Hello,

The last 2 days, I have taken the liberty and ran both the Beginners Box, and Shadows of a Black Sun, with custom-made characters and the full rules from the core book. I adjusted some NPC stats minimally in Escape from Mos Shutta/Long Arm of the Hutt, but with Shadows of a Black Sun, I went with an entirely different approach: I modified/ran the entire module with high exp characters. High exp, in this case, reflecting roughly an additional 520 exp, which would be precisely the suggested number for a year of playing weekly (52 weeks, 10 exp per session, I assumed nobody ever got any bonus, so its rather at the low end.)

My players were not overly familiar with the system after Long Arm ended, but knew enough (and they are practiced roleplayers who know how to work a system without being silly) to build powerful characters, those being:

Wookie Marauder

Droid Gadgeteer

Bothan Pilot

Human Doctor

The result was very interesting:

Combat at this exp level is an entirely different affair than in the beginning. Mind you, most other systems have you at the upper midlevel in terms of progress after a year of playing at recommended levels, but EotE more or less has you near the cap:

You hit. ALWAYS. At the suggested levels, there is barely a shot that you wont have 4+ successes on top of. The adversary talent, even jacked up to 4 on the last boss in Black Sun, doesnt do nearly enough, except for one thing: Your weapons jam. A LOT.

Enemies dont have said problem: They hit, too! But since you dont have adversary, near the very end of the exp scale, at similar skill and ability levels, they are actually STRONGER than PCs, since adversary provides Despair.

Most shots do about 5-7 above their weapon base level when fired on the big boss, who had the big armor and all that, making him take 17 shots and hits to take down. On the other hand, smaller henchmen, with less adversary levels, can take in excess of 20 pts of damage pre-soak from a character who would struggle to put more than a minor dent into the BBEG.

For the PCs, unless they invested heavily into soak (the droid BH, to a lesser degree the wookie), it was insanely more deadly than in Mos Shutta, as the NPCs rarely, if ever, miss them. Also ,there are not that many ways of upgrading the difficulty dice for a PC, meaning they cant pray for frequent Despairs jamming or ruining their opponents weapons.

In fact, Despair became the single most important defensive mechanic. Mind you, we used a system where its fair game to always trigger the same effect, namely the weapon jam, on a despair. Getting the chances for a jam as high as possible, thus not only countering the shot but also costing an action next round was crucial, and the best defense mechanic unless you had tons of soak.

The difficulty dice just do not scale into the higher exp game at all, and the setback dice get easily outpaced by boost dice through talents, weapons and helping each other through advantages.

The game mechanic as written in the book thus leads to a very strange kind of firefights where everyone hits, but does little damage on anyone armored enough, and Despair becoming the single most decisive factor in who wins that battle of attrition.

Given the emphasis on narrative gameplay, I think you're probably breaking the system's intended combat flow if you use high-level gameplay as an excuse to make people run out of ammo more often. There's an implicit assumption in the rules that the dice symbols will be spent in ways that make combat more cinematic, and if you deliberately go in the opposite direction then I really don't think it's surprising that you are having some issues. It's impossible for a game writer to cover every edge scenario of how their game will be used, and doubly so if you expect to stay within a reasonable word limit.

Also, there is something that is not entirely clear to me from your post. It sounds like you scaled up the adventure as well as the PCs, but you give you no indication of how you did so. Depending on your method of arriving at tougher opposition, it could have some serious unintended consequences.

Doing an experiment like this is a daring effort, and I applaud you for making the attempt. However, I'd really advise against making assumptions about how a system will play after a year of XP when you've got necessarily limited experience with the final engine overall.

EDIT TO ADD: Sorry if I came off a bit strong, I think I might have done so. I really do mean it when I say that trying this kind of thing is a cool thought experiment, it's just that drawing definitive conclusions about a brand new game is always going to be tricky until you've gotten some more extensive play experience under your belt. Good gaming to you!

Please post the character sheets and NPC stat blocks, the skill/ability caps within the system should be mitigating this. Did you let them spend 520xp all at character creation? Which wouldn't be raw or did they spend their initial xp balance, then spent the rest of the xp properly afterwards (where for example they pay more for talents that raise attributes)

I ll post details when I am home from the office, but to explain my way of scaling up, I went like this:

Normal char creation, then spend exp as if they had gained it (so no special char creation discounts, BUT ability to plan ahead obviously, thus they used their initial exp on abilities mostly.)

In terms of gear, they used normal gear, but I allowed them one fully kitted out armor, and one fully kitted out weapon. These didnt really make much of a difference aside from the Droid Gadgeteer with his superior craftmanship armor, but thats really not that hard to get to be honest.

Now, the interesting part for NPC scaling: First of all, I had a look at the normal profiles of thugs in the book. I then "leveled" these up for around 250 xp, on skills, talents from sensible specializations. For henchmen and the boss(es), I used 350 and 400 exp respectively. Initially, I actually had them leveled up the exact same amount as the PCs, but due to the lack of need to spec for non-combat, I backpedaled on that idea quickly. In the end, on average, the enemies were about 1 lower in ability, and if henchies 2 lower in skill level than my PCs in their important skills. I didnt buy them defensive talents, but increased their adversary level to: 2 for minions, 3 for henchmen, 4 for the boss. This "cost" them 10 xp each.

You are, of course, correct that abusing the Despair mechanic to just spam weaponjams is not in the SPIRIT of the game, and frankly, in a non-experimental group, I would quickly object. I am a big fan of unexpected happenings, and currently working on a randomized table for "weapon malfunction" as a general despair effect, ranging from weapon jams, to simple out of ammo, to actual damage, blowing up or losing it in a trash compactor, to remove the "gamey" aspect a little bit. Cineastic storytelling is, in my experience, sidelined real quick when people feel their characters are in danger.

Please note that I did not try to emulate a high-xp mission which would reasonably happen in Shadows of a Black Sun, as street level thugs will obviously not have Brawn 5, Melee 4 or something similar. I merely wanted to test the mechanics of the system. In an actual adventure, my players would obviously face elite troopers, secret weapon specialists or dathomirian witches or something like that, to justify the massive stats.

My primary concern, even more when removing the "always use despair on weapon jams" issue, is that you ALWAYS hit, and soak alone is the decisive factor in surviving longer than your opponent, as any kind of dice pool manipulation is simply outscaled massively by the higher skills and abilitiy scores involved at that point.

As a first idea, I d probably suggest a skill, or a series of talents, that lets you upgrade modifiers like cover, darkness, flashlights or whatever, from setback to difficulty dice or something of that note. You would still be hit, as makes sense if professionals shoot each other, but if you pick the right arena to fight, you can actually start thinking about being missed now and then.

Okay, addressing the two points in there that I think probably had the biggest impact on this:

First off, XP is for Player Characters (and the Nemesis, if using the GM kit rules). Regular NPCs don't really get XP, and should just be given what makes sense for them. If you create NPCs who make no sense, then it probably follows that your results aren't going to be sensible. Just like with the ammo thing, I don't think deliberately boosting NPC stats purely to "scale" them is going to get you results inside the assumptions that the game was balanced around. Saying more would require seeing exactly how you boosted them, but I'd guess that has a lot to do with it.

Also, on the topic of always hitting: There are two approaches to this. One is that there are in fact talents that make it harder for people to hit you. Defensive Stance and Dodge come to mind as the big ones, although I will admit I have not yet used them in play. The other is that "always hitting" is not necessarily a problem. Becuase of Advantage, Threat, Triumph and Despair, what "hitting" means can vary greatly. You can barely scratch someone and still make a decisive impact on the battle's outcome by shooting their blaster from their hand or causing a Critical Injury. Similarly, landing a solid hit that does lots of damage doesn't always put you in the lead if you overextend yourself and becone heavily exposed to return fire with lots of Boost dice or the like. As such, soak is not the sole deciding factor in surviving longer by a long shot. Everything from strain threshold to backup weapons can play a part.

While your analysis is very thought provoking, I simply assume that it is time to retire that particular bunch of heroes when they get so powerful the players are having less fun.

Or move the game away from combat and more into wide ranging political and administrative models. Most systems have difficulties at higher levels of power and ability, I do not find this particularly shocking. I will have to actually play with the system in a real world setting before I get too worried about it.

Here is hoping for a lack of power creep with any additional books though.

While your analysis is very thought provoking, I simply assume that it is time to retire that particular bunch of heroes when they get so powerful the players are having less fun.

The problem is, with the way FFG set up their 40k games, and how they probably will set up their Star Wars games, characters in each following game START with more XP than starting characters from the earlier games. So it could be that if you want to play a Jedi, you will have to be using characters like this from the start of your Force and Destiny game.

While your analysis is very thought provoking, I simply assume that it is time to retire that particular bunch of heroes when they get so powerful the players are having less fun.

The problem is, with the way FFG set up their 40k games, and how they probably will set up their Star Wars games, characters in each following game START with more XP than starting characters from the earlier games. So it could be that if you want to play a Jedi, you will have to be using characters like this from the start of your Force and Destiny game.

Or FFG could have each game follow the same rules for chargen, with the ~100XP per character to spend. There, of course, will be a sidebar about "starting at higher level" for those who don't want to play Jedi Initiates and instead want to play full Knights.

WH40K is not really a good model to base Star Wars stuff off of. Space Marines are above and beyond any normal human, but a blaster bolt to the chest will still kill a Jedi just the same as a street urchin.

-EF

The problem is, with the way FFG set up their 40k games, and how they probably will set up their Star Wars games, characters in each following game START with more XP than starting characters from the earlier games. So it could be that if you want to play a Jedi, you will have to be using characters like this from the start of your Jedi game.

It very well could be, but frankly Jedi have always been over-powered in almost any setting and system. I will simply wait patiently until that book is released. Until then, I really like how they did FSE characters by keeping them fairly low powered. It gives players who want a taste of the force that freedom, but doesn't create a rift in the power dynamic of the party between Jedi and non.

If it becomes a problem, I am a skilled enough GM to find ways around the issue. More intrigue and non-combat skills, and less in your face combat.

Hmm...since starting XP is based on race and not occupation, how would that work in this system? Did WFRP simply grant a bonus to XP based on the assumed power level of the character base in additional books? I am not familar with that system.

Or FFG could have each game follow the same rules for chargen, with the ~100XP per character to spend. There, of course, will be a sidebar about "starting at higher level" for those who don't want to play Jedi Initiates and instead want to play full Knights.

The FFG guy said on the order 66 podcast that he intended to take his proto-jedi from EotE in to the Rebellion game, and then on to become a full Jedi in F&D, which implies to me they are supposed to ramp up.

I really like how they did FSE characters by keeping them fairly low powered.

Sure. I am just saying that in this case the performance of the system at high levels of XP is important because a fair number of people are (probably) going to be starting F&D games at that level, as it is likely to be the default for that game.

Or FFG could have each game follow the same rules for chargen, with the ~100XP per character to spend. There, of course, will be a sidebar about "starting at higher level" for those who don't want to play Jedi Initiates and instead want to play full Knights.

The FFG guy said on the order 66 podcast that he intended to take his proto-jedi from EotE in to the Rebellion game, and then on to become a full Jedi in F&D, which implies to me they are supposed to ramp up.

That was in specific reference to his Force Sensitive character and how it will gain more options through the later games. They have said more than once that each core book would be standalone or combine to give a wider/blended array of options. I'd expect starting mechanics to be the same across all three books, you just get different options in each book.

Or FFG could have each game follow the same rules for chargen, with the ~100XP per character to spend. There, of course, will be a sidebar about "starting at higher level" for those who don't want to play Jedi Initiates and instead want to play full Knights.

The FFG guy said on the order 66 podcast that he intended to take his proto-jedi from EotE in to the Rebellion game, and then on to become a full Jedi in F&D, which implies to me they are supposed to ramp up.

That was in specific reference to his Force Sensitive character and how it will gain more options through the later games. They have said more than once that each core book would be standalone or combine to give a wider/blended array of options. I'd expect starting mechanics to be the same across all three books, you just get different options in each book.

I misunderstood. I apologize. ^_ ^

-EF

Combat at this exp level is an entirely different affair than in the beginning. Mind you, most other systems have you at the upper midlevel in terms of progress after a year of playing at recommended levels, but EotE more or less has you near the cap:

You hit. ALWAYS. At the suggested levels, there is barely a shot that you wont have 4+ successes on top of. The adversary talent, even jacked up to 4 on the last boss in Black Sun, doesnt do nearly enough, except for one thing: Your weapons jam. A LOT.

If there is a flaw in this system (...there is a flaw in every system...) this is it. The problem is the defence is rather static, and once your attack dice pools exceed the defence dice pools by a couple of dice (or 50%, whichever is greater) the odds swing heavily in the attacker's favour. Then again, the flaw in D20 is that your defence rises as you progress, making you essentially immune. Overall I prefer the EotE approach...stormies will always be somewhat dangerous, if there are enough of them.

I think the problem is assuming that every NPC should be leveled up.

Instead of having a horde of guys that can always hit the PCs, you have guys that can't . And then you've got the few badasses in the group who can. So you've got the PCs able to hit who they need to hit, while you've got the NPCs still all along the range of danger.

Making everything max is just going to create problems, but if you scale minions to hit about 30% of the time, Adversaries to hit 50% of the time, and Nemesis NPCs to hit 60-70% of the time (edit: completely made up numbers just to demonstrate a danger curve), I think you'll get a much more enjoyable scenario. And that isn't really a weakness in the system, but rather learning how to tune it.

If I've got my 520xp group, I don't want them to struggle against everything--they've earned the right to pull a Return of the Jedi and just wreck an entire platoon of Stormtroopers. And then Vader's secret apprentice shows up and suddenly you've got a challenge. And the you have to decide..do you leave the Stormtroopers to fire at you freely, generating Advantage for the Sith, or do you try and clean them up while someone distracts the Nemesis?

And that's the cool thing about EotE--those Stormtroopers can't hit you? Well, their attacks can still weaken you. And that's the angle I think you need to take to create some really fun encounters.

This intrigues me, of course, as I am wondering what sorts of guidelines there might be for encounter building. Masses of minions, or clusters of minion groups would certainly add challenge, even if the characters are capable of cutting 2-3 of them down at a time. I think just doing straight-up fights at "higher level" with EoTE (or the next two games) will be less and less interesting for characters. If you think about how things were in Star Wars, it wasn't simply about defeating X number of enemies, there were very few encounters where that was the case... usually there was some sort of objective that needed to be achieved (get to the ship, shut down the tractor beam without being detected, rescue Han). While hordes of Stormtroopers are individually poor, a single minion-group of 20 Stormtrooper minions shooting at characters are going to be rolling only once when they fire, but they will be doing so with a whole lot of dice.

If I'm reading this correctly, 20 stormtroopers all firing at the same target would effectively have 19 ranks in Ranged (heavy). This means using rules as written that they'd be shooting with 11 proficiency dice! However, since technically 6 is the maximum rank that anybody can have in anything, Stormtrooper minion groups of 10 would be optimized, shooting with 6 proficiency dice per shot. So 20 stormtroopers by necessity would have to be broken down into groups of 10.

Needless to say, the lower the level of your players, the smaller the minion groups would need to be. People could still be fighting 20 stormtroopers, but you could break them into smaller groups to make them less dangerous in terms of their shooting.

This is all, of course, assuming that I've read the minion rules correctly...

Skill ranks cap at 5, so Minion Groups cap at 6. But they still roll Advantage/Triumph, so even if they can't reliably hit the PCs, they're going to be stacking setback and boosts on their allies.

Your group of PCs are huddled behind cover, hiding from Bobba Fett's aim. The stormtroopers assisting Fett are filling the air with blaster fire, but unable to actually hit the PCs. However, the constant barrage forces our plucky heroes out of cover and provides plenty of distraction, allowing the bounty hunter to land a brutal shot against the group's Slicer.

The Stormtroopers weren't a threat on their own, but it was their contribution that allowed Fett to do what he did.

That's how I would craft the encounter--that the main threats aren't always hitting, but instead rely on the advantage/triumphs rolled by their minion backup to reach that territory. So, basically, the minions become part of the Nemesis, in a way--as you whittle down the stormtroopers, Fett himself becomes weaker.

Don't aim to make individual enemies a threat, but instead craft a threatening fight as a whole, realizing that, unlike a d20 system, all enemies in a fight enhance each other's effectiveness.

Thanks for the correction Inksplat. Still, having a minion group fire with 5 proficiency die is still pretty frightening. In that case, for lower level characters, grouping minions into smaller groups would make the encounter easier.

Still, for level scaling, maybe a good guideline would be to have minon groups no higher than say the average (or even maximum) skill ranks that characters have. So if somone in the group has 2 ranks in a given combat skill, you'd size a minion group to be rolling no more than 2 proficiency die (so groups of 3)... where someone at higher levels might have 5 ranks, then you'd scale minion groups to be bigger... In both cases, you could have the same number of enemies, but since they might coordinate better, they'd be tougher to face.

I'm liking this more and more actually.

I find this fascinating.

Would people be interested in some statistical modeling of higher level theoretical play? I'm likely to do this anyway; because clearly, being in Grad School means that I'm not doing nearly enough with sadistics statistics.

Would people be interested in some statistical modeling of higher level theoretical play? I'm likely to do this anyway; because clearly, being in Grad School means that I'm not doing nearly enough with sadistics statistics.

I'd find that pretty useful...!

The thing with modelling this is that we need to be clear on what the future xp expenditure will look like. If the player spends all of his 520xp on combat skills then he will definitely start maxing out but there are other skills and talents to buy that won't necessarily have an impact on combat. Not all builds will end with combat monkeys.

I'll likely start with simple data points, and after I have a decent feel, move on to actually modeling characters.

The thing with modelling this is that we need to be clear on what the future xp expenditure will look like. If the player spends all of his 520xp on combat skills then he will definitely start maxing out but there are other skills and talents to buy that won't necessarily have an impact on combat. Not all builds will end with combat monkeys.

Though we're talking about these issues in the context of combat. I totally agree that what would be modeled could only be regarded as an extreme but it still gives us a good idea of what to expect.

Yeah, I saw this when I was doing some stress tests using higher-XP characters.

Against more skilled foes (like a large minion group or a really capable Nemesis), those characters lacking defensive talents are going to be in trouble. Even taking advantage of cover (+1 ranged defense or 1 setback die added to attacker's roll) didn't help all that much.

I would imagine that FFG came to a similar conclusion, as one of the Beta Updates was an overhaul of several specializations to replace a few talents with more defensive talents to help bolster their chances in combat.

I think part of the trick, at least for the GM, is to avoid using super-competent NPCs too often, particularly when the PCs are just starting out and haven't had a lot of chances to purchase those defensive talents.

These are the purely defensive talents and how many times you can pick them potentially:

Dodge 7

Side step 6

Defensive stance 5

Bodyguard 2

On top of that there is cover. As a GM I'd give 1-3 black dice for cover.

Then you have the disorient talent that allows you to give enemies more black dice.

You can also spend advantages to give black dice to the targets next check.

All in all if you go all in with defense you could upgrade quite a lot and add black dice - well beyond advesary 4.

With a dice pool of 6Y+1P+3R+5Blu+4Bla you have 21.3% risk of missing entirely.

Compared to what players can get I imagine the advesary talent will range from 1-10

But if combat players don't stack up on defenses then they can be in trouble, but there are a lot of defenses to be had. One house rule to consider would be reducing the strain of using higher ranks though. But against ranged attacks a capped character could opgrade 15 times if someone was bodyguarding him. If he had cover, disorient and used all his advantages on giving black dice, then he could perhaps add quite a lot of black dice too. Oh and a superior personal shield generator too.

@Gallows

Interesting facts, I didnt yet go and try to min-max defense.

For this discussion, its also important to distinguish between PLAYERS being easy to hit and kill (which turns the entire game into a decidedly bad direction) and what is necessary to prevent that (namely, stacking defense, or leaving NPCs relatively weak, thus allowing the few players who DO stack defense to be nigh invincible), and NPCS being easy to hit and kill, which is really just a problem for realisms sake, and can be circumvented by either stacking the Adversary talent, or giving them more Wounds.

As a symptom of the above, there is the issue of combat becoming an "auto-hit" affair, which in turn promotes Red Die upgrades to defend, which in the end means a large number of Despairs showing up, and (since they are uncounterable) how to handle that, since the system gives little guidance beyond "weapon jams, out of ammo, weapon damaged" for these, and if you go with that, you end up with a combat system where you really fight by using despair vs. the enemy to the max.

Also, I am absolutely certain we will be seeing higher exp with Jedi and Rebellion topic RPGs. The dice are not going to change for production reasons, and the various WH40k systems show us the way FFG has, successfully more or less, handled this in the past.

However, the WH40k rules had the very same problem of scaling badly into high stats, requireing adjustments and counter-scaling to a large degree to remain playable.