http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/92462-combat-is-too-deadly/?p=896285

I think my houserule variant may help. Adding dice may be tougher than upgrading a purple into red die.

Something to consider regarding the house rules is the dice pool size. One of the reasons I stop playing Warhammer 3 is because at some point the dice pools where ridiculously huge and it slowed the game.

we're still far from warhammer, thanks to the dice upgrade system

I thought about upgrading defense dice instead of adding 1 black per training in relevant skill but thought it would be a bit too complicated sometimes (combining with defense talent... or...). I might try it for real.

Ok ! I forgot adversary. And boba wasn't a good catch. You convinced me. What about leia vs aunt beru ? (Non combat career)

Are they still naked?

Ok ! I forgot adversary. And boba wasn't a good catch. You convinced me. What about leia vs aunt beru ? (Non combat career)

Are they still naked?

****, i saw it coming !

Ok ! I forgot adversary. And boba wasn't a good catch. You convinced me. What about leia vs aunt beru ? (Non combat career)

Are they still naked?

Should I fill this kiddie pool with Jello or what?

Honestly, it seems like you are trying to make combat not deadly for characters that really have no business in combat. Have you play tested the game with characters that have defense talents?

One of my players has Dodge and another has Side Step, it makes them harder to hit and damage which is the point.

If I was going to make any changes, which I'm not I would just add a bigger base WT. Maybe add 5 to all players.

Passive defense bonus Houserule : It gives you a little help without breaking the game and offers something even to those who haven't some defensive talent in their career or specialization trees. One from agi based skill, one from brawn, not skills used in combat. From 0 to 5 dice.

You may add setback dice to your defense up to your number of training in coordination against range attack or in athletics against melee/unarmed attack.

OR

Active defense bonus houserule : If you want to limit it a bit to don't be able to stand against a crowd of foes, you might add a mechanic like the defense talent to make it an active bonus, not a flat one.

You may pay 1 or more strain to add or more setback dice to your defense up to your number of training in coordination against range attack or in athletics against melee/unarmed attack.

EDIT : more clarity, addition to an active variant.

One of my players has Dodge and another has Side Step, it makes them harder to hit and damage which is the point.

If I was going to make any changes, which I'm not I would just add a bigger base WT. Maybe add 5 to all players.

I'm happy with the way combat is with regards to it being deadly. It seems to work for our group.

However - and this is a separate issue - the game does a poor job of showing us the kind of combats you see in the movies. Everyone getting hit a couple of times a round, everyone constantly chugging stimpacks, and everyone wearing armour just doesn't tally with what we see there.

Which might be what's bothering some people,

I'm happy with the way combat is with regards to it being deadly. It seems to work for our group.

However - and this is a separate issue - the game does a poor job of showing us the kind of combats you see in the movies. Everyone getting hit a couple of times a round, everyone constantly chugging stimpacks, and everyone wearing armour just doesn't tally with what we see there.

Which might be what's bothering some people,

and bingo.

I'm happy with the way combat is with regards to it being deadly. It seems to work for our group.

However - and this is a separate issue - the game does a poor job of showing us the kind of combats you see in the movies. Everyone getting hit a couple of times a round, everyone constantly chugging stimpacks, and everyone wearing armour just doesn't tally with what we see there.

Which might be what's bothering some people,

and bingo.

Yet at the same time, most of the characters we see in the movies expressly aren't starting tier PCs, having plenty of experience already to account for having picked up some of the various defensive talents that the game offers. Han Solo certainly had a couple ranks of Side Step, and Luke was probably making good use of the Sense power's defensive upgrade. The only folks we really see standing out in the open for any length of time and not getting plastered with blaster fire are the Jedi, the bulk of whom are at least Knights if not Masters. Even during the Theed battle at the end of TPM, you saw Padme and her security escort making use of cover, and they were going up against battle droids (who are even more incompetent than stormtroopers).

I think the combat system in this game isn't exactly deadly , but it is dangerous . It's much grittier than the d20 system, particularly Saga Edition where a PC of high enough level really only had to worry about Condition Track damage, but a lucky shot won't insta-gib your PC the way it could under D6 (bad guy rolls a lot of sixes on his 5D blaster rifle damage, PC rolls snake eyes on their Strength check to resist damage, PC is toast) or even the OCR/RCR (critical hit from a sufficiently damaging weapon could kill a PC regardless of level).

In short, it forces the players to think smart when entering combat, and not just stand there blazing away at the bad guys like they'd do in other RPGs, particularly if their character isn't designed to be a combatant. Honestly, doing something as simple as getting into cover helps, as the movies themselves demonstrated; in many cases, if you were standing out in the open in the films and weren't wielding a lightsaber, you got shot down.

I'm happy with the way combat is with regards to it being deadly. It seems to work for our group.

However - and this is a separate issue - the game does a poor job of showing us the kind of combats you see in the movies. Everyone getting hit a couple of times a round, everyone constantly chugging stimpacks, and everyone wearing armour just doesn't tally with what we see there.

Which might be what's bothering some people,

and bingo.

I would like to point out that the PCs at lower xp are going to be more along the lines of General Madine's commandos that Han was leading on Endor, rather than Han himself. This means taking hits. While you don't see stimpack use in the movies, you never see a lot of things in the movies, and it would be absurd to not include an item that would logically exist just because you never saw it in the movies. A space suit for instance. Stimpacks are a mechanic that fits within the technology available in Star Wars, and works in gameplay. I don't see anything wrong with it.

On the idea of armor: several of the heroes wear what could be considered heavy clothing, but none of them are combat-oriented characters...so heavier armor doesn't make sense, since they aren't expecting to fight. Look at the bounty hunters from the Executor scene if you want examples of combat characters in the Star Wars movies: Boba Fett and Dengar are wearing Heavy Battle Armor, Zuckuss is wearing what I would classify as laminate or armored clothing, and the two droids are armored as well. Bossk is the one that sticks out being unarmored, but he can regrow limbs. If these are Star Wars bounty hunters as presented in the movie, why should bounty hunters or hired guns go without armor? You also see plenty of padded armor/armored clothing around Jabba's palace. This is precedent for most characters in EotE to wear armor I think, EotE being a game about the seedier elements of society.

Question to those of you with issues:

How do you design encounters? What does the opponent list usually look like? How often do you use minions and how do you decide when to group them and when to leave them independant?

On the tangent of space combat being too deadly, consider the average damages and soak values:

On personal scale, most of our characters have Soak of 4-6 (using padded armor when heavy combat is expected, some characters have a level of Enduring). Blaster pistols have damage 6, blaster carbines and rifles have damage 9.

On a starship scale, our ship has Armor 4. Most lasers have damage 6. Missiles and torpedoes are aother story...

So, in a typical fight, shooting ships with lasers is about the same as shooting characters with pistols. The difference is that characters can raise Soak rather easily compared to raising the Armor of a ship. Within the next 50xp, our Wookiee Marauder is likely to hit Soak 9 when in padded armor. He's not pistol-proof, but he is **** resistant to it. OTOH, there is no way we can get an equivalent bump in staying power for our ship.

The other factor is that a ship is one lump of HT while a group of characters has the ability to spread damage around. Sure, you can get around this by using multiple ships for PCs, but I've gathered that this isn't a common thing.

I honestly beleieve that there isn't a game on the market that can get the feel of the movies "just right". Movies are narative constructs with no elements of random chance. Once the dice hit the table in a Star Wars RPG, you are going to get a different "feel" from the movies.

Playing Star Wars A New Hope could easily see Luke rolling a despair when trying to retrieve the Princess' message and perhaps destroying it. Han may have shot first in the Cantina, but he could have rolled a 1 on a D20 and blown a hole in his foot.

Games are not movies. Movies are not games. Find the game that does it "close enough" and have fun.

Tear44 your definition its just amazing

I supose that RPG games adapted to movies/series/games try to recreate scenes as accurate as posible but, instead of that they prefer to adapt to the world that represent that movie.

This way you can be immersed in a scifi, fantastic or medieval world. RPG aren't "Movie simulators" they are more alike "World simulators" so, any similariy with the movie its a mere coincidence XD

I would like to see someday a game that focus more on movie scenes that in worlds recreation, but thanks they choose the "World option" there is a lot of freedom in a world recreation. As someone said before, there is a lot of thing that don't appear in movies or even in TV series, so, it would be near impossible to play a game in that world to the lack of info and options.

On the tangent of space combat being too deadly, consider the average damages and soak values:

On personal scale, most of our characters have Soak of 4-6 (using padded armor when heavy combat is expected, some characters have a level of Enduring). Blaster pistols have damage 6, blaster carbines and rifles have damage 9.

On a starship scale, our ship has Armor 4. Most lasers have damage 6. Missiles and torpedoes are aother story...

So, in a typical fight, shooting ships with lasers is about the same as shooting characters with pistols. The difference is that characters can raise Soak rather easily compared to raising the Armor of a ship. Within the next 50xp, our Wookiee Marauder is likely to hit Soak 9 when in padded armor. He's not pistol-proof, but he is **** resistant to it. OTOH, there is no way we can get an equivalent bump in staying power for our ship.

The other factor is that a ship is one lump of HT while a group of characters has the ability to spread damage around. Sure, you can get around this by using multiple ships for PCs, but I've gathered that this isn't a common thing.

Great input.

Lower soak, but shields in space. Sounds fair to me. Oh you dont want to forgo attacking to use gain the advantage, then enjoy 2-4 setback dice + 1 upgraded difficulty on attacks

Who cares - if a PC dies, another one is ready somewhere to take his place. It's a big galaxy.

I like that it's deadly - even FFG says it's Gritty adventure in the SW galaxy.

XD Well, of course but, roleplaygames is (or uses to be) heroic oriented game, where heroes only use to die in really important events (if they die).

In games, movies, series or books (generally) heroes use to survive to almost anything, more in SW that have that "Good always wins" spirit. They only die soing something trully heroic or epic. That uses to be the SW mood. Of course you are free to become a PC Butcher. A few years ago my players used to call me like that XD

It wouldn't gather the world essence if heroes dies at the first brawl with a angry rodian in the first sesion. Of course, interpretation its free but this system encourages players to be more aware of its PC's integrity.

Games aren't movies. There's no overarching series plot that must be resolved by the characters who are alive when the game starts. I admit, heroes in EotE do have a bit of plot armor in the form of the Destiny Points (enemies get better, but that's another story). But the movie characters are not at all representative of starting Edge of the Empire characters.

It's not easy to flat-out kill a player character. It is easy to remove them from combat via getting knocked out. Perhaps this is the bigger issue?

Yep of course. At the beginning you aren't Luke Skywalker *SPOILERS* that destroyed the Death Star (XD) but yes that young farmer that fly through Tatooine with his old T-14. And personally... Luke wasn't killed by a bunch of womp rats or a few sand marauders because he was "tainted" with the HERO role.

Chracters its suposed that are heroes, in their first form, so (of course based on your game style) the main idea is to evolve and become "pseudo Hans, Lukes or Leias". With some care, of course characters can survive, but I think that the main idea of designers was to kill heroes at his/her early stage, just aware them that "here there isn't 150 HP and 35 to Ref Def, so think a bit before die" XD

A player of mine in d20 (not Saga) had a Bounty with almost 140 Vitality, and he was almost berserker until his Vit was 30 or above, at that point he began to think and strategy... I don't like that XD

I think of EotE as a very different beast. The main protagonist is not a

PC, but the ship. The PC's are its crew, but it's the ship that tie them together and even though a PC dies the ship persists. I'm not refering to the ship as the physical space craft, but more the entity that is the sum of all PC's in the group.

So characters can die. That's not a tragedy, bit an opportunity to look for a better navigator :-)

This sounds like "Show must go on!" XD

While I'll agree that once you do land a hit it's more likely to take out the target character, this game also puts a lot more pressure on the GM to come up with interesting encounters and avoiding metagaming then other systems do.

Your whole post is full of great points, but I just wanted to highlight how important I think this point is!

In my game our first experience was really exciting, with Stormtroopers chasing the PCs around and various Advantages and Threats causing power couplings to fly off of the walls and explode, basically loads of environmental effects happening, lots of variety in the combat. Everybody had a great experience.

Then I (as the GM) kinda forgot about that in our next couple of games. We had combats where the PCs hunkered down behind cover and shot, and the NPCs hunkered down behind cover and shot. Then repeat until one side is dead.

Last night's game I knew this was a problem so I spent time designing a bunch of options for what the NPCs can do during the fights to make it interesting, as well as adding in environmental effects like rain, nighttime, and adding a ferocious barely-chained lylek nearby to complicate things. There was an exploding excavator, a rainstorm and a monster AS WELL AS the movements of the PCs and the NPCs around the fighting area.

(This was in "Long Arm of the Hutt", by the way, in the assault on Angu Drombb's developer camp.)

It went really well and everybody had a blast. I think the players felt it was very cinematic, dramatic and exciting, far more than just shooting at each other until one side falls down.

It's going to be a focus of mine when designing future encounters, even ones that come up on the fly, to find ways to use the environment and other factors to make combat more interesting.