The book seems to be a little vague about how to gauge the difficulty of encounters for your party, as well as for different sizes of your party.

How do you guys determine encounter difficulty for your players? Especially after they start spending more and more experience?

I am trying to find where the balance between easy, average, and difficult lie. Especially for a party of 6 players.

Also: Minion groups. They act as a single entity. Do you have them take damage as a single entity? What I mean is, if a person does enough damage to kill 2 minions of a 4 minion group, do you have them kill 2 minions or just 1? Do you apply the soak for each separate minion in a group, or just once for the initial incoming hit?

Any thoughts, ideas, answers will be appreciated.

This is an oft asked question with no really good answer besides experience.

Scale it small to start and add in more threat as needed until you know your PC's abilities well enough to judge.

Soak is applied per hit. Total damage can kill off as many minions as appropriate based on damage and criticals.

To add to what FangGrip said, think of combat rounds as being up to a minute in length, and one attack (or rather, the net roll result of the assembled dice pool) is not necessarily one pull of the trigger, or one swing or thrust of a melee weapon! (The latter is, in fact, my explanation of lightsaber duels under the current rules. ) As such, there's no reason that a player who deals two-minions-incapacitated's worth of wounds to a minion group shouldn't be treated as managing to down two of that group's minions on their turn during that round.

Plan an encounter with backup/reserve units or waves. If the PC's are wrecking your first wave, call in reinforcements. If they are struggling, then ease up on them a bit or give them ways to escape/prevent the next wave from arriving.

"Open the blast door, Open the blast door!"

This system is virtually impossible to balance mechanically since 90% of the careers are non-combat careers and you can build a 500 XP character with ZERO combat abilities. While a character with 150 xp can be made ultra deadly. How you spend your points, not how many points you have determines your ability to conduct combat.

As such, you really just need to get to know your group. There is no mechanical balance rating system to the game because its impossible to create one.

My rule of thumb has been 1 minion group of 3-4 per 2 players, 1 rival per 3 players. So a group of 4 would fight 2 minion groups and 1 rival. A group of 6 (which normally or group) faces 3 minion groups and 2 rivals.

But, as others have said it really depends on the groups combat characters. If you have a group of 6 and no one is combat focused you might survive 1 minion group and 1 rival, if you have 6 combat characters they would roll through them. Try to narrate into the story the possibility of reinforcements and a way out.

For example; combat starts round 2 you might have them make a perception check to hear footsteps from a hallway. Now that might take a player out of combat hacking the doors terminal even though if the combat is going had they will never arrive. Try to keep it fresh and different.

Remember, no player (well few) will be upset with kicking butt and finishing a combat fast and if the players are being overwhelmed the enemy doesn't always need to fight to the death. Take an opportunity to use advantage or triumph to have bad guys flee.

Just some thoughts.

The only advice I'd have, based on GMing three sessions so far, is start conservatively and allow for the possibility of backups. If you're not careful this game can get lethal for the PCs ridiculously fast.

The only advice I'd have, based on GMing three sessions so far, is start conservatively and allow for the possibility of backups. If you're not careful this game can get lethal for the PCs ridiculously fast.

Agreed. You have to almost think of it in real world terms. Any man with a gun is potentially lethal. Put any two men with a blaster in a room with the intent on killing each other and skill really almost goes out the window and I'm speaking from experience here in game terms as exactly such a thing happen in our last session. We have a droid character who had sneaked into a bounty hunters hideout intent on setting up a trap for him. The simple fact that he got the first shot defined who wound up dead and who lived because strictly speaking someone who gets the jump on you with a blaster is very likely to kill you and that works both ways.

The system isn't necessarily intentionally deadly, but it does simulate the dangers of gunfire quite well and if your rolling dice in the open (which you should always do in this particular game), someone who's pointing a gun doesn't have to be a skilled gunmen, most weapons are sufficiently deadly enough to kill you or wound you badly enough that you'll never even get a chance to shoot back.

I think balancing is done less so in terms of skill vs. skill and more so in terms of advantage vs. disadvantage. Skill plays its role, but positioning and circumstances of a fight are going to be the major factor so you want to always consider the situation of the fight itself. I think in part its why Vigilance and Cool are such vital skills in the game, getting that first action really makes a huge difference in a fire fight.

How do you guys determine encounter difficulty for your players? Especially after they start spending more and more experience?

Personally? I don't.

I'm not really an "encounter difficulty" sort of GM. I don't balance my world around my PCs. I expect the PCs to work around the world. That is to say, if the PCs decide to storm an Imperial outpost, they will be facing as many stormtroopers as makes sense, plus whatever toys an outpost like that might keep around.

Obviously, that wouldn't be a "balanced" encounter, but I don't really think it's my duty to balance the world around the PCs.If the PCs are headed into an "unwinnable" encounter, that's their cue to get creative and do something that doesn't involve charging the Imperial Army head on. As someone else mentioned, most of the careers aren't very combat focused, so getting creative and not attacking head on should really be the default stance.

When it does happen, however, the 'balancing act' for me is to either ensure that the players have a reasonable idea of what they are heading into (or at least the option to find out), or arrange things so that the players have a reasonable chance of surviving long enough to realize they are in over their heads and get out of there.

Not every fight is winnable. Sometimes you have to find another way. What I like about the Empire is an enemy (unlike, say, a pack of Rancors ) is that they take prisoners. Even if the PCs fail all attempts at investigation, walk into a death trap and stubbornly refuse to back down, surrendering is often a perfectly viable option.

I realize this is not always acceptable to the players. I have players who have a very "D&D-esque" outlook on encounter design. If they don't have a reasonable chance of success, it's because the GM is being unfair, not because they tried to do something stupid. The same players tend to also have the outlook that surrender is worse than death. It has taken some work to get them to accept that being captured by the Empire (or the local Hutt warlord, etc.) is an opportunity for adventure, not the end of the game.

Anyway. That's how I run it. EotE is fairly lenient in how much damage a PC can take, so there hasn't been issues with anything so far. It is, of course, important to get a sense of how much a PC can reasonably expect to take on (which could be very little if they are all politicos or something ).

I'm going to second Slaunyeh here. There's a whole galaxy of different opponents with varying degrees of challenge. If the players want to bullseye Womp Rats from their T-16 in Beggar's Canyon, that's fine. If they crash, maybe a throw in a couple Tuskens in a survival scenario.

If they want to go up against a Star Destroyer, or storm a Stormtrooper garrison, or a similarly powerful challenge, do three things. First, give them ample opportunities to realize what they're up against and reconsider or plan accordingly.

Second, if they do go for it, you shouldn't hold back. Activate the shield generators, launch the TIE Fighter squadrons, deploy AT-STs, whatever you should reasonably expect the resistance to field. (Alternately, it can go quietly, maybe a little too quietly. See how long it takes before they realize "It's a trap!")

Thirdly, use the result of the encounter as a plot device. Such a climactic battle will certainly have consequences, either in the form of retaliation, (Bounty Hunters or Imperial patrols), an offer of alliance from the target's enemies (Rebel agents), or a whole new adventure (escaping from captivity).