Greetings, GamerNation!
It’s GM Rikoshi here with the first-ever installment of “Ask a GM,” wherein I hope to be able to address your gaming quandaries and soothe your gaming woes! Feel free to check here if you’re looking for more details on how I plan to meet that lofty goal.
Let’s start by getting right into my first-ever question, sent to us by Empty Bacta Tank, with a query about Fantasy Flight Games’ Star Wars roleplaying line (including Edge of the Empire, Age of Rebellion, and Force and Destiny).
I had a question about balancing encounters between Force Users, specifically lightsaber users, and non force users. What’s a good way to present credible challenges to lightsaber users in combats, that won’t overwhelm the non lightsaber/force users in the same combat?
Ah, the lightsaber. Arguably one of the coolest weapons ever put to the silver screen, starring in the imaginations of children across the world, in addition to gaming tables for several iterations of various Star Wars roleplaying systems by this point.
Let’s face it: the lightsaber might as well be a glowing stick of awesome held in your own two hands (or one in each hand, if that’s how you prefer to roll). It doesn’t always make the transition from screen-to-sheet all that well, however. How do Fantasy Flight’s rules handle it?
Honestly, in my experience, the lightsaber, in this system, is actually pretty well balanced as-is against the other weapons. It has the reputation among the game’s player community, however, as being rather overpowered, though–but there’s a reason for that.
When first introduced to the system back in Edge of the Empire, the lightsaber was meant to be a very rare and very, very special thing. And if you think of the aspects of the saga that the game aimed to represent, it needed to be. When Obi-Wan Kenobi pulls out his lightsaber in the Mos Eisley cantina, it makes an entire room full of rowdy thugs stand down in awe; if you check Edge of the Empire‘s stats for the lightsaber, this makes plenty of sense from a minion’s perspective!
And absolutely, a weapon like this makes a character extremely powerful. However, given the role that the lightsaber is supposed to play in an Edge of the Empire game (which typically focuses on smugglers and scoundrels in the Outer Rim), it’s meant to be something of a monumental event if a character ever gets to actually wield one, so much so that the Lightsaber skill doesn’t even technically exist in that version of the game. By that point, it’s easily possible for characters to have attained and modified other weapons to be just as effective (and as scary) as the lightsaber, if not more so, so it fits its own balance benchmark in that regard.
When Force and Destiny came out, however, the in-game stats for the lightsaber revealed that the earlier versions of the lightsaber were meant to represent a weapon with fully maximized attachments and modifications; if we consider a Jedi Master like Obi-Wan yet again, it makes sense that his lightsaber would fit this bill. The baseline lightsaber for Force and Destiny characters has stats that are much more balanced with more readily available weapons to PCs in the system.
But still, the lightsaber has some powerful abilities–doesn’t it still present a balance concern in combat? Honestly, if you look at the numbers, other weapons stack up more than favorably to everyone’s favorite glowstick. Sure, the lightsaber has the powerful Breach ability, effectively allowing it to ignore all personal-scale armor, but most normal melee weapons can easily be modified to ignore enough of such armor to effectively ignore the same amount that any typical threat is going to have–and many of those deal more base damage than the lightsaber in the right hands.
As for ranged weaponry, and out-of-box heavy blaster rifle will do comparable damage to a lightsaber once a target’s soak is taken into account, and given the Auto-Fire ability, a skilled ranged combatant presents the GM with a far more powerful threat to account for than a single lightsaber user, who will have to balance strain costs for the weapon’s defensive abilities (such as Parry or Reflect) with strain spent on maneuvering quickly around the battlefield, countering only a single foe at a time in most instances.
I would encourage a GM to ignore their fears that a lightsaber is ‘too good’ for a PC of appropriate experience level for the system they’re using it in. Give it a try in your game, and if it seems like the lightsaber-user is overpowering the threats, the issue may simply be that you’re not including enough threats for the rest of the party to deal with, or perhaps not including enough things to do beyond simply making attack rolls in order to give other PCs a chance to meaningfully contribute. Or, even better: use it as an excuse to throw more epic and over-the-top threats at the party in order to maximize the Star Wars feel of larger-than-life space opera.
Have a question? Send them to gmrikoshi@d20radio.com
Kevin Frane
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I don’t disagree with your comments. Lightsabers have a decent edge against very brawny characters. Stormtroopers, at soak 5, are slightly less strong against the saber than the blaster (but yes, for the same 2 difficulty you can open up a short range autofire and potentially outpace), and large beasts are significantly easier to fight with glowsticks. But yes, against your general run of foes, it’s as close as makes no difference.