I didn’t play much Star Wars so I’m mostly dependent on the Genesys book to understand how the bits of the system fit together. When thinking about big monsters, discussion often touches on how it’s hard to make a big monster significantly stronger than a (typically human sized) PC. Sometimes people have mentioned that Silhouette is what makes the difference.

Looking at the core rule book, I only see two significant effects of Silhouette:

• It governs what you can carry like a mount would
• It makes you easier to hit if you are significantly bigger than your enemy (and vice versa).

Neither of these would make an enemy more dangerous or mechanically impact damage or Brawn rolls to (for example) open a stuck door. Am I missing something?

Silhouette has more influence on how vehicles interact than on personal scale stuff. I mean, with the way adversaries are designed, it doesn't matter much beyond fluff.

Silhouette just gives the players a scale to compare too, it’s the Soak, Wounds, Strain and Talents that really make a big creature scary. A Silhouette 5 monster with Soak 12 and 80 Wounds is basically unstoppable on a personal scale, realistically you need vehicle scale weapons or siege weapons to fight it.

A big monster who can attack anything in Short range is bad news

A big monster who can hit multiple enemies at once with some kind of sweep attack is dangerous

A big monster that can use magic is dangerous

If it’s hard to hit because of adversary and defence then it’s dangerous.

You can combine all that together and you end up with something that just decimates cities, yet the Silhouette just acts as an indication of its size

3 hours ago, dbm_ said:

I didn’t play much Star Wars so I’m mostly dependent on the Genesys book to understand how the bits of the system fit together. When thinking about big monsters, discussion often touches on how it’s hard to make a big monster significantly stronger than a (typically human sized) PC. Sometimes people have mentioned that Silhouette is what makes the difference.

Looking at the core rule book, I only see two significant effects of Silhouette:

• It governs what you can carry like a mount would
• It makes you easier to hit if you are significantly bigger than your enemy (and vice versa).

Neither of these would make an enemy more dangerous or mechanically impact damage or Brawn rolls to (for example) open a stuck door. Am I missing something?

Silhouette has nothing to do with encumbrance capacity. The only mechanical widget that hangs on silhouette is adjusting the difficulty of combat checks.