gribble said:

Boehm said:

If your players aren't looking at Coordination as a useful skill to at least have a rank or two in, you're missing out on a lot of stuff from an encounter design perspective. Fighting on rain slicked rooftops of Kamino, conveyer belts with heavy machinery working on building droids as you navigate through them, desert skiffs bucking around as a melee breaks out on them… There are TONS of uses to have your PCs make Coordination checks. Make 'em roll one if they want to get through a particularly dangerous section of terrain in a single maneuver. If the bad guy hit's 'em near an edge, have him spend some advantage and give the PCs a Coordination check to avoid falling.

Cyril said:

+1

It's one of those universally useful skill. You're usually not going to "specialize" in it, and it won't define your character's schtick like Mechanics or Pilot will, but that doesn't mean it's not important, and it should certainly come up fairly frequently.

Inksplat said:

Did you miss the part where it never explicitly states that in the description? If the designers make that clear I'd be likely be fine with it, but nothing states that it cannot be used with other talents.

In response to it being easier, uh, I suppose. I'd hardly call the system and npc generation particularly difficult. It's definitely much, much, much easier than saga ever was, even without adversary.

Chrislee66 said:

I get the feeling that this system runs by the idea that it's the GM's responsibility to make sure that his adversary isn't abusing a combo of adversary + other defensive talents. They don't need to explicitly state it, it's implied, if they stated it explicitly (which probably isn't necessary for a beta test anyway) then a GM couldn't apply it with defensive talents even if he felt it was reasonable to do so. There might be times,where a GM might want to have a extremely defensive villain.

Chrislee66 said:

Perhaps as a part of EotE's indie game influences, perhaps they didn't think it was necessary to spell out the fact that Adversary was a replacement for the various defensive talents.

That and the fact that in the update, just about every NPC that had other defensive talents lost those talents and had them replaced with varying levels of Adversary instead. So to them, it may simply have been pretty obvious.

Still, when the guidelines for stating up your own NPCs shows up in the final version, a sentence or two about using Adversary instead of the other defensive talents wouldn't be a bad idea to include.

Chrislee66 said:

Thats because they put a blurb in the week five news, 3rd paragragh. You would have looked near it to get the download link. Well, thats were i get the link to the download

Might it be interesting to give NPCs maybe 2 more talents that are entirely their own? Like adversary, they could be ranked, allowing for them to be mixed and matched in interesting ways. As a GM who has a job that eats up most of my time, I have zero interest in learning all the various player-side talents, nor do I want to be expected to build threats with those talents that will be competitive with PCs who inevitably learn their own abilities inside and out.

But 3 simple talents for NPCs only? Yeah. I could handle that.

This is all to say that I love the adversary talent.

Give me a system where I can stat out a threat in under 60 seconds. Those that wanna use PC rules to make threats? There's nothing stopping them.

RonRamron said:

And that's exactly how it should be. Flexibility to support both camps, whether they want to or have the time to stat everything up, and those who can't or don't want to.

RonRamron said:

Which is what the current Adversary Talent is…it's built on the common Talent paradigm. Sure it's "NPC Only," but what's the point of having an NPC only exception in an otherwise compatible section of the rules?

Just yank it out of Talents and shove it into the GM Section. The deal is, it really has no point lurking in the Talents chapter because it's an NPC modifier mechanic. Do we have to apply a Minion talent to NPCs? Henchmen Talents? No…they're NPC modifications and clearly presented as such. Do the same with the throttling mechanics for NPCs. Whether it's a pool, template, overlay, or even an NPC only talent. You can still make a sandwich if you keep your bread in the closet in your bedroom. But it might make more sense to keep it in the kitchen. And now I'm hungry…

The current placement and roll-out of the Adversary talent mucks up an otherwise clean separation between PC and NPC construction and their general overlap. It really could be as simple as changing its location in the book to maintain organization of the material. If this was a game where NPCs were entirely built like PCs bar-none…yeah it really wouldn't matter. Mix and mash up the rules because everyone has to obey the same restrictions ( which…sucks from a GM standpoint imo and one of the reasons d20 is the bane of my existence when it comes to building front line NPCs ).

But, when you provide a central resolution mechanic that is approached from separate directions in terms of how you build a participant in an encounter…why suddenly cross over the line just to generate an in-game effect that you could get by writing it into the section of the game system where all the other "NPCs aren't built like a normal PC" rules are already located ?

TL;DR Ctrl-X….Ctrl-V; Problem mostly solved :-)

Callidon said:

Except they've done exactly that. NPC Only or not, it's a Talent, so it was put in the chapter that is dedicated to the Talents found in the game.

The PCs already get a basic breakdown of the talents for their specializations in Chapter 2, but Chapter 4 is where Talents get their full breakdown. Since Adversary is listed on the stat blocks as a Talent, putting it in the Talent chapter makes perfect sense.

It also lets players know exactly why their attacks against one particularly enemy are so much harder (i.e. rolling additional challenge dice) even though the GM isn't spending Destiny to upgrade their difficulty. Yeah, it's a bit meta-gamey, but just every player to one extent or another indulges in a bit of meta-gaming, even if it's only to ask "which bad guy looks the most hurt?" or work out what Armor Class they need to beat in order to land a hit on the BBEG.

Hi everyone,

Thanks for the feedback on the Adversary talent. How we "frame" this ability in the final game is still up for debate, and we'll take your feedback into account when we do so. However, we're more interested in the mechanical effects of the ability. We'd like to know if Adversary 1, for example, drastically increases the danger of an opponent, or if Adversary 3 makes someone nigh-unkillable and is excessive (or not).

Thanks!

Change Side Step to: “Once per round on the character’s turn, the character may perform a Side Step maneuver to side step and try to avoid incoming ranged attacks. He then suffers a number of strain no greater than his ranks in Side Step. Until the start of the character’s next turn, upgrade the difficulty of all melee combat checks targeting the character a number of times equal to the strain suffered by the character.” Side Step becomes ranked.

This was in the week 4 update that removed most improved talents, but I just caught it… typo? Top line says incoming ranged attacks, next line then says melee attacks. The original was ranged, so I assume that was the intention.

Eruletho said:

I mentioned this last week in the Week 4 thread, but apparently it got overlooked in the furor over the change in non-career specs and skills.

That's a good catch. Thanks to both of you.

If I'm not mistaken, the Adversary talent is not compatible with the Side Step and Defensive Stance talents. If so, wouldn't be better to specify this in the talent's description?

LukeZZ said:

I don't think Adversary is specifically incompatible with Defensive Stance, Side Step, or any other defensive-based talents. To quote from the Week 5 Updated web page:

"The second major change is the introduction of the Adversary talent. The Adversary talent is a unique ranked talent that is only given to NPCs. It’s designed to replace all other defensive abilities for NPCs, and allows GMs to give mid or high-level adversaries defensive buffs without having to actively track a wide variety of abilities."

So you could in theory give your Nemesis-level NPCs (or even your Henchman level ones) ranks in stuff like Dodge, Defensive Stance, and Side Step, it's just that it behooves the GM to just use Adversary to get much the same effect (boost to defense) without the extra bookkeeping that comes from those talents (maneuver and Strain expenditures specifically).

So for a specific BBEG fought at the end of a story arc, the GM could give them a rank in Adversary and then Side Step to make them really tough to hit with blaster fire, but as noted it's something else the GM has to track and remember to use, and might just be better off going with a couple ranks of Adversary instead.

That said, my and some friends found from our high-level stress test session that the Adversary talent worked quite nicely for it's intended purpose, as the extra challenge die (or dice in some cases) did make those Henchman and Nemesis foes more of a challenge to take down as the heroes didn't generate as many successes and advantages as they would have previously. Still didn't help much when the Wookiee Death Machine or the Minor Jedi did score a successful hit on said foes, with the WDM taking a Master Hunter straight to dead with a single Critical Hit (vibro-axe, multiple levels of Lethal Blow, and a high percentile roll will do that).

We did have an Autofire-monkey as one of the NPCs we were battling against, and I agree that it does need some refinement. It and Linked, as both of them are far too inexpensive to activate, and the Linked trait on most starfighter weapons makes it so that the first to score a hit is the survivor. We pitted TIEs vs. Z-95s using the standard Imperial Pilot minion, and each fight pretty much came down to who scored the first hit, with the only exception being the Y-Wing as it was tough enough to withstand a Linked attack from another starfighter. For the YT-1300's quads though, since they've got Linked 3, I'm thinking the base damage could be reduced down to 4; still nasty for a starfighter if you get multiple advantages, but not quite insta-lethal like they currently are.

Chrislee66 said:

The GM could give NPC's some/all of the normal defensive talents. The new NPC talent is just a simple way for GM's to keep track of a NPC's defense and there's nothing strange, alarming or cheating about it. It's just a help for the GM.

Gallows said:

I thought Adversary was an aid for the GM, so he has simpler way of handling defensive instead of using the various defensive talents.
If an NPC can have both the Adversary bonus AND the defensive bonus from other talents… it won't help GM to simplify nothing (and NPC can became quite… hard to hit).

I think that is exactly what the Adversary talent is - a way to incorporate many different defenses and other various things into one simple Talent, rather than putting on scores and scores of other talents. It makes enemies easy to make on the fly, rather than a more laborious method of creating them

FFG_Sam Stewart said:

WARNING: Spoilers for Crates of Krayts follows!

Next session of my game is tomorrow night (unfortunately we only play fortnightly), and it'll be the final part of the Crates of Krayts adventure - namely the encounter with Cordell's Chain. The update doesn't include Adversary changes for the bounty hunters, but I'm assuming that the journeyman get Adversary 1 and the boss gets Adversary 2, similar to the generic bounty hunters.

I'll update after tomorrow night with how it works out!

gribble said:

Looking forward to how this plays out, but I'm inclined to think that with the sheer number of bad guys involved, it might be best to just give the boss Adversary 1 and leave the journeyman as-is to give the PCs a bit more of a fighting chance. The Henchman are going to take at least a couple of shots (more if none of the PCs are packing blaster rifles or other high-damage weaponry) to drop, and there's quite a few Minions in the two groups, making them quite dangerous already.

Donovan Morningfire said:

Yeah… sound advice. Still, I'll probably leave go with 1 and 2 for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, they absolutely wiped the floor with the three groups of sand people minions in the first session. If that is anything to go by, the minions will be little more than speed bumps, and once the autofire crazies in the party have wiped out the minions and turned their guns on the main bad guys, I think the issues with autofire against single targets will rear their ugly head, and I don't expect the bounty hunters to last long.

Secondly, more use of the Adversary talent provides for more opportunity for playtest feedback.

And I can always re-balance things through the techs making a fightback, or environmental conditions if things do get hairy for the PCs. Ultimately, the combat isn't really about taking out all the bounty hunters - it's about escaping, so for I'd rather the combat was balanced in favour of the bounty hunters than the PCs.

I don't mind the Adversary talent. I like the idea of shortcuts that let me develop NPCs on the fly that represent significant challenges for my players. I am almost never going to sit down and generate NPCs with the whole process.

My gut tells me that Adversary 3 would make it very difficult for starting characters to defeat an NPC, but a group of starting players probably should not encounter a threat like that unless you intend to railroad them into a particular situation.

From a narrative point of view, the Adversary talent gives me an opportunity to describe an NPC as having obviously better armor or training compared to other opponents. You can already do this with the minion/henchman/etc. mechanic, but I think the Adversary talent gives the tougher NPCs a better chance of lasting a few rounds against a group of NPCs.

I have not experienced the "super deadly" aspect of combat described by some other folks. I have barely been able to scratch my players while they mow down groups of minions. I had already decided to step up the difficulty of encounters a bit, and the Adversary talent gives me a quick and dirty tool to achieve the effect I want.

I am not bothered by rules that separate NPCs and players. However, I am not absolutely sure that Adversary needs to be presented as a talent in the same way as player talents. I like the idea, but I would be perfectly happy if it was rolled into the NPC rules in the same way as the skill bonuses for minions acting in groups.

I will try the Adversary talent in my next session this weekend and see how well it works.