Ruskendrul said:

While it's true that strength makes you very tough, that exists for a very good reason. Wookies are going to have to survive long periods of time in close combat, I've played several RPGs and melee characters in a primarily ranged setting are very hard to play. Having to be in the fray means that he has to be able to survive in the front lines and usually won't get much use out of cover or prone (two defensive techniques that ranged characters can get a lot of use out of) soak helps with that.

He also put all of his potential into a single ability, that is going to make anyone very adept in the area that the ability covers, and this means that he can't do much out of the area of hitting things and taking a hit. If you have a problem with the Wookie, get him through his strain, Wookies have a Strain Threshold of 8+Will, so he will only have 9 Strain, even with 7 soak a Blaster Rifle set to stun deals 9 damage + Successes, so you could probably knock out the Wookie in about 3 turns, and there are other ways of straining characters: threats, enviroment, fear, and certain abilities can all cause strain.

I agree that a melee character should be able to withstand a beating, but not break the beating system. As it is now the Wookie must use a Vibro-axe or an Vibro-sword to even be able to defeat himself. And even if they do it will still take at least 10 clean hits to get the other Wookie down. If he would be armed with anything else and meeting a twin nothing would even happend unless one of them rolled extra hits. It is just poor game-mechanics.

I do not have a problem with the Wookie, I have a problem with an ability giving way to much unbalance to an aspect of the game. Simply going "oh, you play a Wookie, then everyone just use stun all the time" is not a solution to a fault in the mechanic.

Remember SW isnt just about combat - its not D&D …and even THAT isnt just about combat Agility is used for lots of very useful skills and even then getting into close combat shouldnt just be easy, enemies seeing a big guy with a vibro ax coming running for them would be likely to try to keep their distance or failing that switch to nasty surprises like underbarrel flamethrower Nothing like the smell of Burning fur in the morning ….

Also remember that a Vibroaxe is a BIG melee weapon - u dont just take that with u into a bar …just like u wouldnt (probably) carry a heavy blaster riffle with u to such a place - so if u want to combare a Vibroaxe against an altertive weapon try comparing it with a heavy blasterriffle with attachments and mods firing full auto and I think u will realise that the good wookie could still go down in a single burst (and yes the full auto rules are broken IMO)

Boehm said:

Remember SW isnt just about combat - its not D&D …and even THAT isnt just about combat Agility is used for lots of very useful skills and even then getting into close combat shouldnt just be easy, enemies seeing a big guy with a vibro ax coming running for them would be likely to try to keep their distance or failing that switch to nasty surprises like underbarrel flamethrower Nothing like the smell of Burning fur in the morning ….

Remember that 2 out of 3 chapters in the adventure is about Combat. And an underbarrel flamethower with a damage of 8 and burn 3 would at best only do 1 point of damage per round if hit a character with a Brawn of 5 and a wearing a padded armor. It is not about Wookies per see, could just aswell been an Trandoshan. And you cannot keep your distance. Unless you spend strain the furthest you can go with one manuever is one range. So if the shooters use an manuever to move away the Wookie can simply use one to catch up or convert his action for an extra manuever and be right on top of the shooter. It is about having a stat that brakes the game when it comes to one of the most important aspects in the game where balance is of most importance.

Boehm said:

Also remember that a Vibroaxe is a BIG melee weapon - u dont just take that with u into a bar …just like u wouldnt (probably) carry a heavy blaster riffle with u to such a place - so if u want to combare a Vibroaxe against an altertive weapon try comparing it with a heavy blasterriffle with attachments and mods firing full auto and I think u will realise that the good wookie could still go down in a single burst (and yes the full auto rules are broken IMO)

You seem to forget that said BIG weapon is just as hard to get in as any other bigass weapons in the game. Cannot bring a Vibro-axe into the cantina, then you sure ass bantha podoo can not bring a heavy blaster rifle or the like. And you fail to to see the obvious brokedness (new word) with the stat.

Being fired upon from an heavy blaster rifle set on autofire on short range (optimal) from an adversary with agility of 5 (Skill 2) would optimally result in death of anything, but lets count the hits and advantages realisticly. From that range and increased difficulty you would score in avarage of 3 success and 2 advantage (see X).

Now, 1 of the success falls of since it is used to hit in the first place, leaving us with 2 spare success that boost damage from 10 to 12. He also activate the autofire 2 times, once for each advantage and therefor score an aditional 2 extra hits. After Brawn and Armor been taken into consideration that would result in 3 hits that each inflict 5 poins of wound damage, rendering the Wookie down from 20 wounds to 5 wounds. Big ouch, but certainly not dead.

Remember then that a normal character in, at least my group, has a Brawn of 2 and wears padded armor. If anyone of them would have been hit with that autofire instead they would all be more then dead (8 in per hit and hit 3 time would result in a minus of 12 wounds).

If the designers and people on the forum do not see an problem with this then sorry, you endorse yet another mehcaic that will ruin the combat experience for all involved players. The ones not having Soak 7+ will always go "Oh, it is combat, lets just sit back and watch Superman handle it" while the Soak 7+ will either go "I kill them all" or "Yawn, another uninterested unchallanged fight". Killing the thill of battle equals killing the joy of actually having any combats at all.

And look at the marauder in the long run. He can buy another 3 wounds (I do not mind wounds at all) and another 2 more in soak. If he invest more exp he can even go bodyguard and survivalist for another 2 in soak, getting a total of 10 in soak (yes, that is with 1 Dedication aswell). Sure it is after a heapload of XP, but it can still be done and it just lame.

Looking at more avarage or even quite good characters this is never a problem. Having brawn 2 or even 3 and wearing the best armor gives you a soak of 4/5, and that value works just fine, you can even tell they constructed the entire combat system around that soak when it comes to balancing out damage and such. To make weapons that hit still effecive but letting the player feel Brawn and armor helps. As it is now a onetrick pony can literally destroy the entire feel of thrill, kill everyone and still walk out of the combat with at least 50% of his wounds left.

So before I get another "Remember" post I urge you all to actually look at this problem, test it out - do an entire group of Wookies/Trandoshans and play Crates of Krayts and see for yourself.

(X) Ability dice has 50% to at least get 1 success. Using 3 Ability Dice will result in 2 success (rounded up couse I am nice). Proficiency dice has at least 58.1% to score at least 1 success. Using 2 proficiency dice will result in 2 success (rounded up couse I am nice) for a sum of 4 success. On short range and using autofire the total amount of difficulty dice would end up at at 2, 1 for short and 1 for autofire. Difficulty dice has 37.5% to get at least 1 Failure. Since I am wicked I choose to round the result down to 1 Failure leaving the total of Sucess at 3. When it comes to advantages we see that the 2 proficiency dice has 49.8% to gain the player at least 1 advantage, so we go with 1. 3 advantage dice has 50% to result in an advantage so that gives us 1.5 advantage in reuslt and yet again I round up since I am a nice guy to a 2. The difficult Dice, 2, has 62.5% chanse to generate at least 1 threat, lets just be nice again and say that no threats where rolled.

In total, an avarage hit with full autofire, agility 5 and skill 2 would generate a sum of 3 success and 2 advantage.

Ruskendrul said:

Well obviously we have different views on what EotE rpg is or should be … obviously some combat is part of it …but its not its all and dare I say not even the main part of it? and some of that combat will be long range or ship-to-ship where brawn doesnt really help much … and btw an underbarrel flamethrower still does 10 dam, which with a couple of success would be 12 dam + burn 5 …. now ofcause a character with brawn 5 WOULD be very lethel in close combat no daubt, as he should be since he cant really do anything else … but I do get your point about soak - perhaps it would be better to calculate soak as 1+half brawn (round up)? On another note, keep in mind (see I didnt say remember ) that ranged weapons can be tricked out with attachments and mods where as currently meleeweapons cannot - thus a modded heavy blasterpistol can end up doing dam 7+2 dam mod=9 and a blasterriffle dam 9+2 dam mod+2 pierce mod= effectively 13 dam. thus quite a step up from the vibroaxe's 3+5 brawn = 8 - and again a Wookie with brawn 5 would crash hard against any kind of dedicated stun weapon (stun granade anyone?) bypassing soak entirely …especially when considering the melee character would in all likelyhood have to charge in spending strain for extra meneuvers.

I admit my base of reasoning is mostly theoretical as I have only played through the 'Crates of K' and we did not have such a brawn 5 yet alone a dedicated melee character in the group …but yes I have no daubt that a character with maxed out soak (Brawn 5-6, gadgetter, marauder, armour approx 10-12ish?) will be very difficult to take down by anyone not smart enough to switch to real heavy firepower or dedicated stun weapons ….(or run away?)

Boehm said:

First of, simply assume we have diffrent views is just wrong. This is the Combat Feedback Thread and I am giving feedback on a faulty mehcanic that involves Combat . I am not talking about what sort of view I got on how people should play the game.

I am pointing out that at the core the combat, soak and such works just fine. Problems arise and literally break the game/combat mechanics if a character gets hold of Brawn 5.

And looking to the record of all printed adventures, the movies themselfs we see that combat takes out a massive portion of what makes Star Wars fun. But if you then add a mechanic that headshots the fun and dance on its corpse then there is not really any reason to play out the combats at all. It will just end up like watching titanic, all you do is fast forward to see the boat sink.

Regarding the flamethrower. It does 8. The only flamer weapon that does 10 is the under-barrel and that is simply a forgotten correction from the errata. Makes 0 sense that an under-barrel attachement would do more damage then an actual flamethrower. As I see they just forgot to change the stat on it when they changed the Flame Projector (page 110) to do damage 8 from its previous 10. But that is something for the Proofreading changes. And even if an adversary had that it is a 3000 credit upgrade to a weapon that at least cost 850 credits. Not something everyone has.

Regarding stun damage: You soak just as much as you would soak wounds if hit by Stun Damage that would inflict strain (page 134). "Soak does not reduce strain inflicted on a target, except in specific instances (such as with weapons with the Stun quality)".

If we then turn the example into a matter of Stun damage the Wookie in my group (Strain threshold 9) would still outlive anyone else in the group. Shot by a blaster rifle on stun would inflict 9 Stun damage. Everyone in my group would soak 4 and take a 5 Strain hit. After three hits they would be out cold. The wookie yould take 2 Strain (damage 9 minus 7) and even if his Strain threshold is only 9 it would still take 10 hits to put that brawlerbear down.

Ruskendrul said:

ok I get what u mean, I guess Im more of the oppinioun that its impossible to not have a system thats exploitable …and I just dont see this as THAT bad though I WOULD prefer if minimum damage from a hit was 1. - so you are probably correct that we arent in disagreement on some things being niffy …

Regarding your example you are correct, unless u speak of what I called dedicated stun weapons .. .such as a stun granade (which does have the stun proporty!) …or the doctors touch-attack and regarding the underbarrel flamer …Im sure you are correct, I even posted it as a missed-correction myself …

As stated by Ruskendrul in the examples above in this thread, this is, as I feared, the return of the dreaded "naked dwarf syndrome" problem, as It was called in the older edition(s) of the warhamer roleplaying game.

The cause resides in factoring brawn to soak damage, and as it is, I suspect its too late to move from this paradigm at this stage, as much as I would like to see a solution where brawn or even soak would not be a factor in determining damage.

This could be acomplished by making natural naked soak (without factoring armor) a fixed number (e.g. 2), not dependent of any characteristic, at which point it would be better to simply remove natural soak (make it 0) and just decrease weapon damage by 2 all across the board.

Alternatively you could make soak =half brawn (round down) and adjust weapon damage accordingly (maybe just a point lower).

This problem, call it the "naked wookie syndrome" happens when some of the results shown above break the "suspension of disbelief" in the game created fiction and the percieved internal consistency of the rules.

Moreover, I really don't like when it cames in my games a situation where someone hits somebody and the damage net result is less then zero, zero, or even minimal. I think it's anti-climatic and not the best design solution. An hit should matter something (unless the target is heavy armoured).

The move to decrease weapons damage in week 3 rules update does not help to solve this particular problem, being in fact, in my humble opinion, a step backward.

OB-1 said:

Well, partially in FFG's defense, but this isn't the first Star Wars RPG where "damage resistance" was Strength-based and Wookiees had a huge advantage over most PCs against your run-of-the-mill weapons. WEG was notorious for it, as the average Wookiee PC with even minimal armor had a better-than-average chance of taking no damage from a blaster rifle or heavy blaster pistol.

The issue cited of Brawn being tied to Soak isn't a "Wookiee only problem," but more of a "Any species with a high starting Brawn issue." Wookiees are just more notorious about it due to their higher base Wound Threshold, enabling to take at least one additional hit compared to a similarly buff Trandoshan with equal Brawn and equal amounts of armor worn.

This is a double post.

Please disregard.

Thank you.

Donovan,

Yes, I know that was also the case in the old WEG STAR WARS game, which is more of a reason to want the problem solved this time around. I just had a lot more exposure to WFRP at the time.

Off course we all agree, this "Wookie" problem is not exclusive to Wookies. I just called it this way as it seemed more iconic.

And I really would like to know your opinion on this matter. It is a problem? Can it be solved?

I agree with OB-1 . Better to simply remove Brawn as a contributor to soak entirely and lower all weapons damage with 2 or 3. Or boost all armors with 2 to 3 extra soak so that they actually makes sense since Pierce is always a static 2 on all weapons (meaning all armors are completely useless if meeting a adversary with a Pierce upgrade, wich in it self only cost about 100 credits so pretyy much everyone and their Bantha can afford it).

OB-1 said:

My suggestion is still the following.

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.

OB-1 said:

Personally, I don't see it as a huge issue.

As the old expression goes, there's more than one way to skin a cat, and while your average Wookiee or Trandoshan might be able to shrug off blaster pistol attacks, there's still some pretty big guns out there, and Soak doesn't do you much good if your attacker can trigger a Critical Hit, something that can be done quite easily if the shooter rolls three or more Advantages when using most blasters, with one extra success being enough to deal damage to even a Brawn 4 character wearing Padded Armor. And a heavy blaster pistol is quite enough to deal with them, to say nothing of the Ranged (Heavy) weapons or Disruptor weapons.

There's also the fact that in order to get a Brawn of 4, they had to spend a decent chunk of their starting XP. Starting XP that wasn't spent on talents or skills or raising other characteristics. And if they went Brawn 5, that means they pretty much spent all their starting XP on a single Characteristic, which means no extra skills and no talents in most cases. It's a character who is a one-trick pony, a melee monster in a game where ranged combat is the name of the game. And melee can still be dangerous to them even without lightsabers, as vibro-weapons all have the Pierce quality, making it easier for them to punch through the high-Brawn PC's Soak Value.

And even though Stun weapons have to go up against Soak, what damage does got through goes up against the character's Strain Threshold, which is going to be a lot lower than their Wound Threshold, especially if the dumped all their starting XP into raising Brawn. It may only be 2 or 3 points of Strain per hit, but that 2 or 3 points is going to mean a lot more to a PC with a Strain Threshold of 9 (base value for a Wookiee) than it would for a most other species (base 11 for Rodians, Trandoshans, & Droids, base 13 for Bothans and Gand, base 12 for everyone else). And you can easily give a Henchman NPC a talent (Scathing Tirade) that deals Strain damage that completely bypasses the target's Soak value.

So in summary, sorry but I don't see it as being a game-breaking problem that needs fixing. But if you do and chose to remove Brawn as a factor in determining a character's Soak Value, then I'd suggest one of the following to counteract the change:

1) Reduce weapon damage by 2, maybe even 3 points.

2) Increase armor's soak value by 2 or 3 points, but be ready for everone to be wearing armor, regardless of whether it makes sense for their character or not (a common problem cited with the RCR version of Star Wars given the way critical hits and the Vitality/Wound mechanic interacted).

3) Increase the Wound Threshold of PCs, Henchman, and especially Nemesis-level threats by at least 5 to account for the damage they're no longer able to soak.

Unless one of those three is used, combat is going to get extremely nasty, and you'll have PCs dropping like flies after only getting shot once or twice with a blaster pistol. And from my experience, it's a very rare player that enjoys having their non-combat twinked PC dropped in every fight.

Talking about soak I have a question as to how people think it should interact with autofire. Autofire does additional hits equal to the amount of advantage spent with a successful attack, and soak reduces incoming damage by the amount of soak. The way soak is worded it is not clear if each hit from a multi-hit attack (be it linked, two weapons or autofire) subtracts the opponent's soak value in damage or if all the damage is added up and then you subtract the soak.

What do you guys think?

Re: Autofire

Apply soak individually for each hit. This is how I have been doing it.

Of all the suggestions above regarding auto-firing, I think the one with the most merit is the one from Boehm that states it should cost 2adv to hit the SAME TARGET with auto-fire.

After having realized on this forums that the issue with the current state of auto-fire revolved more with hitting the same target multiple times and less with hitting different targets, I was thinking on something along similar lines.

The objective, for me, should be to help mantain the effectiveness of auto-fire when hitting different targets (generally henchmen, and specially minions), while at the same time decreasing its lethality when hitting a target multiple times (generally nemesis, and specially player characters).

With that purpose in mind, I was considering two alternative solutions:

1. The first, according to which, when using "auto-fire" (weapon quality) or "walking fire" it should cost 1 adv to activate said quality the first time vs. each different target. 2 adv the next consecutive hit on the same target. 3 adv the next one. And so on…

The cost to activate the quality should be 1adv the fist time to a target other than the original, 2adv the second time to the same target, 3adv the third time vs same target….such as the cost to hit a target multiple times should be [1 adv. for each additional hit, times the total number of hits against the same target].

So, when "walking fire", ( i.e. spreading the fire vs. multiples foes) the cost would remain 1adv. per the first extra hit against a different foe. the second extra hit would cost 2adv., the third extra hit 3 adv, and so on, as usual.

In this case, it would cost

• 1adv [to hit 2 characters];
• 2adv [to hit a character 2 times] or [to hit 3 characters];
• 3adv [to hit a character 2 times] and[ another one 1 time]; or [to hit 4 characters];
• 4adv [to hit a character 2 times] and [another two 1 time]; or [to hit 5 characters];
• 5adv [to hit a character 3 times]; or [to hit 2 characters two times]; or [to hit one character 2 times] and [to hit 3 characters]; or [to hit 6 characters];

and so on… (thanks gribble for helping me clarify those examples, please tell me if you find something wrong still)

This was based somewhat on something proposed by WarrenH in the Week 3 Update thread.

2. As per the second idea, when using "auto-fire", the cost to activate should be 2 adv. When "walking-fire" the cost should remain 1 adv (mitigated by the fact that you are adding 1difficulty die upfront).

This later solution seems to me cleaner and more elegant, on principle.

what do you think?

OB-1 said:

If I'm reading the text of the first change correctly (rather than the examples, which seem contradictory), the first rule is more simply stated as "the advantage cost to gain each hit on a target is equal to the total number of times they will have been hit by this attack."

I.e.: first hit on original target is free (it's the hit from the successful attack). To purchase a second hit on the original target would cost 2 adv because he is now being hit a total of two times. To purchase a third hit on the original target would cost an additional 3 adv (for a total of 5), because he is now being hit three times. To hit additional target(s), it costs 1 adv each, as each is now being hit by the attack for the first time. Choosing to hit one of them a second time would cost another 2 adv (for a total of three), as that target would have now been hit twice by the attack.

It's a little more complex than the second option, but has a scaling effect, which seems like it'd be a bit less easy to break with uber-optimised autofire PCs.

gribble,

Sorry, the editing above was a mess, utterly incompreensible ( I really don t understand muliquote in this boards. doesn t help i type from an ipad, either).

Anyway, the ideia I tried to implement in my post above had the purpose to decrease the lethality of auto-fire when hitting a target multiple times while mantaining the effectiveness of walking fire when hitting multiple targets.

That said, I would mantain that, on principle (there are nuances) the first extra hit would cost only 1adv. (otherwise the goal to mantain effectiveness when hitting multiple targets would be compromised).

The thing is, I think that if you started the scalling effect with 2adv, you would nerf autofire too much.

Think about it: what i am proposing is an alternative to a flat out increase from 1adv to 2adv activation cost to Auto-fire, as to mitigate the consequences to the effectiveness of Auto-fire, while trying to decrease its lethality.

I will try to clear the post above. Thanks for your patience.

OB-1 said:

But that's exactly what my clarification/restatement does…

First additional hit on the original target costs 2 adv, because they've now been hit twice, but the first hit on any additional targets only cost 1 adv, because it's the first time they've been hit (by that attack). Make sense?

gribble said:

Yes, of course.

I can see now where the examples provided were wrong.

I will rectify asap. Done. Please do tell me if its better now.

Really, your post made me evolve all the formulation behind the initial idea, and its a lot better for it now.

I still prefer the simplicity of the later proposal, though.

@OB-1 I like the scaling proposal better because even with it requiring 2 adv. it's fairly easy to make it over the top. All it really takes is the jury-rigged talent, jury-rigged would make it so that it costs 1 adv. again, with the scaling cost it wouldn't be as insane.

Donovan Morningfire said:

1) I kind of like the damage on the weapons in the errata. Gives the feeling they are actually weapons that can actually hurt people. Considering how fast people, rebels and stormtroopers went down in the movies I think on a whole that the damage on the weapons are just fine.

2) I houserule that all armors get another 2 more soak, except Heavy Battle Armor that gets 3 more soak. Simply to make armors better and actually be able to soak at all since Pierce always is a static value of 2. Also, if you intend to be in alot of combat it makes more sense that you invest in a good armor then just rely on being pumped.

3) No. Wounds are fine as they are and you can always buy a few more in the more combat oriented careers.

Combat should be nasty if you get hit and PC's are already dropping like flies even without modifying the rules if you manage to hit them two or three times in a row. The problem never been or will be the normal PC. And simply taking away Brawn the soak-adding attribute combat result in far more interesting and dangerous battles for all participants. And as you said "Considering how fast people, rebels and stormtroopers went down in the movies I think on a whole that the damage on the weapons are just fine." I do belive you would go "wtf" if Chewbakka got hit in the face by a Blaster Rifle and just went "*shrug*, whatevz dude".

OB-1 said:

Why must Advantages trigger the autofire? Think about it. We already got all these things you can spend advantages on in the combat section (page 133).

As I and my players interpret the "extra sucess adds extra damage" is that you score a particilarly good hit. One success, in the chest. Three success, POW right in the kisser.

I therefore houserule that autofire scores extra hits on extra success instead of adding extra damage. That way our group can deal with it without it being over powered and the one using it can still use advantages just like everyone else.

This means that an Agility 4 shooter with Skill of 3 would in an avarage score 4 Success and 3 Advantage. Correcting for avarage difficulty it would end up on 3 Success and 2 Advantage. In total 3 hits with the base damage and the shooter could immediate perform an free maneuver (cost 2).