I blundered into this NPC Generator for Saga Edition while researching for my next series. It doesn’t make the stat blocks for you, but you could use this as a creative spark for some data entry into the latest version of Saga Sheet.

http://webspace.webring.com/people/pz/zircher/saga_npc.htm

The Unknown Regions contains an expansion of beast creation rules from the core rulebook. It also contains a very simple and Star Warsy planetary system generation system.

The last book in the line was a winner.

I also recommend picking up the Essential Star Wars Atlas. It contains some awesome star maps and planetary bios on many of the major systems found in that galaxy far far away.

NPC generation isn’t too difficult if you cheat and do it the 4e way- Recolorize and reorganize NPCs from the book. The main challenge is that the stat blocks reference feats and special abilities that do require memorization, so they don’t tell you explicitly what the dealio is.

***
As for Jedi, I haven’t seen any balance problems. Characters that are similarly “all-out” geared for combat are just as effective. Your Noble and Scoundrels probably just spend more towards talents that are effective out of game rather than in game.

For example, does your noble use wealth to buy rocket launchers and battle droids? Or fancy gold earrings?
Does he use Trust to essentially gain the combat potentially of any PC?

Does your scoundrel ‘chainstrike’ using Destiny points+Sneak Attack+That ability that allows you to attack twice after a critical hit? Does he use placed explosives to change terrain/knock the ceiling down over the heads of the enemy? If he’s a gunsliger, does he knock enemies -3 down the track in a single shot?

@Scott
I’m working on a table which I’ll post whenever I get a chance to finish it. However, its really party dependent… there’s not an easy way to do it strictly by level. My best metric is the +/- 10 rule: For a 50% chance to hit/to be hit, defenses should be the party’s average attack mod + 10, and attack rolls should be party’s average defense – 10. As for HP, the blaster rifle deals an average of about 13.5 damage per shot. So use that times the number of hits you want the guy to take before going down as a ballpark number.

I’d almost re-design the encounters using the Budget System and setting the difficulty that you want in the Adventure Path scenes. The encounter balancing guidelines in the core book are next to useless.

The Destiny Point system is completely broken. After the first few levels, the Adventure Path presented a lot of encounters that were too easy. The encounter balance in the game is out. So my PCs would save all their Destiny Points for the one really big bad guy in each module and then all drop auto-crits on him and kill him in the first round.

My players are pretty good min-maxers, so had no trouble hitting high DCs for Move object or Battlestrike.

Right On!

Reducing my work load might just do THAT.

If you were to put up a table of attack bonus, defenses, and hit points, I bet it would become a go-to source for quick NPC generation– much like the unofficial encounter budget system. If nothing else, reducing his work load might encourage my GM to get back to it sooner… I guess you see where my self-interest kicks in.

Scoundrels can be quite effective, but a player must use their abilities to maximum effect. Scoundrels have some amazing Talents. I also didn’t see any evidence that the Noble was useless in combat. Far from it. His persuasion abilities alone turned the tide in more than one battle.

We’ve had very different experiences it seems.

There were problems with the classes and races as well. No one would play a Scoundrel (I think over 20 levels and 5 characters one player took 1 level of Scoundrel to help qualify for a prestige class). The Noble we had was very fragile and all but useless in combat until higher levels. All but 1 character was human, because other races had too many stat penalties.

As soon as 4e came out I saw a lot of cool features that should have been in Star Wars. In a lot of ways I think that the 4e system is even better suited to Star Wars than it is to fantasy. I’d like a 4e style system for Star Wars if only for the ease of GMing. Maybe Gamma World will give us enough of a basis to do a conversion.