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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MerakSpielman" data-source="post: 7440362" data-attributes="member: 7464">This is the first time I've run a non-D&D game. I'm having a tricky time with some GMing stuff.The crew was hired by an anonymous "benefactor" and is performing missions for him. He gave them a basic ship, which is largely used for transport (I'm focusing on away-team action more than ship combat). The party consists of an android "tank" who is made a SOAK/melee build,A Felan scavenger,A Felan ex-military heavy weapons user,A Venetian psionisist/medic. The first problem I'm having is encounter balance. There have only been two major combat encounters so far, and both times the enemies have a hard time doing any serious harm to the crew, especially the android. I'm worried that any enemy capable of being a serious threat to him would be able to one-shot any of the other crew members. Further, I have a hard time eyeballing enemy stat blocks (from the Beastiary website) and knowing which enemies would be a good threat, how many of them to use, and so on. So far the encounters have been a cakewalk, even when I doubled my planned number of critters and had a "boss" type encounter. The only time a character took significant damage is when the medic accidentally moved into a vulnerable location and got surrounded briefly. What numbers should I be looking at to figure out how threatening an opponent is supposed to be? The players are pretty experienced min-maxers and strategic thinkers, so maybe I need to crank things up a few notches?My second issue is one of rewards... I may have over-rewarded them for the first mission... Their benefactor gave the group 10k credits for their first mission. In D&D there's a huge list of magical items that all cost tons of gold, so I'll frequently give a new party a bit of cash early on so they can pick out a few items to customize their characters. But all the equipment in the NEW book is fairly cheap... all the weapons and armor are largely a pittance. The most expensive equipment is mostly level C and D, which I'm disallowing for campaign purposes. The players are having a hard time figuring out what they're saving up their money for. They can get higher quality items, but at the grade they're at, they can't use the extra dice yet anyway. They actually left the post-mission shopping trip with thousands of credits in cash because they couldn't think of anything they wanted to buy. I did look through the rulebook but I can't find any guidance on giving out rewards. I don't have a good idea how much credits-worth of equipment characters are expected to own at different grades. I'm also a little worried about using money to motivate the characters if they can't think of any equipment they want to save up for.I don't want it to sound like I'm complaining about the system. It's playing very well so far, and after just 2 sessions the players are already pretty solid on the rules and mechanics, and they seem to be enjoying the campaign. I just want a few pointers. Thanks for reading and replying!</blockquote>

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