Perhaps I missed it when perusing the Beta book, but I didn't see much in the way of information for Encounter Building and balancing them appropriately, especially as players advance. Since EotE is a level-less system it's a little harder to judge these things. Does anyone have suggestions on building challenging encounters for players in this system?

Right now, there aren't any guidelines as to what constitutes a "balanced" encounter like you'd have in a more tactical-orientated RPG. This can get particularly problematic as characters accumlate XP, as how they spend those XP can lead to a disparity in character strength; the PC that spends their XP to raise their skills is going to be a lot more capable of succeeding at whatever you throw at them than the PC that spent their XP buying Talents or the Force-user who spent their XP buying Upgrades for their Force Powers.

My thought/suggestion would be play it be ear, using a lot of Minion-tier threats in the early going, maybe with the occasional Henchman here and there, and save the Nemesis-tier threats for the really important encounters.

With Minions at least, they're able to be used regardless of how advanced your PCs get, since you can just simply pack more of them into a group, and they still go down pretty easy in most cases.

I haven't really done enough GMing with this system to give any sort of really definitive advice. Maybe this will be something touched upon in the upcoming GM Kit, but for now you're probably gonig to have to eye-ball it and take your best guess as to what constitutes a "balanced" encounter. Though honestly, I'd err on the side of caution, as it's often easier ot add more threats to an existing fight than to pull threats out without it looking like the GM is fudging things just to keep the players alive.

I'd use the Crates of Krayts adventure for examples of threats. Or possibly the free adventure on the Beginner's Box support page ( The Long Arm of the Hutt ). If you need examples of what encounters should look like, those are probably a good place to start.

After a few sessions of GMing, you'll probably be able to eyeball the encounters your group faces, like Dono was saying.

awayputurwpn said:

I figured these are excellent examples for early encounters. The part that I think will be more challenging, and what I was curious to see if anyone had thoughts on, was keeping them balanced as players advance. Probably not too tough after their first 20-30 XP but once they've gained 40-60 XP they're likely to need a little more thrown at them. Given the Advesaries don't have level or even XP amounts attached to them guaging just how much of a threat they might present is quite difficult.

I do suspect that the GM Kit will have some information of this sort. Probably some ideas on making use of obligations in building a story for the characters as well, and other similar things.

That's true in a system where you are getting harder to hit as you increase in level but that doesn't really apply to EotE. It takes some very specific talents and equipment to actually make the players harder to hit and that can be mitigated by the players rolling threat, destiny points, etc.

A very very high end character can potentially have a soak of 12-13 if built a very specific way, but doesn't matter too much when you start bringing heavy blasters and up to the table or aiming vehicle weapons at them. An average high end character will have maybe 5-8 soak and be making the enemy roll 2 setback dice.

Bottom line is character servivability does not scale the way it does in d20 games so there isn't a large need to start heavily scaling encounters.

Edit: Lets not forget spaceship combat. No matter how awesome the pc's freighter and personal equipment a star destroyer will still blow them up very very easily.

Pff, Star Destroyers? Try the lowly Nebulon-B Frigate. Hands down that thing will absolutely wreck any ship the Crew has any realistic chance of flying. The stat blocks are deceiving becasue they are written in such a compact form, but that ship, really any military ship, completely blows anything else out of the water in terms of power. The scale of the game works great here, as it is very easy for Galaxy Masters to always have a means to seriously threaten the Crew.