SWSE Fire Damage

Fire damage is pretty weak in this game. I get the idea that fire damage isn't really trying to kill the pc but more to deny actions. Stopping to put out a fire is a full round action, regardless of the character using water or just patting it out or even stopping, dropping, and rolling. 1d6 just doesn't cut it. And if you follow the Rules As Written (RAW) then the GM makes an attack roll for fire each time that character has a turn while on fire. 1d20+5 against Fortitude (Fort). Most time, this doesn't do anything since the attack is low and misses. My own house rule is simply that if you are on fire, you take the damage each turn - no attack roll vs Fort. THis works fine, except the damage is still so low that nobody ever stop to put out the fire unless they get low on health or have some other reason to stop and deal with the fire. So how do we turn up the heat and make the players feel the burn? A few ways, actually. One option is to apply a -5 penalty to any and all actions including damage rolls while the character is on fire. You could increase the damage however many steps you feel is necessary - from a d6 to a d12, perhaps. And both of those are good options. In fact, if you do both of those together, you still get relatively low damage plus a penalty that might get players putting the fire out. But, if your are players are like mine, or me for that matter, then you will need something a bit more potent. We will keep the d6 for damage, and we keep just automatically taking fire damage while on fire. What we change is the amount of dice. It increases the longer they are on fire. The first round a character is on fire, they take 1d6. Second round is 2d6, third is 3d6, fourth is 4d6, and so on. Alternatively, fire typically doubles in size every minute, so instead first round is 1d6, second round is 2d6, third round is 4d6, fourth round is 8d6, etc. I suppose to be fair, if you are going to double the damage every round, then the Gm should make an attack roll. The character will still take half damage on a miss. While I'm here talking about fire damage, let's take a moment to look at Lava damage. Popular culture says you melt into lava when you fall or stand in it, which technically is true - you will melt and be burned alive. However, it won't be anywhere near as fast as movies makes it look. SWSE does have some lava rules. If you are adjacent to lava, it makes an attack against Reflex (1d20+17), and if it hits the character takes 2d6 fire damage and moves -2 steps on the condition track. If you happen to catch fire from contact with lava, then an extra 1d6 until you put it out. it doesn't say if you take half on a miss, but since every other example of fire damage follows that rule, I will assume fire damage from lava does as well. Now, that's all well and good. If we combine our above fire damage rule with this, it means the players will be take a lot of damage real fast, and they should be. Lava is molten rock for crying out loud. It should be deadly hot and nasty. Only change I would make here is that if they become immersed in lava somehow, then they take 20d6 per round until they are no longer immersed. For example, if a hero, for whatever reason, falls into the crater of a volcano he's going to get hurt. AS the GM, we rule there are some rocks in the volcano walls and some huge masses of rock that haven't melted yet. Unfortunately, the character fails his rolls to catch himself and falls into the lava itself. That's 20d6 damage immediately. Luckily, he landed close enough to one he can pull himself out of the lava. He's gonna take 1d6 damage for that first turn while on fire, and you could get gross and add 2d6 for being adjacent to the lava. Next round, player puts the fire out, so he doesn't take fire damage but if the GM wishes he could take 2d6 for being adjacent still. So, the hero starts climbing out of the volcano, and the GM decides he now has two additional problems to deal with - smoke and extreme heat. Both of these deal 2d6 and move the character -1 step down the condition track if they hit but no condition track movement and only half damage on a miss. I'd call no more lava damage if the hero is climbing. Assuming the character has enough hp left, he could climb high enough and get outta dodge. After some point, the extreme heat will be gone and the smoke will be gone once he exits the volcano. You could rock slide or even a fire/heat version of icy cliffs in there for a challenge while climbing, but if the hero doesn't have something to help out with heat stuff - fire resistant gloves or something - then I'd say leave those off and just keep the climb DC low, maybe a 10 or 12 - 15 at most. Assuming he wasn't dead or knocked unconscious because of all the condition track damage, give the player a break. Hell, even a DC 5 can be challenging when you are at -10 on the condition track. OK, that's enough fire damage for one day.

Dragon Rules

In converting dragons, I decided to port some special rules from Pathfinder, as well as some special rules unique to dragons specifically. Some of them don't fit properly into the way SWSE does things, and my initial thoughts was to go with beast for a number of levels. But beast doesn't quite fit, at least not if we go strictly what the book says, and that's most beats follow the rule of having 1 or 2 Int. Well, that's no good for a dragon, now is it? Next I thought about going with non heroic levels, and this could work remarkably well - it would give them skills, feats, and some hp. the downside is it's a d4 for hp and we are limited in what we can do. however it would go well to making sure the dragons don't overshadow our players. Ultimately, I've decided to go a different route. Dragons will be a class unto themselves. While they can take heroic classes if they want, they won't need to. I'm hoping this will work along the lines of making them a bit mysterious and nobody quite knows type of deal, while also keeping them a credible threat in more than just combat. Not taking heroic classes would prevent them from taking talents, though, and I'd like to allow them to have some of those as well. Probably OP if we let them just keep there hit die, defenses, feats, and now gain access to talents. There has to be a balance somewhere. Maybe simply allowing a similar event as feats but they can only select form Noble talents? Or, they could keep the hit die but lose the saves?

First, all dragons have the following:

Features

A dragon has the following features.

• d12 Hit Die.
• Base attack bonus equal to total Hit Dice.
• Def bonus equal to 1/2 of CL.
• A dragon gains 1 feat + 1 per every 2 Hit Dice after the first (so, 1 at 1 HD, 2 at 3 HD, etc.). It must qualify to take a feat as normal.
• The following are class skills for dragons (trained in 3+Int): Acrobatics, Climb, Deception, Endurance, Gather Information, Initiative, Jump, Knowledge (all skills, taken individually). Mechanics, Perception, Persuasion, Pilot, Ride, Stealth, Survival, Swim, Treat Injury, Use Computer, Use the Force.

Traits

A dragon possesses the following traits (unless otherwise noted in a creature's entry).

• Darkvision.
• Immunity to stun and fear effects.
• Proficient with its natural weapons only unless humanoid in form (or capable of assuming humanoid form), in which case proficient with all simple weapons and any weapons mentioned in its entry.
• Proficient with no armor.
• Dragons breathe, eat, and sleep

Following this is that each type of dragon will have a subset of rules.
Sub-types are:

•  Chromatic - Black, Blue, Green, Red, White
• Imperial - Forest, Sea, Sky, Sovereign, Underworld
• Metallic - Brass, Bronze, Copper, Gold, Silver
• Primal - Brine, Cloud, Crystal, Magma, Umbral
• Outer - Lunar, Solar, Time, Void, Vortex

Then there are various other dragons:  Aeetes', Fareie, Tidepool, Cave, Cloud, Dungeon, Skincrawler, Smoke, Wrath, Mist,  Mithral, and River.

There there are age categories. these consist of: Wyrmling, Very Young, Young, Juvenile, Young Adult, Adult, Mature Adult, Old, Very Old, Ancient, Wyrm, Great Wyrm.

Certainly not all of them use all 11 age categories, but if they did you'd end up with 407 new stat blocks of npcs. That is both awesome and cool, yet horrendously a big work load, and I'm going to say NO. Instead, I'll write the rules for each type of dragon, complete with any changes for each age category. This way, you can just go through and grab what you need. This cuts down the load from 407 to just 37, one for each type of dragon listed. Some of them are less work, using 3 or less age categories, but Using this set of above rules, and adding any ones specific to the dragon type, you should be able to effectively recreate the dragons.Magic will be an issue, as SWSE doesn't even use it, and the Force is very different. I will See which spells can be swapped out for a Force power, and which can just be made abilities. Already in the books are some creatures listed as "we don't know how it works, but it does it anyway." If I need to, I'll just use that to justify them.

 Some of the rules make dragons very effective, without needing non-heroic classes.

Here is a table that shows the avaerage hit dice a dragon would have at a given CL.

CL	1/2	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
HD	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	11	12	13	14	16	17	18	19	21	23	25	29

Using the average of 6.5, this gives our CL 10 dragon an hp of 65. If we use a Chromatic Red Adult Dragon, which is size large, it get s a +16 to Con, which is a +3 before even giving stats. That puts us up to 95 hp and it'll only got higher with stats. If we presume that this dragon, at level 10, has a 16 for Con, and being large gives it a +16 to Con for a total of Con score of 32. This gives us a +11 modifier. Our dragon's HP is now 205. Which is a lot at level 10. Level 20 with those same stats? I will assume the dragon did not put any stat increases in Con, so we still have a 32/+11. At level 20, it now has 408 hp. All of this is using the average roll of 6.5 for the d12.