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Any advice on handling droid characters? My brother is toying with the idea of making a technician and a droid fit with his backstory, but he's not sure about being forced into specializing super-hard, which seems necessary with the droid's lower xp budget.
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Sep 21, 2014 23:01
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Valatar posted:Droids and their expanded free skills let you be fairly un-specialized. You just have to not be afraid of keeping some unnecessary stats at 1 and by and large a droid character will have a broader base of trained skills to work with than the meatbags. Ok, so generally you get a few stats to 3 and one to 2, then pick up a big pile of skills?
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Sep 23, 2014 19:10
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Yeah, we might not even end up with a droid in the group. My brother's thinking that his droid backstory doesn't feel quite right and might reconsider. I appreciate the advice, though. It's a neat way to set things up and I can see why they didn't just give droids equivalent xp. Now I just have to decide between Colonist and Smuggler for my character...
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Sep 24, 2014 16:02
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Fuzz posted:Colonist, then make a Marshall because they're loving awesome. What book is Marshall in?
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Sep 24, 2014 16:16
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I also vaguely recall you saying that the problem isn't that he eats combat stuff and the non-combat characters feel bad, it's that he eats combat stuff and there are other combat characters who seem useless. In that case, you just need to setup combats that plays to the other characters' strengths. For instance, have an all-ranged battle (other enemies are on a catwalk above the party, or there are enemies flanking the party on two sides so that he can charge one group while the other shoots at the party, or the party's on one landspeeder while getting shot at from another landspeeder, etc. etc.). Or throw in a clearly-marked mini-boss for the droid alongside a pack of other ranged combatants that hassle the party - the party gets dumped into a pit with a young Rancor by an angry Hutt or bounty hunter, or lured into a slot canyon with the same, and the party has to lay down covering fire and/or fight off the boss enemy and/or his mooks while the droid gets to have a brutal melee fight with the Rancor (who ignores certain types of crits because it's a Rancor). All of this could have an overlay that the non-combat characters are hacking a system to stop the actual bad guy's ship from taking off, meaning the non-combat folks and the combat folks are cooperating to stop the bad guy from escaping while the droid holds off the rancor. One way I've seen this type of combat run effectively is to have the DM quasi-split the party. You're all in the same room, you're all fighting at the same time, but you say - let's turn to one player first. Droid-man, you and I talk our way through the fight. Everyone can pitch in with stories about what your dice rolls mean, but it'll go more fluidly if you and I go back and forth about how you fight the rancor. Then you turn to everyone else and say - while he was fighting the rancor, lets talk about your fight with the bounty hunter manning an E-Web blaster & his army of mooks. Do the same thing, but get the droid player to help you describe what the despairs and threats are doing. You can retell the story of what they see the droid player doing in their peripheral vision, but they're clearly focusing on their part of the fight. Give them a roughly equivalent number of rounds before the droid player can rejoin them and help out. (NOTE: This doesn't have to be the same number of rounds as the droid fight. Tell your party that rounds are an approximation for fluid time and you're deciding what the narratively appropriate time for the droid to finish fighting the rancor is) This works well if the party can see clear benefits from the other people in their group but still feel like they're contributing. So if the droid dispatches the rancor particularly spectacularly, that demoralizes the mooks and they take black dice on their shots at the party. But because the droid gets so involved in finishing off the rancor, he can't get over there to slice off their faces, or something like that. Or if the hackers debilitate the escape craft the big bad turns and fights with more focus/force against the party, giving him a bonus to his attacks, but he's scared and furious and on edge because he doesn't have an out, making him more vulnerable so they have an advantage shooting at him and he can't escape. Etc., etc.
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Nov 21, 2014 20:00
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Make them decide! Half the fun of making characters is making them decide how they met up and/or know each other. If you have a vague idea of what you want the first adventure to be, tell them a little bit about the ideal first quest hook, and then have them spend part of the first session figuring out how they got there.
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Dec 12, 2014 22:02
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Trading and selling are a little weird, though, so you might want to run some simulations on your own to see how well it would work for the players. (Also, you might use your simulation to determine the number of setback dice or something on trade attempts, so that a player's attempt to buy/sell is affected both by the quality of the merchant they're dealing with and the rarity of the goods (difficulty), and by the current market conditions (setbacks and/or difficulty and/or transitions to the big evil dice that I can't remember the name of).
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Dec 13, 2014 04:08
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The only time or reason I can think that multiple checks for the same skill are appropriate is when you have a situation where outright failure isn't narratively desirable (say you have to hack the thing to proceed-ideally you'd have an alternative route if the party failed to hack it, like hunting down a password, but that can make the hacker character feel devalued if every time they roll it's basically "roll to see if you're relevant or if there are other characters who are more important than you) and you can reflavor the multiple rolls as progress while there's also time pressure of some sort (again, if you have to hack the thing - tractor beam, power generator, etc - and in the mean time the party is fighting off a pack of mooks and reinforcements).
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Feb 15, 2015 20:16
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Isn't it somewhat similar to what keeps happening with superhero movies, where every new movie kinda gets to make up its own canon? I haven't followed the comic book world very closely, but it seems like the Whedon Marvel movies borrow heavily from but aren't particularly faithful to the various comic canon timelines.
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Apr 14, 2015 20:10
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Depending on how big you want the debt, instead of home/homestead, make it a recreation/garden asteroid/station that caters to the super rich. They were banking on a wave of gentrification and expansion. But then the hurts moved into the system and that sector fell out of fashion on Coruscant, leaving the PC holding the bag for this huge investment property/money sink.
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May 6, 2015 02:30
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Who cares? The class labels aren't really that important in the grand scheme of things. Plus maybe he started as a scoundrel and is now more of a thief and later will do more scoundreling.
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May 6, 2015 05:15
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Madurai posted:...unless they had the same shield system Echo Base had on Hoth. And then the Empire would have landed a bunch of walkers, like they did on Hoth? There's no indication in ANH that the rebels had a set of transports prepped for evacuation, so they couldn't have escaped like they did in ESB.
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May 13, 2015 18:09
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I'm thinking of running a short (5-6 session) campaign for my normal D&D crew. It looks like folks would prefer playing the rebel/empire game over EotE. Is there a decent pre-gen campaign I can use as a starter for inspiration and/or a rough campaign outline?
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Sep 27, 2016 00:58
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Finster Dexter posted:Yes, this is all good advice. kingcom posted:Seconding watching Rebels. Its basically a show about someones rpg party. Is there a place to stream Rebels online? I don't see it on Netflix or Amazon Prime.
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Sep 27, 2016 03:26
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kingcom posted:If you got a US cable account you can watch them all on the Disney XD site i think? Thanks, I didn't realize I could do that.
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Sep 27, 2016 23:15
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Honestly, I'd tell the players they were playing baseball and then ask them what they plan to do. Each time a player says they're doing something, pick an appropriate skill and make them roll it. Move the game along quickly enough to be narratively appropriate (i.e. if you want the game to take half an hour to an hour or so, do a roll or two per inning plus descriptions and strategy talk, maybe two.).
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Sep 28, 2016 02:33
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Yeah, my group's response to the janitor-bot was to run him over with a speeder bike. That they proceeded to shove into the hallways of the base and used to try and gun down stormtroopers.
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Jan 1, 2017 19:47
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Does combat & fighting ever get less lethal? It feels like everyone has very few options to mitigate incoming damage. Soak seems to cap at brawn +2, defense seems to cap at one or two black dice (hiding behind cover), and then I suppose dodge talents let you add another black dice or two?
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Mar 27, 2017 00:43
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Droids can be tremendously powerful. They are really good at focusing on one or two things and getting really good at them because they start with all ones and have more experience for attributes. I like coming up with an idea for the droid's manufacture and programming though, which gives it focus and feels more atmospheric. Plus it makes the "in amazing at the few things I do and terrible at the rest" part of being hyper-focused more tolerable at the table. For instance, take a medical droid that was initially used as a veterinarian. Pump intelligence to 4 (90 pts), so you are great at doctor stuff. Add a brawn of 3 (50 pts), to represent the ability to throw animals around and do surgery on giant space cows or whatever. Add agility of two (20 pts) to represent being able to do fine surgery when needed. 15 points for random crap (droids start with 175? In my head they were 200, which let's you take two 4's, but it's been a while since I have looked). Now you have a character with a clear advantage and focus, one whose not too bad at melee especially if you pick up a bunch of relevant ranks, and you have plenty of weak points. Plus you get to yell about how dismembering storm troopers is way easier than doing hip surgery on banthas. Or suppose we have an astromech droid that was taught to pilot because its master kept getting injured. 4 intelligence, 3 agility, 2 willpower or something. Or double down with 5 intelligence and a few 2's.
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Jun 15, 2017 21:48
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Grab the WEG D6 sourcebook and layer in any cyberpunk source material you want (Shadowrun, Stephenson/Gibson, whatever).
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Jul 24, 2017 20:47
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Crash a moon into the offending wookie. (But seriously, I have found that the ensemble system is really nice, particularly if you have players who can invest in the narrative and enjoy watching the story unfold for other characters.)
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Aug 19, 2017 04:02
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susan posted:Very true. Like, realistically, aside from a few ship statblocks, does anything need to be updated for the new setting? Assuming we ignore Warp travel speeds, just like the films do... Not really. Reskin any blaster rifles as the new blaster rifles, reskin stormtroopers as first order soldiers, make up a stat block for the swinging lightning things that Finn always throws about...
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Dec 17, 2017 17:17
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susan posted:And X-Wings have some kind of afterburner, so... I don't know the best way to handle that one, actually. Up their speed/strain/maneuverability? Give them a modification that lets them Punch It without taking strain.
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Dec 18, 2017 00:38
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| # ¿ May 7, 2024 12:36 |
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echopapa posted:Bacta is tremendously valuable and your players remember it from the movies. Yeah, an Old Republic bacta factory that has been shut down but can be repaired and brought operational fairly easily, plus it has a big cache of stored bacta. That gives a few things for factions to fight over - instant cash, a long-term cash cow - and the option for a longer-term commitment to a project if the party wants.
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Nov 21, 2019 18:55
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