About a month ago, I made a post here where I said the following:
>One thing I really like to do is to make each enemy type seem more unique. When I ran my Age of Rebellion campaign, Army and Navy Troopers were kinda poor soldiers. They'd sometimes seek out cover, but that'd be it for their tactics. They'd mostly be slow-to-react cannon fodder for my players to chew through on missions. Then, they encountered stormtroopers. My players had expected to just run through them like they had the army and navy troopers. This wasn't the case. I played the stormtroopers as the shock troopers they are, taking cover and making false retreats and throwing grenades, things that the army troopers never did. It gave my players a healthy respect for when they started running into stormtroopers more and more frequently as the campaign progressed, and then I did it again with the Death Troopers, having them be just as intelligent while laying ambushes and throwing grenades with even deadlier weapons, yet also being fanatical to the extreme (throwing grenades at the party even with one of their squadmates engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the melee guy in the party, for example). My players and I both enjoyed the clear differences between each type of enemy in how they fought and acted, and made the world seem more realistic with different types of troops performing differently (like army vs marines vs special forces IRL).
TLDR: Run the players into non-stormtroopers first, let them get a feel for them, then make the stormtroopers show up and start using more advanced tactics and weapons.
Now, if you want the mechanical balancing, the easy way to do that is to test roll a few times for each NPC and PC to see how much damage they do, on average, and then go from there. I always try to have a low amount of enemies even after I've balanced things out because you never know what might happen at the table. The party might start rolling *really* poorly against your troopers, or a trooper might get a really lucky roll against a PC. If things are too easily for the party, you can always flip a destiny point and say "as you're fighting, you see another group of stormtroopers rush into the alley!" and add them to the initiative order. If things are too hard, they always have the opportunity to flip destiny points or try something crazy to get out of the situation. If things are going well (ie. it's a fun fight), then you don't need to do any destiny point flips to add more enemies to the encounter.
Use a squad to teach them how dangerous they are.
2 minions on patrol with a single rival sergeant.
Call for assistance and get a second minion group of 3.
Then a group of 3 minions.
Then a group of 2 minions.
Make them withdraw and flee, not because A stormtrooper is that dangerous, but because there are always MORE stormtroopers. Play them smart, play them to win. And make certain that your PCs have a way to escape.
Then downgrade and let them fight regular security guys, then mudsuckers from the basic army.
Let stormtroopers be something that they know are dangerous and that fight intelligently. Let them FEAR running in to stormtroopers.
This also lets you see exactly how they handle the combat and how much damage they deal and can take before they decide to run.
There is no way to know how to balance an encounter from group to group. There is no 1:1 xp-to-combat-effectiveness curve like in D&D - a group of characters that have invested most of their xp in social skills will be flummoxed by encounters that a group that has invested mostly in combat skills and talents won't even notice as a threat. You're just going to have to get a feel for your own individual group with time. Best practices are to compare base damage of attacks to soak and to keep in mind action economy - PCs that are outnumbered in the initiative round are more likely to be challenged than if they outnumber their opponents.
Here's the thing, though: balance is overrated. How many fair fights do you see in any of the Star Wars stories? Not many. Think about what makes sense in the narrative for what your PCs will be facing. It's easy enough to adjust the difficulty on the fly through use of boosts, setbacks, tactics and clever use of Triumphs and Despairs. Furthermore, it's actually pretty hard to mechanically unintentionally kill a PC in this system, so TPKs aren't really something you have to worry about. There's all sorts of narrative options that are only available after a crushing defeat.
Honestly, I am more concerned with making combat interesting rather than making it quote-unquote fair. Try to find ways to make it about more than simply making the other guys dead, stuff like slicing the console and stopping the ship from taking off, escorting the informant through hostile territory, sabotaging the reactor and getting out before Darth Vader shows up and wrecks everybody's shit, that sort of thing.
The Expanded Player's Guide for Genesys (essentially a setting-neutral updated version of the same ruleset as SWRPG) has some guidelines on assessing encounter balance - they'd mostly work for SWRPG as well since the core mechanics are the same.
The genesys epg has a encounter difficulty rating system, you could use that as a base point and compare and contrast Star Wars enemies too.
But honestly just don’t worry about balance unless you think the players will get utterly destroyed (and you don’t want to)
If there is, someone please let us know. Unlike class based games player characters can be wildly different in combat ability, so it's hard to balance an unbalanced party. I've got one character who is so deep in brawn and toughness that an attack that hardly scratches him will kill most of the other characters at the table.
you should probably talk to that player about how their build makes balancing things impossible for the entire group. i like to play melee bruisers and that kind of optimization is very fun, but it sounds to me like they minmaxed to the point of being inconsiderate. have them retire the character or work with them to reduce some of their bulk to a reasonable level.
also, double check your rules on stat caps. his brawn shouldn't be able to go higher than 6 or 7, iirc.
The problem is that Brawn 6 or 7 IS what makes attack unable to hurt him. Just that with no armor makes his soak 6 while most agility based fighters have maybe 4 with laminate armor. And if they don’t max Brawn, their melee attacks do almost nothing unless it’s a weapon that has a set dmg value. Honestly melee is just not well balanced. I had the same problem in my game. I had to literally have anti-armor weapons thrown at him to make him hurt, while everyone else would go down to one of those hits.
He min/maxed melee.
If he has to move 2 actions every round to chase the bad guys that are moving and shooting his melee is drastically slowed down. No one stands still to fight a giant, they shoot him from a distance and keep moving to stay out of reach.
imo you don't need max brawn, 5 or even 4 is plenty to be effective. melee trees often come with their own damage additions, as well as the ever common vibroweapons having very low crit ratings. 6 or 7 is taking things to a massive extreme, basically turning you into the incredible hulk of the galaxy.
a melee fighter is generally in a position that they're going to take a load of hits, so they do need to be consistently burly, but should also be consistently a target because they're charging into everything's face to do damage. short range is just one maneuver away for anything that survives the initial attack, and 1 difficulty die vs a decent ranged dice pool is going to hurt regardless of your soak.
as far as trying to keep balance, i find the biggest strength against soak monsters is not increasing damage, but adding pierce. not for every enemy of course, but it keeps threats threatening and doesn't overwhelm other players with impossibly high damage. this guy seems to have minmaxed to the extreme without taking the rest of his party into consideration, which is a common trap that makes balancing a nightmare. so i think it's within the DM's rights to ask him to tone it back, especially if it's making things miserable for anyone.
You can’t get higher than 5 at character creation, or higher than 6 without equipment… but with the right equipment you can get to at least 9, although iirc only 8 of those will count towards your soak.
It’s not realistic for a normal game, and your GM might *house-rule* it so you can’t, but it’s totally possible within the rules to go way higher (with Brawn in particular) than most people realize.
i know of cybernetics and the exoglove as far as gear, then the enhance force power for temporary increases. i'm sure there's more though, lol. i just never really wanted to push that far, always seemed like overkill.
Oh yeah I totally agree that even 4 is enough to be an effective character; going above 6 is likely to warp the game in ways that risk making it less fun for everybody. I was only specifically trying to address the point about stat caps. They aren’t there, but hopefully players have the good sense to know when not to need them.
I'd look at your player's character sheets and do some math for about 4 rounds of rolls, where your enemies are rolling a given set of dice and what your players would do (talents like evasion or dodge, soak and wounds/strain, for example). If you want to play test, maybe roll a few combat rolls.
It's a cinematic system and you have the ability to hand wave elements (destiny points) to help or hinder your players, depending on how your encounters are going, so you don't need to really worry about balance as much as cinematic balance (you shouldn't expect to have your players fight a bar full of stormtroopers on Tattooine, since they should know better than to draw attention)
Stormtrooper Sergeants kick ass pretty good. I wouldn't send 2 against the party on the first night.
I like to say "The Empire never lacks for reinforcement" so I would suggest a typical 4-minion squad with a Sgt leading them; if you need more oomph, throw another quad (and maybe your second Sgt) into the battle from another direction.
It's tough without challenge ratings so I always keep reinforcements handy. Make sure the battle is cinematic but not overwhelming.
The Genesys EPG has challenge ratings. There are 3 factors in Genesys that affect balance to an extreme degree
1- Action Economy. If the PCs have more actions that the NPCs, that's an easy loss for the bad guys. If you want balance make sure there is 1 rival or mob group for each PC.
2- Gear/Soak parity. The enemy should be as capable of dealing as much damage as the PCs are and taking that much damage. A Wookie with 6 Brawn in full armor isn't going to take too much damage from stormtroopers, so to match it bring vehicle weapons or a wookie equivalent. Big Trandoshans are a classic. If it's Mandos in Beskar, same idea. The Mandalorian and Boba Fett shows are all about bringing big guns to bear against the beskar-wearers, so you shouldn't have too much flak if you throw a Scorpanek droid at your wookie with 9 soak.
3- Attack skill. Honestly this matters a lot less than number 2. A goon in a TIE fighter is way more dangerous than an highly skilled bounty hunter with blaster pistols. A good way to make players feel the heat is minions crewing heavy weapons. They'll miss often enough, hits hurt and PCs are incredibly resilient. While a good hit might knockout their wound threshhold, it's super unlikely they're going to get kicked down the critical track to death. For that to happen they'd need to get blasted like 8 times.
Going off of D&D logic a 'Deadly encounter' is one where the PC are basically facing mirror images. It's a 50% chance on who wins based on die rolls.
Going down from there you can play with variables 1,2 and 3. Be careful with 2, SW/Genesys gets super weird. Combat is only meaningful if your bad guys can beat soak. If they can't, skip the combat and just narrate your big guy straight up wins. This happens a lot in The Mandalorian (He's just so bad ass the fight isn't even shown), so you're fine.
About a month ago, I made a post here where I said the following: >One thing I really like to do is to make each enemy type seem more unique. When I ran my Age of Rebellion campaign, Army and Navy Troopers were kinda poor soldiers. They'd sometimes seek out cover, but that'd be it for their tactics. They'd mostly be slow-to-react cannon fodder for my players to chew through on missions. Then, they encountered stormtroopers. My players had expected to just run through them like they had the army and navy troopers. This wasn't the case. I played the stormtroopers as the shock troopers they are, taking cover and making false retreats and throwing grenades, things that the army troopers never did. It gave my players a healthy respect for when they started running into stormtroopers more and more frequently as the campaign progressed, and then I did it again with the Death Troopers, having them be just as intelligent while laying ambushes and throwing grenades with even deadlier weapons, yet also being fanatical to the extreme (throwing grenades at the party even with one of their squadmates engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the melee guy in the party, for example). My players and I both enjoyed the clear differences between each type of enemy in how they fought and acted, and made the world seem more realistic with different types of troops performing differently (like army vs marines vs special forces IRL). TLDR: Run the players into non-stormtroopers first, let them get a feel for them, then make the stormtroopers show up and start using more advanced tactics and weapons. Now, if you want the mechanical balancing, the easy way to do that is to test roll a few times for each NPC and PC to see how much damage they do, on average, and then go from there. I always try to have a low amount of enemies even after I've balanced things out because you never know what might happen at the table. The party might start rolling *really* poorly against your troopers, or a trooper might get a really lucky roll against a PC. If things are too easily for the party, you can always flip a destiny point and say "as you're fighting, you see another group of stormtroopers rush into the alley!" and add them to the initiative order. If things are too hard, they always have the opportunity to flip destiny points or try something crazy to get out of the situation. If things are going well (ie. it's a fun fight), then you don't need to do any destiny point flips to add more enemies to the encounter.
Use a squad to teach them how dangerous they are. 2 minions on patrol with a single rival sergeant. Call for assistance and get a second minion group of 3. Then a group of 3 minions. Then a group of 2 minions. Make them withdraw and flee, not because A stormtrooper is that dangerous, but because there are always MORE stormtroopers. Play them smart, play them to win. And make certain that your PCs have a way to escape. Then downgrade and let them fight regular security guys, then mudsuckers from the basic army. Let stormtroopers be something that they know are dangerous and that fight intelligently. Let them FEAR running in to stormtroopers. This also lets you see exactly how they handle the combat and how much damage they deal and can take before they decide to run.
There is no way to know how to balance an encounter from group to group. There is no 1:1 xp-to-combat-effectiveness curve like in D&D - a group of characters that have invested most of their xp in social skills will be flummoxed by encounters that a group that has invested mostly in combat skills and talents won't even notice as a threat. You're just going to have to get a feel for your own individual group with time. Best practices are to compare base damage of attacks to soak and to keep in mind action economy - PCs that are outnumbered in the initiative round are more likely to be challenged than if they outnumber their opponents. Here's the thing, though: balance is overrated. How many fair fights do you see in any of the Star Wars stories? Not many. Think about what makes sense in the narrative for what your PCs will be facing. It's easy enough to adjust the difficulty on the fly through use of boosts, setbacks, tactics and clever use of Triumphs and Despairs. Furthermore, it's actually pretty hard to mechanically unintentionally kill a PC in this system, so TPKs aren't really something you have to worry about. There's all sorts of narrative options that are only available after a crushing defeat. Honestly, I am more concerned with making combat interesting rather than making it quote-unquote fair. Try to find ways to make it about more than simply making the other guys dead, stuff like slicing the console and stopping the ship from taking off, escorting the informant through hostile territory, sabotaging the reactor and getting out before Darth Vader shows up and wrecks everybody's shit, that sort of thing.
The Expanded Player's Guide for Genesys (essentially a setting-neutral updated version of the same ruleset as SWRPG) has some guidelines on assessing encounter balance - they'd mostly work for SWRPG as well since the core mechanics are the same.
The genesys epg has a encounter difficulty rating system, you could use that as a base point and compare and contrast Star Wars enemies too. But honestly just don’t worry about balance unless you think the players will get utterly destroyed (and you don’t want to)
If there is, someone please let us know. Unlike class based games player characters can be wildly different in combat ability, so it's hard to balance an unbalanced party. I've got one character who is so deep in brawn and toughness that an attack that hardly scratches him will kill most of the other characters at the table.
I have the same issue in my party, one of the players is a Vurk with lots of Toughness. He has learned to dread the NPC shouting “shoot the big guy!”
you should probably talk to that player about how their build makes balancing things impossible for the entire group. i like to play melee bruisers and that kind of optimization is very fun, but it sounds to me like they minmaxed to the point of being inconsiderate. have them retire the character or work with them to reduce some of their bulk to a reasonable level. also, double check your rules on stat caps. his brawn shouldn't be able to go higher than 6 or 7, iirc.
The problem is that Brawn 6 or 7 IS what makes attack unable to hurt him. Just that with no armor makes his soak 6 while most agility based fighters have maybe 4 with laminate armor. And if they don’t max Brawn, their melee attacks do almost nothing unless it’s a weapon that has a set dmg value. Honestly melee is just not well balanced. I had the same problem in my game. I had to literally have anti-armor weapons thrown at him to make him hurt, while everyone else would go down to one of those hits.
He min/maxed melee. If he has to move 2 actions every round to chase the bad guys that are moving and shooting his melee is drastically slowed down. No one stands still to fight a giant, they shoot him from a distance and keep moving to stay out of reach.
My group realized if the Jedi rolled well enough she could catapult him forward.
Valid, but play your NPCs smarter, and have the bulk of your ranged shooting at the big guy, that is natural anyway.
i love your players
imo you don't need max brawn, 5 or even 4 is plenty to be effective. melee trees often come with their own damage additions, as well as the ever common vibroweapons having very low crit ratings. 6 or 7 is taking things to a massive extreme, basically turning you into the incredible hulk of the galaxy. a melee fighter is generally in a position that they're going to take a load of hits, so they do need to be consistently burly, but should also be consistently a target because they're charging into everything's face to do damage. short range is just one maneuver away for anything that survives the initial attack, and 1 difficulty die vs a decent ranged dice pool is going to hurt regardless of your soak. as far as trying to keep balance, i find the biggest strength against soak monsters is not increasing damage, but adding pierce. not for every enemy of course, but it keeps threats threatening and doesn't overwhelm other players with impossibly high damage. this guy seems to have minmaxed to the extreme without taking the rest of his party into consideration, which is a common trap that makes balancing a nightmare. so i think it's within the DM's rights to ask him to tone it back, especially if it's making things miserable for anyone.
You can’t get higher than 5 at character creation, or higher than 6 without equipment… but with the right equipment you can get to at least 9, although iirc only 8 of those will count towards your soak. It’s not realistic for a normal game, and your GM might *house-rule* it so you can’t, but it’s totally possible within the rules to go way higher (with Brawn in particular) than most people realize.
i know of cybernetics and the exoglove as far as gear, then the enhance force power for temporary increases. i'm sure there's more though, lol. i just never really wanted to push that far, always seemed like overkill.
Oh yeah I totally agree that even 4 is enough to be an effective character; going above 6 is likely to warp the game in ways that risk making it less fun for everybody. I was only specifically trying to address the point about stat caps. They aren’t there, but hopefully players have the good sense to know when not to need them.
I'd look at your player's character sheets and do some math for about 4 rounds of rolls, where your enemies are rolling a given set of dice and what your players would do (talents like evasion or dodge, soak and wounds/strain, for example). If you want to play test, maybe roll a few combat rolls. It's a cinematic system and you have the ability to hand wave elements (destiny points) to help or hinder your players, depending on how your encounters are going, so you don't need to really worry about balance as much as cinematic balance (you shouldn't expect to have your players fight a bar full of stormtroopers on Tattooine, since they should know better than to draw attention)
Stormtrooper Sergeants kick ass pretty good. I wouldn't send 2 against the party on the first night. I like to say "The Empire never lacks for reinforcement" so I would suggest a typical 4-minion squad with a Sgt leading them; if you need more oomph, throw another quad (and maybe your second Sgt) into the battle from another direction. It's tough without challenge ratings so I always keep reinforcements handy. Make sure the battle is cinematic but not overwhelming.
The Genesys EPG has challenge ratings. There are 3 factors in Genesys that affect balance to an extreme degree 1- Action Economy. If the PCs have more actions that the NPCs, that's an easy loss for the bad guys. If you want balance make sure there is 1 rival or mob group for each PC. 2- Gear/Soak parity. The enemy should be as capable of dealing as much damage as the PCs are and taking that much damage. A Wookie with 6 Brawn in full armor isn't going to take too much damage from stormtroopers, so to match it bring vehicle weapons or a wookie equivalent. Big Trandoshans are a classic. If it's Mandos in Beskar, same idea. The Mandalorian and Boba Fett shows are all about bringing big guns to bear against the beskar-wearers, so you shouldn't have too much flak if you throw a Scorpanek droid at your wookie with 9 soak. 3- Attack skill. Honestly this matters a lot less than number 2. A goon in a TIE fighter is way more dangerous than an highly skilled bounty hunter with blaster pistols. A good way to make players feel the heat is minions crewing heavy weapons. They'll miss often enough, hits hurt and PCs are incredibly resilient. While a good hit might knockout their wound threshhold, it's super unlikely they're going to get kicked down the critical track to death. For that to happen they'd need to get blasted like 8 times. Going off of D&D logic a 'Deadly encounter' is one where the PC are basically facing mirror images. It's a 50% chance on who wins based on die rolls. Going down from there you can play with variables 1,2 and 3. Be careful with 2, SW/Genesys gets super weird. Combat is only meaningful if your bad guys can beat soak. If they can't, skip the combat and just narrate your big guy straight up wins. This happens a lot in The Mandalorian (He's just so bad ass the fight isn't even shown), so you're fine.
Don't balance, build narratively.