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So a player in my group, this is his first time playing an RPG, wheras the rest of us have all played before. He's not super familiar with Star Wars either, so we have to kind of hold his hand through a lot of story stuff. I've decided to make the source of his Obligation a pseudo villain for the party (also another player is basically his Chewbacca so two players share this obligation). Anyway, the player in question, he's a Scoundrel - Thief. The obligation is debt - an imperial officer is holding his family hostage/for ransom. I asked him in our Facebook group what he did to the guy to make him abduct his family, and he just responded with "housing market collapse." I've decided that the imperial officer in question is the planetary governor of the planet Teth, capital of the Baxel sector, which nominally includes Hutt Space (where the players are now thanks to the adventure in the Core book). They're currently smuggling some space weed to him because they killed his supplier and he's a huge playboy that needs his space weed for his legendary parties. But housing market collapse, wow. I'm thinking Teth would experience a bit of a boom as Imperial bureaucracy moves in, but then maybe a bubble burst causing prices to fall. And somehow my thief got in on the action? And screwed this guy over? I did just see a Law & Order episode where a swindler stole info of a guy that owned his house full and clear, took out a mortgage on the house, took the cash, the home went into foreclosure, the dude who owned his home gets evicted. Also I assume that holding family hostage would be expensive, maybe he's using the family as house servants or something? Is there something else housing related my player could have stolen from the governor?
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May 5, 2015 22:01
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My only concern with something on a larger scale is that he's a Thief not a Scoundrel. It probably doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things, but swindling someone as a sleazy contractor/developer sound much more like a scoundrel thing rather than a thief. But I'm not sure how much the player is invested in being a "thief" vs just a smuggler in general.
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May 6, 2015 05:02
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The problem with Star Wars EU (and I don't really mean anything specifically but just the whole concept of an EU) is that at its core Star Wars is a story about heroes. This leads to writers taking the heroes we know and jamming them into as many stories as possible. And when those heroes just can't be jammed into any more stories, they don't make up heroes from whole cloth, they take minor characters and turn them into heroes (Porkins should not have a Wookiepedia page this long: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Jek_Tono_Porkins). And then we try and weave everything back together which ends in bizarre stuff like the second death star computer actually being an IG-88 assassin droid (but not the one we see in Episode 5, no, it's way more complicated than that). Then there's the whole thing where the Republic has stood for tens of thousands of years as a basically stable entity, and then you've got a 200 year period where we just go back and forth between an Empire and Republic with endless war. And then it turns out actually the Republic has been at war basically always. There's just too much stuff.
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May 14, 2015 04:53
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Isn't it the AoR GM screen/kit?
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May 15, 2015 17:55
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Man, so I ran a combat where it was Gozanti cruiser (50 HP, 5 armor) vs the party YT-1300, and then another Gozanti carrying 4 TIEs jumps in, and fires, and while the players are making GBS threads their pants, it turns out the second Gozanti is actually an ally and is firing on the first. But after about a half round of the Gozanti's six cannons, I just said "screw it, the odds are overwhelming, you win." So keeping track of 14 NPCs (2 pilots plus 12 gunners) is just kind of awful. There's got to be some way to... abstract that all.
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May 25, 2015 04:44
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vuk83 posted:Do you have AoR. There are rules for rolling gunnery attacks together. Are these the Barrage attacks in the starship combat section, or is there something else you're talking about?
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May 26, 2015 16:23
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Well in Rebels, the rebels are able to physically capture a broadcast a communications tower and broadcast a message on the local holonet. The imperials respond by destroying the tower, requiring them to physically shuttle droids between the surface and ships in orbit. There's also a rogue senator that's able to hijack a transmission and insert his own message He's actually working with the imperials, which may explain how he can "hijack" the signal, but the rebel group believe that it's genuine, so it's possible. They're also able to have holo transmissions with a secret rebel contact, but who knows the details of that. I think the general consensus is "who knows" so do whatever makes the most sense for your story I guess?
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May 26, 2015 22:13
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We've only gotten one crit in my games so far, and it was that the ship was jostled. Am I not throwing enough at my players?
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Jun 5, 2015 16:49
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I feel like maybe "Critical" is a bad word to use though too, because it makes them sound way worse than they are. Yeah, repeated crits will kill you. But looking at the personal crit table, everything 1-95 is fairly minor and temporary. 96-100 is Crippled but that can be "healed" and then finally 101-105 you're at maimed where you could start to lose a limb.
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Jun 5, 2015 17:04
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RE: Beginner box, there's an adventure you can download online that continues the beginner adventure (as well as a few more premade characters to choose from) if you want a bit more content after running that beginner box adventure but still aren't sure if you want to dive in head first. As for "levels" of campaign books, I'm actually curious about that too. Obviously there's no levels in the game, but players that have played longer and have gained more XP will be more powerful than players that are starting out with the base from the book. How can you tell if a campaign is going to be too hard or too easy for your players?
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Jun 8, 2015 16:17
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I ran the adventure in the back of the core book and then used Lords of Nal Hutta to keep my players faffing around in Hutt space.
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Jun 8, 2015 16:25
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FISHMANPET posted:So a player in my group, this is his first time playing an RPG, wheras the rest of us have all played before. He's not super familiar with Star Wars either, so we have to kind of hold his hand through a lot of story stuff. I've decided to make the source of his Obligation a pseudo villain for the party (also another player is basically his Chewbacca so two players share this obligation). Anyway, the player in question, he's a Scoundrel - Thief. The obligation is debt - an imperial officer is holding his family hostage/for ransom. I asked him in our Facebook group what he did to the guy to make him abduct his family, and he just responded with "housing market collapse." So this is what I settled on, in a fit of inspiration: The Imperials were going to have a diplomatic conference with the Hutts to have them "formally" join the Empire. Part of this conference was a large gift of art and jewels and other such valuables that the Imperials would be giving to the Hutts as a token of good will in accordance with Hutt customs. The player in question, the thief, worked with a crew to steal this gift. It was enough for the player to acquire his own ship, but the Hutts were incredibly offended by the lack of a gift and the talks fell apart. The Imperial "nemesis" holding the player's family was an imperial bureaucrat that was assigned to oversee the development of Teth and the Hutt conference. When the Hutts became a part of the empire, Teth would have become a huge trading hub full of wealth, causing a rush in speculative housing. When the talks fell through, the housing market collapsed, and the nemesis was assigned permanently to Teth to fix the problem (and he is the type of guy that would rather be living on Coruscant or Eriadu) so he's unhappy about his posting and blames the player for his current assignment.
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Jun 8, 2015 18:20
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There's also an official FFG Star Wars Dice app, it includes dice for all the FFG Star Wars games (not just the RPG but Xwing and Armada and any other game that uses dice). It can also do "regular" RPG dice and it has cool sounds. As far as everything cancelling out, I don't think I've ever had everything cancel out, but I guess if I did then the action would fail but there are no other reprecussions. Kind of boring narratively, but not every common either. "You miss, and the blaster bolt hits a durasteel wall, causing no damage." "The Twi'lek dancer isn't interested in your story about pod racing, but she's still hanging off every word you say." Kinda stuff like that. The success or failure plus threat and advantage is pretty much a but/and. "You are successful and another good thing happens." "You don't suceed but a good thing happens." "You succeed but a bad thing happens." You don't suceed and a bad thing happens." No result is just null. "You don't succeed but/and nothing else happens."
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Jun 19, 2015 23:16
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Space combat is truly atrocious, especially as you try and design more complex encounters.
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Aug 17, 2015 14:46
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I tried to run an encounter with my 6 players in a YT-1300, a hostile Gozanti Cruiser (which has like 5 guns) and then another Gozanti Cruiser which appeared hostile to the PCs but was actually there to attack the first Gozanti. Anyway I went through about half a round of combat doing 7 or 8 NPC actions and I just said "gently caress this you guys win the battle let's move on with this story." The second Gozanti jumping in had a great narrative effect (the players were all like "oh poo poo we're hosed now") and there was great dramatic effect as I tell them it warps in and makes an attack and I roll the dice in the open and it was a pretty high number and they're like oh_shit.png and then OH MY GOD IT ATTACKED THE FIRST CRUISER but then any dramatic effect was gone as the 3rd battery did 3 points of damage to a 50 HP cruiser. I don't think it'd be as bad if you had bunch of fighters versus other fighters, or if you abstracted larger ships to only have one move and one weapon action (hint: you'll probably need to do this ahead of time, it's a bit too complicated to restat a ship on the fly), but as it is a single weapon on a large ship may not do that much damage so you'll need a lot of weapons firing and four or five weapons a turn per ship, it just becomes a slog. Also really hard for the GM, because instead of just controlling an enemy ship, you're controlling the pilot and each gunner and probably an engineer etc on the ship.
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Aug 17, 2015 15:25
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I'd say that's a pretty easy encounter, because each enemy ship only has 2 actions, his move and his standard (or attack or whatever this system calls it). It'd take no more time than it would take on the ground to defeat two enemies. From the GM perspective, and also somewhat from the players perspective, combat is boring/exhaustive when each "enemy" has 10 or 15 actions each round. The number of NPC actions overwhelm the PC actions, and that's just boring for the PCs, and exhausting for the GM.
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Aug 17, 2015 23:06
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echopapa posted:You could just make the crew of the enemy starship into a minion pool. See, this seems like a pretty reasonable solution, and one I'll be trying in the future if I need it (or some other way to reduce an enemy ship to one move and one standard action) but it's kind of annoying that the rule book makes no mention of any this, or really much of anything for making vehicle combat better. So it's kind of a let down to plan this great encounter and it quickly devolves into a mess of die rolling. I mean, I don't think any game system is going to be perfect and it's always going to need some little house rules for little things here and there depending on the disposition of players, but this just seems like a glaring oversight where we're left out in the cold on our own.
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Aug 18, 2015 16:56
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Players are probably never going to do what you want them to, so don't plan too much, just be able to roll with it. The adversary decks are really great, they let you pull out a ready made character with a full stat block and everything. You don't even have to use the "name" of the character and you could even swap some skills on the fly but they give you a really good base to work with.
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Sep 22, 2015 19:11
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There is! I don't know where it is, but I've seen it before. I think I found it at something linked here before, but I don't remember what.
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Jan 3, 2016 00:41
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That looks better (or at least more up to date) than the one I was thinking of: https://fanggrip.wordpress.com/2015/04/16/consolidated-index-for-ffg-star-wars-roleplaying/
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Jan 3, 2016 01:03
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Looking at attempts to stat the movie heroes in previous systems, they just get kind of ridiculous looking with all the multi-classing and what not. I think not stating them in this system is kind of an implicit acknowledgement that they're not really statable in this system, and I think that's OK, because I don't think that's what the system is meant for.
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Jan 12, 2016 21:57
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I'm thinking of running something fun and easy for some friends on a weekly basis. Nothing too deep as far as story goes. Since not everybody can make it all the time I'm thinking of just doing it as if they're all rebel operatives and they get some shoot 'em up blast the stormtroopers rescue the princess type missions and whoever is around is who will run the mission. So would it make sense to just cut out the whole Duty thing entirely?
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Feb 1, 2016 23:58
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There's a luxury yacht in one of the books that's really close to the suggested starting ship price, I always thought that could be an interesting choice.
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Feb 9, 2016 20:06
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You can mix the books as far as classes. You may or may not want to consolidate the party on a single... I don't know what to call them, but EotE's Obligation, AoR's Duty, or FaD's Morality. Those 3 mechanics are basically the only thing different in each book. Any character from any book can use Duty or Obligation, but Morality I think only really works for Force users.
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Feb 22, 2016 23:33
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I went all out and got six or seven sets of die. Since this isn't a game that lives and dies by a gridded map in the center table, we keep our pile of dice there, and people can just grab what they need when they need it. People end up holding onto a pool for an action they do frequently but there's always plenty to go around.
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Mar 2, 2016 05:52
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Upgrading and Downgrading dice is covered in EotE p 21, AoR p 28, and I don't have F&D, but in the other books it's under "Modifying a Dice Pool" under the larger heading "Building a Basic Dice Pool" in the first chapter, so probably there as well.jivjov posted:Does anyone by chance have an old Edge of the Empire Beta book they wouldn't mind parting with? My insane need for completionism is making be very angry at my bookshelf for not having one, when I have the other two Beta books.  
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Mar 18, 2016 03:09
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Hutts can take a ton of damage, so they don't have the typical disadvantages if they're non combat classes.
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May 10, 2016 01:30
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Certainly looking at dollar/content you're probably getting a better deal buying a single core book and splat books for that, because much of the content in each core book is duplicated (aka the rules). ON THE OTHER OTHER HAND, it can often be useful to have multiple core books at a table so more than one person can look something up, so if you're inclined to get multiple core books for that reason, might as well diversify.
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May 31, 2017 18:46
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