 3 green,12yellow and ignoring 2 soak. From what we've read, melee combat is always 2 purple dice, so he routinely gets 3+ success or a large number of advantages to convert to crits(or use abilities). The ax does 8 damage(with his brawn), so a single hit is doing 9 damage, ignoring 2 soak, and killing 1 trooper and wounding a second. Keep in mind he only needs 2 advantages to activate the crit(and kill a second), and when the team works together to pass him boost dice it gets insane.

The 3rd member doesn't often do much damage as he's a support character(but he can add to the pile pretty quickly). He does the slicing and such, but has an Int of 4 and doesn't struggle with too much on his side.

When these 2 go against a group of 4 troopers, they can often down 2 to 3 in a single turn. Anything with lower soak, like typical thugs or gang members(like naval troopers or such) gets slaughtered wholesale.

The roll to trick the guards was against a squad of 4 Storm Troopers, not just 1.

Admittedly my group has very hot and cold dice, often failing as miserably as they succeed. They all use the dice app, so they let it provide the totals. Now here's the difference that I see, and it's something I have to be extremely cautious with. They will immediately pick up and use a downed trooper's blaster rifle if they are in range to do so. When they infiltrate a base and overwhelm the first set of troopers, all of their numbers suddenly jump. A successful blaster rifle shot(1 success) kills a trooper(9 base +1 success). If 2 players shoot and hit, that's 2 troopers dead(possibly 3) and suddenly the troopers will have a hard time hitting in return with their 1 attack. If we throw in the melee character, they can wipe out a squad of 4 in a turn.

As for examples, it's hard to put one down specifically. I post our games to youtube, and when listening back very few of their rolls sound outrageous. From my experience with other systems, something seems off and I have no doubt it's my understanding of the rules. I come from games like Champions and GURPS which are much more combat flexible but also more difficult and quite deadly for players. Maybe I'm just not used to the feeling of imbalance I'm getting from this and everything is normal.

Okay let's see.

1. There seems to be a slight error in how you count wounds. An NPC is taken out when you exceed his wound threshold, not when you reach it. So taking the stormtrooper squad as an example, the first trooper is taken out when the squad took six damage after soak, the second when they took 11 damage and so on.

2. Don't make the skill checks too easy. There often is a reason to throw in one or more setbacks. Let your minions take cover or visibility might be reduced. This also allows all the talents that remove setbacks to be useful.

3. If you want to challenge your group you need more opponents. When you have just one minion group, the fight is basically three against one, as the minion group only has one initiative slot and action per round. And Your melee character is basically completely combat focused (assuming he started with brawn 5 thats all his starting xp) so he should be able to take on a minion group 1v1 and win.

For a challenge in combat I would consider something like two squads of three stormtrooper minions plus a stormtrooper sergeant. (And I would expect your group to still win that encounter, but they probably will need stimpacks/take strain for extra maneuvers)

4. Out of combat your example of 1 yellow 1 green vs three red is pure luck. The character had a 21% chance of success and at the same time a 23% chance of one or more despairs. That's not something one of my characters would attempt unless he has no other (better) options.

On 10/20/2017 at 10:16 AM, Maelora said:

a) you've given them hundreds or thousands of XP and they used it to min/max rather than build well-rounded characters

So much this. We have three PCs in play and are hovering at about 850 points (give or take) and a handful of minion groups played smart can still do us some serious hurtin'. Last night, the group had gotten spread out in a mining facility courtyard, two minion groups each - and while it wasn't a close thing, the players were wobbling on their feet by the time the fight was done. I think we all have three trees each (or two trees and tons of force powers to deal with).

2 hours ago, wanderlust2 said:

I have 3 players in the group. 1 has 3 agility, uses a heavy blaster pistol with an +1 damage module upgrade(so 8 damage). He has NO ranks in the skill. With a single success, required to hit, he'll all but kill a single trooper. He often aims, giving him a boost die, and 2 successes is not difficult at all at medium or short range. That's a single trooper easily killed.

Hmm, looks like y'all doing the math wrong here. Okay, I'll grab my dice and lets go through this step at a time:

Mr Gun is aiming and shooting at a four man Stormtrooper minion group at medium range, three greens and a blue vs two purples. My sample roll comes up with two success, one fail, one threat, two advantage. The damage on the slightly upgraded gun should be 7 base + 1 for the mod + 1 for the roll = grand total of 9.

A single minion has a wound threshold of 5, meaning the group has a total of 20. Their soak is 5.

So 9 damage - 5 soak = 4 damage through (and one annoyed but not dead Stormtrooper minion)

Even if he eats the strain and double aims, my sample blue added to the roll comes up 1 and 1, so just enough to bring the minion to a wound threshold of 0, which still doesn't drop him since you have to exceed the target's value to kill them.

2 hours ago, wanderlust2 said:

The combat focused player uses a vibro-ax and has a brawn of 5(he's a Trandoshan). He also has 2 ranks in Melee, so is rolling 3 green,12yellow and ignoring 2 soak. From what we've read, melee combat is always 2 purple dice, so he routinely gets 3+ success or a large number of advantages to convert to crits(or use abilities). The ax does 8 damage(with his brawn), so a single hit is doing 9 damage, ignoring 2 soak, and killing 1 trooper and wounding a second. Keep in mind he only needs 2 advantages to activate the crit(and kill a second), and when the team works together to pass him boost dice it gets insane.

Never bring a knife to a gunfight. Why are they not shooting Mr Sword as he closes the distance? Why are they not backpedaling to keep Mr Sword from reaching engaged range? Why are you not putting things between him and them? Why are the minion groups standing next to each other so Mr Sword can get to them both easily? Are you upgrading Mr Gun's difficulty because he is shooting at the stormtroopers while Mr Sword is engaged with them so when Mr Gun gets a Despair, Mr Sword just got shot too!

2 hours ago, wanderlust2 said:

He does the slicing and such, but has an Int of 4 and doesn't struggle with too much on his side.

Throw bigger tougher challenges at him. Just yesterday my engineer had to repair the flight controls on a crashing spaceship - no proper tools (one setback), extremely rushed (two setback dice), no windscreen so she couldn't really see from all the wind and rain blasting her in her face (third setback), a tumbling out of control vehicle (setback four), no adequate replacement parts (setback five) oh, and the cockpit was on fire (setback six). So make him do that - find any excuse to pile on the black dice (and in the interest of fairness, throw blues just as generously too).

9 minutes ago, Desslok said:

Hmm, looks like y'all doing the math wrong here. Okay, I'll grab my dice and lets go through this step at a time:

Mr Gun is aiming and shooting at a four man Stormtrooper minion group at short range, three greens and a blue vs two purples. My sample roll comes up with two success, one fail, one threat, two advantage. The damage on the slightly upgraded gun should be 7 base + 1 for the mod + 1 for the roll = grand total of 9.

Short range should be only one purple. If you take 3 green one blue against one purple you have about 80% chance to hit and about 29% chance to get three or more successes to instantly kill one minion.

If you add a single setback because the stormtroopers took cover this reduces to 71% chance to hit and 23% to kill a minion. So killing one stormtrooper per round of combat should be the exception not the norm for this character.

(Yes I like math)

That's what I said. Medium range.

10 minutes ago, Sterf said:

Short range should be only one purple. If you take 3 green one blue against one purple you have about 80% chance to hit and about 29% chance to get three or more successes to instantly kill one minion.

If you add a single setback because the stormtroopers took cover this reduces to 71% chance to hit and 23% to kill a minion. So killing one stormtrooper per round of combat should be the exception not the norm for this character.

(Yes I like math)

Hey, I like math too! We should totally be friends!

One of the main issues with range and the melee character closing the distance is that our campaign is currently inside a city, with combats most often taking place inside rooms, corridors, and the occasional warehouse/hanger sized room. Range is very rarely an impediment for the melee character to worry about. If he's too far, he'll often eat the strain for extra move.

The thing about exceeding the threshold was not something I was aware of. I read it, but obviously didn't process it beyond reducing them by their individual WTs. That will definitely change a few fights here and there. I know they don't typically encounter large groups of enemies, preferring to avoid them if they can, so large fights with multiple minion groups and leaders hasn't been a huge thing yet. However, they've progressed enough in the story that it makes sense for them to start seeing larger groups. I'll give that a try in our next session to see how they fare.

I don't think the issue is anymore complex than you need to simply throw more target sets at them. If you use one minion group attack versus their three they are going to wipe the floor constantly.

There are a bevy of weapon options to confound any melee type and the big huge dude with the vibro axe isn't a new trick stormtroopers have never seen, they'd be ready to deal with it.

They would also not hesitate to call reinforcements.

2 minutes ago, wanderlust2 said:

One of the main issues with range and the melee character closing the distance is that our campaign is currently inside a city, with combats most often taking place inside rooms, corridors, and the occasional warehouse/hanger sized room. Range is very rarely an impediment for the melee character to worry about. If he's too far, he'll often eat the strain for extra move.

Lets see, just off the top of my head. . . .

Having a fight inside a warehouse/hanger is just a gift from the gods. The minions are on one catwalk, the PCs are on the other. Mr Sword has jump from conveyor to conveyor and dodge swinging machinery. Mr Sword has to fight on a moving belt, adding all kinds of black dice to his attacks. The Imperials drop shipping containers on him, there are barrels of exploding things near him. Steam jets, fire jets, fountains of sparks - all these things start to add up after a while.

In a corridor? Easy! Go to the Galaxy Quest well:

Range is very rarely an impediment for the melee character to worry about.

Then make it an impediment. You control where the fights go down, so get away from corridors and move it to rooftops with gaps and things to fall off of.

If he's too far, he'll often eat the strain for extra move.

Then hit him in the strain. Seriously, strain management is one of the most important tools in the GM's arsenal and one of the easiest ways for you to control the fight. If they're just barely hanging on and spending those advantage to recover strain, they're not getting crits and otherwise making your NPC's lives ****.

The other thing is to give the enemies the initiative sometimes. This group is optimized for fights in small spaces against a limited number of minions. But they're in a city, right? Are they sure they took out all the security cameras? * Flips Dark Side Destiny Point * Are they really sure? If not, that's the perfect opportunity for some investigators to be on their tail, which could easily result in ambushes at inopportune moments, city-wide restrictions put into place in their species and/or weapon loadouts, or even legitimate arrest warrants being issued.

There's always a way to make the fight something they're not prepared for, or forcing them into encounter types they're not statted to excel at.