Hey everyone, Id like ya´lls opinion on a homerule i was thinking on:
So I always felt that high soak can be quite frustrating, bc you went through all the trouble of
hitting an enemy and then you are told that you do like, 1 Damage (or even none at all).
So my homerule would be that soak can only negate a weapons damage, but not the damage generated from
uncancelled success. That way, someone skilled (or lucky) enough can still get a good result with a **** weapon.
I was wondering if there is anything I overlooked that might get broken by applying this homerule?
I think the highest impact might be on brawl attacks. (Which i think is a good thing)

The main thing I can see with this is that it would make a holdout blaster almost as effective as a disruptor pistol against high soak (8-10) targets.

As for Brawl attacks, they really aren't all that great until you get some talents (or weapons) for it. The main benefit to those is Disorient and Knockdown.

That said, there aren't a lot of RAW Adversaries that have more than 5 Soak, so perhaps the issue is with Adversaries that you are building (unless the PCs just haven't invested in good weapons). If it is, you can always just lower their Soak. If it is with the PCs, pack heavier weapons. If their enemies know they can absorb a lot of damage, they are going to arm their fighters with better weapons.

First and foremost, consider your players' preferences. If they've been eyeing gear lists like Christmas catalogs, this might annoy them. But if to them a blaster is a blaster, try it. Making success more about the hero than the equipment is the essence of Star Wars. Aside from the quintessential example of AT-ATs ("That armor's too strong for blasters!") Soak as a general rule can be an uncomfortable fit for the setting depending on table preferences.

Wilsch has a point about how that could very well annoy players who like to focus on gear. It might also impact any PCs that invested in the Parry and/or Reflect talents, since the main point of both of them is to reduce damage to a point where a PC with an okay soak value (3 or 4) can tank some amount of damage from an attack.

One other thing to consider is that the house rule is going to make skilled combatants even more dangerous, as they'll have a better ability to inflict damage on your PCs due to their better chances of generating excess successes on their combat checks.

I do have to ask, what kind of soak values are your players walking around with that most weapons aren't doing much in the way of damage? And also what sort of weapons are your adversaries attacking with? If your bad guys are mostly sticking to clubs/truncheons and blaster pistols, then yeah they're not going to be doing a lot of damage because those weapons are on the low end of the spectrum. If your adversaries are using things like vibro-axes and blaster carbines/rifles and they're still only doing what amounts to chip damage against your PCs, I again have to ask what sort of soak values do they have, and if really high (8 or above), what did they do to get those kinds of soak values, as getting above a 7 takes a fairly dedicated build.

I tend to play rather *gritty* games, where the PCs dont get access to high quality weaponry for a long time.
On the low end of weaponry, enemies that are challenging for PCs using ranged (heavy) can be somewhat annoying for PCs using ranged(light).
My Games have not been very focussed on combat so far, so maybe i should have gone with more of a mix of enemies so that the guys with the rifles can take down the armored enemies and the pistoleers
and close combat bois can go after the lightly armored.


Anyways, thanks for the feedback

The thing to keep in mind is Combat should be exciting for everyone and for it to be exciting there must be a sense of danger along with some survivability.

It hasn't been an issue in my recent games because I've been lucky to not have any Min-Maxer's so Soak hasn't really gotten out of control. In any case I use a house rule of a minimum 1 Damage or Strain on a successful hit regardless of Soak unless a PC uses an active defense you pay for during combat (Dodge, Parry, Reflect etc.). This keeps combat a risk for all the PCs because no one is effectively immune to being hurt by their static defense.

I find this works really well considering that most PCs have a static Soak of 3-4 so the minimum will almost always be reached anyway, as a result it's really only going to affect very high Soak PCs. PC's with some sort of active defense through a Talent can avoid this minimum by activating that Talent so it's fair in the sense that it doesn't nerf Talents like Parry, Reflect, and Dodge. But most of all it keeps a sense of danger in combat even for those super tanked out PCs because there is always the chance that if a battle goes on too long they can get worn down and overwhelmed, plus there is still the danger of getting hit by a Critical (remember Criticals require that you take at least one point of Damage).

As a GM this House Rule also allows me to keep my player's adversaries from having to carry weapons specifically aimed at the highest Soak PCs in the party because we all know that when you do that it disproportionately affects the lower Soak PCs making it harder for them to survive combat. The point is I want my tanking players to kick ***** but also not be invincible at the expense of the lower Soak PCs. In any case my player's understand it and like it.

I hope this helps.

3 hours ago, MaxXIII said:

I was wondering if there is anything I overlooked that might get broken by applying this homerule?

I think you'll introduce more problems, when it's more easily solved just by getting the party better gear. They don't even have to go shopping, they can just find it as part of an adventure arc. You may want to run a gritty game, but you need to scale this "grit" with the scenario.

You can also drop limited-use items for the task at hand...I've dropped plenty of high end gear that either has limited ammo and is too heavy to carry around in a chase, or I make sure to spend Threats or Despairs to ruin it. Example: I had a clone-wars graveyard which eventually produced a Doom-like BFG style gun which the Engineer managed to jury-rig to get it functioning, and net successes = number of charges. This kept the Anoatian hordes at bay long enough to get near their hanger but once it was out of charges they'd have to sprint for it or be overwhelmed.

I guess my point is it seems to me it's more easy to fix in story than in a global house rule that affects everything else in the game.

I consider the Soak RAW to be broken.

In that vein I've had the characters halve their Soak (based on Brawn and Talents) while Armor adds to THAT soak normally.

In my opinion that tweak has worked REALLY REALLY well for my campaign.

High soak d/n protect from critical hits, special weapon effects or environmental mayhem. A shootout in a bazaar or a cantina or an automated robot factory can be exciting and colorful even if you won't do much actual damage. Consider the final scene of The Mandalorian s01e03, for example.

WDG

17 hours ago, MaxXIII said:

I tend to play rather *gritty* games...

I wonder if that might be part of the stumbling block for you. This system really isn't meant to do "gritty," just as Star Wars in general isn't really geared towards a properly "gritty" story. The Mandalorian kind of comes close, but even that's more spaghetti western with some Akira Kurosawa flavoring than anything else.

It might be worth mentioning that the design intent for combat in this game is that wounds represent the sort of superficial damage (bumps, minor scrapes, light bruises) that your typical action hero shakes off with a bit of rest. Real, lasting damage comes from critical injuries, and the attacker only needs to score a single point of damage to inflict a critical injury. The game is very much meant that most PCs can take a couple of hits before they have to start worrying about the damage they're taking, which isn't exactly what I'd call "gritty."

So perhaps rather than messing with the damage system, if you really want to scale up the danger of combat to make it feel "gritty," I'd suggest instead lowering the crit rating of all weapons by one (minimum of 1), and giving your more dangerous adversaries ranks in the Lethal Blows talent, so when they do grit, it's gonna hurt.

I think that testing it out is a must, and I would have a few test combats play out with it to see how it goes, even if you just do it yourself. I do think it would add a different feel to the combat and make it flatten out a bit, with attacks being able to damage regardless of defensive threshold. I agree that fizzled attacks can be a bit of a pain, but a traditional role-playing game solution is usually for the players to have to think up some ingenious way of defeating such a foe.

To me it feels like people get combat rules tunnel vision a lot and start to see things in two dimensions. If I can't hurt it with my blaster then I can't do anything. In a game with as much narrative focus as this one that really shouldn't be the case.

But if you feel that combat as a whole isn't working for you then yeah I say test it and see how you like it