DreamLyrics™ Play-by-Post Forums Hall of Fame - Latest Top 10 completed games CFH: A Call For Heroes OOC: Mos Eisley

Sorry about the delay, I was crewing at a wedding. Between prep, serving, and attending I lost a couple of days. All done, couple happy, life good.

Happy is good. Wedding is good. Furthering and love is in fact, very good.

No problemo, Pandemonium. I only ghosted you and Gypsy because I wanted to move us on quickly before today. I started back at work today after the annual factory fortnight and it's usually a crazy week for me.

You know, I never have any worry about you ghosting as need be.

Boooo! Booooo!

Do we have some players taking a half-time orange?

Preach has sensed impending galactic doom.

Mhar-li has asked J.B. where she learned to fly. In a positive sense.

The team still has to contact Lieutenant Bek using the military-grade communicator in J.B.'s backpack. Otherwise you could be floating in space a long time. That might be Winta's call as team leader but you aren't a drilled military unit, you're more like a team of equals, like Rey, Finn and Poe, so anyone can jump in.

I was sort of thinking this was a GM I put place. We still going freeform for a bit?

Aye, feel free to chat in-character, it makes sense and is a nice change of pace after all the action. Thanks Art.

Thanks for the patience guys.

And thank goodness August is over! It's always a crazy month at work for me as our factory customers come back from two weeks of holiday---the traditional factory fortnight---but this year they're coming back from four months of shutdown! Chaos ensues. But now I have the long weekend to look forward to, with the Bank Holiday Monday.

So we left off in a Dun-dun-duuun! moment, Star Destroyer threatening to swallow the tiny Quadjumper whole and a desparate plan put in place by the Resistance Team to evade detainment. Splendid!

Warm up your porgs and feel the Force, it's time for the final encounter in the Beginner Game!

I'm off to the cinema this morning! Should be interesting.

Going to see Tenet.

I'm about halfway through the GM post so when I get back I'll finish it off and you should have it by the end of the day.

Let us know how it goes. Looked interesting!

Cinema is currently £5 all day, every day for anyone who actually pays for tickets any more. So that's cool. I get six free tickets a year from my bank and one a week from work benefits, and I have a cinema gift card from Xmas so I never pay (directly) for tickets these days.

It was a comfy experience. Not crowded, everything distanced, in the screen two seats between each party and every other row closed.

As for the film, I enjoyed it a lot, one of Nolan's best works but suffered greatly from two of his trademark flaws. Insistance on no ADR, and overlong.

No ADR (additional dialogue recording) means the dialogue used is always what was recorded when the scene was shot. In Tenet there are scenes on a racing catamaran, on off-shore wind farms, scenes in gas masks. Without recording the dialogue later in a studio, you get all the wind noise, all the muffling. There are entire conversations in Tenet that are unintelligible because of it.

It's also 2 hours and 31 minutes long. Add your 30 minutes of adverts and trailers and that's 3 hours out of your day. Unfortunately Tenet is not a character drama, it's an action thriller with a bare-bones plot. By the final 30 minutes I was getting a bit bored, a bit hungry, and needed a pee.

Ironically, because of both of these factors I think Tenet will work much better as home viewing, despite Nolan fighting so hard to get a cinema release.

So, the Resistance team are back aboard the Bargon Flit and almost guaranteed a clean getaway from Jakku, since the First Order are looking for the Sunstrider.

That puts us one skill check away from completing The Force Awakens Beginner Game, so exciting times!

No PCs have been killed off in the course of this game, nor NPC allies. A bit unusual for one of my games, which tend to have a high body count. But Fantasy Flight Games intend their Beginner Game products as introductions and they're relatively easy by design.

By comparison, Wizards of the Coast's D&D 5th Edition Starter Set has a potential TPK in the very first encounter and some major difficulty spikes down the road. I'm not sure how players new to RPGs would feel about their party being wiped out in their first ever combat, but I think FFG chose more to threaten the PCs' allies with their product.

Either way, I've found it a lot of fun to GM and have gained a much better understanding of the system.

As always it's the players that bring a game to life and I think your character play injected more story and depth into the Beginner Game than its writers probably expected. I knew you would though! As written, the Beginner Game comes with pre-gens, Mhar-Li, Fira Bon, Bormo and Tiras. Obviously, it was more interesting with your custom-built characters.

I hope you've enjoyed it too and learnt more about FFG's Star Wars system, although it now looks like FFG might be abandoning the Star Wars RPG licence. So now's probably not the best time to get into it.

Thanks for the write up, now awaiting the DVD release

Or rent it when it comes out on Amazon Instant Video. That's usually £3.50, stream as many times as you want for 48 hours.

That's how I watch most new home releases these days, rather than buy a physical product that I'll only watch once.

Martino watches most movies a lot more than twice!

OK, yes, so it's been a while since game start so let's go over what we've done, where we're at.

We've been playing through this guy:

https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/star-wars-the-force-awakens-beginner-game/

A sort of potted adventure made up of small encounters that each introduce new mechanics in FFG' Star Wars system. (Obviously their intention is that you'll be intrigued enough to buy the full game line.)

We're just about at the end of it now. It ends at the point the team escape the First Order. We still have some role-play left to resolve though and a quick brush with Astronavigation, so let's keep going for the time being.

Once we've completed the Beginner Game, there's the follow-up 'bonus' adventure here:

https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgam...-bd4d-930c245db53d/a-call-for-heroes.pdf

I also planned on running this, which is where the discussion about powering up the PCs to a higher XP level came in. In D&D terms, it would be like jumping from 2nd level to 5th, something like that.

I think we're about a week away from completing the Beginner Game portion.

Alrighty all, here's the plan then!

I'm going to resolve the last round in the Beginner Game portion now and leave it at that.

In our own minds we'll know that the team successfully recovered the Ghidrah data, escaped Jakku and made the jump to GH-531.

We'll also know that in the Battle of Exegol (in The Rise of Skywalker), the fleet of the free Galaxy arrives in time to save the day. So Ghidrah must have been successfully disabled or hijacked.

Although I think we'd have some fun with the follow-on bonus adventure, it doesn't teach us any more about FFG's Star Wars system and we've learned enough already that we're either sold on it or not. And that's the whole point of the Beginner Game as a product.

Perversely, it now seems certain that FFG have abandoned the game line. They laid off their RPG staff prior to lockdown and confirmed they wouldn't be reprinting. But most people assumed they'd at least hand off reprinting to another company.

It might be that the Star Wars licence doesn't allow that, who knows. All we know is that as of now, FFG's Star Wars RPG line is discontinued, no reprints planned, very limited stock available. Ah well, it happens with these big IPs.

I hear you though. "We don't have to play current, in print games here on DreamLyrics." "There are still PDFs." I agree totally. But CFH was conceived more as a lightweight introduction to a very distinctive and unusual game system, whilst enjoying some Star Wars hijinks at the same time.

Before game start we didn't develop relationships before the characters or an idea of forward story arcs for them. We dived right in and made the most of the lockdown.

So I decided I'd rather keep CFH as this small slice of self-contained gameplay. Neat and tidy.

You're not too disappointed I hope?

I also need to post my conclusions on FFG's Star Wars system. (Spoiler alert! I'm not convinced.)

I would love to hear your feedback on CFH as a game and/or FFG's Star Wars system.

OK, what do I make of FFG's Star Wars system? ("FFGSW" for short.)

First up, I have to say all four Beginner Games are excellent stand-alone products, providing easily enough material for one day's gaming, and with the follow-on bonus adventures, maybe another two sessions. Pretty good value for money.

Each Beginner Game comes with pre-gen characters and a set of FFG Star Wars dice. None of the Beginner Games contain character creation, starship combat, or the complete ruleset on personal combat, so for that you have to pick up a copy of the core rules.

Yes, I can gladly recommend buying one of the Beginner Games. They're a fun, high quality product and pretty good value for money.

Beyond a three session run, I have my doubts about the system.

I've used the system now for a couple of years, playing in an ftf campaign and GMing CFH on DreamLyrics. We tried the Beginner Games, we use all three core rule books, Edge of the Empire, Age of Rebellion and Force & Destiny.

One thing stands out as a glaring flaw: Skill checks are too drawn-out.

Most checks run off of a character's skills (another flaw I'll come to) and require assembling a dice pool.

Assembling a dice pool is always a slower mechanic than rolling single dice but plenty of excellent systems use dice pools. FFGSW adds some variables to the pool that can further slow things though.

Let's take an ranged combat check with a blaster pistol.

You assemble the dice pool. Your positive dice pool is derived from ranks in the Ranged-Light skill and ranks in Agility and should be recorded on your sheet. The difficulty depends on what range you're shooting at.

You can negotiate with the GM to add Bonus or Setback dice for situational benefits or penalties. Finally, you or the GM can spend Destiny Points to upgrade the positive or negative dice.

That's a fair bit of discussion right there, and once the dice pool is rolled, you have to resolve.

The first hurdle is remembering the function of each symbol. It only takes a few sessions to learn but while you're learning can be frustrating.

Then starts a lengthy tracking process.

For our ranged combat check we track number of Success or Fail symbols (for determining damage), the number of Advantages or Disadvantage symbols (for spending on specials), and any Triumph or Despair symbols.

There are many effects to spend Advantages and Disadvantages on, some granting Bonus or Setback dice to other character's next checks, requiring them to be tracked also.

If you roll 5 Advantage, for example, that's up to five separate effects you could buy. The more powerful the effect, the more Advantage it usually costs.

Once you've decided that, you can inflict any damage dealt. This is tracked against the target's Wound Threshold or Strain Threshold, depending on the type of damage.

If you've bought a Critical with your Advantages, the target must now track their Critical Injury, which is determined by rolling on a table using 1d100. Each Critical Injury has a separate effect and difficulty level.

Before you get into any other mechanics, this ranged combat check is already ridiculous, involving tracking Destiny Points, Bonus and Setback dice, received and granted, the three pairs of symbols, Strain and Wounds, Critical Injury effect and Critical Injury difficulty. That's eight to twelve separate things we're tracking for one roll!!

I would be just about OK with that if one roll resolved a whole scene or action sequence. But it doesn't. The result isn't an outcome; in D&D terms it's a loss of hit points. Like D&D, combats generally go on for three rounds.

The skill system is another, lesser flaw, but one that's hard to ignore.

A skill check's dice pool is derived from a primary Characteristic. Either Brawn, Agility, Intellect, Cunning, Willpower or Presence. Purchased with XP.

The skill will have ranks too, purchased with XP.

So far so good. But a character also has a Career and Specialisation that gives them access to Talents, aka special abilities, and may have Force Powers too. Purchased with XP.

The problem is, Talents and Force Powers all tend to boost a skill check.

So you are generally just as capable, maybe more so, by buying as many ranks in your Characteristics as you can. Then buying as many ranks in your skills as you can.

Talents and Force Powers then become somewhat redundant. Understand that this is purely from a mechanics POV. If you want to be able to Force Push a squad of Stormtroopers, then yes, you need to invest XP in your Talent tree, your Force Powers and your skill check. But ultimately, if you just want to get rid of those Stormtroopers non-lethally, you could just invest in Agility, Ranged-Heavy and use a Heavy Blaster set to stun. A fraction of the XP spent and probably more effective.

The game doesn't make a good enough mechanical argument for Talents and Force Powers.

In conclusion, FFGSW's core mechanic, the skill check, takes far too long to resolve and character creation/progression might be viewed as hollow in parts.

It is interesting that your end conclusion is very simliar to mine. I haven't played FTF with it, but I get that it is too complicated. Personally when we are talking about Space Opera/Star Wars I feel like a less complicated system is better. I still like the old West End d6 version. It played well.

Especially for this environment of gaming I find that the less complex the better.

Much the same here. As when I kept trying to ask about estimating ballpark probabilities because I couldn’t really get an intuitive feel for them like I can with many simpler systems.

Ideally for play-by-post gaming you want any roll to resolve as much action as the player has described their character doing. So I don't think even D&D is ideal for PbP gaming. It's d20 mechanic is quite simple though and doesn't involve much tracking. Usually you don't track the result of the d20 at all, you either hit or miss and then roll damage (which is tracked against hit points). That's tracking one thing per roll vs tracking eight to twelve things.

I think FFGSW works in the Beginner Game products because it slips each mechanic in step-by-step and the adventure is short enough that it doesn't overstay its welcome.

But certainly I found it taxing to match the actions that you guys were describing to the mechanics. Sometimes I just couldn't squeeze it into one turn because each player only has two Manoeuvres and one Action to play with. That could lead to resolving one round becoming two rounds--- twice as much working out behind the scenes and delaying the write-up.

That's just the mechanics though.

As far as the story goes, I think we made it thrilling, with a colourful cast of characters and a Star Wars-vibe that was reminiscent more of The Mandalorian and Rogue One than perhaps the saga movies. I guess the saga movies are more romantic.

I enjoyed it. As always, thanks for the game guys!

I definitely enjoyed it.

I take it we aren't going to do the follow on?

I prefer it FTF. It does take a few games to get a feel for how the dice work but once over that, it works! My only beef is the cost of the dice. Over £12 or $16.