Star Wars Stand Alone - Staff Sought
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@skew Will this be Empire vs Rebels, First Order vs Whateverthefuck, Republic vs Confederates? What's the sitch, yo.
He/Him
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@tinuviel said in Star Wars Stand Alone - Staff Sought:
@skew Will this be Empire vs Rebels, First Order vs Whateverthefuck, Republic vs Confederates? What's the sitch, yo.
Without giving away too much.
The system is under Imperial Occupation. It is compliant but only for political purpose, to include avoiding the alternative of an Imperial storm. There is give and take here, room for resistance and sympathizers alike. There is an indigenous population as well that is generally opposed to both. The primary resource of the planet is highly prized for its technological value in subspace communications. Generically its a conflict of choice between support of Empire vs support of rebels, first loyalty is to the system itself and deciding for the character which option suits their interests and planet and pursuing those goals ICly to their end if possible.
So Locals vs Empire/Rebels/Outsiders/Natives. Its Imperial Era (between Clone Wars and A New Hope), so technically its Rebel vs Empire.
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Update: We've set a very loose timeline to get us toward a December 1 open date. Progress has been very fast, and using the FFG Star Wars system Faraday already had installed (and has quickly tinkered whenever we found something we didn't understand) has been very simple. Customizing Ares to look and feel and output information we want has been very straightforward.
I also want to add: there's no bells and no whistles. Our system has chargen, sheets, dice, XP, story points, and whatever else is built into AresMUSH. That's it. This game will emphasize stories and RP, not automated systems, minigames, etc. Combat will be done like on a pen and paper game, without automated NPCs or any such thing. No coded space flight (and, really, most of the game will take place in one small space), no dog fights, no... you get the idea.
That said, we are still discussing how to handle aspects that are easy to track in a tabletop, but not exactly easy or balanced on a MUSH. Things like, how do I buy/upgrade my spaceship. We'll get there! I'll add that we are fixing to learn Ruby and Ares to make some tweaks, but that's way down the road talk.
For anyone that's excited and wants more detail, in a week or two we're hoping to show off the public wiki which will help people that are planning characters.
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Definitely sounds like a very intriguing concept, and I'm also in the camp that heavily favors non-FC and a small, backwater outer-rim type system. This makes it so that Imperials can't just blow in with a giant fleet of ISDs to wipe everything out because things got rough or they have a heavy tech/military hardware advantage that makes everything hard to do. I also feel that FCs draw too much away from the players, who should be the focus when creating stories.
I would add myself to the list to join if I wasn't so busy with work and stuff. Right now my game limit seems to be at a maximum of one and that one game can't be huge. :X
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I'm definitely in. The FFG system is by far the most fun of all the SW systems I've played. It inspires and appreciates creativity rather than stifles it. It makes for more variation in scenes than other games where everything pretty much every scene is handled the same way every time.
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@warma-sheen I had a passing familiarity with the FFG system as we started this. It was sort of a Core/Fate resolution, dice are rolled with either positive or negative indicators compared to each other to determine final outcome. When I asked, I was imagining I would be doing my own take on old WEG d6. What I found is it builds right from there, including WIld Die, and expanded to make each situation rather unique in resolution. I'm loving it more, as it seems complex on the surface but is pretty simply as a tool for storytelling through use of dice, rather than gaming mechanics and stats/numbers.
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I love the FFG Star Wars dice system. If it's properly embraced it can lead to some really cool storytelling situations.
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@zombiegenesis Give examples!
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We haven't played the game in a while(which makes me sad) so forgive me if I'm a bit off on the mechanics.
Scene 1: We were playing Edge of the Empire. Our characters were in a cantina and all hell broke loose. Our characters all scrambled and my wife's character, a Twi'lek bounty hunter, decided to jump up into the rafters of the bar. Well she succeeded but generated a lot of strain in the process. So we asked as a group, why would she gain all that strain climbing up into the rafters? And one player commented about how the character had "packed on some pounds in the downtime" so started the "fat Twi'lek" meme at our table. My wife embraced this and future physical related strain were rationalized by her being a bit out of shape.
Scene 2: Same characters on another adventure. One of the characters, a smuggler, tried to charm a waitress in another cantina. She failed but generated a lot of opportunities. The GM decided that she failed at a normal charm but decided that the waitress had become completely enamored and obsessed with the character and a new NPC was introduced into the game for future complications.
There are other minor things. You can use opportunities to create gun jams in enemies or use opportunities to set up cool collaborations. It's a neat mechanic but you do have to embrace it. Some times things would get a bit stagnant at our table and people would just use opportunities to heal strain or use the negative symbols to cause strain without rationalizing it. In the end it is a mechanic but it's one that can be used by creative people to really liven up a standard RP encounter.
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So judging by what you've leaked of the theme is it safe to assume you'll be primarily using Age of Rebellion as your source? What I'm really asking here is...will there be Jedi? It seems like the answer would be no but I just want to confirm that.
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@zombiegenesis said in Star Wars Stand Alone - Staff Sought:
So judging by what you've leaked of the theme is it safe to assume you'll be primarily using Age of Rebellion as your source? What I'm really asking here is...will there be Jedi? It seems like the answer would be no but I just want to confirm that.
Yes Age of Rebellion will be the primary source, will probably borrow from others for things like additional race options. No Jedi, but some minor force elements, you are correct.
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@AlexRaymond Thanks for the clarification.
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Re: FFG SW system and enhanced creativity...
Instead of rolling flat dice against difficulties, you roll special dice (d8 or d12). Instead of numbers, you have different symbols, which represent success and failure, but also positive side effects, negative side effects, and then another layer of "critical" successes and failures.
That means on any given roll you not only can succeed or fail, but also there's a chance to have positive side effects beat negative and vice versa. So, you try to shoot the enemy. You roll more successes than failures, so you succeed! But there's more negative side effects than positive, so the shot goes through the bad guy and hits tank that contains toxic gas. Whoops.
It really sounds like a lot of fun!
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@skew It really is! I'd love to see them do more with it via Genesys.
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Play an Imperial again, you say?
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Re: FFG system and @Misadventure's comment, I want to echo somewhat and stress that while it's really innovative (I ran it for about a year in a VTT), the narrative stuff can be counter-intuitive and requires really good GM supervision and player buy-in.
It also has a really sharp combatant/noncombatant divide. Due to soak, a rando with a 1h blaster will struggle to do meaningful damage to any target, and be unable to touch Stormtroopers (who are kinda scary in this game), whereas a combat-teched person is one-shotting most of the printed 'boss' types before they even hit their first top-tier talent.
Not telling you not to do it, but be aware of this stuff and plan accordingly. PvP would definitely be a nightmare in this rule system.
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@bored said in Star Wars Stand Alone - Staff Sought:
Stormtroopers (who are kinda scary in this game)
I just want to say that while you bring up worrying notions of balance, even without my having read the book, this makes me grin with glee. Any game/system where Stormtroopers are scary, elite fanatics is good in my book; any game/system where Stormtroopers are hapless mooks is bad in my book.
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@seraphim73 said in Star Wars Stand Alone - Staff Sought:
@bored said in Star Wars Stand Alone - Staff Sought:
Stormtroopers (who are kinda scary in this game)
I just want to say that while you bring up worrying notions of balance, even without my having read the book, this makes me grin with glee. Any game/system where Stormtroopers are scary, elite fanatics is good in my book; any game/system where Stormtroopers are hapless mooks is bad in my book.
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@seraphim73 Oh yeah, and particularly if you're playing 'Fringers vs. Imperials' (as is the conceit of EotE, vs the later books), it's thematically perfectly appropriate that the Empire's faceless enforcers are scary.
Game mechanic wise, it's a facet of equipment and mook rules. Minions combine attacks into one pool and end up becoming highly accurate, while both the stormtrooper armor and blaster rifles have high soak & damage. So you get otherwise 'fragile' mooks behind hard to pen damage reduction shooting accurately with their high damage E-11s.
This also means that as soon as one of the (combat oriented, it's a separate skill) PCs steals a dead stormtrooper's rifle, their own damage shoots up dramatically. Add some of the talents or, gods help you, a repeating weapon and things get kind of hilariously out of control very quickly.
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Expanding a little on Rebel vs Empire, Fringer vs Empire, etc, (and maybe repeating myself or @AlexRaymond ?)...
Players will be in the Tageeri Confederation, the governing body of Chontio. All characters will be similarly aligned: they want the Confederation to succeed. What "success" means will be defined by the character (and the most of the application process). Could be you want to snuggle up to the Empire. Could be you want to start a revolution. Whatever the case, we're aiming for "people trying to do good that might get in each other's way". And if that's not clear enough, no one will be playing a member of the Empire or the Rebellion, though you can potentially end up working for either.
And now an update!
- We are writing pages and pages of lore, setting information, plots, etc.
- We have decided we will only be using the Age of Rebellion book, with the exception of Species. We will be pulling in most of the species from the other two books. This might mean adding additional talents that are tied to species or just adjusting the template to use existing talents. Still in the works.
- We will not be using the Destiny mechanic. It's very, very cool to use in a tabletop setting, but in a MU, it doesn't feel like it's going to work (plus, the code mechanics are going to be repurposed).
I think our state goal (to each other) was to have the wiki public by the end of next week. I think we're on track for that.
We are almost to a point where we're going to start building the grid. I've received zero (0) offers to help design a grid, so I could definitely use a lil help! If anyone is interested, hit me up. I know someone out there wants to desc a cantina...
