Autofire isn't a problem; quite frankly not all weapons were created equal and it is especially tailored to wiping out groups of people. Some weapons are natually much higher in power to give the players or apposing NPC's pause for thought; if autofire didn't exist, then there wouldn't be any real value in taking a heavy weapon with it compared to a rocket launcher. The heavy blaster rifle is meant to be that instrument that is designed to either suppress or mow down large groups of minons, in the same way that a person with high presence, cunning or corc can have a strong influence during the talkative encounters.

That being said, the GM needs to present more situations where it might not be possible to have that weapon available for an encounter. For example within a civilised setting or a smuggling port the offical there (even if they aren't "official" ) will usually set up rules on what is/isn't acceptable at the port and to leave any weapons that don't meet those regulations aboard the ship. E.g. only pistols, weapons of a certain size category must be kept in a case. No droids. e.g. to provide situations where the party might not necessarily have access to all their tools or to raise the risk factor by having to smuggle those tools in, within briefcases, trollies/whatever. Though if you get caught the consequences should be quite hefty. Fines, detainment and other interesting complications.

My GM had a lot of problems initially because he never applied any of those restraints, therefore the heavy gunner basically took his heavy blaster rifle wherever he went, until it came to a head in a session where the gunner was posing as a dignitary in a high class, high security casino, and when things went wild he simply stated. "I will draw my heavy blaster rifle and open fire." which caused a huge argument because quite frankly "no one would have been allowed within the function room of this planets upper crust with a weapon that could potentially clear out this planet's government in 2 minutes.". Since then, naturally introducing certain expectations and enforcing security checks for illegal items per person, it had become possible to tailor the encounters, having tons of minon groups for the full out war encounters while being able to scale back for those lesser encounters, unless the party was particularly inventive.

It's not your fault for taking what you specialise in as frequently as possible, but rather then using the rules to play passive/aggressive moderator and the other attempting to wiggle out of them, you two should be hashing out the terms of engagement or what is and isn't reasonable within a particular environment, until then your game will be doomed to eventually collapse. Once that starts to happen and he starts using squad rules to represent groups of minions, the problem should naturally clear itself up. This means also being able to compromise within those environments. Your character shines during the full blown military ops, just you might want to consider a different load out when within certain environments with restrictions.

In short, drop the house rules, enforce narrative restrictions and be flexible.

11 hours ago, syrath said:

I still maintain that without jury rigged its hardly broken, because it is much harder to roll 2 advantage , never mind 4 in a check and if you do you start to run the risk of failing the check. My own groups players are realising that dual wielding lightsabers is not as consistent as single wielding, firstly you roll less advantage and increase your chance of mssing by about 10%

Fair enough. I never disagreed about it being unbroken. I think auto fire is fine as is. Our experience is that getting that two advantage is not so difficult (as Bantha's eye adds one automatically for example). But we also do not see our heavy cutting down swaths of enemies on the regular. In fact, it is our assassin type character in normal combat doing some serious killing.

1 minute ago, Geodes said:

Fair enough. I never disagreed about it being unbroken. I think auto fire is fine as is. Our experience is that getting that two advantage is not so difficult (as Bantha's eye adds one automatically for example). But we also do not see our heavy cutting down swaths of enemies on the regular. In fact, it is our assassin type character in normal combat doing some serious killing.

2 advantage would be common enough (allowing 2 hits) 4 will be rare so getting 3 hits is not going to be happening very often. When you get a hit for every advantage it starts getting silly, regardless high soak or an enemy with improved reflect is the key to causing trouble for autofire. If you dont have breach or a high pierce on your weapon most of the damage per hit gets mitigated.

1 hour ago, LordBritish said:

Autofire isn't a problem; quite frankly not all weapons were created equal and it is especially tailored to wiping out groups of people. Some weapons are natually much higher in power to give the players or apposing NPC's pause for thought; if autofire didn't exist, then there wouldn't be any real value in taking a heavy weapon with it compared to a rocket launcher. The heavy blaster rifle is meant to be that instrument that is designed to either suppress or mow down large groups of minons, in the same way that a person with high presence, cunning or corc can have a strong influence during the talkative encounters.

That being said, the GM needs to present more situations where it might not be possible to have that weapon available for an encounter. For example within a civilised setting or a smuggling port the offical there (even if they aren't "official" ) will usually set up rules on what is/isn't acceptable at the port and to leave any weapons that don't meet those regulations aboard the ship. E.g. only pistols, weapons of a certain size category must be kept in a case. No droids. e.g. to provide situations where the party might not necessarily have access to all their tools or to raise the risk factor by having to smuggle those tools in, within briefcases, trollies/whatever. Though if you get caught the consequences should be quite hefty. Fines, detainment and other interesting complications.

My GM had a lot of problems initially because he never applied any of those restraints, therefore the heavy gunner basically took his heavy blaster rifle wherever he went, until it came to a head in a session where the gunner was posing as a dignitary in a high class, high security casino, and when things went wild he simply stated. "I will draw my heavy blaster rifle and open fire." which caused a huge argument because quite frankly "no one would have been allowed within the function room of this planets upper crust with a weapon that could potentially clear out this planet's government in 2 minutes.". Since then, naturally introducing certain expectations and enforcing security checks for illegal items per person, it had become possible to tailor the encounters, having tons of minon groups for the full out war encounters while being able to scale back for those lesser encounters, unless the party was particularly inventive.

It's not your fault for taking what you specialise in as frequently as possible, but rather then using the rules to play passive/aggressive moderator and the other attempting to wiggle out of them, you two should be hashing out the terms of engagement or what is and isn't reasonable within a particular environment, until then your game will be doomed to eventually collapse. Once that starts to happen and he starts using squad rules to represent groups of minions, the problem should naturally clear itself up. This means also being able to compromise within those environments. Your character shines during the full blown military ops, just you might want to consider a different load out when within certain environments with restrictions.

In short, drop the house rules, enforce narrative restrictions and be flexible.

Whether you're imposing narrative restrictions or making house rules the reason is the same, the mechanic is broken. If the mechanic wasn't lop sided, there wouldn't be a need for either. That's why you don't see thread after thread carrying on about Pierce, or Breach, Burn, Ensnare, etc, because they work and they aren't broken, and why a thread about autofire pops up every month because it creates the same problems across many tables.

5 minutes ago, 2P51 said:

Whether you're imposing narrative restrictions or making house rules the reason is the same, the mechanic is broken. If the mechanic wasn't lop sided, there wouldn't be a need for either. That's why you don't see thread after thread carrying on about Pierce, or Breach, Burn, Ensnare, etc, because they work and they aren't broken, and why a thread about autofire pops up every month because it creates the same problems across many tables.

Indeed, it is overpowered weapon as was intended the design of the rules. Just there is a reason why we almost never see a true autofire weapon in any old rag tag group; it's too heavy, attention drawing or just flat out inappropriate for that parties needs. If the campaign doesn't involve fighting a war, then it likely isn't appropriate. That talk of expectation needs to occur at the start of the campaign to set expectations of whether autofire weapons are appropriate or not for the campaign.

17 minutes ago, LordBritish said:

Indeed, it is overpowered weapon as was intended the design of the rules. Just there is a reason why we almost never see a true autofire weapon in any old rag tag group; it's too heavy, attention drawing or just flat out inappropriate for that parties needs. If the campaign doesn't involve fighting a war, then it likely isn't appropriate. That talk of expectation needs to occur at the start of the campaign to set expectations of whether autofire weapons are appropriate or not for the campaign.

In episode 4 there is a rack of heavy blaster rifles in one control room off of one small little landing bay on the DS. Autofire weapons are everywhere in Star Wars. Not having them commonly available is simply another narrative roadblock to try to adjust to a bad mechanic.

@2P51 how many autofire weapons have you fired? I have shot a few and the rules model them pretty well.

1 minute ago, Daeglan said:

@2P51 how many autofire weapons have you fired? I have shot a few and the rules model them pretty well.

I have put tens of thousands of rounds through various auto fire weapons. This isn't about emulating life. This is about a game mechanic that is lop sided and consistently keeps creating the same balance issues as expressed by the monthly new topics on it.

It hasn't come up for us under the NaDS engine, but back in the day under the D6 engine I had - well, he would be a Heavy with that big *** rotary machine gun that we came up with reasonably balanced autofire stats for. It was pretty much a "When you absolutely, positively have to make every single MutherFer in the room dead" showstopper of a weapon. Generally it remained behind on the ship because, you know, crowds tend to panic and start running around screaming when you're hauling a Gatling gun around with you in the library. But when it came time to throw down and the Floorsweeper came out - yeah, it was glorious (and often messy).

So yeah, I don't see it as unreasonable to have other limitations placed on it like "cant bring it to a fancy restaurant" or "every cop on the planet stops you as you walk down the street".

1 minute ago, Desslok said:

It hasn't come up for us under the NaDS engine, but back in the day under the D6 engine I had - well, he would be a Heavy with that big *** rotary machine gun that we came up with reasonably balanced autofire stats for. It was pretty much a "When you absolutely, positively have to make every single MutherFer in the room dead" showstopper of a weapon. Generally it remained behind on the ship because, you know, crowds tend to panic and start running around screaming when you're hauling a Gatling gun around with you in the library. But when it came time to throw down and the Floorsweeper came out - yeah, it was glorious (and often messy).

So yeah, I don't see it as unreasonable to have other limitations placed on it like "cant bring it to a fancy restaurant" or "every cop on the planet stops you as you walk down the street".

So what if it's a statted out autofire pistol? Again, this isn't about a specific weapon, this is about a game mechanic.

Well, I know how I'd handle it at my table (should the subject come up, as we've not had the mechanic in play yet beyond my Minions have Linked and/or Autofire houserule that I occasionally use). If it was causing trouble, I'd 1) see if the player with the auto-fire would be willing to exercise some discretion when busting out the top shelf stuff and not do every single time and 2) Make sure to build in encounters into the game where going to town was appropreate and expected. It's unreasonable to have a character that sunk a bunch of resources into one facet of that character and not be able to unleash it from time to time.

So how's that for a non-answer?

I haven't seen a problem with it. In the hands of a skilled person they should be scary. There are Plenty of tools to to deal with it. Mostly what I see are consistently lazy GMs have issues with it. The multitude of threads just tells me there are a lot of GMs who are lazy.

I always wonder how many people have actually tried these mechanics and found them to be broken. I see lots of people saying that the mechanic needs fixed, but I've also pointed out that any reasoably average check has a 1 in 2 chance of triggering a second hit and of those perhaps 1 in 5 of those would have 4 or more advantage (of which a significant number of these would have failed the check and missed in the first place, because while you roll advantage your aren't rolling success). Against better opponents that chance starts to go downwards to a 1 in 10 chance or less of even getting 2 hits. Against most nemesis targets you may only get 3-4 dmg per hit (see above, while you roll success you arent rolling advantage).

I used to think that Scathing Tirade and all its variants led to a broken build until you actually look at the actual damage output you are doing per check (and while you can fit in 3 checks per round your strain isnt going to hold out long).

With through 200-300 earned xp I can build a brawler whose minimum damage with a hit is 20 or so damage with a bit more you can get pressure point which means you ignore soak thats way worse than a ranged fighter who might hit for 12 damage twice in a round.

27 minutes ago, syrath said:

I used to think that Scathing Tirade and all its variants led to a broken build until you actually look at the actual damage output you are doing per check (and while you can fit in 3 checks per round your strain isnt going to hold out long).

The Scathing Tirade is only super potent when you've dropped a ton of points into it. Once you get your coercion up to 4 or 5, picked up all three Scathing tiers and THEN picked up the Unmatched Expertise with the difficulty reduction talents - after ALL that, then you will be able to make folks run in terror of your acidic tongue. In one round, with 3 uses of Tirade, a pretty good roll and a great insult, I was able to make a Sith Apprentice lose face in front of all his slaves and run away. Good thing too - because my politico was all alone and would have gotten her butt whupped if I was not successful.

The downside he ran away to get his master. Oh boy. . . .

16 minutes ago, syrath said:

I always wonder how many people have actually tried these mechanics and found them to be broken. I see lots of people saying that the mechanic needs fixed, but I've also pointed out that any reasoably average check has a 1 in 2 chance of triggering a second hit and of those perhaps 1 in 5 of those would have 4 or more advantage (of which a significant number of these would have failed the check and missed in the first place, because while you roll advantage your aren't rolling success). Against better opponents that chance starts to go downwards to a 1 in 10 chance or less of even getting 2 hits. Against most nemesis targets you may only get 3-4 dmg per hit (see above, while you roll success you arent rolling advantage).

I used to think that Scathing Tirade and all its variants led to a broken build until you actually look at the actual damage output you are doing per check (and while you can fit in 3 checks per round your strain isnt going to hold out long).

With through 200-300 earned xp I can build a brawler whose minimum damage with a hit is 20 or so damage with a bit more you can get pressure point which means you ignore soak thats way worse than a ranged fighter who might hit for 12 damage twice in a round.

50% chance to double your damage? That sounds amazing. And at my table an attack targeting a "typical" Nemesis does a lot more than 3-4 damage.

I'm inclined to think that other GM's are facing somewhat different challenges at their table than you than they are lazy GMs who don't know what they're doing. There are a lot of experienced GMs on these boards who think Autofire is a problem (and others who don't). Most seem to agree that Jury Rigged is broken. Everything - practically - is a glass canon in this game and the ability to hit twice with the same attack roll is potent. I'm not convinced either way on whether it's broken but I lean towards thinking it is because it's such a powerful ability that's easy to take advantage of. I've got an Ataru Striker in my group who has finally acquired Hawkbat Swoop and Saber Swarm and can now actually exceed the Heavy's damage output but he had to spend more XP to get to that point and he has to spend more resources (Maneuver, Strain) to pull it off. Autofire is one of the if not the most premier way of dealing damage in this game and at relatively low cost. I do know that whenever I pull out Autofire weapons against my PCs they do everything they can to take that out as fast as possible.

I don't think comparing Autofire to one of the other oft-considered broken Talents in this game (Pressure Point) helps your argument that Autofire isn't broken.

1 hour ago, Daeglan said:

I haven't seen a problem with it. In the hands of a skilled person they should be scary. There are Plenty of tools to to deal with it. Mostly what I see are consistently lazy GMs have issues with it. The multitude of threads just tells me there are a lot of GMs who are lazy.

I'm not a lazy GM. Mostly what I read is people who don't have intelligent things to say opt for insulting people. A good mechanic doesn't need anything to "deal with it" you just use it.

1 hour ago, Daeglan said:

I haven't seen a problem with it. In the hands of a skilled person they should be scary. There are Plenty of tools to to deal with it. Mostly what I see are consistently lazy GMs have issues with it. The multitude of threads just tells me there are a lot of GMs who are lazy.

I'm not a lazy GM. Mostly what I read is people who don't have intelligent things to say opt for insulting people.

6 minutes ago, 2P51 said:

I'm not a lazy GM. Mostly what I read is people who don't have intelligent things to say opt for insulting people.

What I see is a lot of people ignore a multitude of solutions. Like most places you are not going to walk around with more than a pistol. Or at least people shoould react negatively to someone carrying a machine gun around.

You know what needs "multitudes" of solutions?? Problems.......I'm done.

This lazy GM is busy typing in 8 custom races and 24 specs to OggDude's app for a Genesys campaign I'm starting........

My personal opinion is that the damage scaling between weapons does not appear strong enough to make them stand out from one another, even if it does mechanically due to the flat reduction from soak. Firing a single shot blaster pistol or rifle seems meh. Ranged weapons do not have many interesting qualities and at some point you are just looking for a way to redistribute those 2-4 advantages yet again.

Autofire offers an easy and powerful way out and it rewards high skill in a very obvious and satisfying way. I think the biggest problem is that Autofire is readily available on the highest damage guns that already do well at penetrating enemy soak. The combination of high base damage + access to multiple hits is the worst offender to the power curve.

2 hours ago, Desslok said:

The Scathing Tirade is only super potent when you've dropped a ton of points into it. Once you get your coercion up to 4 or 5, picked up all three Scathing tiers and THEN picked up the Unmatched Expertise with the difficulty reduction talents - after ALL that, then you will be able to make folks run in terror of your acidic tongue. In one round, with 3 uses of Tirade, a pretty good roll and a great insult, I was able to make a Sith Apprentice lose face in front of all his slaves and run away. Good thing too - because my politico was all alone and would have gotten her butt whupped if I was not successful.

The downside he ran away to get his master. Oh boy. . . .

what difficulty reduction talents your lowest difficulty is always going to be 2 purple for all scathing tirade checks. In fact most are pretty much unaffected by everything (not even influence control upgrade affects what you roll.

I challenge you to total up the results you get with scathing tirade over time and compare with, influences basic strain damage power with the strength upgrade and lets say FR 3 or 4 , you will cause more controlled and consistent damage with influence.

I thought id show an example of what im talking about, 4 gellow / 1 green vs base 2 purple,

roll 1 , 1 s, 4 a, - total 5 dmg on one target

roll 2, 3s, 1a, total 1 dmg on 2 targets, 2 dmg on one target

roll 3, 6s ,1triumph, 2 threat, 1 dmg on 5 targets ,

roll 4 4 s, 1 triumph 1 a, 1 dmg on 3 targets, 2 dmg on 1 target

roll 5 6s, 1a - 5 targets with 1 dmg, 1 with 2 dmg

1 did 11 rolls and other than a streak of 2 with 3 advantage, only one got 4 advanfage (the first roll) and 1 with 2 adv.

you had 4 times where I could do more than 3 dmg to 1 target,.

Note, with the same results how often you would have triggered autofire, with the above rolls, one roll hit 3 times for base +6 damage (awesome result but if you look at that one result in seclusion all positive dice had double results, and both negative had blanks), these results are based on 5 skill/ 4 agility at short range with an autofire weapon against non-nemesis characters with no defensive skill and I trigger auto 4 times out of 11 and 3 times for double hits, and once for triple hit, against nemesis this would be much less. For someone with that level of skill investment and an autofire weapon I would expect significantly more from a broken skill / weapon quality. Having jury rigged more than doubles the amount of hits , previously 1 advantage results cause 2 instead of 1 and 3 causes 2 instead of 1, which leads to significantly more hits, even then its controllable, but you really have to build for it. Autofire in its base form isnt much better than dual wielding.

11 hours ago, Tom Cruise said:

What do the properties of real life guns (which aren't blasters anyway) have to do with making a balanced tabletop roleplaying game?

This I don't get. The system is FULL of this stuff, it's just an inevitability you have to deal with. I've had entire well planned boss encounters ended by one very good crit in the first round, and I've had players spend an entire combat missing against grunts. The game's pretty swingy, I don't think autofire is any more guilty of that than other mechanics in the game.

Everything. Watch ESB when they use the Heavy Repeating blaster. It's not much different than how many rounds an M-60 or 50 Cal machine gun fires per minute. When using any autofire weapon, you are putting a lot of fire down range. This will inevitably lead to more shots hitting the target(s) because there are many more "rounds" going down range within a given time frame. The Autofire rules reflect this very well. There is nothing broken about that.

And, there are plenty of systems which also use autofire rules to great effect, such as Cyberpunk , where each additional point above the required to hit adds an additional hit on the target for full damage. For the record, Cyberpunk is far deadlier for PCs than FFG Star Wars .

2 hours ago, Azmodael said:

My personal opinion is that the damage scaling between weapons does not appear strong enough to make them stand out from one another, even if it does mechanically due to the flat reduction from soak. Firing a single shot blaster pistol or rifle seems meh . Ranged weapons do not have many interesting qualities and at some point you are just looking for a way to redistribute those 2-4 advantages yet again.

Autofire offers an easy and powerful way out and it rewards high skill in a very obvious and satisfying way. I think the biggest problem is that Autofire is readily available on the highest damage guns that already do well at penetrating enemy soak. The combination of high base damage + access to multiple hits is the worst offender to the power curve.

If you are playing a game with spies and diplomats, or normal criminals and frontier types the smaller weapons are fine because armor is going to be less of a thing, and the gameplay will fit those weapon types. Full-on Combat Assault Squad is where you just go to the high end of damage and hash it out with opponents wielding the same things you are and having full defensive kit. Regardless of the equipment worship, the GM can kill you any time he wants, autofire or no. If it works for you, it works for NPC's. If it's the combat squad game I would be putting your group up against enemy squads made of rivals and nemeses with minions on both sides. Because combat is the point yeah?

I hope that you are looking for such challenges and not just looking to squash bugs by carrying the biggest gun allowed but complaining if the NPC's have anything above a blaster carbine.

7 hours ago, Archlyte said:

If you are playing a game with spies and diplomats, or normal criminals and frontier types the smaller weapons are fine because armor is going to be less of a thing, and the gameplay will fit those weapon types. Full-on Combat Assault Squad is where you just go to the high end of damage and hash it out with opponents wielding the same things you are and having full defensive kit. Regardless of the equipment worship, the GM can kill you any time he wants, autofire or no. If it works for you, it works for NPC's. If it's the combat squad game I would be putting your group up against enemy squads made of rivals and nemeses with minions on both sides. Because combat is the point yeah?

I hope that you are looking for such challenges and not just looking to squash bugs by carrying the biggest gun allowed but complaining if the NPC's have anything above a blaster carbine.

Our most recent adventures involved hitting an imperial controlled mine, which was run by slave prisoners. Now we are defending a rebel base on Arda from an imperial assault. The lightest weapon used against us so far claws (8 damage) and a heavy blaster pistols

Before that we had a brief stint on Coruscant where we were meeting a crime boss, but it was in a remote location so I was able to bring the HBR for intimidation purposes.

6 hours ago, Azmodael said:

Our most recent adventures involved hitting an imperial controlled mine, which was run by slave prisoners. Now we are defending a rebel base on Arda from an imperial assault. The lightest weapon used against us so far claws (8 damage) and a heavy blaster pistols

Before that we had a brief stint on Coruscant where we were meeting a crime boss, but it was in a remote location so I was able to bring the HBR for intimidation purposes.

First off, that sounds like a fun game. I think maybe it sounds like you are the Heavy of the group, the guy with the big firepower. I don't know if you are also like the group leader or if you have other roles but I imagine that your character is the knockdown guy, the one who puts down big fire at the right moment. If your whole team is armed the same as you then like I said before you guys are armed like a military unit, and doing light stuff isn't going to be challenging as far as the combat goes.

But the Empire and local Sec Forces are also not going to let you guys walk around with that kind of firepower, even if you are licensed. Secure areas and civilized cities will be a problem for you guys as far as carrying your max DPS gear (as you alluded to), and I don't have the book in front of me but if you have an HBR isn't that normally semi-auto only? If it's modified (forgive me it's been a minute since I read your OP) then it's probably illegal on that account alone. In my game I have the Empire and Local Authorities always on the lookout for "Sliced" gear, as it is a sure sign of illegal activity. It's also something that people do not generally approve of in my game because the reliance on technology has given rise to a "don't mess with it," attitude, especially among people who live in enviro domes or who depend on the tech for daily living. At the very least it's a source of revenue as the cops/Empire shake down people who look like they might be trouble, and as a part of the Authoritarian Society that is Imperial Space. Giving people access to military grade weapons is not what such regimes do, and allowing altered weapons is a big no no.

Now if you guys are in the outer rim or some place where there is lawlessness then it's a different story, but that HBR is an advertisement for trouble, and local bad guys who rule by force are not going to be content in many cases to let you come in and show the locals that they are not in charge.