Playtest Report: Star Wars Force and Destiny, part 2

What is it about beginner modules and us lately?

First off, this is a fun game. I like what Fantasy Flight has done with Star Wars and their entire RPG line. I liked the dice, and I like the system. We had a great time with the Edge of the Empire Beginner Game too and loved that adventure. That boxed set was great stuff, and you even got to dogfight with TIE fighters at the end.

But we had no luck with the Star Wars Force and Destiny RPG Beginner Game boxed set. The module fell flat for us, and we found ourselves rubbing our eyes with disbelief at some of the situations. As a "introduction to the post Order 66 Jedi life" it felt like it didn't deliver, and I probably need to go over what happened during our game. Warning, spoilers ahead.

It all started out good enough, as we left off last time, our group of Jedi students holed up in a shelter on their way to the mountain temple. We left off feeling pretty good, and then we proceeded to the next part of the adventure, the ancient holocron with the Jedi master. Let's just say things didn't go so well there, and the players didn't like to have a hologram threatening them when they were there to help. There is a line in the holocron's dialog that is an outright threat to pit them against the locals, and that set my group and the omnipotent computer on a collision course. DarkgarX told the holocron, "We find you, we're pulling your plug."

Yes, like a line out of the Expendables movies. And that was it with the holocron, until...

Let's move on to the next encounter, where "dark side infused" primitive villagers were directed to attack the party by the "I am really a Jedi not a Sith" holocron. Now, the entire "dark side infused" rationale for both the wolves and the villagers in this module is pretty silly, my players were playing this like true Jedi, and they did not feel it was right for good Jedi following the code to wipe out a group of primitives. They ended up scaring them off with blaster shots and disengaging. Yes, this encounter was just supposed to be a simple run-through to teach the combat rules, but two things:

1. Good Jedi do not wipe out villagers (given deception caused this)
2. "Dark side infused" felt like a cheap rationale to make the villagers more like D&D monsters

Nobody liked the "dark side infused" thing in either encounter and my players didn't buy it (probably because there feels like little in the movies that supports this). Good Jedi do not pull out the longswords and kill the orcs, they act a step above. I give my players credit for taking the high road here, and the whole encounter would have been better served had the primitives been disposable combat droids or something.

The stupid holocron being there and sending the villagers off to attack the party did not go over very well at all. DarkgarX had this look on his face that said, "When I find you, I am erasing your memory circuits." Even if you are a good Jedi holocron, sending primitives off to their doom is a pretty Sith move. Especially since, um, when the dark side taint from this valley is going to be removed at the end of the adventure later, and it will be supposedly removed from the villagers as well.

Yes, don't put the players in a position where they are having to explain why they wiped out the village to the survivors. Not Jedi, and not cool, dude.

I mean, really, droids here would have been the better choice, and I could have imagined my players jumping at the chance to swing lightsabers at combat robots and whoop it up having a good time. Instead, the group elected to take the high ground, and the combat tutorial turned into a moral choice, which is probably not what the module designer had in mind, but my players are true hardcore Jedi fanatics who believe in the code.

Now, I don't like railroads as much as anyone else, but the whole "everyone falls into a separate hole and can't get out" encounter that WIN or LOSE the previous fight felt really, really silly after that fight. Yes, this is just another tutorial encounter, but it did not go over well, especially for six players falling into six separate holes. One of the players ended up getting out and helping the others out one by one, though by the end, some of them at least tried to use the force as the tutorial directed as a face-saving move.

You know that scene in Return of the Jedi where the whole gang gets caught in the Ewok net? Yeah. Painful like that. Times six.

From there, the adventure got better since the tutorials were over. The bridge encounter with the guard mercs went well (non combat resolution), the wolf encounter ended up being another moral choice but it ended up with another novel non-combat solution, and the temple fight was a pushover. My players wanted a lightsaber duel, but the big-bad had a longsword, and lightsaber versus longword fights usually don't end well for the "I am a D&D fighter in Star Wars" side. Plus we wanted this guy to have some cool force lightning or telekinesis powers, and he had some lame ones, so minus fun points there as well.

And in the end, that stupid holocron got pulled out of its socket.

"Adventurers! Thank you for rescuing the temp-"

...PHSSST!

But seriously, we came up with  better structure for this entire module, and it goes like this:

1. Players are students at this Jedi temple
2. A strange ship lands
3. Combat robots seize the temple, school, and village
4. Escape and get your stuff from the school
5. Save the village!
6. Rescue the master at the temple!

It is simple, and you could have even mixed in the tutorial parts with the "students at the temple" part before the attack, or mixed them in with steps one through five. You could have even left the holocron in as a helpful mentor directing players along the way. It is a much better setup, avoids the problem of "how do they know each other" issue, and gives the players a heroic motivation and robotic bad guys that are fun to beat up without sticky Jedi code moral decisions.

Yes, I expect later when stormtroopers show up, the grim reality of being a Jedi and doing bad to do good will come up, but my players didn't feel that decision should have came here, and not for the reasons given.

In the end? The big-bad was captured, the mentor saved, and the players wanted to turn the Sith over to the Rebel Alliance for judgment. Did we have fun? Yes, when the silliness of the first encounters ended, and the real fight began at the temple, but it took too much absurdity to get there, and the last fight was a kind of a letdown. It was a tough time for this group and for this adventure, but the promise of hooking up with the Rebels is looming out there.

I guess this will lead us into the next beginner's set, next time....