Greetings! I'm super new with this game (bought the books but haven't run any games yet) and I made a character to play around with so I could learn the systems. I read that a PC should be able to handle multiple minions at once (I'm sure your class and skills affect that) but when I pitted my character against a single minion Street Tough, it was a bit of a slog. My character had a brawn of 2 and a melee skill of 2. So, if I'm understanding correctly, my dice pool would be 2 proficiency dice and 2 difficulty dice, correct? Almost ever single time I rolled, I would get zero successes or failures and a few advantage and threats. From that, I took it to mean that I would miss but either give myself an advantage next round or suffer some threat from whiffing so bad. However, my main concern was that I hardly ever rolled successes even though I understood the proficiency die to be upgraded ability dice. When I did manage to succeed it was usually with 1 success. So, using a truncheon, (I felt my Jedi to be would not want to carry lethal weapons and would look to subdue enemies) I would barely do 1 damage after bonuses and soak. So, for my 1 PC to take down a single street tough, it would take maybe 8 or 9 rounds. All the while, I was suffering mass amounts of strain.

I decided to see what would happen if I used a virbo knife and things went a bit better. So I then tried my hand against a rival guilded bounty hunter. I missed the first round and the bounty hunter shot me in the face with a disrupter on his turn, pretty much annihilating me.

My question is this: does all that sound right? Am I messing up the rules or is that a single PC shouldn't be able to just obliterate a single minion mob? Am I expecting results from my dice and PC that I shouldn't be? Thanks for any advice, corrections, or any help you can provide!

Lets break this down a bit. In the first instance with your character vs a single minion. Note that the single minion won't get have any upgrades to their dice pool as if they were in a group so if they have Melee skill, a single minion will only have green dice equaling their Brawn. As for your character, you are right. A Brawn 2/Melee 2 will give you 2 yellow dice (2 green for Brawn upgrading one each for 2 ranks in Melee). Considering you are in Melee with a target, the difficulty is 2 purple. If the minion has any defense, add 1 setback die per defense. You can take an aim maneuver (even with melee attacks) to give yourself 1 Boost die to make your dice pool YYBPPS which should give you a decent chance of successes.

Remember that when you do roll success, you add the number of successes to the base damage of the weapon. So if a truncheon did 5 damage (don't have books so don't know actual damage) and you rolled 3 successes, the minion would take 8 wounds minus soak. Even if you are doing Stun damage, Minions and Rivals don't have Stun Threshold so all Stun damage goes to Wounds..

The Bounty hunter should not be able to one shot you unless you gave him an advanced weapon. Don't forget that you subtract your soak value from the original wound damage.

If you want to post your character here, I could give you a more detailed example of the fight if you still need it.

25 minutes ago, Varlie said:

Lets break this down a bit. In the first instance with your character vs a single minion. Note that the single minion won't get have any upgrades to their dice pool as if they were in a group so if they have Melee skill, a single minion will only have green dice equaling their Brawn. As for your character, you are right. A Brawn 2/Melee 2 will give you 2 yellow dice (2 green for Brawn upgrading one each for 2 ranks in Melee). Considering you are in Melee with a target, the difficulty is 2 purple. If the minion has any defense, add 1 setback die per defense. You can take an aim maneuver (even with melee attacks) to give yourself 1 Boost die to make your dice pool YYBPPS which should give you a decent chance of successes.

Remember that when you do roll success, you add the number of successes to the base damage of the weapon. So if a truncheon did 5 damage (don't have books so don't know actual damage) and you rolled 3 successes, the minion would take 8 wounds minus soak. Even if you are doing Stun damage, Minions and Rivals don't have Stun Threshold so all Stun damage goes to Wounds..

The Bounty hunter should not be able to one shot you unless you gave him an advanced weapon. Don't forget that you subtract your soak value from the original wound damage.

If you want to post your character here, I could give you a more detailed example of the fight if you still need it.

Thank you for the detailed breakdown! I didn't know about the aim maneuver, which will definitely help!

I think what was happening is that the truncheon was +2 (so, with my 2 brawn and 1 success, the damage came to 5, I believe) and the tough had no defense and a soak of 4, so I was only doing 1 damage. However, I also did not know about the stun threshold, so that would have increased that damage.

As for the bounty hunter, I was being a little dramatic. He did do a big chunk of damage with an easy success against me, though.

Thank you again for you response! Time for me to hit the books again!

And...just realized it auto logged me in under my brother's account. Sigh. Thanks from the real me this time!

That is correct. A weapon that has +X damage add the X to Brawn rating. In this case, with 1 success that would be 5 points with 1 point going through. Adding 1 more rank in Melee to give you one additional green dice can work wonders on this percentage.

I found this image somewhere on the forums and have kept it. I'll post it here, if you were the developer of it and want it pulled, let me know:

One thing to keep in mind is that a Brawn 2/Melee 2 character is not designed to be a melee fighter. Brawn 2 is average , not exceptional. Once you get a Brawn of 3 you'll see your success rate increase a lot (per the above table, from 57% to 70%).

Until you get three dice in your pool, you're not considered to be a specialist, and with melee combat you're going to want a Brawn of 3, since Brawn also determines your damage. If you were trying to be a good pilot or gunner, either Agility or the skill at rank 3 is fine, since the characteristic isn't factored into the effect. And when you aim, that 70% success jumps to 75%.

Keep in mind those numbers are based on 1 or more success . If you're interested in the percentages of 2 success or even of getting advantage/threat, take a look at this anydice program .

Jeez, who knew RPGs would make all of us into a bunch of math/research nerds

Not that I'm complaining. It has helped me out in more than just gaming

5 minutes ago, Varlie said:

Jeez, who knew RPGs would make all of us into a bunch of math/research nerds

Not that I'm complaining. It has helped me out in more than just gaming

I'm an accountant by trade, so math/research nerd is what pays the bills 😛

In this game you rarely go wrong bringing a gun to a knife fight. For many characters, the best melee option is to pull out a Ranged (Light) weapon and shoot them. A Damage 6 blaster pistol does higher base damage than most Brawl/Melee weapons for a Brawn 2 (or even Brawn 3) character.

What you (should) have learned from this is; the green dice are more important than the yellow dice, for overall success.

Try running this simulation with a PC that has just 4 Brawn, no skill die.

1 hour ago, emsquared said:

What you (should) have learned from this is; the green dice are more important than the yellow dice, for overall success.

Try running this simulation with a PC that has just 4 Brawn, no skill die.

This was exactly what I was wondering about. I feel like the yellow die are actually hurting me lol

As for the melee vs light ranged, yeah. I was trying to go for a more "non lethal" build but what I might have done is make an "ineffective" build. And I am a Togruta so my brawn of 2 was after already paying for a +1

10 minutes ago, saitou666 said:

This  was exactly what I was wondering  about. I feel like the yellow die are actually hurting me lol 

They are not hurting you. It's just always better to have more dice. The proficiency dice have more faces with double-symbols and are the only dice to have the triumph.

10 minutes ago, saitou666 said:

As  for the melee vs light ranged, yeah. I was trying to go for a more "non lethal" build but what I might have done is make an "ineffective" build. And I am a Togruta so my brawn of 2 was after already paying for a +1

If you're looking for a non-lethal option, I'd suggest looking into a blaster pistol set on stun. But if you're set on being in melee, look for a stun baton or something similar that does a set amount of stun damage (and potentially with the Stun quality, to boot!).

But really, if you want to be a primary melee fighter you'll need to have a Brawn of 3. That's the assumption the game makes. Trying to excel with an average characteristic just don't work.

I appreciate all the input! Thank you all!