How to handle high dice pools?

[Purzelkater]

How are you handle high dice pools for skills on your games? Dice pools for skills can increase boundless but the difficult levels are always limited. Also ranged weapon damage are fixed.
Now on my group I have a technican rolling 30+ like nothing, just has to check the wild die. Yes, it's an 1D strength wimp without fighting skills but he don't need this. Because their is also a fighter sucking 5D Blaster Rifle fire at breakfast. And the pilot... Well, you know where it's going.

So I have technical unlimited dice pools vs. fixed difficult levels. Most times I just want a wild die check, because all others are negligible by now. And I don't like the idea to make 30+ as a minimum for technical rolls but a 12 on perception is good.


For comparison Shadowrun also has a D6 dice pool system, but counts successes (only 5 and 6 are a success). So with higer dice pools you can have more successes, but without 5 or 6 you can also fail with a pool of 20 dice. On SWD6 - if you don't fail the wild die - you can't be lower than 20 (21 if the wild die needed to be 2 at least). Also with 10 dices (a default value for the trained skills on my group) it's no problem to count very difficult levels.

Is there a dice pool limit what I have read over? Or is the system unbalanced beyond a certain level?

Kind regards
from Purzelkater

[CRMcNeill]

Try expanding the limits...
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"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.

The CRMcNeill Stat/Rule Index

[Naaman]

I have always felt that the purpose of the Character Point system was to create an opportunity cost. A character gets good at something at the expense of something else.

In other words, you mentioned that it is meaningless that the character has 1D in strength.

What a character lacks should never be meaningless. The character should, at some point, come upon a situation that his technical know-how can't solve, and he must roll some other skills to hopefully scrape by.

But don't go crazy with this: I had a pilot once who crash landed very early in the campaign and spent 7 or 8 adventures marooned on a poor planet without access to a starship, so all my primary skills were useless. Ended up having to raise blaster and dodge and some even melee combat to swing a stone axe that I took off an enemy's corpse when I got low on ammo to make it out of there. That was, IMO, a bit extreme, but it was also a campaign where all the players were veteran RPers and we were good sports about things not going our way A LOT.

Anyway, make him sweat one or two out of every 10 adventures.

[Pel]

I like the expanded difficulty chart! I've also found it fun to toss in a variety of situations requiring obscure skills (beast riding!) not only to keep the players guessing, but to spread the CPs around a bit. I'd never endanger a PC just to invoke some oft-ignored skill, but I'm not above introducing complications if the roll total or Wild Die allow.

The feedback I've received is mostly positive and encourages the players to think of their characters as complete beings in a complex universe.

Great example with the stone axe, btw. It's a huge galaxy and one never knows what might pop up.
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Aha!

[garhkal]

[Whill]

Good perspectives in this thread.

[Purzelkater]

At first thank you for all the replys. Because of the question, we are playing SW D6 2 years now with a total of 280 CP now. I have to say, it's the first time playing SW D6 (or D6 at all). Mostly we have played Shadowrun all the years, so it's a new experience for us and as the GM I still have some issues - as you can see here.

The expanded limits are a nice approach, but I don't know how this can reflect the "real world". What I mean, I can't say all problems our tech has to slove are at "super legendary hero difficult level", just because HE has to slove them - even if it's just a bad motivator. And all other "poblems" are between moderate and difficult to match the other dice pools.

Most skills of our chars are between 3D and 5D. Also our Padawan survivor has a 7D on her lightsaber specialization as her highest skill. Just the TECH skills of our mechanic and the piloting skill of our pilot are above 10D. For this reason I don't know how I should handle this (if I should handle this a special way). We have a average world with average people how can do average (on Star Wars heroe measures) things but only flying or repair broken equipment are the hell to deal with (if I would raise the difficult levels here) - and because every pilot in this world would have to fly like a hero or this galaxy would be filled with starship scrap.
(hope my translation makes sense here)

So at the moment there are 2, maybe 3, chars with one skill breaking the levels. But how will it come in 2 or 4 years? As I said, we are playing SW D6 just 2 years now, but how about groups playing much longer with the same chars? How they handle this?

Also I don't say the char with 1D strength is meaningless. They all (and he too) knows about his capabilities and they also know he is no fighter (so they have to shield him on a fight). They know, they need him to break the security for open the door and they shield him so he can open the door. This works fine. But there is no challenge to broke the security and open the door itself (even the broken hyperdrive is no challenge on this values).
So the last time the ship accidentally was in the middle of a starship combat they where rammed by a starfighter (also with the heroic pilot roll) and the mechanic could'nt repair the hyperdrive because the lack of spare parts.

[garhkal]

280cp awarded over 2 yrs of gaming? How long do you game for, and how often?

Assuming a 5-6 hr session twice a month, that's 48 games played. 6cp given almost, per session. Seems high to me.

That said, On the skills they have at 10d, sure, don't up the diff if there's no one there, but have enemies coordinate actions to stall/styme them. 8 techies who are sitting in the imperial center the PC's are trying to hack into, who have only say 6-7d each, when coordinated, gain +3d to that. So this makes 9d to 10d. ADD +16 modifier (for knowing the system in and out) and they can be a great foil tot he party.

Additionally, how quickly were they training those skills up???
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[Whill]

[Purzelkater]

Yes, we are playing every 2 weeks for 8 hours on average. Because the lack of experience on D6 I'm using a CP calculation table I have found. The average CP I give are 14-17 CP per "mission" (or say adventure), sometimes 20-22 CP for the more epic things.
As said on another thread, my players are... well... very "penny-pinching" on spending their CP on play. If not realy necessary, the collect their CP only to raise the skills (okay, this is changing a little bit the last times, because of more challenging adventures).

btw: I like the idea of coordinate actions for the enemies to challenge my players. A nice and elegant way. I had missed this option.

[garhkal]

How many 'game sessions' per mission for that 14-17CP??
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[ZzaphodD]

"If you want to beat the Red Baron, don't get into a plane"
I also from time to time had problems with overly specialized PC:s
The simple solution is to have random stuff direct them, just like in real life, into situations where they are pitted against other tasks than their specialisations. At 1D Str, a drunken Tramp Freighter would beat up the Techie, as long as he/she isn't accompanied by the PC thug. Etc, etc.
It hasn't have to be set up 'unfairly', just that you can not always predict what's gonna happen where..
It should teach the PC:s to make more all rounded characters.
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[Naaman]

[Kytross]

Playing a specialized character is a choice. You are choosing to be exceptional in one area at the cost of being decent in all areas. It is a choice I've made as a player and sometimes the ramifications are quite enjoyable. Everyone tends to remember the failures, those become the stories we tell.

The advantage of being an exceptional technical skilled person is that enemies are more likely to capture you than kill you. Everyone needs a doctor, a starship mechanic, etc. When something is broken it needs to be fixed and if you have the reputation for being the best fixer around, people will seek you out.

That can make a good storyline, the villains are trying to kidnap your tech, so they deliberately separate the party to get your tech alone.

I recommend not increasing the difficulty of tasks just because they've become trivial to your players. If a player is rolling 10D then they've earned their skill and things that were difficult back when they were only 4D in the skill should be trivial now. What I do is give them one particularly challenging encounter with that skill set per adventure. So a slicer would go up against a team of slicers that are prepared for him, or he'd have to try to hack the Imperial database on Coruscant, or some such. Give them a challenge commensurate to their skill level.

Another way to challenge them is to give them multiple targets in one round. Multiple action penalties will quickly even out a fight. If your player has 10D in Blaster, send 5 troopers to attack just him. Or with a tech, have multiple systems break at once so he has to make multiple rolls at the same time. The advantage to this is that they really begin to feel like a hero when they face down five troopers and survive, or they manage to keep a ship together that they know should have been lost. If they're anything like the players I play and GM with, they will remember their characters when they were starting out couldn't pull off feats like that and will be proud of their progress.

Remember the chart on page 207 of second edition revised and expanded under the heading Assigning Skills and Special Abilities. It's a list of Die codes and how good that skill should make you relative to the people around you. 4D is professional level. 8D is one of the best on a planet. Only 1 person in 100 million get to 8D in a skill. 12D means you're one of the best in the entire galaxy.

Take a look at the Movie Trilogy sourcebook. Han Solo has the best blaster ability in the game, 10D with his Heavy Blaster Specialization. Darth Vader has the highest lightsaber skill 11D+2. No one in the movies has a higher combat skill than Darth Vader, and that's reflected in the stats. Obi Wan is only 11D in lightsaber.

I hope that gives you some perspective. Good luck with your game!

[garhkal]