That Old Fossil:
By all rights, that Force Point should have went further. I'm cool with giving a reduction in difficulty due to the tossed glowrod but the darkness is partly due to opaque (in the unaugmented human visual spectrum) smoke rather than mere absence of light. How much of a modifier do y'all think I should give?
Looking through the book, the section on Cover (PDF page 96, book page 93) does indeed give difficulty modifiers for both smoke and darkness.
If that +4D was just from Darkness itself, then the smoke would probably add another +2D or +4D on top of that, and we're basically screwed. If the +4D was from both the smoke and darkness combined, then I figure the glowrod could reduce it down to just a +2D smoke penalty, creating a bright spot with humanoid shapes to fire at through the smoke. If we use that method and just knock off the last two dice in the Darkness roll, the difficulty goes down by 9 and we'd need to hit 13 instead of 22.
That's probably the most in depth way to handle it. Easier might just be rolling 2D and reducing the difficulty by that much.
Also, fun times: stormtrooper helmets give a +2D to Perception rolls in darkness, and +2D to Blaster rolls to hit targets that move more than 10 meters in a round. Pretty sure they wouldn't actually make it much easier to hit us than it is for us to hit them, just easier for them to spot us. Still, I can easily assume these particular troopers were decked out for literally this plan, because Imperial commanders are cocky but not necessarily stupid. Maybe we should nab these helmets once we get out of this.