I realize this is a very broad question, but I'm curious what house rules others use in their games, why they use them, and how they've worked out for them.

· Combine Pilot (planetary & space) skills

· Medpac will be known as MedKIT. Medkits allow 2 stim uses per encounter and cannot be separated from the Medkit

· Trained assist: if assisting character does not have attributes/skills that upgrade the roll, upgrade 1 die on the skill check

· NO called shots. Use triumphs for similar results

· Destiny points do not reset after a game, they will be tracked session to session

· Spend 2 advantage on a successful hit or 3 advantage on a miss to destroy SOFT cover

· You receive 5 or ¼ of the EXP the group receives on a session that you miss, whichever is higher.

· Catching your breath: At the end of each encounter, each player can make a Discipline or Cool check to remove strain. Every success & advantage heals 1 strain

· Surprise round: Ambusher’s group stealth check vs highest vigilance in targets group; successes add to initiative check of ambushers group. Advantages can be used for boost die on actions taken during that round.

· Obligation rolls will be done at the END of each session to provide a cliffhanger tension building!

Gain the Advantage (Action) lasts until canceled or the target is outside of close range longer than a round

The cost of an additional specialization is discounted by any extra XP previously spent on the career skills granted by that specialization.

We've just started out (three sessions in) and I have wanted to keep things as by the book as possible to try things out before changing anything.

Currently the only thing we've changed is rolling Obligation at the end of each session in order for everyone (me especially, I'm the GM) to have plenty of time to prepare.

It seems likely that we'll change how Motivations work before long, or remove it totally. Other than that I forsee no specific issues right now.

Good question, and I'd be interested in the answers.

For us, we don't use Obligation or Duty in the same way. Obligation doesn't ever affect stress thresholds (though I apply stress if the character would naturally feel it on a given adventure). There's no party limit, and everyone checks all their Obligations on % at the end of every adventure (not session). If their one comes up, I incorporate it into the narrative next time.

We don't track Duty at all numerically. I give +2 stress threshold to any character whose chosen Duty matches the current scenario, and sometimes toss in narrative effects. All equipment, supplies and promotions are handled in a purely narrative fashion.

Finally, I don't track hits for minions, they go down whenever they are injured. Which leads to our Colonist shouting squads of stormtroopers to death on a frequent basis. The rest of her friends assume it's something to do with her Force powers...

Starship house rules:

Make a pilot check at the beginning of your turn. (Leadership for silhouette 5+ ships). Difficulty based on relative speed to opponent:

2+ faster: (0 difficulty dice)

1 faster: (1 difficulty die)

Even: (2 difficulty dice)

1 slower: (3 difficulty dice)

2+ slower: (4 difficulty dice)

Do not track current speed--just use the ship’s speed rating (which can be modified by talents)

Environment obstacles upgrade half silhouette (rounded up) and add setback dice per Table 7-8.

Handling applies boost or setback dice and Skilled Jockey applies.

If you fail you can only take normal maneuvers.

On success pilot may pick one advanced maneuver. Silhouette 4- can spend 2 Advantage or Triumph to pick a second advanced maneuver (at the normal cost of doing 2 pilot only maneuvers).

Pilot must take one Pilot Only (*) maneuver. Silhouette 4- can pick a second pilot only maneuver (pilot must use action or take 2 strain, and also costs the ship 2 system strain).

Each Pilot Only (*) maneuver can only be taken once per round.

Defender picks targeted facing if silhouette 4- unless otherwise indicated.

Moving between close and medium costs 1 range band if speed is 4+. Otherwise a range band is a range band (no half range bands).

Turbolasers against silhouette 4- upgrade twice.

Capital ship gunners are sometimes minions.

Dogfight is considered engaged for attacking into (hitting friendly).

Advanced Maneuvers:

Evade* (silhouette 4-): Pick target, increase range band by one relative to target, attacks from and against add setback dice equal to half Pilot skill (rounded up) until beginning of pilot’s next turn.

Pursue* (all): Pick target, decrease range band by one relative to target.

Punch It* (silhouette 4-, speed 4+): Pick target, change range band by one relative to target. Costs 1 system strain if target is trying to escape or catch and target has higher speed.

Dogfight* (silhouette 4-): Only if Close. Pick one silhouette 4- target not in dogfight or you are dogfighting with, attacks from and against add setback dice equal to half Pilot skill (rounded up) until beginning of pilot’s next turn. Once in a dogfight may only choose Dogfight, Hard Bank, Scissor, Line Up, or Pilot Craft.

Hard Bank* (silhouette 4-): Only in dogfight. Exit dogfight.

Scissor* (silhouette 4-): Only in dogfight. Pick facing of target.

Line Up* (all): Negate your vehicle’s attack penalty for one maneuver (such as Evade and Dogfight and Heavy Maneuvers and Evasive Maneuvers).

Heavy Maneuvers* (all): Pick one silhouette 5+ target, attacks from and against add setback dice equal to half Pilot skill (rounded up) or half Leadership skill (rounded up) (if silhouette 5+) until beginning of pilot’s/commander’s next turn.

Lose ‘em* (all): Only if circumstances provide opportunity. Only at Long or Extreme range (GM’s call). End encounter.

Normal Maneuvers:

Pilot Craft* (all): At a minimum must take this maneuver.

Push Engines* (all): Pick target, change range band by one relative to target. Costs 1 system strain if target is trying to escape or catch.

Full Burn* (silhouette 4-, speed 5+): Pick target, change range band by one relative to target. Costs 1 system strain.

Evasive Maneuvers* (silhouette 4-, speed 3+): As rulebook.

Stay on Target* (silhouette 4-, speed 3+): As rulebook.

Angle Deflector Shield (all): As rulebook.

Actions:

Damage Control (all): As rulebook.

Additional Ship and Vehicle Actions (all): As rulebook.

Perform a Combat Check (all): As rulebook.

Maneuvers and Actions removed from game:

Accelerate/decelerate*: No speed tracking.

Punch it*: No speed tracking.

Gain the Advantage: Replaced with Advanced Maneuvers.

I have ruled that the Speed increase from the Full Throttle Talent does satisfy the requirements for Speed-restricted Actions and Maneuvers. This is often the main purpose in using it for us.

None yet. We tend to enjoy RAW for systems.

Then again we also make our own systems wholesale.

• New Maneuvers: Hunker Down & Sit Up

  Mechanically, this works the same way as Lying Prone behind cover. It adds 1 Setback to ranged shots (stacked with cover) but also 1 Boost to Brawl/Melee attacks. Hunkered characters cannot take any actions that would peek around cover (like shooting or making Perception checks). Instead, they have to Sit Up, act, and then Hunker Down again. Characters who start their turn already hunkered cannot be targeted by ranged attacks until they either Sit Up or their attackers change position to regain line-of-sight (Blast weapons, of course, are still fair game).

  Side Note: I had added this one when my players had found themselves in an uncomfortable fire fight in the beginner game. They were taking fire from the Bounty Hunters outside the lylek den and it seemed no amount of cover could help them. It just so happened that the NPCs were making some really lucky rolls, but it was no less frustrating to the players. They wanted to hunker down behind the rocks and recover a few wounds (and maybe draw out the BHs), but the circumstances just wouldn't allow it.

• 30 minutes of resting recovers 1 Strain. This was just an extrapolation of "Full Night's Sleep = Fully Recovered Strain" for those situations where the characters maybe didn't get a full night.

• Emergency vs. Full Medical Care: If a character receives medical treatment in the field and then later gains access to proper medical facilities, the character can receive a second medical check. However, the second check must exceed the first in net successes in order to remove any wounds.

  Example: PC suffers 7 wounds and receives treatment in the field. The medic rolls 3 net successes, recovering 3 of those wounds. The PC later seeks treatment at a hospital. The doctor there rolls 4 net successes, recovering only 1 additional wound.

I use the same one HappyDaze mentioned. I've also been toying with the idea of letting a ship add a boost die to attacks against ships with a lower handling (and letting the Skilled Jockey talent count as increasing your handling by +1 per rank for this purpose).

house-rule free!

I don't have any at the moment. There are a few things that i have thought about but they have yet to come up in game so I don't want to do any houseruling yet.

• New Maneuvers: Hunker Down & Sit Up

  Mechanically, this works the same way as Lying Prone behind cover. It adds 1 Setback to ranged shots (stacked with cover) but also 1 Boost to Brawl/Melee attacks. Hunkered characters cannot take any actions that would peek around cover (like shooting or making Perception checks). Instead, they have to Sit Up, act, and then Hunker Down again. Characters who start their turn already hunkered cannot be targeted by ranged attacks until they either Sit Up or their attackers change position to regain line-of-sight (Blast weapons, of course, are still fair game).

  Side Note: I had added this one when my players had found themselves in an uncomfortable fire fight in the beginner game. They were taking fire from the Bounty Hunters outside the lylek den and it seemed no amount of cover could help them. It just so happened that the NPCs were making some really lucky rolls, but it was no less frustrating to the players. They wanted to hunker down behind the rocks and recover a few wounds (and maybe draw out the BHs), but the circumstances just wouldn't allow it.

• 30 minutes of resting recovers 1 Strain. This was just an extrapolation of "Full Night's Sleep = Fully Recovered Strain" for those situations where the characters maybe didn't get a full night.

• Emergency vs. Full Medical Care: If a character receives medical treatment in the field and then later gains access to proper medical facilities, the character can receive a second medical check. However, the second check must exceed the first in net successes in order to remove any wounds.

  Example: PC suffers 7 wounds and receives treatment in the field. The medic rolls 3 net successes, recovering 3 of those wounds. The PC later seeks treatment at a hospital. The doctor there rolls 4 net successes, recovering only 1 additional wound.

I quite like these rules actually, and we may end up implementing these in our own game. I especially like the idea of Hunkering down, as we run a militaristic campaign and the idea of one of our group scrambling behind cover and curling into a ball comes to mind. The medical care rules also seem intriguing.

In our campaign, we roll Obligation at the end of each session and work with the GM as to how that will be implemented in the upcoming session. We also, though I don't know if this is what you had in mind, use the Edge of the Jedi (I can't remember who made it, sorry!) supplement that was posted somewhere. It's worked out quite well so far in our campaign.

Deadly Accuracy

Instead of adding 1 damage per skill rank we changed it to adding 1 pierce per skill rank.

Only house rules I really have at the moment are the extra species from the Unofficial Species Menagerie and the material from my Ways of the Force fan supplement.

Thinking about granting Wookiees a free boost die on Coercion checks, though a large part of that is from prior Star Wars RPGs making Wookiees be fairly good at intimidation, something they're not in this system due to Coercion being based off of Willpower, but that's not been put in place just yet.

Crimson Death,
Interesting house rule regarding Deadly Accuracy, however I could see this leading to diminishing returns as the PC's skill rank increases; after all, Pierce 4 (from 4 skill ranks) isn't that useful against an opponent with a 3 Soak Value. And it'd get even worse with weapons that already have the Pierce quality; an Assassin with a vibroknife (Pierce 2) and 4 ranks in Melee would have Pierce 6, which means that they're routinely going to have one or two ranks of Pierce have zero effect on their target.

Maelora,

Interesting take on implementing Obligation and Duty. In regards to Duty, it sounds like the other PCs don't get a benefit if their Duty isn't specifically called upon, but seeing as how you're not doing the random roll (at least that's how your post reads), I guess it makes sense, otherwise you might as well just increase every PC's Wound Threshold by +1 and the PC whose Duty comes up gets an extra +1 for that mission.

Only house rules I really have at the moment are the extra species from the Unofficial Species Menagerie and the material from my Ways of the Force fan supplement.

Thinking about granting Wookiees a free boost die on Coercion checks, though a large part of that is from prior Star Wars RPGs making Wookiees be fairly good at intimidation, something they're not in this system due to Coercion being based off of Willpower, but that's not been put in place just yet.

Crimson Death,

Interesting house rule regarding Deadly Accuracy, however I could see this leading to diminishing returns as the PC's skill rank increases; after all, Pierce 4 (from 4 skill ranks) isn't that useful against an opponent with a 3 Soak Value. And it'd get even worse with weapons that already have the Pierce quality; an Assassin with a vibroknife (Pierce 2) and 4 ranks in Melee would have Pierce 6, which means that they're routinely going to have one or two ranks of Pierce have zero effect on their target.

Maelora,

Interesting take on implementing Obligation and Duty. In regards to Duty, it sounds like the other PCs don't get a benefit if their Duty isn't specifically called upon, but seeing as how you're not doing the random roll (at least that's how your post reads), I guess it makes sense, otherwise you might as well just increase every PC's Wound Threshold by +1 and the PC whose Duty comes up gets an extra +1 for that mission.

Yea I know but it's the only thing we could come up with that was half way decent.

Generally if the target has less than 5 soak it won't be around long anyways. The top end damage is what we had a problem with. It made the GM feel that he had to either have high hit point mobs or increase the soak but then that screws over people that can't do 20+ damage or can't take multiple blaster shots to the grill.

Deadly Accuracy with Auto-Fire is broken. We haven't come up with something for Auto-Fire yet. Maybe make it 3 advantages per shot? We've had a guy get 10 advantages at once! 11 shots at 20+ damage per hit is down right dumb.

I do pretty much everything by the book.

I use the species from the unofficial menagerie.

And to any melee weapon that has one or less emcumbrance I add the "finesse" perk, allowing you tu use your Agility instead of your Brawn.

(Ugh, why is my 'reply' function not working??)

Donovan

Yes, we felt Duty as written was a big disconnect. Let's say we're doing a pure stealth mission with no combat, lest we alert the Imperial base. But if Jaleela, whose Duty is 'Combat Superiority', has her random Duty roll come up, she gets a boost even though it has no bearing on our immediate situation. That seems very disconnected to us, so I just award a flat +2 whenever the PC's Duty matches our current session.

As it stands, I feel Duty and Obligation are a fiddly holdover from WHFRP3, like things we disliked about that game such as Stance Meters and Party Tension (the latter just felt like penalising the players for role-playing...)

I just like a lot of GM and player control, so we use these elements narratively rather than randomly. Likewise, getting resources or promotions will be handled purely in a narrative way, depending on the current needs of the game.

And with regard to wookiees getting intimidation dice.... we do this all the time. I think GMs should be encouraged to add blue and black dice on the fly. I get the impression this doesn't happen enough.

So Chakk gets extra blue dice when he's doing things like intimidation or climbing trees. And the twi'lek Cynn gets them for dancing or whatever else her race is supposed to be good at. GM fiat, yes, but it saves having a long list of racial abilities and plays to the narrative. Likewise, backgrounds become important - Jo is from a noble senator background, so she gets blue dice when dealing with these things. And Red gets them for dealing with other bounty hunters because she knows the inside track.

Likewise black dice - Chakk is going to have a bunch of them when dealing with Trandoshans or Imperials. Non-humans in general will find the Empire a rather hostile place. A lot of folks don't like uppity droids and might even insist on 'speaking to the owner'.

We recently had a situation where a smuggler leader sneered at Cynn because he was more used to twi'lek women being strippers instead of ship's captains. I changed the black dice to blue ones when she stuck her blaster up his nose, because that seemed like 'the right tool for the job'...

Crimson Death,

Interesting house rule regarding Deadly Accuracy, however I could see this leading to diminishing returns as the PC's skill rank increases; after all, Pierce 4 (from 4 skill ranks) isn't that useful against an opponent with a 3 Soak Value. And it'd get even worse with weapons that already have the Pierce quality; an Assassin with a vibroknife (Pierce 2) and 4 ranks in Melee would have Pierce 6, which means that they're routinely going to have one or two ranks of Pierce have zero effect on their target.

Yea I know but it's the only thing we could come up with that was half way decent.

Generally if the target has less than 5 soak it won't be around long anyways. The top end damage is what we had a problem with. It made the GM feel that he had to either have high hit point mobs or increase the soak but then that screws over people that can't do 20+ damage or can't take multiple blaster shots to the grill.

Deadly Accuracy with Auto-Fire is broken. We haven't come up with something for Auto-Fire yet. Maybe make it 3 advantages per shot? We've had a guy get 10 advantages at once! 11 shots at 20+ damage per hit is down right dumb.

On changing deadly accuracy to pierce: I agree with Donovan Morningfire that by the time you get it, you're not going to be getting a lot out of it if you change it to pierce, especially because most weapons can be pierce weapons with the right mods.

On deadly accuracy and autofire: the book states you add the damage to "one hit of a successful attack with non-starship weapons." If I am interpreting this correctly, only the first hit gets the extra damage.

I've seen the house rule proposed before that jury rigging autofire only works once per attack. Do the rest of you think this is a necessary nerf?

No opposing Destiny Point flipping.

That's about it really.

I realize this is a very broad question, but I'm curious what house rules others use in their games, why they use them, and how they've worked out for them.[/

Player gains +1 xp for every triumph he roles during the session.

Crimson Death,

I'd suggest re-reading the text on page 134 for Deadly Accuracy. It only applies to one hit of a successful attack, so it's been "fixed" already in regards to Autofire.

As for your other concern, it sounds like your group uses nothing but high-damage weapons such as heavy blaster rifles and the like. A heavy blaster pistol (base 7) with a +5 damage bonus from Deadly Accuracy (assuming max ranks in Ranged - Light) isn't quite a "one-hit kill" against everything. It also sounds like the GM isn't making good use of minion groups, which can go a long way towards presenting a capable threat for experienced PCs without having to artificially inflate Wound Thresholds of any Rivals.

We actually started a new campaign with Beyond the Rim with actual real characters and not just pure lets see what damage I can do break the game type characters. I really enjoy it more as I get to play the "face" as a doctor and can still do respectable damage with pressure point when I have to.

Edit: yea I know the rule on Deadly Accuracy applying only to one hit. IIRC the guy had a base damage of around 15 or so rolling 5 yellow die + 2 greens = A LOT of success and advantages. It may have been more yellows since he had true aim.

Our group consists of a lot of Pathfinder(PFS) players and a few novice players

I offered that players who wear a Star Wars T-shirt are allowed one of the following:

A) a re-roll of the force die during the balance of the force check; must accept the second result

B) a one time re-roll of an advantage die, if the original result was blank; must accept the second result

I'm particularly fond of the above suggestion of +1 XP for Triumph rolls

I may have to consider that in future games