D&D 4E 4e Special Ability PER Encounter stinks...

[psionotic]

I, for one, am sick of keeping track of multiple magical effects that are measured in rounds/level and minutes/level. I'm not sure which of those two time frames I dislike more. The former requires me to keep track of which effects belong to which characters, so that I can increment them on the correct turns, and end them at the correct number of rounds (based on caster level). The latter requires me to keep track of time outside of combat, on the chance that the PCs wander into another combat inside a window of time defined as 1 minute x caster level of the spell.

Either way, I'd love to see per encounter effects that last for the encounter's duration or are instantaneous.

Hear, hear! Keeping track of duration rounds for multiple effects is one of my 3.x pet peeves, and I'm glad to see it go. For the same reason, I'm very much against MMO-style refresh counters between uses.

 

[Jim DelRosso]

First all jedi are going to take skill focus:UtF by 2nd level(unless they're human and take it at first)

Actually, the Jedi in my game hasn't taken it yet. He took Force Training at 1st level, and Melee Defense at 2nd.

The only character taking Skill Focus has been the noble.

I'd be willing to bet that most Jedi will take SF:UtF at some point in their career, but for all that I've seen folks claim that there's an irresistible imperative to take it as soon as possible... I haven't seen it happen in play. Even when building a 3rd level "Sith" NPC, that feat just didn't make the cut. It's really good if you've got a lot of Force Powers/Talents that require UtF, but it's competing with some really neat stuff you can do with just a lightsaber.

 

[Mallus]

Riiight, it's my encounter design...not the fact that 10 stormtroopers means you only have to get 3 with each use of the Force Slam ability(with 3 jedi, even though I was palying with 4+a soldier) which has a range of 30' and is an auto-kill on multiple opponents. The soldier one shot kills the last, and I ask myself how was one of these suppose to be in any way a challenge for four 1st level PC's. Oh yeah forgot, the encounter wasn't designed right...whatever keep reaching for straws. A jedi w/use the force trained and focused and no ability modifiers only has to roll a 2 or higher to succesfully kill every stormtrooper he gets...avg dmg of 4d6 is 12.

About your encounter design...

The stormtroopers presumably have blaster rifles, right? Their range greatly exceeds Force Slam's, so add a little distance between the troopers and the Jedi... and supply a paucity of cover, and you get a much more dangerous encounter. And let's say the troopers have a grenade or two each and a willingness to use them, then the balance swings in their favor.

Remember that an average damage of 14 pts. for the Force Slam means that almost half of the troopers will survive a single slam and retaliate.

The difficulty of that encounter is up to the GM; the stormtroopers could be set-up in such a way that their knocked down like bowling pins, with a commensurate level of threat, or the encounter could represent a significant tactical challenge.

 

[Imaro]

About your encounter design...

The stormtroopers presumably have blaster rifles, right? Their range greatly exceeds Force Slam's, so add a little distance between the troopers and the Jedi... and supply a paucity of cover, and you get a much more dangerous encounter. And let's say the troopers have a grenade or two each and a willingness to use them, then the balance swings in their favor.

Remember that an average damage of 14 pts. for the Force Slam means that almost half of the troopers will survive a single slam and retaliate.

The difficulty of that encounter is up to the GM; the stormtroopers could be set-up in such a way that their knocked down like bowling pins, with a commensurate level of threat, or the encounter could represent a significant tactical challenge.

Mallus, I get what you and others are saying...but can you at least admit that either something is screwy with the CL ratings(there's still no way I'm conceding that a single stormtrooper is a challenge for four PC's, even if none of them are jedi), or the PC's can be more powerful than the designer's originally expected. I can see using the setup above once in a while, but everytime they fight stormtroopers the environment hinders them, I don't think my player's would be cool with that after the nth time I pull it. In the movies the stormtroopers are mooks. But the SW book makes no distinction like this and clearly gives them a CL of 1(if they're mooks wouldn't a CL of 1/2 or even 1/4 be better). Now the article cited by another poster is great, if you have internet service and didn't start playing till it was published...but the rulebook should stand alone and issues like this(especially for those just getting into rpg's) should be addressed in the book.

Once again let me state I understand this in a game based of the Star Wars tropes...it wasn't what I expected after running D&D 3.5, but it's Star Wars not D&D. I brought this up mainly as a point for the designers of 4e to consider. If you rate a Hobgoblin at CL 1 and I have to throw in artificial factors to make not 1 but 4 or more of him a real challenge for PC's something is a little off, once again in D&D 4e not Star Wars.

 

[Imaro]

Actually, the Jedi in my game hasn't taken it yet. He took Force Training at 1st level, and Melee Defense at 2nd.

The only character taking Skill Focus has been the noble.

I'd be willing to bet that most Jedi will take SF:UtF at some point in their career, but for all that I've seen folks claim that there's an irresistible imperative to take it as soon as possible... I haven't seen it happen in play. Even when building a 3rd level "Sith" NPC, that feat just didn't make the cut. It's really good if you've got a lot of Force Powers/Talents that require UtF, but it's competing with some really neat stuff you can do with just a lightsaber.

I can only speak for what I witnessed in my game, but every jedi was a human and every jedi took Skill Focus: UtF. They also all put above average scores in their Wis so they could start with more powers per encounter. The advantage they found was if they used their force powers at the beginning of the combat, in a no-holds bar fashion, anything left was easily dispatched by the soldier or those jedi without force powers left. I mean when it's the difference between a +7 and a +12 with whether your powers work it's a very attractive option(especially since that one skill controls the effectiveness of all force powers)...Another thing is I feel a game should be tested at extremes, even if that isn't the norm(which on the WotC board certainly seems it's the norm, and is probably where my player's got it from.)...it's clearly possible and not by any exploits or reinterpretation of the rules...so it should be accounted for. YMMV of course

 

[Jim DelRosso]

I can only speak for what I witnessed in my game, but every jedi was a human and every jedi took Skill Focus: UtF. They also all put above average scores in their Wis so they could start with more powers per encounter. The advantage they found was if they used their force powers at the beginning of the combat, in a no-holds bar fashion, anything left was easily dispatched by the soldier or those jedi without force powers left. I mean when it's the difference between a +7 and a +12 with whether your powers work it's a very attractive option(especially since that one skill controls the effectiveness of all force powers)...Another thing is I feel a game should be tested at extremes, even if that isn't the norm(which on the WotC board certainly seems it's the norm, and is probably where my player's got it from.)...it's clearly possible and not by any exploits or reinterpretation of the rules...so it should be accounted for. YMMV of course

Honestly, that +7 is powerful enough against most of the enemies you face at 1st level that I think the addition +5 is almost superfluous: mooks at that level have Defenses in the 10-12 range, IIRC. (I may be wrong, as I don't have my book with me at work.) If that's the case, other feats can definitely give you more bang for your buck. Like I said, none of the Force-users in my game had it, and I think they failed all of one UtF check in 3 combats; hardly an argument for the feat's necessity.

Now, somewhere between 3rd and 6th level? That's when I can see picking up SF:UtF. YMMV.

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

Mallus, I get what you and others are saying...but can you at least admit that either something is screwy with the CL ratings(there's still no way I'm conceding that a single stormtrooper is a challenge for four PC's, even if none of them are jedi),

I'll agree that, at the low-end, certain CLs don't work as cleanly as I'd like. Saga also streamlined away the fractional CRs that D&D has, so the minium CL in Saga is 1.

On the other hand, a well-placed grenade or autofire burst can really ruin multiple PCs' days. And that's just 1 attack.

The argument that you seem to be making is analagous to one in which a group of well-played 3E PCs can, at first level, get the drop on an ogre and kill it before it can retaliate - and that it therefore shouldn't be a CR 2 challenge. Or that a horde of CR 1/4 kobolds, if caught grouped up, can be taken out by a single sleep spell.

Yes, if the tactical situation is such that the PCs can always bring their area-effect attacks to bear on clumped up, fragile bad-guys, then they're golden.

One of the big changes when GMing SWSE is that the PCs will have those AoE attacks more often than they did in the RCR. That's neither bad nor good (or, rather, that depends on your point of view), but it is a susbtantial change.

One of the real tricks to "mastering" nonheroic badguys that I've picked up in my work with the system so far is that they are *really* the ultimate in glass cannons. They have decent skills, feats, and BAB for their threat level, but they have very low Defense and HP values. Or, in other words, they're there to serve as one-hit kills to the PCs who can still pack a wallop. Accordingly, you need to use them in certain ways if you don't want them to put up more of a fight, and the biggest part of that is keeping them spread out.*

* - Except, of course, for the couple you have clumped up exactly so that the Jedi and the Soldier can Force Slam / Autofire them and feel like badasses. After all, slamming a bunch of stormies to ground hard enough to kill them is fun.

The biggest issue that you report encountering seem to be tied almost inextricably to the range at which your encounters are occuring. Your Jedi characters (more on them later!) have been routinely capable of nailing all 10 stormies in a single turn. That means they are no more than 12 squares away. Stormtroopers' blaster rifles have a range of up to 300 squares, and can shoot 60 without tremendous loss of accuracy (-2). They should be taking advantage of this.

but every jedi was a human and every jedi took Skill Focus: UtF. They also all put above average scores in their Wis so they could start with more powers per encounter.

What we have here is sometimes called a "degenerative strategy." This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that your party is set up in a way that is different from the expected norm. I first heard it applied to fleet-building games (Bab 5, perhaps?) where taking nothing but fighters was doable. And the issue with that is that the rules assumed that you'd have a mix of capital ships and fighters, and taking nothing but fighters into combat broke it in interesting ways.

The SW rules more or less assume that you'll have a group that looks a lot like the Millenium Falcon, because that's usually what most people end up playing. You, on the other hand, have an [almost-]all-Jedi team, and, moreover, have an "All-Force-Power-All-Jedi Team."

Just like in D&D, where you need to plan and execute encounters a little differently if you're running a party of all clerics (or no clerics!), you'll need to take this into account. By no means should you custom tailor every single fight to shut down the PCs' abilities - that would suck. Rather, take the fact that they are going to somewhat reliably knock down a bunch of stormtroopers if they're clustered into account. Give them some juicy targets up front, but have the real goal of the encounter be the elimination of the E-Web nest some distance away (where careful maneuvering to prevent being caught in the open is important), or the snipers in the trees, or the Chariot-class LAV.