Sutter said:

Bolded for emphasis. This is exaxctly the point. Breach is the kind of power you need to cut through a blast door with a combat maneuver. Qui-Gon was using a lot more effort than a combat maneuver to cut through that door.

That doesn't mean that a lightsaber shouldn't be able to cut through "just about anything" given enough time and effort, but that's not really what the Breach quality represents.

I wish they hadn't moved away from what a lightsaber is. It should cut through a point of armor effortlessly. Breach should stay. No way a vibrosword cuts through more than a lightsaber.

I can understand getting rid of deflect as just a base quality because you should have Jedi-like reflexes to be able to do that. They need to add a mechanic that will allow for deflect, though. I can see a lightsaber talent tree. Deflecting and redirecting shots is an iconic use of a lightsaber if there ever was one. Saga had it perfect. It was a reflection of Jedi training and Force ability and training could make it even better.

Maybe defensive 2 should not be a base quality. They are hard to use so someone could not just pick one up and automatically have 2 melee defense. They would be more of a harm to themselves actually. Maybe making a LS add to melee defense should be a ranked talent in some Force or Jedi tree.

But I really wish they had kept breach. Or give it some other quality to account that it can cut though a few inches of steel like butter.

As far as the Qui Gon action, cutting into the door took only a few seconds. That's what breach reflects.

LS should probably have breach 5 or so. Breach 1 pretty much negates any character-level soak anyway so you may as well make it but though the 5 points of armor that a blast door probably represents.

usgrandprix said:

No, Breach is the ability to penetrate starship-scale armour effortlessly. I think what you're looking for is the Pierce quality. I'm not saying that a few points of Pierce wouldn't be appropriate. Breach was totally overkill for what we ever see lightsabers actually do.

I was just thinking a blast door is about 5 points of armor.

usgrandprix said:

I just think there's a difference between what you can do just swinging your saber around (like scoring a direct hit on Vader without carving him in two) and what it takes some effort to accomplish (cutting your way through a starship-scale bulkhead). The former is a combat action, the latter is a narrative-style action. We know things exist that can cut through "just about everything". Like fusion cutters and whatnot. Lightsabers should be able to do this as well, but I think there's a big difference between swinging at something in combat, and taking the effort to carve through it. At no point do we see a lightsaber cut through a starship hull like it wasn't there.

You know, the same way that you don't cut down a tree by hitting it with a chainsaw.

I get what you are saying. Maybe another more nuanced quality to reflect what it can cut through over tie is in order.

A couple of thoughts though. I think I read a round in this game can be up to a minute. I read that as an "attack" action is an abstraction of several swings, shots, blows, parries. I might be off base there but there are time-consuming skills that can be preformed in an action. I think a round allows for more time than other games and its length varies.

I'm also thinking of a situation like a Jedi versus an AT-ST. I'm guessing an AT-ST leg has about 3-4 armor. I think a LS should be able to have a chance to cut through that leg and have a chance at a crit to bring it down. That's about the upper end I'm comfortable with.

Lightsabers need the Pierce quality, full stop. 2 at a minimum, 3 is nice, 4 maybe a little much. I'm fine with dropping Breach and having Deflection be a Jedi Talent. But even in untrained hands, sabers should cut through personal armor like butter.

Slaunyeh said:

Actually, no. There's no difference between armor types, except for thickness.

It's like your own example with the chainsaw…..a chainsaw will cut through the tree given enough time or, for an even better example, it'd be like cutting through a few feet of ice cream with a fusion cutter. The blade of the Lightsaber is a concentration and focused beam of "Force fused energy", it has no equal (unless it's another Force fused item, like another Lightsaber and the Sith blades from the Expanded Universe).

Besides, at no point do we see anybody use the bathroom, but we assume they do. The Lightsaber (and the bathroom) is implied….I mean, at no time do we ever see something that a Lightsaber CAN'T cut through.

Also, if people keep in mind "Starship Scale" and how 1 point of damage equals 10 points on people then simply reverse that and you see that the Lightsaber would be doing 1 point of damage to Starships. Besides, Lightsabers had a Breach of 1, which ate through 1 point of ship armor (10 soak)……that is EXACTLY perfect for the Lightsaber. With a Breach 1, this allows it to easily tear through speeder bikes but somehow I doubt that you'd be tearing a hole through a Star Destroyer's hull anytime soon.

So again, I'm keeping things just the way they were ORIGINALLY. Hopefully FFG will realize the point I've made and put the Lightsaber back to the way it was and should be…..Breach, all the way!

I personally think the Breach quality should have been left in, as it did a great job of reflecting a lightsaber's long-standing ability to carve through most things like a hot knife thru butter; it's a pretty short list of the things a lightsaber can't cut through (cortosis weave and phrik alloy being the two main ones). Maybe drop the base damage to 8, so it's much less likely to result in an insta-drop against Henchman or Nemesis opponents. Don't have the book handy, but unless the Aratech Z-74 speeder bike has 0 Armor, then Luke wouldn't have been able to dispatch that speeder bike on Endor (GM Lucas played it up to have the trooper spiral out of control until he explosively crashed into a tree, but he's been known to do that).

Deflection being removed and Defensive being nerfed to melee-only make sense, as the former is a trademark "Jedi ability" and the the latter change also addresses the oddity of vibro-blades being able to protect you from blaster fire.

While I agree with you on your speeder bike example, I think their reasoning is due to the fact there aren't opposed skill rolls in lightsaber combat. One hit with Breach 1 will remove almost all of someone's wounds.

Zar said:

Which would be perfectly in-tune with the setting and what we now about lightsabers. Pretty much, you get hit with one of these things, it's game over (man!)

It also reflects why they are so outrageously expensive and difficult to acquire one; you could literally buy your own ship for the black market cost of a lightsaber.

Also, most Henchman and Nemesis level threats as well as PCs have a Wound Threshold greater than 10, so barring an extraordinary degree of success (requiring a skill that either doesn't exist or is generally going to be expensive if it does), a single hit isn't going to drop anything but a minion, who should be dropped with ease anyway. Most of the combat-capable NPCs have at least a 13 for a Wound Threshold, so you'd need to roll at least 4 successes (1 to hit, 3 extra for increased damage) to be able to take them down in one strike.

Breach and Pierce feel good to see in a lightsaber's stat block. But there has to be some simplification of the "and" addiction people have with lightsabers. Breach, and sunder, and deflection, and defensive, and vicious, and low crit rating, and high damage. It's easy to narrow our gaze on "but why take off breach!?" But there is a lot of mechanical "and" left on the lightsaber that makes it rock.

I'm not saying that the new version of the lightsaber is perfect or anything. I think Sam n the gang are using the community here to playtest and react to their choices so they get it as rightish as they can ( no one is going to be entirely happy accross the board as the last 15 pages of this thread can attest to ). So first off we had the "and" lightsaber. And now we have the "but" lightsaber. The lightsaber needs a couple buts imo. Which ones? That's what the playtest is for.

The lightsaber as it stands now can chop through darn near anything by way of sundering, and leaving vicious critical hits through its bonkers low crit rating. But that doesn't "pop" in the weapon description since people have to actually read through how criticals work, what vicious does, sundering, advantage, etc. I don't mean to say that people haven't read the rules so please don't take offense at that. But from the standpoint of just browsing through the equipment chapter people are immediately drawn to the "specials" column and they see that vibro weapons have pierce and more exciting sounding "bells and whistles" than a lightsaber. So even though the design isn't flawed from a dice and numbers standpoint, the lightsaber is being seen as flawed from a window-shopping standpoint. That matters. Even though players might never get to use a lightsaber in Edge of the Empire, they want to walk by the window display at christmas time and drool over the shiny lightsaber.

I like that deflection was scratched off for the same reasons other people like that it was removed. Same goes for the change to defensive affecting melee only so that vibro…yeah no sense retreading it.

Breach just has that "it" factor when you read it. That counts for more than mechanics because…people like things that sound cool. If the mechanics for breaching vehicle scale levels of armor was spread over several other loosely related mechanics…it would get the "BORED" treatment and people would be less than happy. But, it's one easy weapon quality entry that immediately fills hopeful little imaginations with dreams of slicing through AT-AT grating, blast doors and speeder bikes. Breach also lets players look at Pierce when they compare a lightsaber to vibro weapons and go "ha, enjoy your piddly Pierce 2 nerds…I'm cutting through the adventure to the next adventure via short-cut *sticks out tongue*" That's important as well. If a player manages to get their hands on a lightsaber they should feel like they got to the top of the mountain and all others are number 2 or lower. The thing costs as much as a freighter or 10. But Breach only affects soak, which is going to come up a lot in combat and other discussions about "can I cut through that", but there are other aspects of the light-saber that need to be maintained.

Sunder is important because someone needs to chop the end of Boba Fett's gun off in a fight. It's one of my current favorite specials that the lightsaber has.

Vicious 2 might look less impressive than Vicious 3 at first glance but comparing Crit ratings…the lightsaber friggin owns the universe at 1 . The Crit rating + Vicious 2 means that lightsabers are going to have a good shot at maiming nemeses, murdering henchmen, and outright dusting a couple minions. That fits.

So we get to high base damage . The lightsaber doesn't benefit from a wielder being stronger since…it's a femto scale blade of energy. So naturally you can't just have it do 1 or 2 damage. Sure there might be future plans for +this and +more in later rulebooks, but you can't let the lightsaber hit the streets like a wet noodle. BUT…a lot of what the lightsaber is good at is handled in the special abilities. You can chop up gear with sunder and that is separate from damage, you can do horrendous critical hits and that is separate from damage, you can bypass the physical soak of darn near any personal scale noun in the galaxy and that is also separate from damage dealt.

To me…the best candidate for a "but" in the lightsaber…take the damage down and leave the specials like Breach in…if for no other reason than the impression players and other readers will get. So if the lightsaber is going to be fiddled with from how it was originally presented I'd like to see something like:

Damage: 6

Crit Rating: 1

Specials: Breach, Defensive 2, Sunder, Vicious 2

You will be dealing six wounds to almost anyone in the galaxy per hit AND chopping off their hands with vicious crits, and destroying their gear and carving up their air speeder taxi…potentially in a single round. Plus it gives us a lot of room to boost lightsaber damage with <future game stuff> whilst maintaining the "Danger: Lightsaber. Aim away from face" warning label.

They are getting rid of Defensive 2 and adding back Breach 1. Sounds like you'll have to take talents to make sabers defensive and I'm fine with that. The weapon requires superior training/experience.

usgrandprix said:

The only problem I have with Lightsabers losing Defensive is that Vibro-Swords get to keep that same quality.

As I suggested in the Week 3 update thread, how about keeping Defensive and Deflection, but adding a requirement to be able to use those talents, such as either having at least one rank in the Lightsaber skill and/or a Force Rating of 1 or better.

Yeah I agree that (only) with training and strength in the Force sabers should add to defense and deflect. I'm not so particular on how they accomplish it. Skill level or talents are fine either way. Force rating should count for qualities like deflect too.

One thing I liked about Saga is you knew when you blocked an attack and you could even dig for the rules on saber locks. With defense you don't know if it missed or you blocked. But some kind of opposed block roll would be cumbersome I think.

usgrandprix said:

Yeah, an opposed check would be cumbersome in this system, and even in Saga it added another roll that needed to be resolved.

That's why I liked that ligthsabers had those defensive traits buit in. And adding a pre-req to access those traits would be fairly simple to track, as it's either "Yes, you qualify and get to use those traits" or "No, you don't qualify and so don't get to use those traits."

Actually, I can handle defensive capabilities being skill/talent training and this should apply to ALL weapons (Vibro axe, etc..), it makes sense. But, YES, Lightsabers need to have Breach.

Perhaps, with Force training, one can get default Defense and Deflect. Maybe the Lightsaber skill or a Lightsaber Combat talent (maybe even an ongoing effect of the Force) would do this.

Donovan Morningfire said:

I think it's to reflect how lightsabers are just plain harder to use than swords. Yes, a sword (and. perhaps, also lightsabers) is easier to parry with than most other weapons, but right now there's not really anything to indicate how hard a lightsaber is to wield without the training to do so. Removing the defensive quality is one way to do that. I don't really have an opinion on whether it's a good way to reflect that, though.

Slaunyeh said:

Well, a lightsaber is, at it's core design, a really fancy sword. Given the business end has no mass and thus becomes difficult to properly wield, I think requiring the user to be trained (i.e. has ranks in the Lightsaber skill) in order to have access to the weapon's Defensive quality becomes a nice, easy way to reflect that.

So if you're not trained, no Defensive quality as you don't really know how to use the weapon to it's full advantage, namely the fact that there's no mass to overcome so it'd be incredibly easy to intercept/parry an incoming attack. But once you've spent the time practicing with it (picked up a skill rank or two), you now have a feel for the weapon and how it handles, and thus can take full advantage of a mass-less blade that can cut through most materials like a hot knife through butter.

Upon reading the errata pages, and being offended that I bought a Beta book that now has some edits on practically every page, I can say this. After all is said and done, I really hope that one of the later books, once they have gotten over their fear of Jedi and their iconic weapons, and the unbalancing power both seem to bring to games (not often a problem in other games of mine, but whatever), gives us a Jedi-themed Specialization, and that one of its early to middle Talents is Jedi Battle Training. This Talent could give me back the Defensive quality, and make it accurate (no vibro-weapon should keep Defensive, if the Lightsabers famous for intercepting attacks don't), as in ranged, too, and maybe go back to giving it some of it's original power. I'm not saying the lightsaber has to be the be-all and end-all, penultimate weapon in Star Wars, but it should have the cool stuff we all know and love about them, AND I shouldn't have to burn through three talents to get them. This should be, for my Jedi, the one and only weapon I use throughout my whole life. It won't be getting frequently modified, upgraded with this kit I bought on Corellia, and I won't have two other weapons to whip out, as the battlefield conditions change, and so it should be a bit above and apart from some of these, especially being pracitvally the ONLY melee weapon in the universe; you can look at that chart, and see a list of melee toys, but this is a blaster universe, with Jedi that have melee weapons to compensate for it, you don't see many other melee weapons, in movies, games, or anywhere. Certainly they are there, but seen almost as rarely as lightsabers are perceived to be in this game.

I can understand wanting to keep them from being silly, and if they can do it in this game, where no PCs or NPCs will ever have one (you can't be a Jedi, you won't see any, and only the Emperor's most powerful servants will have them, even among his FS ones. You can't buy one, because who else did? They'd turn the seller in, or fear the Stormtroopers. How do you even offer it for sale? Having one is akin to a sign to every Stormtrooper to shoot you), it seems, then it can only help later, when the game has to step out of the Empire's shadow, and remember that lightsabers exist, and 2+ members of every party, as well as 75% of the bad guys will have them, which would be a terrible place for them to be a hand-held nuke, or a wet spaghetti noodle. It's also fine to make them Talent-driven, somewhat, as even General Grievous, a skilled warrior before, trained further by a Jedi Master + Sith Lord specialized in fighting WITH lightsabers against other enemies WITH lightsabers, still can't do everything with one that a Jedi can, experience and superior reflexes not being enough. To this end, a Talent, or two, to give them the ability to apply Defensive, Deflection, and/or Pierce might be appropriate.

Jedi Combat Training
Activation: Passive
Ranked: Yes
Trees: Lightsaber Master (some similarly named other future-made thing)
This Talent augments your combat capabilities with the favored weapon of the Jedi, the lightsaber. Each rank gives you two points to allocate between the following list of Weapon Qualities: Defensive, Deflection, Pierce. Once allocated, these points cannot be changed, but function with any lightsaber your character wields.

Put this Talent on a Jedi tree once, or maybe twice, and you can approach what a Lightsaber was going to be, without having them always be cheese, and it gives that player a bit of flexibility with what the lightsaber will do. It also reflects some of the "it takes time to master this weapon" feeling people always want lightsabers to have, even if no other weapons usually do.

Venkelos,

Regarding your talent idea, I came up with something similar for my Jedi Initiate specialization quite a while ago, but simplified it so that each level of Lightsaber Defense provided a rank of the Defensive and Deflection qualities to the Jedi's lightsaber when they were wielding it. Works much cleaner, and ties into the classic lore than being adept at using a lightsaber was a mark of great prowess and a heads-up to the local criminal riff-raff to tread very carefully.

Also, given lightsabers already have Breach, which makes personal Soak all but worthless anyway, Pierce is pretty much unneeded, as it does so little against vehicle armor as to not be worth taking.

I think it would be cool to add another weapon quality, Dangerous. Any time a weapon with the Dangerous quality that is used untrained gains a difficulty die at rank 1 or a challenge die at rank 2. This would be good to showcase certain weapons as being dangerous to use untrained. I would see the lightsaber as having Dangerous 2.

Just a thought.

Yeah. Dangerous… sounds nice! Mostly applicable in relation to the UCT, any other weapons that could have it? A thermal detonator?

Anyways, I'd love to see some people's take on Jedi specialisations when the times come…

Donovan Morningfire said:

One supposes. I seem to remember reading in the last 16 pages possible plans to remove Breach, since they seem somewhat hellbent on making lightsabers "just another weapon", rather than a "swiss army ALL OF IT of twinks". In that case, having Pierce was better than nothing, even if lesser than Breach. Having both as equal options in said Talent, yeah probably dumb, but I can only say oops.

mouthymerc said:

Trying to make the lightsaber cool is nice, but why do people often want to make it so hard to use, compared to every other weapon. There are no Jedi, and no one else can learn how to use this thing, even with trial and error, so no Skill available for it,even as some "excluded from all trees, pay double" sort of skill, like a 40k Elite Advance. Then, they take an, admittedly, rather silly weapon, and try to nerf it down until, when the Empire is weakened, and the Jedi come back, they will probably look at the lightsaber and say "why did we ever use these? Let's just build something simpler, easier, and such. Oh, vibroblades used to work for us, way back when, let's grab those again." Taking a weapon with as many built in limits, and then making it have a mechanical probability of maiming you, or sucking, when you are already forbidden to get the training, smacks odf one more attempt to just make people not want them, or Jedi, and let their absence slide. You already have that every bad guy will either shoot you on sight, or call in the guys that will, as soon as you draw the thing, and that assumes you can find one. depending on who your allies are, they might not favor a saber-wielding Jedi much, either, or the attention you will inevitably draw to their operations, with your "I'm over here" flag. You also already lose out on dice for no training, or ability thereof. I know that the lightsaber is still a crazy weapon, with great damage, crazy crit, and Breach + Vicious, but I sort of wonder if, when trying to mechanically nerf it, they failed to realize some of the not-on-paper, non-mechanical parts of its balancing scale. Maybe we should just let them kind of stay cool, something the players can WANT to strive for, despite the risks, rather than a curiousity people question why it was ever used, and players saying it never should be.

My apologies, if I seem to be just roaring in your face, but I am still getting over the fact that it is Star Wars, bt without it's chief stars. I'm not sure yet what about Star Wars, sans Jedi and their lightsabers, is so appealing to people that they want to paly it, AND call it Star Wars, that several other RPGs don't already do. Smuggling, space exploration, adventures, firefights with the ______ Empire's finest, all of these are in numerous games. When I think Star Wars, I think that PLUS Jedi, Sith, and stuff; it's what sets it apart. And so much here is directed at playing the universe without them that I just wonder why they sat down and said "this is the game we want to build, today". I'm hoping that it more becomes a case of hammering out the rest of the details, getting the base system stable, and then, when the Jedi book comes out, integrating it back into the game, as Jedi, Force powers, and lightsabers CAN be one of the big balance-breakers. I know the book is coming, but I'm just iffy on it till then, and constant attempts to diminish the lightsaber, the weapon that won't even appear much in the game, just smacks the fan in me. That, and paying $30 for a book that, while I confess is a beta, has had changes to almost every page, by now, it feels. Sadly, you might have gotten the brunt of my whining rage