*potential spoilers, Don't read unless GMing

So my game group busted out our copy of EotE last night and we got into the first cantina encounter. Everyone hid succesfully so 3 PC's had initiative. Oskara decides to take a shot from her concealed position. Uses a maneuver to aim and now builds her dice pool. By our reconing she got; 2Y 2G from ranged- heavy skill, 2Y 2G from the blaster carbine, and 1B from aiming. She was at the far side of the bar, so medium range for a 2P dificulty. Total was a shot at 4G 4Y 1B 2P. It seemed to us that that made it almost impossible to miss the shot. Needless to say she decimated the head of one gamorrean. What our wookiee did to the next one on his initiative can only be described as 'cleft in twain'. Are we building the dice pool wrong or is the beginner game set up to enable PC's to decimate on such a level?

Even with that small issue we all had a great time and loved the mechanic of the dice pool, we're just hoping that we either did something wrong or that we're kinda playing the 'bunny' version.

Plexi said:

Hi Plexi

There's your problem. Weapons don't usually grant extra dices. There are some exceptions, like weapon with the "accurate" quality but even then, they'd only add boost or setback dices.

I'd be curious of what led you to come to the conclusion that weapons add ability and proficiency dices to the pool.

You are in fact doing it wrong. The dice listed by the weapons are the skill type used in the check. In her case she was using Ranged: Heavy twice. She should have just rolled 2Y 2G 1B for all of that. So skill (Ranged Heavy) plus any boosts and setbacks added into it.

Thanks for the responses first off. I had a feeling that something was somewhat fishy about how we were figuring out the pool. I suppose what led us to play it that way was the somewhat vague description of what to put in or not put into the pool. We saw symbols and just added 'em up, I can see now that the character sheet was just trying to help out noobs by figuring out your dice pool for you before difficulty dice. Seems like it's going to be quite a stretch to get crits in any sort of regularity with the correct method, which I guess could be a good thing.

Like I said though, we all really enjoyed the game and can't wait to get our hands on the regular book and some more dice. It's kinda nice to have a RPG forum to use for questions, be they mundane or important. Last time any of us played an RPG was before WoC had bought D&D so there wasn't really a resource like this for us back then. Thanks again for the help.