Force and Destiny: On Lightsabers and Duels

Been meaning to get this one typed up for a while, just kept getting sidetracked for one reason or another.

I remember quite some time back, there was a lot of concern of lightsaber duels being far too deadly in FFG's Star Wars RPG, particularly with lightsabers in that game being Damage 10, Critical 1, and Breach 1 weapons, ensuring that the target was going to take a lot of damage and suffer a pretty nasty critical injury in the process.  There were a number of proposed "solutions" to this problem, with the most frequent one being to simply have lightsabers upgrade the difficulty twice (rolling two Challenge dice as the base for a Lightsaber combat check) to avoid the "first hit = victor" scenario that became a major issue for the WEG D6 Star Wars RPG in regards to the Lightsaber Combat power in the hands of a highly capable Force user.

Personally, I felt the real problem was that lightsabers in EotE and AoR were simply way too good, and should have been toned down to something more reasonable than "near-instant death on a stick."  I think the reaction of my GM for the (now on hiatus) Rascal Squad Age of Rebellion campaign in the session immediately after he allowed Valin to assemble a lightsaber of his own, having earned a suitable focusing crystal by completing a series of "trials" during the GM's modified running of the "Echoes of the Past" fan module.  He was rather shocked at how quickly Valin, who was not a major contributor to combat encounters compared to the rest of the group, had gone from "kid with a blaster" to "kid capable of wiping out minion groups in a single round" or "kid capable of crippling important adversaries with only marginal degrees of success."  After we finally concluded the last portion of Long Arm of the Hutt, the GM confided in me that he was starting to really regret letting Valin have such a powerful weapon afterwards.

Luckily, that session took place just before GenCon 2014 and the release of the Force and Destiny Beta.  One of the first things I noticed in the equipment chapter was that the Basic Lightsaber was far less powerful than the EotE/AoR lightsaber, with the damage nearly halved, the critical rating doubled, and a lack of the Vicious quality with the cost only being reduced by several hundred credits.  And that the other lightsaber types were of a similar vein; Breach 1 remained to make them dangerous, but these were not the "one-hit kill" weapons that the lightsabers in the prior books had the reputation of being.  What was interesting was that if the PC was willing to invest the time and resources (and had a bit of luck on their side), they could modify a basic lightsaber into being the potent weapon, so the option was there, though certainly not easy to achieve (at least not before the Beta Update #4).

Now, shortly after the Force and Destiny Beta came out, I managed to wrangle up the players from the Friday night game I was in and offered to run a one-shot using the adventure at the back of the Beta book.  Though I made a number of little tweaks here and there to the adventure, the players had plenty of fun and were eager to play these one-shot characters again (handing out double XP probably helped on that front).  One of the things I'd wanted to do was have the party's Nautolan Makashi Duelist (Kennis) get into a one-on-one lightsaber duel, with one pick-up session pretty much being cribbed from the FaD demos that FFG was running in the Dealer Hall at GenCon (a bunch of Force users are on this planet to find a small child, but are confronted by stormtroopers and one or more Imperial Dark Jedi).  I added enough other details to make the core idea fit into the loose continuity I'd established thus far (the group are all students of an Order 66 survivor and are working towards setting up a refuge/compound for those sensitive to the Force that is hidden from the Empire), but sadly Kennis' player couldn't make it.  Instead, Viado (Human Starfighter Ace who had just recently picked up the Shien Expert spec, a rank of Lightsaber, and nothing else) stepped up to duel the Imperial Dark Jedi that I concocted for that encounter.  The fight was pretty tense, with the party eventually ganging up and the IDJ and taking him down and Viado doing surprisingly well (though part of that might have been to lousy dice rolls on my part) though the fight did get a bit silly with the amount of disarms going back and forth.

Now this past Friday, I finally got to have a bona-fide lighsaber duel between Kennis and a Saber Rake NPC.  And the fight got pretty nasty, particularly for Kennis who got hit with multiple critical injuries and wound up loosing his non-weapon hand before other PCs stepped in to defeat the Rake.  Granted, it took a few rounds of back and forth, with the Saber Rake getting fairly beat-up as well even with his 3 ranks in Parry, 2 ranks of Adversary, and Melee Defense of 2.

To further add to this, Valin (who wound up getting a Mephite Crystal with a couple of modifications already made for his basic lightsaber) got into a couple of saber-fights, having delved into the Ataru Striker specialization.  However, the true test of Valin's skills was against an Inquisitor made using the rules in the back of the Adversary chapter of the FaD Beta, and to put it bluntly the only reason Valin didn't snuff it was that the option was there for him to make like Luke in ESB and take a "suicide plunge" out of a high-speed repulsor-train into a lake far below.  Now at this point, I'd bought far enough into Ataru Seeker for Valin to have two ranks of Parry and Reflect (but no Improved Parry), and I got my ass handed to me, simply because rolling against a dice pool of 2 Challenge dice, 1 Difficulty die, and 1 Setback die with a pool of 2 Proficiency dice and 1 Ability die put the odds pretty solidly not in my favor to both hit and have Advantage left over, and the fact that while I could impose the same difficulty dice pool on the Inquisitor, his 4 ranks of Lightaber and 4 Brawn meant he had a far better chance of hitting with Advantage left over.  In fact, I think the only reason that Valin survived at all was that the GM was having lousy rolls on the critical injury chart, even after spending 7 Advantage with a prior critical injury on what should have been a "kill shot" only to roll 08; this still was bad since it increased the difficulty of Valin's efforts to attack even more.  To say it was something of a rude awakening to just how far Valin had to go in becoming a 'saber-wielding badass would be an understatement.  I figured that in-character, it would lead to Valin being too focused on "fighting like a Jedi" and forgetting his background as a street rate, and that he'd adjust his tactics appropriately in the future to be more of a combat pragmatist.

Now while getting into a 'saber combat with Valin was fun, the fact remains that even before delving into Ataru Striker he had a lot of XP invested into Force Emergent and the Sense power, giving him a solid defense option in the defensive Control Upgrade with the Duration and Strength Upgrades as well as additional wounds and strain.  One of my friends has been gracious enough to let me bring a Force and Destiny PC that's much closer to being a starting PC into her Star Wars game, and while he's not had a chance to get into a fight or even break-out the lightsaber, I'm curious to see how it goes when said opportunities do present themselves.

So the point of all this?  In short, I think FFG got the settings just about right for Force and Destiny PCs to be able to engage in lightsaber duels, particularly once they've seriously invested in one of the Lightsaber Form specializations, but not have those duels being the "first hit wins" scenarios that they'd have been if they'd stuck to the EotE/AoR lightsaber stats.  And while I'm sure that there are some power-gaming twinks that are lamenting the lose of such "out-of-the-box uber-weapons," the game is overall better for replacing them with the basic lightsaber and its cousins from FaD.