In the first part of this article, I let you know how I got back into being a Game Master using the Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) Star Wars rules five years ago. During that first outing, I was playing with some old friends that were familiar with the D6 RPG rules for Star Wars and I was preparing to take them through the Escape From Mos Shuuta scenario from the Edge of the Empire Beginner Game. It was the first time for any of us to play using the FFG rules and they were using their own characters rather than the pre-generated characters that come with the beginner set. In this second part, I’m going to share with you some of the triumphs and despairs we shared at the table as we explored the narrative dice system together. There may be some potential spoilers about the scenario, but I will try to keep those to a minimum.
As we began playing, the group included four players and me around the table. Since the scenario starts with the PCs on the run from guards of Teemo the Hutt I had worked out in their backstory that a recent smuggling run for the crimelord had resulted in their ship being shot up and crashing in the Tatooine desert while returning to Mos Shuuta. Teemo was furious about the loss of the vessel and wanted them punished and so his goons were now chasing them through the streets and alleys of the spaceport. This soon resulted in a combat encounter between the PCs and four Gamorrean thugs armed with clubs in a seedy little cantina. This is where I made two key mistakes in my first foray with the rules.
The first mistake I made was explaining how to create a dice pool for making skill checks. For example, to determine the dice to roll for an attack with a vibro-ax, you use the score for the Brawn characteristic and the score for the Melee skill. The player with a Wookiee Marauder had a Brawn of four and Melee skill of two. By comparing the two numbers, four and two, you start the pool with a number of ability dice equal to the larger number. So I had the player take four green ability dice. Next, I took a number of proficiency dice equal to the smaller number and handed those to the player. I gave him two yellow proficiency dice. At this point, I should have told him to upgrade two of the green ability dice and replace them with the yellow proficiency dice to give him a total attack pool of two green and two yellow dice. However, I gave him the four green and two yellow and left that as the pool. This mistake persisted throughout the entire encounter for both the PCs and the NPCs. Needless to say, there were a large number of very successful attacks and a fairly high amount of critical hits scored due to a large number of generated advantage. I caught this error during negotiations with a shopkeeper conducted in the next encounter and corrected it from then on.
The second mistake I made was having players roll on the critical hit table for hits on minion opponents. This was a minor error and the players enjoyed the flavor of seeing the results of their critical strikes. The entire table burst out in loud laughter when I announced that the Wookiee had gotten a “hamstrung” result on one of the porcine Gamorreans! However, with the rules as written, minion NPCs who suffer a critical hit are automatically defeated. Had I used critical hits correctly the combat encounter would have been resolved much quicker.
Early on during our game, I provided options for threat and advantage generated from dice rolls. Before we had even completed the first combat encounter my players were offering their own suggestions for how to use their threat and advantage and doing so in descriptive ways. For example, the player of the Chiss Scout used deception to distract the Gamorreans during the first fight and generated four advantage. The player passed on a boost die to both the Wookiee and the Human Gadgeteer to represent them being able to flank the temporarily distracted thugs. My players began to really enjoy this new feeling of empowerment at the game table; they were able to influence the narrative in meaningful ways.
This extended to the use of triumph and despair, for the most part, as well. The Human Gadgeteer attempted to coerce the shopkeeper during the social encounter and failed with despair. Though he offered a few ideas on how I might use it, I told him that I would hold onto it and apply it later. Unknown to the group, I decided that the angry shopkeeper would alert the slaver whose ship they were trying to get information about. This would allow the slaver to arrange a trap for anyone who came looking for him. Later, while infiltrating the spaceport control center, the Chiss Scout generated triumph on a computer check and asked to access the security surveillance in the slaver’s docking bay. The PC was able to see that barricades and security droids were arranged to ambush anyone entering the docking bay. This allowed the group to figure out a way to bypass the trap and fight the slaver on even footing.
The players successfully completed the adventure and managed to escape from Mos Shuuta. We were all extremely satisfied with what we saw of the FFG rules and Edge of the Empire. My friends asked me if we would be able to continue our revival of the old Star Wars campaign. I answered with an enthusiastic “yes” and told them that we should be able to play online using a virtual tabletop. Though we managed to get together to play a handful of times using Roll20.net, we were never able to get our schedules to all match up enough to continue long term. Even so, it felt great to get back to the GM chair with a system as good as FFG’s, if even for a short while. I went on to play in some online one-shot games and eventually found a local group to start a bi-weekly game at a local FLGS, But that is a tale for another time.
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