Hey people, I'm just curious to know... based on what you all already played, Star Wars or Genesys or something using the system, how much enemies you already used in a single fight / scene? Minions is by far the easiest way to create a horde of enemies, how much of them your group used in a combat? I'm not talking about that "last fight for glory" where everyone will die, but a cool moment, full of enemies.

I'm curious cause I really like the adversaries system of Genesys and I never tried very well this specific point, so I believe you can help me with this. I want to know how much adversaries are possible to be used at the same time to create a big mess

To be honest, I think you can have a horde of enemies and with this narrative dice system just do a skill challenge to overcome the horde in a more narrative way.

During a climactic last session of a campaign I ran a skill challenge for a group of rebels in a Star Wars game I ran to infiltrate a Star Destroyer, rescue prisoners, and plant explosives / overload systems to blow it up. Everyone had a task to perform and on a Star Destroyer you have thousands of enemies. So, we just ran with it many triumphs were rolled and a despair.

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Based on my Star Wars rpg experience, it depends on your groups combat power/xp level.

Groups of 6 make pretty solid combat pools (not to mention Wound Thresholds) for Minion Groups (YYYG), assuming a base pool of GG. Going over 6 members in a Minion Group is gonna result in some ridiculous pools once you throw in Boosts for Aiming or previous Advantage, Story Points, etc. ...

A party of 5 new, or nearly new, PCs - with at least 3 combat-capable PCs - could go up against maybe 2 Groups of this size of without taking heavy damage (just "some damage")?

PCs w/ around 300 earned-XP could maybe stand up to a number of Groups of this size, equal to their party size? So if there's 5 PCs w/ ~300 xp, they could handle maybe 5, 6-Minion Groups? That's 30 foes.

The higher the xp level the more likely it is that your party can handle greater numbers of smaller Groups, than they could small numbers of large Groups...

The caveat I'll throw in here, is that Star Wars has Lightsabers/Parry/Reflect, which may skew these numbers upwards due to their defensive capabilities that aren't necessarily available in any given Genesys campaign...

Skill challenges work well.

but I have run a 30 Minion encounter... two groups of 15! No combat skills because they were villagers, but I gave them vigilance and Coercion. They were as tough as you would expect but it was nowhere near as dangerous as the space dragon I unleashed in a different game

I always used the mass combat rules for larger amount of enemies.

1 hour ago, Toppe said:

I always used the mass combat rules for larger amount of enemies.

I don't know this one for Genesys. Where can i found it?

Grouping and mass combat (which may not be from Genesys) are probably the answer.

In the same way miniatures games block large armies into units this scales down the numbers, and if there are hundreds of units (it's a big battle) you might not want to play out the whole battle and roll for many many hours for every encounter- maybe just the highlights a bit like a sports match highlights on TV- identify some key exciting nail-biting moments of the battle where the tide could turn and play/roll for those, the rest done with narrative based on the movements in advantage and dominance of the battlefield.

If it's a many years war or long fight you'll want some of the time to pass in narrative rather than structured gameplay. Or it's gonna be a long game!

I've not found any rules/tips for large battles in the CRB (I may just have missed them thus far) so we may have to build our own. It might work as one option to give the armies/sides a collective value each for soak, strain etc specific to the battle- the two sides effectively then formed into two entities (perhaps more if you want to have allied forces or simultaneous battles in different places thus adding resource challenges- where to focus forces etc), possibly with some of the exaggeration and tips shared for superheroes to respect their size and strength in numbers- their 'harder to defeat' nature. The encounters can then be army vs army rather than hours of individual smaller clashes (which could still feature but with the highlights approach above- some key moments the heroes are directly part of played separately to army v army encounters).

If it's just the heroes and there's a big opposing army it's going to be tougher and harder to make realistic- either they'll need to avoid getting caught up in the conflict as the odds are so stretched or there needs to be a way they can either achieve peace, undermine the army (maybe they can just about take out it's leader and not have the whole army turn on them, maybe, this verges on the unrealistic a little though) or raise an army themselves if talking isn't going to happen.

On 15.2.2018 at 11:49 PM, Bellyon said:

I don't know this one for Genesys. Where can i found it?

Can be found in Star Wars "Lead by Example". There is also a thread in the Age of Rebellion community.

The order66 did a good episode on it http://ia801209.us.archive.org/18/items/Order66PodcastEpisode86TheMassEffect/Order 66 Podcast Episode 86 The Mass Effect.mp3