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

Sure thing. She'd probably have to shift position a few metres, so we'll say that uses up her free manoeuvre.

These swoop bikers aren't the Blue Angels so they're quite spread out and erratic.

piggybacking on art's ooc post- I am hoping that they are close enough together that, if the grenade sticks as they pass over, their own momentum will take them away but the blast radius destroys all the bikes at once. at least that was what i was trying to describe anyway!

Ah OK, first thing's first then, J.B. has a shaped thermal grenade. It has no black radius per se, but whatever she attaches it to is going to be fubar for sure.

Alright, sorry for the delay, I had to put together a rather length explanation of Minion groups for you before I could proceed.

Whereas the Strus Clan in the first combat were individual Minions, the adventure presents these Strus Clan as Minion groups. Generally speaking that works in everyone's favour, players and GM. The PCs can quickly cut through a Minion group, but grouped Minions stand more chance of doing serious damage than individually.

You can read about them in Rules Clarifications, but basically Minion groups are more cinematic and less D&D.

This can change the way we describe the fiction. If Jelly Bean successfully detonates a Shaped Thermal Grenade on a swoop bike, it might well do sufficient damage to take out two or three. Yet we know it has no Blast radius, so what's happened? Something exciting and cinematic. e.g., The target swoop bike explodes, the one behind it yanks to the side to avoid the explosion and collides with a third, and boom, they mate with a sand dune at 150 mph.

Initiative. You might also have noticed that the adventure asks us to roll for initiative in this combat. There's nothing very interesting about that, but it results in the same form of flexible initiative order as before. With PC slots and NPC slots. If we were sat around a table, you players would decide who takes what PC slot. A nice side effect of this is that lightsaber-wielding Luke Skywalker might roll a top initiative slot but doesn't have to use it himself, if he thinks Han Solo can make better use of it with his heavy blaster pistol. (Han always shoots first, after all.)

A lot of Setback dice in that last couple of rounds!

Hot, desert environment. 1 Setback dice
Called shot (to hit the rider on the back of a swoop bike). 1-2 Setback dice
Targeting a speeding air target at all. 1 Setback

But you still managed to scratch off 9 Minions and even recoup some Strain. You do tend to accumulate less Strain when mounting a static defence, simply by not moving. Jix and Sirra suffered light wounds, burns, bruises. Be mindful though that they do mount up, and after you exceed your Wound Threshold you gain a Critical Injury and are temporarily incapacitated. If you dip back below your Wound Threshold via healing, get back on your feet and take Wounds over your Threshold again, that's another, more severe Critical Injury. Once you start nudging your Wound Threshold, things can go downhill for you fast.

Finally, despite the Beginner Game coming with battle maps and tokens, so far I've avoided creating a live tactical map. The system is designed for 'theatre of the mind' and that's how I'd like to keep it if at all possible, using maps and other imagery as purely visual aids.

Is everyone fine with that so far? I know combat can be chaotic and hard to dissect, but ask questions as needed---as you have been doing---and I think it'll work out.

Im fine as long as I can ferret out needed details.

The pic you posted was great!

I am fine with theatre of the mind, I tend to be lost in my own much of the time.

Do what skills are needed to use that door gun and who has them? And at a guess would she be as effective aiming at the pilots with her gun, or that one?

i would guess -ranged heavy- since it is a big rifle on a pintel mount. too big to free carry unless your rambo... but not hardmounted on the ship. if it was hardmounted then the skill would probably be gunnery ie the turbolaser. then again, just having the mount might make it gunnery. not my call but i am familiar with them in real life

FFG's Star Wars is remarkably pedantic for a modern RPG. Each weapon is specifically assigned a skill it uses (and sometimes exactly how it uses that skill). It's certainly not a lite or fast system! In this case, we have a Z-6 rotatary blaster cannon that uses Gunnery skill.

Anyone without ranks in Gunnery can still use it at their base Agility. If Gunnery isn't a career skill (has a green tick next to the skill), they'll have a Black dice on their check. But tbh, Black dice are nothing to be scared of. They're like a -1 modifier in a d20 system.

And how bad would trying to hit the with her trusty sidearm from this moving ship be? Not asking for percentage, just a very general sense.

(In other words, I suspects she’s better off just using her own and aiming for the drivers, am I right?)

Aiming for the riders adds 2 Black dice, on top of 1 already. Given the high damage output of the Z-6, she might be better manning it and letting rip, aiming for the swoop bikes instead. Her cyber-eye still gives her an automatic Advantage on Gunnery, and she'd negate those 3 Black dice.

Auto-Fire, Blast, Linked are all weapon qualities very very strong against Minion groups, because they allow you to multiply your damage. Since damage to a Minion group rolls over from one Minion in the group to the next (provided they're within range), you can devastate a Minion group with fully automatic blasters, double-barrel balsters, scatter blasters, grenades, and such.

Generally speaking, as a team, Jix and Sirra are most suited to long range. Jelly Bean and Amos to short range. Preach and Winta to engaged/melee range.

after reading your post I certainly felt the confusion that JB might feel- pilot the ship or man the gun or fix something to keep the ship in the air... those are her specialties but she can't do all of them at once... and this scene has a need for all of them at once.

given that she is quite good with her blaster as well, JB is quite the fun character to play in battle... although she'd probably kill herself just turning on a lightsaber so there's that.

EDIT- then i remembered this from the intro chapter...


Does this mean all of the PCs who are awoken have at the minimum built a saber and held it in their hands? Asking for a friend...

Good question, PP.

There are a few steps to answering it.

The Beginner Games are all quite generous with starting equipment. In the Force & Destiny Beginner Game, the pre-gens with lightsaber skill all have lightsabers.

However, in the Force & Destiny core rules, no PC could afford to buy a lightsaber at the start and it's described that they should build their own anyway, which would take some adventures to gather the materials.

What about our game here on DreamLyrics? Well, we know only a Force-sensitive can build a lightsaber and that most of the PCs are Force-sensitive.

Maz Kanata says that these Awoken characters have completed lightsaber construction with Professor Huyang, but not all our Force-sensitive PCs have a lightsaber, lightsaber ranks or even it as a career skill.

So in the case of Jelly Bean and Sirra, they must have completed the 'lightsaber construction' class, so to speak, but not built their own lightsaber. They might have constructed a basic hilt and inserted a crystal into it, for a working saber. Then perhaps Professor Huyang dismantled it for the next student.

It's not as if the Resistance has resources aplenty, and you have to remember that the traditional source of Jedi crystals was the planet Ilum. The First Order converted planet Ilum into Starkiller Base, and then the whole thing was destroyed by the Resistance. In fact Preach has his own crystal, a cracked Jedha crystal from his youth.

Can Jelly Bean wield a lightsaber? Sure, anyone can. She only has 1 Green dice in it though, and since it's not a career skill, 1 Black dice too. I'd be tempted to spend a Dark Side Destiny Point to upgrade the difficulty of your check so it has a Red dice, for more potential disaster. But I can only do that if you don't spend a Light Side Destiny Point first to upgrade your Green dice to a Yellow.



OMG this system is complicated to explain!! Thank you all for being patient with me.

all good- even with the complicated nature I think you did pretty well and I have the gist of it.

trust me, JB is not handling an active blade until she has training... and even then, she will need to discover a form of martial combat that isn't reliant upon Brawn... or else she will never be all that effective at it... maybe in this modern age with so few to teach, a style reliant on brawn is what is known but obi wan said the lightsaber is a weapon of finesse

“This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight. Not as clumsy or random as a blaster; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.”
-Obi-Wan Kenobi

since we didn't go down this path as player and GM I am not sure what the game rules permit- if brawn is just a default check stat and there are alternatives. Anyway, the possibilities for development as a force sensitve are quite intriguing to me.

I am not sure how long this game will last, whether it is just for this beginner module or perhaps you have in mind a continuation of the story into a campaign style game- you know... Neil Marsden, back by popular demand!

regardless of what the future holds, i am enjoying the character and the game quite a bit.

Sirra would view seeing herself as a ‘force warrior’ as vaguely ridiculous, so while she may have completed training, I’m sure she still doesn’t view herself that way.

“I know exactly what I’m for.”

From look at the sheets, PP, I’d guess that when untrained lightsaber defaults to brawn, but when trained it’s something else. Looking at preach, for example, his lightsaber skill has intellect listed. And for Winta it’s willpower. So it doesn’t look like it’s always brawn.

Looking further, it looks like it depends on the technique you learn.

Brawn is probably kind of Darth Vader original trilogy battering style, for example.

One thing about skills in this system. Anyone can have a go at anything, there are just Black dice (aka Setback dice) if it's not a career skill, and if you have no ranks in the skill, you might not be great at it either.

Amos actually could have a good go at Piloting-Space. He has 3 Green dice vs some Purple and 1 Black dice. If he could blag a Blue dice to improve the positive side of the roll, he'd be in a pretty good spot.

How difficult is piloting in the Star Wars setting?

We looked at this in-depth for our ftf campaign. From the cost and availability of starships, and how they're portrayed in the films, we determined that a light freighter costs about the same as a tractor rig, coach or Class-A RV in real life. Expensive, but not crazy money, and tricky to park and fine manoeuvre but fundamentally the same as driving a car.

This seems borne out in the films, where no-one ever hits a mental block piloting any starship or speeder. Either everyone in the Galaxy goes through the equivalent of helicopter/commercial pilot/astronaut training, or it's just not that hard. Like learning to drive a car.

So your character probably does know how to pilot a speeder or starship, even if they have no ranks or career skill. It's just that they might be as competent as your average car driver.

Lightsaber skill. So as you've figured out, this defaults to Brawn but there are lightsaber Specialisations that contain Talents, allowing you to use other base characteristics. Winta has Niman Technique, allowing her to use Willpower. Preach has Soresu Technique, allowing him to use Intellect like Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Jelly Bean has a 4 Agility so it would make most sense for her to learn Ataru Technique (uses Agility).

Sirra has 3 in Brawn, Agility, Intellect and Cunning, so her optimal choice would be to choose a technique that matched her planned stat boost from reaching Dedication Talent. Frex, if she planned to increase Cunning to 4, she might want to choose Shien Technique.

At the same time, the difference between a Lightsaber check with YYYG or YYYY is barely 5% across the board, so as long as you have 3 in the base characteristic, pick whichever style takes your fancy.

Just checking, I know she missed, but there also was ‘veering off’ are there still followers in her line of fire? And second ... can she “aim” a weapon like this: as in, spend a maneuver to make her hitting more likely? First time the maneuver was spent getting out the gun.

Repairs on the roof of a starship during a firefight, you say?

[Hmmm ... once 2BB-2 lets us know that wonderful news, either JB flies the ship and Winta goes outside to fix the thing, or JB goes outside to fix it with Winta covering her and Amos flies the ship.]

Sirra is keeping the swoop bikes at bay, discouraging them from getting to Short range and creating further mischief. With the undulating terrain and approaching Carbon Ridge, the Quadjumper will be moving around a lot so the swoop bikers will be targetable at some point.

Or alternately the astromech droid does what an astromech droid does. Neither JB or Winta have the means to secure themselves in place whilst on a rapidly-evading ship, let alone execute repairs whilst doing so.