Hi all

This is a random thought I had - could the 2-weapon combat rules be expanded to allow a character to attempt two actions at once?

So, in 2-weapon combat, the player selects the lowest relevant skill and the lowest relevant characteristic, and then (assuming the skills are different from one another) rolls against the highest available difficulty +2. This makes 2-weapon attacks very difficult, especially for a low-XP character, with the fairly obvious pay-off of extra damage.

Is there any reason this couldn't be broadened out to include all skills. Say a PC is involved in a dogfight, and wants to both Gain the Advantage AND fire his blasters - would it be game-breaking to allow him to use whichever is lowest out of Piloting/Gunnery and then add 2 difficulty dice to the highest availability? Low chance of success, high chance of awesome?

There are Talents that do some of that which you would be gutting.

So how would that work? You make the roll and have to spend 2 Advantage to resolve the secondary action?

I allow it only for certain types of actions that make sense. If a player says, "I want to leap across the gap, swinging my vibrosword at him," that's something I want to encourage! I've already established that the leap requires a roll, so I would just use the lowest of each Attribute and Skill. I may toss in a setback, but probably not a difficulty die, because I want my players doing crazy antics.

Apparently Jay Little when GMing early on in the SW RPG era said that trying to resolve the kind of multiple actions you might need is to roll one check and resolve the other with advantage. Chase down a criminal on a speeder bike and leap off to tackle the chasee roll a piloting (planetary) or athletics check (for the leap) and let threat and advantage determine the secondary result. Advantage from the check causes strain dmg , (which to all intensive purposes is damage to non-nemesis characters) , does it matter how that damage gets narrated.

why reinvent the wheel.

I think it depends how hardcore you following the rules and what you try to do, as 'The Grand Fallon' said.

I know in our game, our GM wants us to do interesting and compelling things to enhance the story and so therefore if you wanna jump off a speeder bike, onto a thick tree branch and double foot kick a guy straight to the head, then just roll the relevant checks and let the Gm get to work...

After all, what's the fun in spoiling epic stunts just cause of rules. The rules just help esstabilsh order in roleplaying

8 hours ago, The Grand Falloon said:

I allow it only for certain types of actions that make sense. If a player says, "I want to leap across the gap, swinging my vibrosword at him," that's something I want to encourage! I've already established that the leap requires a roll, so I would just use the lowest of each Attribute and Skill. I may toss in a setback, but probably not a difficulty die, because I want my players doing crazy antics.

Is this technical not just a standard attack with two movement maneuvers which fails if the character doesn't roll 3 advantage on his attack to justify the movement? Don't get me wrong, I am technical not the biggest fan of the execution of the narrative dice system, but such bonus events are usually handled by the advantage and threat system. Kicking someone down, gaining better position, noticing something important about the encounter,using force move freely fuelled just by advantages from a lightsaber attack to kick someone against a wall and disorientate them for a turn, etc

Jumping across a gap sounds like a perfect valid to just use a single combat roll and requiring not only a success but enough advantages as well to do it successfully. Increasing difficulty or adding setbacks at the other hand sounds perfectly within the theme of the dice mechanics. Even downright replacing the average difficulty with difficult terrain options sounds good.

And the clarify, the main reason I am a fun of the concept of the narrative dice, but not the actual mechanics is mainly the systems like Ubiquity, Per Aspera, Agone and many, many more have mechanics which consider already the options to combine normal skill checks and add synergies between skills. Like for example a All-For-One Fencer could be an amazing dancer and combine is fencing style with his dancing skill to add an boost to his fencing checks or add a boost to his dancing based on his fencing skill. The only prerequisite was having a skill level of 4 out of 5 and gaining GM approval that your description of the action justifies the combination. Want to murder someone from behind? Melee with Stealth and Medicine boni for sneaking up and hitting a lethal spot. This was the base for the assist system as well. So one of your fellow musketeers could use his deception skill to get the attention of the guards to make it easier for you to sneak up and kill them for you. A simple cap of a maximum of 4 boosts overall and you were ready for a very cinematic system, because you tried to make your actions as colorful as possible to your 4 boosts on most of your actions, which sounds easier than it is, because sometimes you just want to shoot the bastard in front of you. ;-)

Anyway, before this gets to much of a rant, just spending advantages to achieve this after you rolled should do the trick as well. Now combined checks are technical in the system, simply using the lowest dice pool should work just fine, I still would require to reach an advantage target similar in cost to what the player wants to achieve with his character and otherwise downgrade the effect to something more suited to the roll. Like just crossing the gap, but not gaining the hit on top. The beauty of the system is really that you first roll and then decide what to do with the roll. The dice doing part of the narrative.