gribble said:

IMO the decision to split skills or not, should be based on how frequent they come up and how critical they are in those situations ei. in most game systems perception is the 'I see everything!' skill, thus making it a no-brainer to max out … this is booring, for this reason I actually really like splitting it up into 2 seperate skills: vigilance and perception. Likewise in SW piloting is such a central skill, that splitting it in two to enable differentiation makes sense, though I think I would prefer splitting it based on craft-size (landspeeder/fighter vs. real space ships) rather than planatary vs. space

Ultimately the test of any skill system IMO is whether any skills are ALWAYS "maxed out" and some are almost always avoided … in that case the system needs to be refined … for this reason I like the split between ranged (light) vs ranged (heavy) …but dislike Melee and Brawl having been split (IMO brawl should either be part of melee or part of athletics) in SW or any other modern setting firearms play such a dominant position that having brawl as a seperate skill IMO rarely makes sense.

or Coordination? unlike in WFRP where its used for dodge … how relavant is it in SW? I mean how often would u expect to see anybody rolling that vs. rolling a piloting (planetary) or vigilance chceck? - mmm might help if you used coordination to control jetpacks :D or upped the blast quality to actually be dangerous and allowed a coordination check to duck for cover ? ;)

nobble said:

+1.

It's a nice, simple means to keep your major NPCs from getting taken down too quickly without having to do excessive bookkeeping in regards to maneuver or Strain costs for the various defensive talents that PCs have access to.

And maybe I'm really showing my old-school gaming colors here, but having slightly different rules for building NPCs than for building PCs, I'm okay with… provided there's a means of checks & balances to cut back on the odds of the GM accidentally (or perhaps even intentionally) building an uber-NPC simply by piling on talents and skill ranks.

A lot of the Nemesis-level NPCs are suitable as "boss fights" for the PCs, so they should be harder to hit, which is a better solution than the "abundance of hit points" approach that 4e took with their non-minion opponents.  Henchmen also shouldn't be quite as easy to drop, and a slightly higher difficulty to do so makes sense.

Minions should be the bread and butter of most fights the PCs get into, and they go down easy enough as is.

 Yeah, for everyone complaining about an NPC-only defense…did you miss the part where its simply a replacement for defensive talents? Its so you don't have to keep track of 4 different abilities--the NPCs don't get both.

So, yes, you could stat Vader out and give him 7 different Talents that make him a badass… or just give him Adversary 4. Seems like a much better solution.

The Adversary Talent reflects (frankly) what I've been doing automatically in any Edge game I've run so far.  Based on how "badass" the foe is, I've been assigning difficulty for attacks on the fly. 

[in my head] "What… he's a minion?  Normal difficulty to hit…"  "Ohhh… he's a second in command, a captain… gonna up the difficulty by a die…"  "Okay.  He's the BBEG.  Gonna up the difficulty by 2 or 3 dice."[/in my head]

It's just easier and more satisfying than making sure all the NPC defensive talents come into play/are used properly - and risking missing something.  It RADICALLY speeds up combat.  Until we're all at the point (like I was for Saga Edition) where we've memorized the talents.

I have ZERO issue with different rules for NPCs than for PCs.  Past that.  People forget that that's pretty much always how it was, until 3rd Edition D&D.  That really started the "transparency" of the GM screen and equivalent rules on both sides.  It was cool at first… and we all liked it.  But after a few years, it became a game of a player questioning (legimitately) the GM running a threat "the wrong way".  This propagated itself into 3.5 D&D, OCR/RCR Star Wars, and into Star Wars Saga Edition.  One of the (few) things I think WotC got RIGHT for 4th Edition was getting rid of this "transparency".  Let them be different!  PCs are not NPCs.  They're big damn heroes.  Dammit.

Make my job easier!  Please.  ;-)

Thank you.

 Does anyone else think its odd that we aren't using Vigilance as a passive perception skill?  The description includes lines about alertness and ability to detect cues from the environment.

-WJL

Yes. I'm a big fan of games like SpyCraft and Savage Worlds where the rules NPCs are different than PCs. NPCs are basically one episode characters and need to be reflected as such. Players are designed to be around much longer. Using the same rules to create both has never made sense to me.

mouthymerc said:

WFRP has NPC "extra stuff" budgets (A/C/E pools for people that have played it).  It allows for quick adjustments on the fly.  It's an NPC only feature and it works great.  No crossing the boundary between player mechanics and those of NPCs.  And it makes whipping out an NPC tailored to the current encounter a snap…but they still interact on the same resolution system so players never need to know or worry about it.  It's sexy and awesome.

I'm all for having additional dials and levers that I can pull to tweak an NPC, adversary, etc.  But make it overtly GM-only territory.  Slapping a new adversary talent down on the table usable only for NPCs works.  I'm not disputing that.  But the other instances of NPCs utilizing talents works entirely within the same structure as PCs (If an adversary has Dodge 1 it works just like a player that has Dodge 1). 

If any parts of the system are going to be common to the Players and NPCs they need  to be open and honestly similar.  Dice pool interpretation, check.  Wound threshold exceeded = defeated/incapacitated/dead, check.  Skill training & Characteristics, check.  Posession of talents for listed game effects and tweaks…oops…almost check. 

If you need a game mechanic to affect NPCs…make it an NPC mechanic.  Why muddy the talent waters with an exception to the Talent system?  If something is going to work for NPCs only…shove it into the GM and NPC chapters…'s all I'm sayin'.

 i'm not sure i understand the opposition to the adversary talent.

minion rules are only available to NPCs and not to PCs so i assume that there being a rule unique to NPCs is not the problem perceived.

if it is the use of the term talent then isn't it simply a semantic problem? if it were called the Adversary Difficulty Modifier but mechanically exactly the same would there still be a problem?

New Zombie said:

Exactly - it's the fact that it's a talent (which already has a well defined term in the game, which this doesn't fit into) which makes it feel cludgy. I don't necessarily have a problem with different rules for PCs & NPCs, but if it's a NPC thing only that is intended to replace other defensive talents, then I think it'd be better represented as an Adversary universal rule - the default being 1 for henchmen and 2 for nemeses, with the option to adjust for particularly powerful or weak opponents.

Not only is that (IMO) cleaner than making it a talent, but it's also simpler on the GM.

gribble said:

Boehm said:

If your players aren't looking at Coordination as a useful skill to at least have a rank or two in, you're missing out on a lot of stuff from an encounter design perspective. Fighting on rain slicked rooftops of Kamino, conveyer belts with heavy machinery working on building droids as you navigate through them, desert skiffs bucking around as a melee breaks out on them… There are TONS of uses to have your PCs make Coordination checks. Make 'em roll one if they want to get through a particularly dangerous section of terrain in a single maneuver. If the bad guy hit's 'em near an edge, have him spend some advantage and give the PCs a Coordination check to avoid falling.

Cyril said:

+1

It's one of those universally useful skill.  You're usually not going to "specialize" in it, and it won't define your character's schtick like Mechanics or Pilot will, but that doesn't mean it's not important, and it should certainly come up fairly frequently.

Inksplat said:

Did you miss the part where it never explicitly states that in the description?  If the designers make that clear I'd be likely be fine with it, but nothing states that it cannot be used with other talents. 

In response to it being easier, uh, I suppose.  I'd hardly call the system and npc generation particularly difficult.   It's definitely much, much, much easier than saga ever was, even without adversary.  

Chrislee66 said:

I get the feeling that this system runs by the idea that it's the GM's responsibility to make sure that his adversary isn't abusing a combo of adversary + other defensive talents. They don't need to explicitly state it, it's implied, if they stated it explicitly (which probably isn't necessary for a beta test anyway) then a GM couldn't apply it with defensive talents even if he felt it was reasonable to do so. There might be times,where a GM might want to have a extremely defensive villain.

Chrislee66 said:

Perhaps as a part of EotE's indie game influences, perhaps they didn't think it was necessary to spell out the fact that Adversary was a replacement for the various defensive talents.

That and the fact that in the update, just about every NPC that had other defensive talents lost those talents and had them replaced with varying levels of Adversary instead.  So to them, it may simply have been pretty obvious.

Still, when the guidelines for stating up your own NPCs shows up in the final version, a sentence or two about using Adversary instead of the other defensive talents wouldn't be a bad idea to include.