jaradaj said:

There are weapon qualities that can give opponents those conditions, and the effects of fear can inflict some conditions. Otherwise no mention (even for critical injuries, which inflict some penalties very similar to the conditions, and in some cases even have the same name - staggered, I'm looking at you…). The critical injury effects really should be cleaned up to include injuries that inflict temporary/permanent status effects IMO, unless the intention is to have them distinct and stackable (in which case the critical injury effects should really be renamed).

As a GM, I'd allow a triumph (essentially a "turn the tide of battle" result) to inflict a condition, but not just spending advantages as because that treads too much on the toes of the relevant weapon qualities, which are also triggered using advantages.

ok we just played through the beta scenario this weekend and here is my observation regarding combat:

1) Autofire seems overpowered & just not entirely right to me. Using autofire makes it harder to hit anything, but if u do it dies messily …dont get me wrong autofire SHOULD be dangerous, but at the moment it seems just too good …now I have a couple of suggestions

* Add a blue-die when using autofire (its easier to hit something when u spray lots of bullets)

* Add 2 or 3 to cumbersome rating (can be offset with brasing, weapon harness etc)

* it should cost 2 advantages per hit to same target - 1 advantage per hit to additional target (ei. make autofire a suppression weapon rather than a single character uberkill weapon)

* Non-gunnery weapons using autofire should jam on a 3 double threat as well as a crit failure

2) Blast seems underwelming to me - Im not entirely sure how to do it, but I would prefer a rule like autofire where additional advantages transferres into additional hits.

3) Flamethrowers - now the underbarral flamethrower is lethal - it just doesnt seem entirely right to me. IMO flamethrowers should be ideal to clear enemies out of heavy cover - perhaps make the burn quality less severe and instead allow it to ignore cover?? (also see 'blast quality' above)

A few big concerns from a session this weekend:

1. It's still just too easy to hit with both ranged and melee. Both beginning PCs and minions were hitting 75%+ of the time. That's with characteristics and skills around 2ish. Move to the 4-5 range and no one will ever miss. I recommend upping the hit difficulties by 1 across the board. Cover and spending advantage and threat helps a little but not enough. I guess adding 1 to the difficulties would result in more threat and less advantage so you'd have to test it, but it seems too easy to hit as it is and it's not going to scale well.

2. Melee difficulty should not be the same for all combatants. Punching an armed marauder should not be as easy as hitting an unarmed doctor with a vibrosword. I'd make melee and brawl opposed skills. Or keep the two difficulty and upgrade it with ranks in brawl (if target is unarmed) or melee (if target is armed).

3. Can you spend advantage again on the same thing if it's already affecting the target? If a player gives a target a black die on their next attack can the next player give a second black die if they have the advantage to spend?

4. Initiative seems a little clunky and time consuming. First there are a lot of similar results. Second, do you track negative successes to order the initiative or are all failures zero? Finally, can you use advantages, threat, etc on initiative other than to break ties? Had a player roll a triumph on initiative but I had a hard time saying they were doing anything to "turn the tide of the battle." Most skill rolls are when you are doing something, but you are not really doing something when you roll initiative.

5. When you use aim to target a part of the body, I'd like to see some suggestions about what that means. I guess you can disarm someone, but in this case I had a player target and hit a wampa's hand. What did that do? Can they choose on the crit chart something that makes sense? I gave it a critical injury and downgraded all claw attacks by one.

We had a great time though. The net is a good weapon.

usgrandprix said:

My preferance would be to:

1) up the advantage of cover … irl this is HUGE, change it from black to purple dice

2) in order to help people not in cover - allow 'evasive running' (from cover to cover, zigzags etc) by spendign an extra menuver … OR maybe by spending an action (roll athletics? to make them harder to hit?) thus still allowing the character to cover 2 range bands

usgrandprix said:

My suggestion when aiming at bodyparts, ask for which effect the character is hoping to achieve ei. disarm or making him drop or ?:

- then in exchange for a harder shot, grant an auto advantage or even 2 towards that effect …thus making it easier to inflict a the effect ei. making someone drop or drop their weapon …or in exchange for a greater chance to miss.

usgrandprix said:

There are suggested uses for advantages and triumph in the Vigilance and Cool skill descriptions. If nothing else, I'd allow those.

Boehm said:

similar concerns in our group, pretty easy to hit and while some classes have defense upgrades the other classes are screwed. Upping cover to adding to difficulty would help a lot as long as its not so much that low levels miss all the time. But that's a better problem to have in Star Wars than hitting all the time.

This would allow combat focused characters to be able to risk being in the open even though cover may be preffered and encourage the scholar and talker types to hug cover no matter what.

Boehm said:

That's a good idea , keeps it important but not overwhelming.

Idea we had was to give autofire a rating, and have it up damage accordingly. Like auto fire 3 adds 3 damage per success instead of one, or adds damage per advantage used. Not as bad as it currently stands but still potent in skilled hands. Would also encourage hugging cover even if your a damage soaking tank.

adrick said:

This is actually a really great idea. I'd also like to see this work with other forms of multiple attacks. As a minor change, I would have autofire weapons add their autofire rating to damage with every successful activation rather than multiplying base success damage adds. It keeps the spikiness down but still makes it a highly desirable addition to a weapon.

Additionally, I think that multiple attack options should be nerfed considerably or added to characters that aren't just wielding a specific set of weapon combos. One of my players noted this weekend that he hated to feel pidgeon holed into specific weapon or build choices because they were more statistically advantageous. If the stated purpose of the combat rules is to encourage narrative combat then certain gear/build combinations should be so clearly advantageous.

I am glad that other players are empirically finding AF feels out of tune, so to speak. Thanks Boehm!

Like I said before, I think auto-fire can be fixed just by increasing its cost to activate to 2 Adv. I think that will solve a lot of problems being found here without fundamentally changing how the power works, or nerfing its f#cking balls off. It should be dangerous, just not quite as dangerous as it is now.

-WJL

In our group we talked about AF again - and ended up with a slightly different version:

AUTOFIRE

Targets an engagement, each advantage hits an additional target with only one hit per target allowed. For each 2 successes rolled everyone in the engagement takes suppression adding a black die to all actions for next turn.

Now I would still love to see AF increase the cumbersome rating, allowing only strong characters to hit anything using AF without brasing or using a bi/tri-pod, but the above rule atleast means that AF becomes a weapon for mass-suppression (killing) rather than a super single target killer (IMO thats the job for the sniper riffle and other high powered single shot weapons).

COVER

Regarding cover - we ended up simply giving cover a rating (in black dice) from 1-3 and allowing a character to spend maneuvers to pop-quick in/out of it to fire pot-shots …ei. 'adding a black die to next attack against them' as to be symmetrical with the aim action.

We have also talked about, but not yet reached a decision - on allowing a character to use Athletics in order to cover open ground in a defensive manner (without spendign maneuvers to do so). ei. to dash over some open ground - you can either spend a maneuver 'dodging in and out of cover' giving a black dice to next attack, in this way u still retain your action OR you could spend 2 maneuvers running cover a greater distance, spending your action running evasively in 'zig-zags etc' rolling an Athletics check to add black or perhaps a purple dice on all attacks this round…. (Athletics needs more love and I feel Brawn needs to be more relevant even to non-melee characters).

Regarding cover on another note, we also talked about flamethrowers - historically they have mostly been used to burn people out of bunkers etc - so we were talking about allowing them to perhaps ignore 1-2dice of cover? (Personally I think flamethrowers should work more like AF, giving suppression etc hitting an engagement etc …and less like the single character superkiller it is now.)

Boehm said:

FWIW, I am much happier if I can use my machine gun to concentrate fire on one target, rather than having to hit several. Like, er, one tends to do in video games like Call of Duty. h

AluminiumWolf said:

I completely understand - but as RAW Autofire is just hugely overpowered … Now dont get me wrong AF should be powerful, but IMO shouldnt be the super character killer …hell, even on long range I would prefer AF to a sniper riffle if using RAW … which just seems wrong to me. - At the very least I would suggest my former suggestion of differentiating the 'advantage'-cost of applying additional hits to same vs. new targets.

For Autofire I would be for a change that makes it less deadly but adds fire suppression to the target(s).

I've barely delved into the AutoFire rules, when I have I will check back in. Adding suppression can really add to the enjoyment of a firefight by adding yet another tactical element to consider. Suppression shouldn't be so powerful that it is the one and only tactic to use though, just an option. I can imagine a Stormtrooper armed with a light repeating blaster suppressing the PCs while the other Stormtroopers advance on them to assault with rifles/carbines.

I lied, some quick thoughts already:

AutoFire itself would be for Attacking a target, actually trying to hurt it without an intention to suppress it. Aiming Autofire shouldn't be allowed. AutoFire is less accurate but has more bullets. Does one cancel the other out? Add 1 Difficulty (2?) to the roll if you declare AutoFire. Harder to get Successes, BUT each Success provides +2 damage instead of just +1 damage. Less chance of hitting, but when you do you get a damage bonus because more bullets hit. Also, Advantages no longer lead to Criticals, but Suppression affects instead (see below).

Suppression could be a seperate action from AutoFire. Any semi-automatic weapon can be used to suppress, but the ones capable of AutoFire should just be better at it. AutoFire weapons get a bonus (perhaps only in the form of AutoFire weapons can use Walking Suppression against multiple targets). Successes provide levels of suppression to the target. Only Advantages could provide actual hits since you are spraying at the target to suppress, not actually aiming.What does Suppression do? One route would to use the Fear rules and give the target's actions Difficulty during the target's next action. Another route would be to use Distracted (for 1 Success) and Stunned (for multiple Successes). Recall that Distracted is loss of free Maneuver, Stunned loss of Action.

Example of AutoFire: Medium range (2 Difficulty) plus AutoFire equals 3Difficulty (if this is not enough add 2?). Only 1 Success is rolled, but it gives +2 damage. One Advantage is also rolled which doesn't give a Critical, but suppresses the target making him Distracted.

Example of Suppression: Three Successes are rolled. The target is Stunned. Two Advantages are also rolled indicating the shooter got lucky and got a hit for +2 damage (as if 2 Successes were rolled) even though he was only trying to suppress the target.

AutoFire weapons could using Walking Fire for either normal attacks or Suppression. You add a Difficulty die to either mode for a chance to hit or suppress multiple targets.

Thoughts? Am I on to something here or not? I've barely learned the rules.

gribble said:

Good call. Thanks.

Perhaps I overlooked it, but is there currently any rule regarding encouraging people to carry a melee weapon in order to 'defend' themselves from melee attack even if they themselves have puny brawn? - My concern is that the system encourage characters to be too one dimensional as in EITHER ranged OR melee orientated - IMO there should be an advantage in having a proper melee weapon to parry adn in general just making the person attacking you weary by possibility you might poke him back … with that in mind I propose that either:

a) Attacking a person NOT armed with a non-improvised melee capable weapon g ains 1 boost die.

or

b) Attacking a person NOT armed with a non-improvised melee capable weapon reduce difficulty by 1

or

c) Increase the defensive rating of all the proper melee weapons by 1 (if they dont have it now they gain rank 1) ei. Im sure even an ax or a riffle with a bajonet can be used to block some attacks …even if its not as good a parrying weapon as a vibrosword.

usgrandprix said:

Armor doesn't make it harder to be hit, it makes it harder for someone to hit you hard enough to do damage. I can walk up to an elephant and punch it pretty easily. It's hurting it that's the problem.

He said armed, not armored. He’s talking about how it is easier tackling a pig verses tackling a porcupine. Easy mistake to make, I just did something similar last week.

Ah, misread that!

Still, I don't mind the standard melee difficulty. Like I said, punching someone isn't all that hard. It's doing it with enough force to do damage. And you can easily add dice to indicate the opponent is skilled at melee combat and avoiding being hit.

Easy mistake. No worries.

I meant punching someone armed with a sword they are trained with. Can't be easy. Seems like a situation ripe for a despair if there ever was one.

Or punching a flyweight who will be standing behind you and tapping you mockingly on your shoulder before your fist even gets where you aimed.

Or a Jedi with a lightsaber who can surge jump over you.

I'm just talking about relativity in an abstract system with long rounds. After a minute with a trained boxer your average dude won't be able to see let alone hit anything.

I agree armor should not make you harder to hit unless it has defective properties.

I actually thought a static difficulty of 2 upgraded by skill and only if skilled seems like a compromise. It seems like a quicker/easier system than having to keep track of the sources of a bunch of defensive dice from the talents/advantage/maneuvers PCs will have to get to defend themselves. PCs already spend a lot of advantage on defense which is boring and requires tracking. So they are getting defense from attacking but not from defensive training? Going into a defensive mode affords a martial arts master and an untrained doctor the same defense?

And skill 3-5 adversaries are going to hit very skilled PCs almost always (with crazy scaled damage relative to no scaled defense) and create a lot of advantage and triumphs doing it with only 2 defensive dice. As will PCs with those kinds of ranks. I like the crit system but maybe not that much. Like I said this will allow for both. I'm concerned with realism and scaling. I'd also like to see melee attacks have the threat of rolling despair.

I want the masters to have epic fights like in the movies. With a static hit difficulty the more skilled you are the shorter the fight if that skill only works for damage and attack.

Not sure if this has been discussed before but I couldn't find it under errata. The cost in strain for executing an extra maneuver is stated differently as 1 or 2.

Page 129 under Maneuver Limitations it states "… may also perform a second maneuver by voluntarily suffering two points of strain."

Later on in the same chapter (can't find where anymore but I'm sure someone will spot this) it states that the cost is 1 instead. Which one is correct?

KafkaTamura said:

Page 141: Strain and Strain Threshold, second non-sidebar sentence: " The most common use is to voluntarily suffer one point of strain to gain one additional maneuver during a character's turn. "

-EF

Yeah, there isn't currently an official answer (that I'm aware of) for the strain for maneuvers thing.

The assumption most people are operating under is 1, but from what I've seen in play the game is better balanced if it costs 2. Otherwise the Players just suffer 2-3 strain for the 2-3 rounds that combat seems to last and then recover it all (or enough to continue doing that until they rest and recover all strain.

gribble said:

We played with 2 and it seemed right, also considering that it only costs 1 advantage to regain one strain!

-= BRAWN =-

One of my players decided to make an Wookie. And since Wookies are naturally good at Brawl and Melee he wanted his Wookie to be an Hired Gun, specialization marauder. First he invested all of his XP in Brawn, boosting it to 5. Since we all where fiddling with characters and noone had tested the mechanics just yet it simply looked as if a Brawn of 5 simply just would be for Brawl/Melee what Agility was for shoothing. But it only took so long as to the first fight that we found out that Brawn is a broken attribute.

1) It adds to the Wound Threshold of all characters (Page 14, 26, and under each species description respectevly). Neither I, or my players had any problems with this since it makes sence. A bigger person can withstand physical punishment better then a smaller one. All characters in my group started of with 12 in Wound Threshold except the Wookie that started of with 20 (5XP invested in Toughened at page 100).

2) Brawn is the ability used to calculate dicepool when using skills like Brawl, Melee or Athletics (Page 71). Nothing strange their either, simple math since Agility is the base for Ranged, Pilot and so on (Also page 71).

3) Brawn is used to get the base damage with Brawl (Page 137) and Melee attacks (strangely no Page reference but since both Brawl wapons and improvised Weapons use Brawn as base value and all Melee weapons has a +X in damage we just went a little crazy and assumed Brawn was basedamage in Melee aswell). And yet again nothing all to strange beeped on the radar. Our Wookie bought an vibro-axe (+3 DMG) and thus made 9 damage per hit (5XP invested in Feral Strenght at page 92). Compared to the smuggler with a modded heavy blaster pistol at damage 8 and the bounty hunter's heavy rifle damage 11 he was doing good damage without being to powerfull.

4) Soak… All of my players invested 500 out of their starting credits and bought the padded armor with soak 2 (page 113). This gave every one in the group a soak of 4, except the Wookie, that suddenly had a soak of 7. Not saying that a soak that high is bad, iIt is gamebraking. Allowing Brawn set the base for a soak value is simply the worst misstake since the introduction of unnatural toughness in Dark Heresy. Letting players get an ability that vill render themself pretty much invulnerable to most conventional weapons is just stupid. Our Wookie is immune to all regular hits from Houldout blaster, Light Blaster Pistol, Blaster Pistol, Heavy Blaster Pistol and Slughthrower Pistol (page 5 in the errata). It also makes him immune to Brass knuckles, Shock Gloves, Combat Knife, Gaffi Stick, Truncheon and Vibro-knife counting that the one using them also has a Brawn of 5 (page 6 in the errata). Since I do not want to rant to much I will simply showcase you with a schematic on how combat in avarawill look in Star Wars when you got a character like that in it. In the folowing table I will compare the Smuggler with the Wookie. The Smuggler with her 12 Wounds and the Wookie with his 20.The Smuggler having Brawn 2 and the Wookie a Brawn of 5.

1S) Smuggler get hit by a Blaster Rifle.
Hit one: 7 dmg out of the Smugglers total 12. 5 wounds remain and can only take another hit unless she uses a stimpack.
Hit two: Down!

1W) Wookie get hit by a Blaster Rifle.
Hit one: 4 dmg out of the Wookies total 20. 16 wounds remain.
Hit two: 4 dmg out of the wookies current 16. 12 wounds remain.
Hit three: 4 dmg out of the Wookies current 12. 8 wounds remain.
Hit four: 4 dmg out of the Wookies current 8. 4 wounds remain and can only take one another hit unless he uses a stimpack.
Hit five: Down!

2S) Smuggler with padded armor get hit by a Blaster Rifle.
Hit one: 5 dmg out of the Smugglers total 12. 7 wounds remain.
Hit two: 5 dmg out of the Smugglers current 7. 2 wounds remain and can only take another hit even if she use a stimpack.
Hit three: Down!

2W) Wookie with padded armor get hit by a Blaster Rifle.
Hit one: 2 dmg out of the Wookies total 20. 18 wounds remain.
Hit two: 2 dmg out of the wookies current 18. 16 wounds remain.
Hit three: 2 dmg out of the Wookies current 16. 14 wounds remain.
Hit four: 2 dmg out of the Wookies current 14. 12 wounds remain.
Hit five: 2 dmg out of the Wookies current 12. 10 wounds remain.
Hit six: 2 dmg out of the Wookies current 10. 8 wounds remain.
Hit seven: 2 dmg out of the Wookies current 8. 6 wounds remain.
Hit eight: 2 dmg out of the Wookies current 6. 4 wounds remain.
Hit nine: 2 dmg out of the Wookies current 4. 2 wounds remain but will be able to take another two hits if he uses a stimpack.
Hit ten: Down!

For the Smuggler I really do not see a problem in the balance of the wounds and how much damage they take in a fight. In all the fights we played out we experienced that it was not uncommon for people to miss their attacks. On a whole I'd say that the characters and a certain nemesis had about 75% accuracy while the "common enemy" had about 50% accaruacy. With the example above it would mean that the Smuggler without armor would go down after 4 rounds (miss-hit-miss-hit) at best, at worst down after 3 rounds. When the Smuggler dons an armor the survival rate raise significantly to 6 rounds, or at least 5.
But the wookie would survive a tiersome 20 rounds, 24 if he uses his stimpack! And that is just counting being hit, not responding or hitting back.

A high Brawn is clearly a broken stat if used as a base for soaking damage.

-= SUGGESTION =-

If the makers of the game MUST have soak as a mechanic then I suggest that you remove Brawn as an contributing factor. A character already get wounds, chanse o hit, use skills and bonus damage for it. That is more then enough! With the absence of Brawn for soak you could easily add 2 to all armors soak value instead ( Heavy battle armor should be buffed to soak 5). That way armors are still usefull and will let the Pierce make more sense since it in its current form automatically bypass all armor.

Or you could replace the solid soak with Ability Dice where each "Hit" would indicate one point of soaked damage. Brawn in combination with an armor would then upgrade dice just as with skills. I would further suggest that armors get their soak raised in this method with at least 2 to compensate for the more random result. So a character with Brawn 2 and Laminate (soak 2, buffed to 4) would roll 2 Abilit Dice and 2 Proficiency Dice. This way armors would still be effective, a high Brawn would still have an impact and Pierce could simply add 2 Difficulty Dice to the roll.