Next game!

The next game will be on January 11 at 3 p.m., assuming my very pregnant co-worker hasn't given birth yet (she's not due until a week later, but you never know). There's a short teaser about the next session up on the side.

Banter!

Two great bits from the recent Robot Chicken Star Wars Episode 2:

The Fightin' Dice-Flingers

What are players' thoughts on combat?  It came up at the recent D&D game how I've been including more combat in Star Wars, and reaction seemed mixed that I was starting to include tougher encounters, in part because with one big exception (Gobmush), not everybody optimized their characters for combat.

Here's my reasoning behind the uptick in tough combat encounters lately:

• We had significantly less and easier combat at the start of the game; we didn't have a combat encounter I'd orchestrated until the third session.  See also: Freeing On-Warr from the Sith battleship, in which we breezed over most of the encounters in favor of getting more story done.
  
• Story-wise, as players move closer to fulfilling their goals (rescuing Ewoks, destroying Riga the Hutt, evading the Exchange on Taris, etc.), enemies are more likely to notice and take greater efforts to stop the characters.
  
• I'm not great at predicting how fights are going to go, Challenge Rating-wise: I thought the rakghoul fights on Taris might be a party-breaker, but not a single PC got bitten; at the same time, Rex, as written, is of a high enough level that he should have been able to take on the whole party, but I kept rolling poorly and two PCs took him out.  Conversely, the fight with Aya Lim proved to be a tougher fight than I expected.
  
• As more combat is incorporated into the game, I'm getting more interested in incorporating scenery and terrain features into those encounters, which can make them seem more difficult.
  
• Skill-based encounters haven't been reduced.  (If anything, I'm going to incorporate more of them, as I've got the handy DC table in Scum & Villainy now.)
  
• Some of the party is optimized more for vehicle combat than ground combat.  I am looking for more excuses to incorporate space combat, and I can promise that the next game will, in fact, open with space combat.
  

Brief news

If you haven't seen already on the right, the next game is January 4 at 3 p.m.  2009 starts with a bang!

Also, I've been working on a few more character write-ups, and the next one will be Rek's often referred-to but never seen father, Areta Luk.