TheSagaContinues

I posted a tentative X-Wing hybrid ruleset a while back. It seems to work okay but admittedly I've had limited chances to test it.

I like L7 Vader quite a bit. The implication here of the PCs being level 4 is not that they are 1/5 the effectiveness they could be, it's simply that I'm not willing to increase the level complexity any more. Vader is suitably out of their league without being unstoppable, and it's not hard to fit in the main Vader traits. To each their own, I guess.I prefer a more narrativist take on statting.

I might try and get some people together to just run the nightclub encounter and test out a couple of these ideas.

I'm thinking that with a panic, the movement would almost always be as directly away from the source of danger as possible.

In a crowded, poorly lit nightclub? i'm not sure people would have enough situational awareness to make that decision adequately. 

The stormtroopers spreading out to bottle up the crowd, keep redirecting them into the path of your PCs. Treat the crowd as one large creature, with a few stragglers, (along the lines of squads and such, to emulate a mob mentality), and you could do things like have the players be in danger of being stampeded over, or pinned and crushed by the press of bodies. It might even present a moral dilemma as they have to kill or be killed by the panic stricken patrons.

I like this a lot. The moral dilemma thing might be a tad too grim for the cinematic, Star Warsy vibe I'm going for, but it's a good idea and I'm locking it away for future use.

Mod's Note by MA. Fixed your quote

Does anyone have any experience running one shots at events? I'm going to run one next summer at CAPA Cup, a Star Wars gaming conference that mainly focuses on X-Wing. If so, any general advice? Planning, timing, etc. I'm running it at level4 since I don't expect anyone involved to have Saga experience, but want to have decent freedom in designing encounters.

If anyone who sees this is planning on going to CAPA Cup and wants to play, stop reading now. That's unlikely but I should be safe.



Separately, I might as well use this space for my specific questions. I adapted the one shot from the mini-adventure "Opportunity Knocks" (if I remember the name correctly) in GoI. Don't have my books on hand for a page number sadly. The printed adventure is substantially different from what I actually run (I've tried this one shot out once already) but the core plot is the same. The PCs intercept a transmission telling them that the Emperor is going to be on Duro for a meeting with the Durese government. They meet a Rebel contact who helps them get into the building, and from there try and take out Palpatine while they have this opportunity. The adventure as written is not really suitable for a one shot, especially because it is explicitly built to tie into a longer campaign. Instead of the written trap encounter, in which Imperial troops basically let the PCs escape in order to track them to a Rebel base, I made a much more difficult climax encounter, complete with Vader's entrance in round 2 (preceded of course with an MP3 of his breathing noise). This actually killed the PC group I first ran it with, because of extremely poor tactical decisions on their part. Most notably, the squishy Mon Calamari medic charging straight down the middle of the auditorium / directly into overlapping fields of fire from enemy stormtroopers. I want to test the encounter again specifically to see if it's too difficult to achieve the escape goal. I doubt it, however.
First question, since I don't have time to do a detailed rundown right now. I want to use nightclub denizens as a combat complication in a different encounter. The PCs are meeting their contact in a nightclub when imperial stormtroopers storm in. Cliche but classic. I had a large number of "random people"  miniatures set up to mill about every round. I rolled a d10 and moved them all one square in the direction indicated by my grid. This ended up moving all the people randomly out of lines of fire and being completely non-interactive. Any ideas on how to make this more interesting? I thought of perhaps randomly moving subgroups so that not eveyrone would go in the same direction. Is that even interesting?

Pretty worrying. CAF is usually pretty good about maintaining their stuff.

Finn's Stormtroopers programing could be why he might not fully understand how he is acting. Also his fear of the First Order is making him do whatever it takes to stay safe from them. Only his feelings for Rey make him even agree to help,  even though he makes himself out to be important and knowledgeable when he's not.

Yeah, that is possible. But if so he is seriously in need of therapy, which is unlikely to be the plot of Ep VIII, haha.

I've seen TFA five times now, and I've come to realize that I really don't like the new characters at all.

Rey is well-portrayed by Daisy Ridley, who seems to be an excellent actress. I like that the main Jedi is a woman this time. However, I can't shake the feeling that the only significant difference between her and Luke is that she didn't go in for the trench run, despite being a pilot.

Finn seems more new, but man that dude is a sociopath or something. He just sits through the planning meeting, where the Resistance is desperately trying to save themselves form destruction and death, and calmly lies to them.

Kylo, as has probably been discussed here, is just inexcusably weak.

Hux seems almost indistinguishable from Tarkin to me, which is a symptom of the plot rip-off as much as his own writing.

We know the least about Snoke but I currently don't see what makes him different than Palpatine. Except he projects a huge hologram.

Poe is the only one(besides BB-8 of course) that I genuinely like.

Right now it has a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes so I'm excited.