Star Wars RPG: Campaign Start

We are in the middle of running a joint three-book campaign with the Star Wars RPG, and things are going along well. We are building out our characters, running through a sample plot, and the larger plot is just starting to form up.

Despite the voluminous system and the large amount of character archetypes, character customization feels a little soft and many character feel and play like each other. As experience points come in, this is improving, but some of our characters feel a little too samey for our liking.

I am not a real big fan of the character generation system, which puts a premium on getting your starting ability scores as high as possible at the cost of skills and other customization. Your ability scores are very difficult to change, and the difference between starting with a 2 or a 3, or even a 4 is huge. You end up min-maxing in a few key scores and forgoing the cool things that make your character special. I would rather place a rack of preset scores (4, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2) and then be given 20-30 points to customize the character rather than have to make a choice between good scores and a unique character. Yes, this would make starting characters a bit more powerful, but I would rather have that and knock down XP rewards by 5 points than what we have currently (which feels like it is being gamed in favor of ability scores).

Less rolls doing more is the way to play this! I ran into a situation where one character tried to open a storage box with an electronic lock, and I ruled "only one try per skill" on the attempt, and it worked beautifully. We have been so trained by the "then I do something slightly different and re-roll" sort of soft-ruled gaming that we immediately fell into that, trying a rock to bang it open, a prybar, and a this and a that. Nope - all of those attempts were part of the same "force it open" roll, and you failed - try another skill. Mechanical, perhaps? Another character with skulduggery skill was able to save the day, and we avoided having a player buffalo their way through a task by throwing the dice so many times they just succeed.

If this was a d20 player I would expect to hear "I take a Triumph" and then I would begin to rub my temples in a mock headache.

I swear letting players "try something slightly different" and reroll the same task is some sort of dice-rolling tantrum. In Star Wars, it doesn't work that way. I am not going to sit here and adjudicate fifteen borderline horrible rolls of random selections of threats, despairs, and advantages until you get the roll you want. The dramatic situation happened when you tried to bang the lock open, it didn't work, and it is time to move on. There is no "let's do a second take" here. Maybe in Hollywood, but in this world you get one shot and then you need to change your tactics.

That said, things are going well, and we are capturing that Star Wars feeling. We are getting a wonderful low-level game as well with very relatable characters, including the bad guys, so I expect the fights and conflicts coming up to get very gritty and personal. This does not feel as light and flippant as the d6 and d20 versions of the game, there is a lower-level grit and realism here that I love. Things are broken, the galaxy itself is broken, and every item, vehicle, character, and societal structure is coated with a level of dirt and grime. I plan on keeping things that way, and forcing some hard choices on the character's behalf.

There are no heroic and clean decisions in this world, there are just bad choices, and worse. Only sacrifice and heroism can turn the tide.

Playtest Report: Star Wars Force and Destiny

So we picked up Fantasy Flight's Star Wars Force and Destiny RPG Beginner Game the other day and sat down for a playtest. They have a boxed beginner's set for each of the main rulebooks, and it is a pretty good deal if you are picking up sets of dice. You can pick up one of these sets (with dice) for around $20 on Amazon, and a set of dice is about $15, so you get some maps, an adventure, some pogs, and a set of intro rule books for just a little more than a set of dice by itself, so these boxes are a good deal.

If I played this game with others on a regular basis? BYOD, because, really. And if you get into high level play you will need two sets ideally, so this game can get expensive. A couple thoughts on that:

• It is a licensed game, so it is expected.
• It is too bad, because sometimes we play with groups with limited financial ability to buy in.

To be fair, there are official Fantasy Flight supported dice rolling apps for smartphones off the Google Play and iTunes stores for only five bucks, and you can roll as many dice as you like with these programs. While I normally don't like smartphones and tablets at the tabletop, this is an answer for those players who can't spend $30 on a complete double set of dice.

The books are expensive as well, and there are no PDF versions of the game. This is another sticking point for us, since character creation and options are 'book heavy' activities, and this means lengthy pass around sessions at the table. With expensive books, this feels like a problem since I like having hardcopy print outs for character creation and leveling up ready and available for player use without passing a book around.

I am one of those 'character sheet only' referees, and I dislike distractions such as books or phones at the table. If someone is reading (even the rules) or playing on a phone, it is a distraction. We have limited time when we get together, and I like to keep things moving because it is fair to everyone spending free time to be at my table. If a game requires constant book reference by players (like 4th Edition D&D), it is a less optimal design for groups I run.

The Force and Destiny game itself is fun though, and we like the dice. They are a unique narrative control device that handle story elements and what happens next in one skill roll. If you haven't read our older article on the dice, please do so since it is a good primer and hilarious as well. Some groups have reported the dice got in the way of the fun of the game for them, as players had trouble deciphering the symbols, but we haven't had that experience. The dice work for us, and I think that is because we figured out the game's narrative control structure.

Read our previous article on macro-style play for Edge of the Empire. I went and re-read this before we played, and we had a great time since we understood not only how to roll the dice, but when. Fantasy Flight's Star Wars games are by default, macro style games more like Arkham Horror than they are micro-style games, such as D&D or Pathfinder. In a micro-style game, you are rolling dice for every single blow in combat and splitting tasks into sub-tasks so you can roll for those individually. You do not aggregate tasks into larger sweeps of the brush as you do in this game, and understanding that will keep you from endlessly having to throw the dice and interpret results.

Do more with less rolls.

These Star Wars games can do micro-style play for critical rolls, but that is the exception, not the rule. If you are trying to do micro-style play and roll for every shot or subtask, you will tire quickly and the narrative control of the dice will be lessened since so much crazy stuff will happen. The sheer number of results and consequences will overwhelm you, so it is best to treat the dice as a larger tool that determines the results of a task with one roll for the entire "scene" of the movie instead of splitting the scene into smaller parts and rolling for those.

For example, we had a situation come up last night during our play session on the first encounter of theStar Wars Force and Destiny game. Some players wanted to not cross over into the hidden valley, and build a shelter to recover from the trip. Yes, players are how players are, and if they wanted to stop and hang out for a couple days in the first "make a skill roll and just get moving" encounter, I say let them play. This brought up two questions that made us stumble a bit with this adventure:

• We needed survival rules for food and water.
• How did this group of players find each other?

The second question we hand-waved away, but it would have been nice to know how this group of people met each other and decided to trudge up a mountain together in the middle of nowhere. This brought up the second question of survival on the face of a snow-covered mountain. I let them build a shelter with a mechanical roll, and the other half of the party went out looking for food and water.

The game doesn't have food and water type survival rules, although we worked out a system using the game's resilience skill after an Internet search and some forum post reading that seemed like it would work well. The game does have survival rations as an equipment item, but none of the starting characters came with rations or survival gear, so everybody was kind of stuck on the face of K2 without preparation.

Since it is entirely unfair to do this to players in an in media res start, I let them roll back time for a moment and buy any gear they thought they would need for the trip (up to 5 ration packs). We then picked up where we left off, and the group at least had some food and water to chow down on while they sat around in their improvised shelter.

But back to the macro-style play example. The players, even though they had rations, still wanted to scrounge around for supplies. They had a survival expert along, so it seemed like a good exercise to get used to handling a survival-style situation. So as a referee, I could have split this up into several rolls:

• Roll to find a good place to scavenge in nearby
• Roll to scavenge food
• Roll to scavenge water
• Roll to find animals to hunt
• Roll to find out anything else about the terrain and paths forward

In a micro-style game, this feels like a good way to break up rolls for the survival task. It may feel a bit excessive, but in games where the narrative control of 'what happens next' depends on die rolls, you need this level of granularity to determine the results of differing actions and if something is discovered or happens as a result of the dice. You have no other way of determining sub-task or related results, so you end up rolling the dice more, often for every little thing or question you need an answer on. How I decided to do this in Force and Destiny is this:

• Roll once to determine the scavenging result

Why only roll for all that? Successes will determine the success of the result, and if the primary thing sought after will be found (food and water). Advantages will determine the extra benefits of the roll, things not sought after but would be nice to know (paths forward). I wanted to do all of the above in one roll, with a primary focus on scrounging supplies, but a secondary focus on information helpful to their current situation. Plus, I didn't want too many rolls since this would generate so many good and bad story results the task would blow up and create a mess of consequences to resolve.

The roll came out that the group failed to find supplies, but they generated enough advantages on the roll for me to rule the group found a great place to cross the icy ridge, and using that path would give each party member a boost die on the skill roll they used to traverse the ridge the next day. This was one roll, it provided the task result and extra information or result we wanted, and we rolled the dice less for more actions covered. Handle more with less rolls? Exactly.

The next day, everyone got moving and made their individual skill rolls, covering each person's actions in the micro sense as required by the module. Knowing when to aggregate and play in a macro style will be the key to your success in enjoying this game. Knowing when to switch to micro will also keep that feeling of individual achievement and contribution going with each player, and this will also contribute to your success when running the game.

Is this an enjoyable game? Yes, and it is competing for time at our table with the other big games. It pulls in a lot of the Star Wars myths and lore, and it is a fun and enjoyable experience. Is this a game that could hold a group's attention? I feel so, yes, because it fills that Star Wars fantasy experience quite nicely, and the character level-up options are deep and allow a high-level of customization.

Does this compete with D&D 5 and Pathfinder? For attention yes, most certainly. I could play this instead of those games, and being a referee of a Star Wars style game would give my game a drawing power that would definitely attract attention, especially if I setup a weekly game at a hobby store. People like to play Star Wars, there is no doubt, and even when we played the d20 version this had a great wow-factor as well.

There is a side-effect of Disney's de-canonizing of the old Expanded Universe that is drawing in players as well, since the barrier to entry to the universe is basically knowing what happened in the six main movies (plus Clone Wars if you are a purist, but you could get away with just Star Wars thru Jedi and be just fine as a player or referee).

So, licensed games? When I bring in Dragon Age, I begin to see a new pattern emerging with tabletop roleplaying, where licensed games feel like they have a larger pull than the more generic offerings. Admittedly, D&D is more popular than Dragon Age in general, but I am sure if I ran it the Dragon Age game would attract attention from those not only into D&D, but also people who have played the videogame as well.

For Star Wars, the dice could be an issue for some (especially those used to micro style games), but we have mastered them quite quickly using our techniques and theories on how the game should be played. They aren't difficult to use, and they do add a lot to the game. We are huge fans of macro-style games such as Arkham Horror, so having a Star Wars version of that experience is a huge plus for us.

Will we be buying in further? Most likely. For a game that is pricey and lacks PDF options, that is quite a huge feat, and it says a lot for the design and production quality of this game. It is one of the great games of tabletop roleplaying at the moment, and one we are getting a lot of enjoyment out of. More playtest reports soon.

Dragon Age Pen-and-Paper: Playtest Report #1

We played the quick start rules adventure for the Dragon Age RPG, and we noticed a couple things about the game. Well first, we noticed one big thing about the sample adventure included with the quick start rules, it supposedly forces you to make a moral choice in the middle of the adventure which turned out to be an entirely morally reprehensible choice.

It is really a terrible situation to put fresh characters in, even as a supposedly moral choice it is on one hand horrid, and the other a terrible way to start a campaign with the local royal family hunting you down. It’s dark fantasy, I know, but I would never play a situation like the one in the module as lighthearted as the module designer attempted to do (I felt the consequences of 'go dark' were dealt with a bit hand-wavedly and flippant).

Even as “dark fantasy” it is just not what my players expected or liked. To be fair, this isn't the big book (as shown), this is just the older free starter adventure, and it left us a bit wanting.

Our Adventure: Inquisition Prolog

We ended up running through the first scenario of Dragon Age Inquisition as our sample adventure instead of the quick start adventure and found a couple more observations.

DarkgarX plays a ranged rogue in the videogame, and we noticed an immediate lack of damage output with ranged rogues in this game. Compared to the videogame, rogues with bows have it good, and they are a decent damage dealing class. In the pen and paper game ranged damage per second for rogues felt woefully inadequate. They addressed this concern in a forum post where a developer suggested letting rogue ranged attacks use the rogue melee talents, such as backstab and dirty tricks. They further corrected this with an even better solution in the sister game Fantasy Age.

We ran into a situation where our melee character in our playtest, the heroic warrior Cassandra from the videogame, where she out damaged the rogue using the bow with her sword. DarkgarX was playing the rogue, and his arrows struggled to get through the darkspawn’s armor. As if the darkspawn should have any armor, as I was using the sample darkspawn monsters out of the module. That was probably a mistake on my part, but I did not have any monster statistics on hand so I used those.

DarkgarX expected to be able to do decent ranged damage, but his bow only did one die plus five, where Cassandra’s longsword was doing two dice plus three. This was to five points of armor, and Cassandra’s blows were consistently cutting through and the bow was typically rolling 1 to 3 points of damage per hit. He got this feeling of “why bother, grab a sword” and we struggled to replicate the feeling of the videogame. It was a frustrating start, and we found ourselves wondering why a longbow would do a base of 1d6+3 damage to the longsword’s 2d6 base. I could see a shortbow doing 1d6+3 (which does 1d6+1) and the longbow 2d6, or possibly halving armor versus bow damage (and keeping the damagers the same), but as it is the bows feel weak in this game.

Mind you, there is little need for a shortbow at all, and the game doesn’t go into too much detail on why and when each was used. I wanted more detail in this area as well.

Fantasy Age makes a huge improvement with rogue bow DPS, allowing rogues to add 1d6 to one attack per turn if their DEX is greater than their opponent’s with a “pinpoint attack”. This solves a lot of problems, and I am sorely tempted to port in this rule to make rogue bow DPS feel on par with what we experienced in the videogame.

Hell, I am sorely tempted to port in the videogame’s power list and give the characters some cool pyrotechnics. I would love to have the videogame’s ‘explosive shot’ available as a rogue archer spell to charge up an arrow and let fly. The pen-and-paper game is decidedly “down” on powers, so the characters play more like real people than action game shoot-and-blast MMO characters. Still, the videogame powers are fun, and they are what the world is like for us now.

There is something to be said for reflecting the world as most people enjoy it, and I would love to have an Inquisition sourcebook listing all the powers, magic items, and other cool bits for use in the pen-and-paper game. Actually, I would pay good money for that, and I would love for the game's super cool stuff to make it into the pen-and-paper game somehow.

Maybe I will spend some time with the Inquisition hint book and do a full conversion. If my hint book would stop being back ordered and ship, that is....

I am hoping we get another session in, this looks like a fun game and I like how it plays. It’s just how it plays isn’t really matching up with how we expect, and that is our problem. Fantasy Age looks to have better, more cleaned up rules, but I don't want to feel I have to pull in rules from that game to compensate.

Legend: Play Test Report #2

I love the random tables in this game. It harkens back to an age where roleplaying games were sort of trippy, "what happens next" sort of shared storytelling activities. We were playing around withe the excellent Pirates of Legend supplement and had a unique and entertaining ship journey full of strange encounters with other boats, storms at sea, meetings with rowboats filled with cheap wine, and fun little "the tables did what?" moments that gave us a great time.

Who cares that it didn't make much sense? It was fun.

The book actually tells you to ignore the charts if they ruined your game or didn't make much sense. This gave me the opportunity (like a great game master) to ignore the advice the book gives you and just run with it. If it didn't make sense, all the better. Our game world is now  full of strange little encounters on the open sea, meetings with ships that could possibly be pirates, and other nationalities sailing about and a sense of "what could happen next?" when the players take a trip by ship to anywhere. It was quirky and silly and my players loved it.

The game-mastering section for this game is short and almost inconsequential. This game really needs a better game master guide. It is so short I wonder why it was even put in, I feel this is one of those "if you can't do it correctly, don't do it" type of things.  The game is unique in that it should focus on community, family, and social bonds (and in some way for us it does), but the short section at the end of the book isn't long or detailed enough to drive that point home and show us how it should be played.

We are having more fun with Legend as a "Traveller random chart fantasy adventure" type of game honestly. Contrast this with most adventure modules written for D&D 5 or Pathfinder. They are heavily story-based and expect you to 'play along' with the adventure writer's vision. You get into issues like player motivation, interest in finishing it, and railroading with strict story-based adventures.

With the game run by random event charts, the world feels like a sandbox. My players are motivated enough to find their own way through the world, and they are already taking sides, aligning themselves with factions, making allies and enemies, and planning for the future. With the lack of a story, my players are creating one themselves. Yes, I have great players, but this also highlights that giving players a little freedom lets them do the things that interest them.

If they want to go off and be pirates, go ahead. If they want to go off and hunt pirates, that's fine by me too. Get in good graces with the island governors on the British, Spanish, French, or other sides? You go guys, run with it. I don't have a story to run on you, and you are free to explore this strange and wonderful world as far as your sails will take you.