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.

Character Composites: Kelly

Whatever Kelly's homeworld or origins, no one can guess.  Some insist that his accent is Alderaanian, while others swear that he hails from the Outer Rim.  A few Hutts believe his Huttese has a Toydarian accent, while Mandalorian mercenaries say he speaks Mando'a with the cadence of a Dantooinian farmer (and wonder how he speaks Mando'a at all).

Regardless, Kelly has created a niche for himself in the galactic underworld.  His uncanny skill with the pistol allow him to choose his own jobs, and as such he is not exclusive to the Hutts, Exchange, or any other criminal organization.  No one wants to be the crime boss who tries to force him under their permanent employ.  Only one has tried; the foolhardy Gand smuggling baron Muulish tried to strongarm Kelly into working only for him.  Muulish and 14 of his men were killed by Kelly's quick draw, and the implicating evidence left to the Bakura authority sent every member of Muulish's operation behind bars for life.

Kelly is known for both his deadly pistol skills and his unreadable body language, which make him an ideal assassin and enforcer.  Still, he doesn't look the part; he tends to wear the simple brown robes of the Dim-U bantha-worshipping cult common to the Outer Rim, leading many to dismiss or underestimate him by his appearance.  It's unclear whether or not Kelly is actually a member or merely wears their garb, though no one has ever claimed to see him mistreat a bantha.

Kelly has recently crossed paths with Kazbich on multiple occasions: first by double-crossing him and Marina working for Davik Kang on Taris, then later rescuing famed bounty hunter killer Borlok as Kazbich helped rescue Galduran Calrissian from Riga the Hutt on Nal Hutta.  Still, his motives are inscrutable, as he has no apparent loyalty to any one organization, and who can say what his plans are for Kazbich.

As Kelly is still a character "in play," his stats must remain a mystery for now.  Kelly is the third character whose stats I'm never completely satisfied with, the other two being On-Warr and the still-unnamed Sith woman who captured On-Warr.  (I know her name — in fact, it was one of the first things I thought up in my campaign plan — but it hasn't come up in play yet.)  I will say that he is of high level and he has levels in Gunslinger, but I suspect I will be redoing his stats over and over until Max is finally of a level to fight him.  I'm not even sure that he'll have only one prestige class.

Max didn't give me a whole lot of NPCs to work with in his backstory, so I really wanted to make Kelly his personal nemesis and to be a continually appearing but untouchable presence.  For inspiration, I looked to the character of Brother Mouzone on seasons two and three of The Wire, who is one of the deadliest men in the drug game but dresses as a member of the Nation of Islam; he's an unreadable character whose looks completely mask his skill.

The show must go on

As was discussed earlier tonight at the D&D game, I have decided that we will progress with the current Star Wars campaign rather than start a new campaign when play resumes in January.  I feel like it would be kind of a cheat to have set up everybody's destinies and stories, and then ditch it all for new ones.  So the game will resume where we left off: on Taris, after the party killed the Togruta pirate Dyani Zaan for the bounty, Aya Lim tells Logger to surrender to the Sith, or they'll kill On-Warr.

If you are really interested in doing a new character, talk to me and we can figure out a way to phase your old character out.

Also, I will continue to do stats and other posts to keep this blog updated about every week if I can help it and keep people checking in.

I got Scum and Villainy!

At 43 new talents for the base classes and 40 new talents for existing prestige classes, on top of 3 new prestige classes, it may be fair to say the new Scum and Villainy is the most ambitious character-building book so far.  The book features a lot of talents that build off of existing talents; a lot of the talents have talents from the core book as prerequisites, and a lot of them are seriously impressive.  Take, for example, the Scoundrel talent Uncanny Luck; it has the prerequisites of Knack and Lucky Shot, and once per encounter, you can treat any one d20 roll of 16 or higher as a natural 20.

Between these, the new species (Jawas are pretty awesome), and a huge equipment chapter that includes new equipment, new rules for upgrading equipment, and new stuff for starships (using the existing rules from Starships, 'natch), this book is a treasure trove for players.

It's also got a huge amount of information for DMs about contacts, allies, adventure building, etc. — in fact, more than half the book is devoted to DMs — but this is a very solid addition to the Star Wars RPG line.

Also, did you know you can't shift in Star Wars?  I bring it up because it's specifically a talent for the Assassin prestige class, simply named Shift, that lets you do just that.  Star Wars and D&D 4th Ed. are really blurring together, I guess...