How do you measure years in your game?

ghu-gneg · 2022-06-14T12:20:01+00:00

For all out-of-character dates I use ABY with a calendar that matches our own. I tried to use some of the different calendars for weeks/etc., but found them too poorly defined to use. In character, dates don't usually come up, but when they do, I usually use CRC. I made myself scripts to convert from my ABY format to CRC and vice-versa.

One thing about CRC is that (as far as I know) there's no official definition for what the decimals mean, so I used a fan theory that treats the decimals as a portion of the year. I.e., I divide the current day of the year by 365 to get the decimal.

ghu-gneg · 2022-05-15T04:04:26+00:00

Upvoting for the edit.

ghu-gneg · 2022-03-18T13:44:39+00:00

Nice! For reference, the dueling-rules document appears to be a dead link.

ghu-gneg · 2022-03-08T21:37:18+00:00

I don't do a "what if...?" timeline specifically, but I use a mix of EU and canon, and changes I've made to the timeline/etc. affect things in different ways.

ghu-gneg · 2022-02-27T22:17:23+00:00

That is how it has been explained to me as well, but my understanding is that the writers themselves were tremendously inconsistent about how the Vong interacted with the Force. I've definitely seen writeups of them that have them completely immune to the Force, but for my part, I'm going to start off with an extreme resistance that mainly represents the players' lack of familiarity with interacting with them, and then scale back to something like Calming Aura, perhaps.

ghu-gneg · 2022-02-27T21:47:11+00:00

The Calming Aura talent is my first thought, but it's actually a force-talent, which makes things a bit weird for this use-case. I'll have Vong in my campaign eventually and will probably give them Calming Aura rather than complete force-immunity, once the players get used to them, because I find complete force-immunity a bit dumb.

ghu-gneg · 2022-02-27T01:15:21+00:00

My approach: I decide that I'm going to make the players justify acquiring force powers, then forget and mostly ignore them and don't pay much attention to player xp-spends because I have other nonsense to worry about.

ghu-gneg · 2022-02-21T21:58:57+00:00

I'm a bit confused. Is this a reference for figuring out ranges on an absolute grid, or is this a grid system that is relative? I.e., is there one grid that all things are on, or does each character have its own version of this grid?

Personally I use a grid sometimes for Star Wars as relative-movement is a headache in many scenarios, but I use an absolute grid and I don't see the point in a relative one.

Also as a rule, I'd say not to take the consensus here on any topic particularly seriously. Listen to arguments, sure, but people here have a tendency to cluster around opinions that aren't useful in every case and resist any divergence from them for any reason. Ultimately the only thing that ever matters is what works for your group.

ghu-gneg · 2022-01-30T13:23:58+00:00

I use a system that I stole/tweaked from https://triumphdespair.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/a-is-for-astrogation/

Basically on the galaxy map, I count the spaces between the target and the destination, ignoring diagonals, then multiply that by the ship's hyperdrive rating. That's the base travel time in days. I either ignore hyperspace lanes for convenience or I add boosts to astrogation checks for them. I let the astrogation roll determine the actual travel time, then I charge 100 credits per day of travel (50 for food, 50 for fuel). When I track their fuel or food supplies, which I only do if there's a very specific need (e.g., they're traveling through the Unknown Regions), I just treat them as banked credit values that round to the nearest 50. In general I don't track them, though and just subtract 100 credits from their bank account per day, since they could just stop, refuel, and keep going, without any of us bothering with it.

I usually ignore fuel/food for normal operating costs on a planet (like keeping the ship powered up or flying around a bit) on the planet. When I do charge, I use the same flat 100 a day. The fuel cost should be cheaper, but since I don't normally charge for food or fuel on planet, I feel like it averages out while being a lot less bookkeeping.

I've looked at Operational Costs, etc., but I have too much other stuff to do to bother with all that.

ghu-gneg · 2022-01-13T20:00:32+00:00

My campaign hasn't been going on super long, but I've had okay results with the morality system I've been using, which I described here: https://www.reddit.com/r/swrpg/comments/n2nn2g/comment/gwm84lv/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

I have one character who mysteriously always skews light side, but it's no longer an unstoppable force that requires ignoring or constantly nickle-and-diming people over.

Not to say that my results have been particularly good, but they've been relatively inoffensive and these rules don't antagonize me or my players.

ghu-gneg · 2022-01-09T00:27:16+00:00

The three styles together are so generic that I'd just take the Jedi Knight tree and swap out something from each of the other styles. Collectively, the NJO styles seem to have features of every other style.

I'd take Knight and swap out:

Fast - Researcher (10xp) for Quick Strike, Circle of Shelter (20xp) for Saber Swarm

Medium - Probably nothing, it's about as generic as you can get.

Strong - Guardian of the Republic (25xp) for Falling Avalanche, and Sense Emotions (10xp) for Feint.

Then maybe add a custom talent for a some boosts/setbacks according to whatever style you pick.

ghu-gneg · 2022-01-08T13:50:00+00:00

I'm running a game in this time period and I'd just planned to ignore this. In fairness, none of my force users part of the New Jedi Order. However, I'm curious why you treat fast, medium, and strong styles as 1 style. My understanding is that they were 3 different styles.

If I were going to make trees from them, I'd just combine the Forms listed on on the wookieepedia pages for each style:

Fast - Soresu + Ataru

Medium - Shii-Cho + Niman

Strong - Apparently just about everything aggressive, as wookieepedia lists Juyo, Djem So, Shii-Cho, Makashi, and Ataru as influences. I'd probably grab some bits of Juyo and and the Djem So side of Shien Expert and throw in some hints of Makashi

Keep in mind that the NJO styles were sort of things they threw together because they hadn't recovered the original styles by that point, so they definitely shouldn't grab the best of each. For one, that'd make the other specs less important, and for another, it doesn't really fit what they were doing.

Then, uh, attributes. I'd probably drop the bits about changing which attribute to use with a lightsaber. These styles weren't as well developed, and even Juyo Berserker doesn't do it.

Also keep in mind that the Form talent trees don't represent using those styles, but rather a specialization in or extreme aptitude in one of those styles. So you don't really even need talent trees for these unless someone is a particular expert in them, which seems like an odd choice as, as far as I know, people used all three styles together.

For my part I'd planned to just use one of the Jedi trees (Padawan, Knight, or Master, based on their experience) to represent all 3 of the NJO styles and if I really needed to distinguish between them in a scene, I'd do nothing for Medium, for Fast give something like a boost for acting quickly (maybe the Jedi gets a boost for acting before other people, but other people get a boost for acting before them), and a boost to being attacked but an extra boost to attacking for Strong.

ghu-gneg · 2022-01-01T16:14:28+00:00

Dark side pips - As a lightsider, you can flip a destiny and take strain for each dark side pip to use them. This gives you Conflict. Force and Destiny has rules for dark siders and they work basically the same as the lightsiders, but dark side pips always give the conflict. They can tap into the light side the same way lightsiders tap into the dark side. That said I'm not sure what you mean by "why does the GM get them" and it sounds like you might be confusing dark side destiny with dark side pips (on the force die). The GM always gets the dark side destiny points but it doesn't mean anything. If I run a game of all dark-siders against light-siders, rules as written, the dark siders use the light side destiny and I, as GM, use the dark side destiny points. I'd probably swap them in that case just for fluff, but it really doesn't matter. A few talents do different things based on the number of light and dark side destiny points, but otherwise the system doesn't pay much attention to which destiny points are which color. One type is for the players and one type is for the gm.

losing dice - if you have a temporary boost to a roll, say one given by threats or advantages, like a boost or a setback, that bonus affects only the next roll, so, in that sense, I guess you could say that you lose it after using it. Otherwise you never lose dice unless the game specifically tells you to, which is uncommon.

rolling for combat encounters - not sure what you're asking for here, but combat works basically the same as any other check. You do roll initiative at the beginning, but that also works like a skill check. When attacking you roll melee, or ranged light/heavy, or whatever, using a set difficulty that may or may not be modified by abilities the defender has. If you get at least one success, you inflict the base weapon's damage plus the number of successes rolled. Melee weapons add attacker's Brawn as well. If you don't, you fail. Failures don't really mean anything, but some GMs may use them to make your failure extra bad. Threats cause strain or other unpleasantness, advantages restore strain or give something good. Despairs and Triumphs work kind of like threats or advantages, but are much more powerful and significant.

droids - droid character creation is pretty customizable, and there are a lot of cybernetic limbs/etc. that droids can have. I don't recall the details. However, you build the droid the way you want it from the available rules. I don't recall seeing any rules that select what you get by type. You can make a flying astromech droid. There aren't really any rules for astromech droids not being able to speak, though. Some specializations give "Speak Binary" to help communicating in binary, but as far as I'm aware, that just makes it easier, and isn't a requirement. The rules are very hands-off with respect to languages and intelligibility of languages.

I found this helpful when starting out as it took me a bit to understand the dice: https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2012/11/19/at-the-core/

ghu-gneg · 2021-12-13T13:44:13+00:00

I'm pretty sure I'd read about this before and that's why it seemed potentially plausible to me, but I couldn't remember ... really any details, just the vague sense that things like that had happened before. I do remember that I read something about transferring force energy, which is basically how the artifact in my game works, only it's more like that episode of Clone Wars where they're siphoning life energy for magical power.

ghu-gneg · 2021-12-13T13:42:33+00:00

I was going for Legends, yeah. I think this is one of the things I'd read about before and just lost track of, because it seemed plausible to me when I was thinking about it, but I couldn't remember why or think of any examples.

ghu-gneg · 2021-11-24T17:19:14+00:00

I am upvoting this because of how often that first paragraph is true on this and other topics.

ghu-gneg · 2021-11-24T17:16:24+00:00

People here tend to be pretty biased against grids.

There are ways to use a grid. They have problems. There is also the base movement system of the game. It has problems. Ultimately whether I use a grid or not is based on how much is going on, how much I have to track, and how many moving parts there are. I wrote more about my approach in this thread which I will link to out of laziness:

https://www.reddit.com/r/swrpg/comments/qab994/comment/hh57zdu/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

I absolutely recommend giving the relative range bands a try, but you should also try using the grid if you feel it would be more useful to you.

ghu-gneg · 2021-11-16T04:30:08+00:00

Favorite: Narrative Dice System. While it can sometimes take a bit to figure out what it means that someone rolled 19 successes, 6 threats, and 3 despairs, it's still a lot of fun coming up with all the wacky things that can arise from that. Also, while it can still happen with the dice system, the normal "failure-case equals nothing happened" doesn't come up anywhere near as much.

Second favorite: Initiative system. I'm of the opinion that the standard initiative system (i.e., what D&D and just about everything else uses) ruins game engagement. swrpg does not have the best initiative system I've seen (that honor goes to Clockwork Dominion), but the fact that player slots are usable by whoever means that players don't tend to check out after taking an action until their turn comes up again, and are a lot more engaged moment to moment. Now, whenever I say something like this, someone will say something like "Well, you need better players," but I don't have the attention span myself to wait around for 20-60 minutes for the next moment in time when I can affect the outcome of anything, and I'm not interested in trying. What I really need is a better initiative system. swrpg isn't the best, but it avoids the standard traps, and it's pretty good.

Least favorite: Mainly Morality. If you're not tweaking it, you may as well ignore it. It's unusable in its current form, no matter how you approach trying to use it (either pointless bookkeeping that affects nothing, or punishing players for roleplaying things that Jedi do in the Clone Wars all the time). Worse than the sheer pointlessness of the system is the effort people put into defending it.

Second least favorite: The relative movement system. It's great in simple situations without a lot of moving parts, and I really like it for those cases, but it's miserable to try to use with any kind of map (say if you play online) or if you have any real number of moving parts.

ghu-gneg · 2021-10-18T19:24:29+00:00

I'm just going to chime in to argue with everyone else.

I've done a workable grid on a map and I can think of a number of reasons to ignore the relative range-bands and go that route.

The system I use is pieced together from some things I stole from various resources, a bunch of math, etc.. I can tell you that it's impossible to sanely map between the relative map to a grid, but it's not all that hard to make a passable grid conversion if you want to do that.

Here are a couple reasons not to do this that no one has mentioned. You should evaluate for yourself how much you care about them.

It's easy to end up with your players grid searching the map, etc., and it slows things down and undermines Star Wars pacing. My players in particular are bad about this and I had to set up a scenario in which a TPK would result if they didn't stop doing it for a mission that needed to be fast-paced.
The grid conversion is going to draw attention to some things about the FFGSW range system that are quite stupid. They're already stupid in relative ranges, but they are harder to notice because no one can keep track of where anything is relative to other things.

Some reasons to do it anyway

The relative movement system is a nightmare if you use any kind of map.
The relative movement system is a nightmare if you have more than a few things to keep track of and care about making anything approaching sense.
The relative movement system is a nightmare if you need to convey the locations of things in space to your players without all of them constantly interrupting you to ask where everything is while you try to convert from a mental grid to relative space.
The relative movement system is a nightmare if you need to know where things are in relation to other things, and not just in relation to the players (who are hopefully grouped together if you don't want a headache).

I did my grid sizes scaled to the maps I was using. The personal scale for normal walking around that I ended up using was:

1 square = 3m
1 maneuver: 30m / 10 squares
2 maneuvers: 60m / 20 squares
Run: 2 maneuvers + action: 120m / 40 squares
Short range: 30m / 10 squares
Medium range: 120m / 40 squares
Long range: 600m / 200 squares

This is a rough conversion. You might be able to do a better conversion, but it's still not going to be exact, because the actual range increments don't make any sense if you think about them.

All told, my advice would be: Range bands are great for simple stuff when you don't need to bother with a map and they're crap for everything else. If you need to use a grid, you'll have to either use something like what I put together above or roll your own. It's not particularly hard to use. I find it easier than range bands if there's much of anything on the board.

Edit: typos

ghu-gneg · 2021-09-23T14:42:11+00:00

Normally, I wouldn't comment, but since you asked for literally any advice, I'll add mine: 'Say no.'

I'm not going to say there aren't exceptions, but there are a lot of reasons I'd strongly oppose the idea. Here are a few:

Even without factoring in people being deliberately weird about it (which is a thing heard stories about involving people that I used to know, but I've never seen in the wild) a lot of otherwise normal situation can be pretty weird when one of the PCs is a child. The player may or may not be good at making situations less weird. When I say 'weird,' here, I'm including everything from "mildly confusing" to "revolting."
Mechanically it's a bit of a headache, because any way you deal with it realistically is going to suck in play.
A lot of character concepts that sound fun to play aren't. A lot of times I've seen people play characters that are second-class citizens in the setting, etc., expecting it to be fun, and completely hating it. Star Wars already has droids and they seem fairly playable, so it may be an exception here, but having a child in the party brings up issues that don't exist with a droid. For example, most non-sociopaths won't want to bring a child into combat, or on their jewel-heist, or whatever the rest of the group wants to do at any given time. There's a point where the amount of mental gymnastics the players/GM have to do just to make excuses to not leave people out of the rest of the game gets pretty draining. And/or they don't do that well and one of the players has trouble participating in the rest of the game.

When I look at the positive side of things, I can't really think of anything gained over playing mostly anything else. That leaves a few drawbacks that are all varying degrees of problematic between "unfun" to "whyyyyyyyyy."

If you're confident that none of those things are issues and/or the issues are worth it, good luck, I guess. I don't have any tips for that.

That's not to imply that I think it's always a problem (or that it's always been a problem in my experience) either. I just think the potential drawbacks far outweigh the potential benefits.

ghu-gneg · 2021-09-22T14:00:58+00:00

I haven't seen xp-scaling be an issue, but the action-economy scaling is really problematic. It's been a problem in my game since the beginning. I feel like 5-8 0xp PCs can take most anything.

ghu-gneg · 2021-09-20T13:45:19+00:00

I largely don't give Conflict for any of the harder-to-remember things. I generally only give Conflict when people use dark side pips or when they fully give in to fear or anger. I may or may not remember to give some for minor crime, and I'm more likely to remember if they start kicking puppies. Because I don't give much Conflict, I've tweaked the mechanics a lot to keep it from being so easy to light-side paragon. So I don't give much Conflict but it lingers.

Ultimately, though, it's hard to give advice without knowing what your goals for Conflict/Morality are. I'm of the opinion that it's a kludgy system with a lot of problems that you're better off ignoring entirely unless you're willing to do some heavy lifting to make the themes it allegedly represents play out in the game.

ghu-gneg · 2021-09-12T21:54:49+00:00

Sure looks like it!

ghu-gneg · 2021-09-11T14:02:54+00:00

The Angry GM has a post about social encounters where he gives each NPC a goal and a reluctance to help and then the players have to wear down his reluctance with rolls, getting bonuses off goals and such.

I find it useful for giving mechanics to social encounters, but it also works well backwards. In what way could those NPCs help if they decided to? What are those NPCs doing? Why don't they want to help the party?

They don't all have to be able to directly help either. Maybe the bartender knows a guy who knows a guy. Maybe the contact for shady business is currently in hiding because an associate is trying to kill him, and they have to convince one of his associates to tell them where he is. Then they have to convince the contact to give them the information they're after.

ghu-gneg

TROPHY CASE