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Echobeats
2015-01-11, 05:56 PM
So, I'm running a Star Wars: Saga Edition game using Wizards' published campaign, Dawn of Defiance , but changing a fair few things because, let's face it, DoD isn't always terribly well thought through.

At the beginning of Episode IV of the campaign the heroes are sent to a planet which is surrounded by a thick cloud of comets. "Fortunately", the quest giver Bail Organa managed to get them some extremely-difficult-to-obtain co-ordinates thanks to having such great connections, so they just go straight through without having to do any gaming.

This seems pretty pointless to me, so I thought of making it a skill challenge. However, the number of conceivably useful skills seems somewhat limited. So I'd prefer to present my players with a puzzle. E.g. if there were some kind of mathematical solution that would get them through unharmed.

Can anyone help me with designing such a puzzle?

Many thanks.

Mr.Sandman
2015-01-11, 09:12 PM
I would probably run it much like a game of Frogger. Set up a combat grid, with a mini for the ship and some various sized scraps of paper for the comets. Comets in each row move at different speeds, occasionally creating gaps for the ship to slip through.

Echobeats
2015-01-12, 02:49 AM
I would probably run it much like a game of Frogger. Set up a combat grid, with a mini for the ship and some various sized scraps of paper for the comets. Comets in each row move at different speeds, occasionally creating gaps for the ship to slip through.

I did think of Frogger (takes me back!) but couldn't immediately see how to translate it to a tabletop. Thanks!

If anyone else has ideas please share.

Beta Centauri
2015-01-14, 01:33 PM
Don't give up on the skill-challenge idea so quickly.

Your instincts are good: why have a challenge if only one person is involved? There's no good reason, honestly, and trying to shoehorn other characters into situations really only suited for one of them is often just sad.

This is why TV shows and movies often create compound situations, to keep the ensemble occupied. One person is driving the car, the others are shooting. One person is piloting the plane, the others are hacking. One person is steering boat, the others are fighting a fire. If you want to make the comet navigation an interesting scene, you have to add something to it.

Fortunately, Star Wars, being a fantasy setting, lets you pull out the stops. Maybe the comets contain an insidious gas (or a tiny space-borne organism) that gets into ships that don't know the precautions or the avoidance methods, and does Bad Things. The pilot is busy just finding a path through the asteroids, but the others need to work fast to keep the other threat from coming to fruition.

Or whatever. Point being, there's never any reason for a challenge to be about just one thing. Heck, oftentimes a challenge isn't even about the thing it appears to be about. Maybe the piloting is really trivially easy - it's negotiating with the ice pirates for safe and discrete passage that's tricky.

Good luck.

Excession
2015-01-14, 04:34 PM
This seems pretty pointless to me, so I thought of making it a skill challenge. However, the number of conceivably useful skills seems somewhat limited. So I'd prefer to present my players with a puzzle. E.g. if there were some kind of mathematical solution that would get them through unharmed.

I don't know the system, but there seem to be quite a few applicable skills. Piloting to avoid rocks, navigation, orbital mechanics and computer use to plot a course that avoids the really dangerous areas, some sort of combat skill to operate laser turrets or tractor beams to thin out the stuff you can't avoid, ship management to balance power requirements between what all those people are doing, and repair for the R2 droid to fix the starboard deflector shield, life support, and engines when the meat-bags inevitably screw up something hits you.

Echobeats
2015-01-14, 07:01 PM
Don't give up on the skill-challenge idea so quickly.

Your instincts are good: why have a challenge if only one person is involved? There's no good reason, honestly, and trying to shoehorn other characters into situations really only suited for one of them is often just sad.

This is why TV shows and movies often create compound situations, to keep the ensemble occupied. One person is driving the car, the others are shooting. One person is piloting the plane, the others are hacking. One person is steering boat, the others are fighting a fire. If you want to make the comet navigation an interesting scene, you have to add something to it.

Fortunately, Star Wars, being a fantasy setting, lets you pull out the stops. Maybe the comets contain an insidious gas (or a tiny space-borne organism) that gets into ships that don't know the precautions or the avoidance methods, and does Bad Things. The pilot is busy just finding a path through the asteroids, but the others need to work fast to keep the other threat from coming to fruition.

Or whatever. Point being, there's never any reason for a challenge to be about just one thing. Heck, oftentimes a challenge isn't even about the thing it appears to be about. Maybe the piloting is really trivially easy - it's negotiating with the ice pirates for safe and discrete passage that's tricky.

Good luck.

This does sound like an interesting scene. I hadn't envisaged it being nearly this involved – I was just planning to elevate it from "pointless background detail" to "minor obstacle", with the meat of the session coming after they get through and encounter space pirates. That fight will be a compound situation, as I've always planned to have the PCs engaging in spaceship combat (with the pirates' ships) and personal combat (with boarders) at the same time, and having to decide e.g. when they need to leave the gun turret and defend the cockpit. (The pirates will also try to turn the gravity off :smallamused:)

However, I might use your suggestion if I can find enough relevant skills. What would they be? Pilot (duh), Use Computer (to calculate comet trajectories and a path through them), attack rolls to shoot some comets, Engineering to keep shields up... anything else?

Echobeats
2015-01-15, 02:46 AM
I thought I might just use an asteroid-dodging game I downloaded onto my tablet, and let them all have a turn, with the target score being reduced if they make good Pilot/Use Computer rolls.

Beta Centauri
2015-01-15, 10:44 AM
(The pirates will also try to turn the gravity off :smallamused:) Uh-huh. I like how in the new Traveller rules, they mention artificial gravity, and how it's not meant to represent some super-high-tech device that can be used tactically, or modified, but just to make running and imagining the game easier. I know Star Wars shows and stories often involve it being shut off, but I feel like that misses the point, and over-complicates a basic fantasy setting. But, hey, go for it.


However, I might use your suggestion if I can find enough relevant skills. What would they be? Pilot (duh), Use Computer (to calculate comet trajectories and a path through them), attack rolls to shoot some comets, Engineering to keep shields up... anything else? I think you're misunderstanding my suggestion.

What I advised was not trying to shoehorn everyone into the "fly through the comets" challenge. Instead, have an additional thing going on during the flight. For instance, someone notices that there is someone scanning the comet field. Maybe there are even little droids patrolling it. It becomes something that the remaining characters can help mitigate: one person monitors comms to let the pilot know when the sensor beam is about to sweep them; others go through the ship deactivating non-essential systems and even a few essential ones that are easy to detect; maybe one even has to go outside to scrape off some probe droids.

The challenges are interlinked, because in order to avoid the sensors, the others have to advise the pilots who then have to make more complicated maneuvers, and failure on the part of the pilots means that the sensors and droids hone in on them more quickly.

Both of these can be relatively short, punchy challenges.

A couple of things:

Figure out what success and failure look like. What if the pilots fail the challenge? What if the others fail to help avoid the sensors? Failure shouldn't just bring the story to a screeching halt.

Don't design a challenge around particular skills, but particular actions. Detecting sensors and droids might hinge on knowledge of electronics, sensors, computers, droids or other things. Advising on an evasive flight path could involve knowledge of tactics, criminals, comets, alien though processes. Helping the ship run silent could involve engineering, speed, athletics, perception, or being a good shot with a blaster. And of course Force skills can always come in handy.

Echobeats
2015-01-15, 05:05 PM
Good advice on all counts, β Centauri. Thanks.

Can anyone think of how UtF might help in this challenge? My party's Jedi is bound to try and find a nail to hit with his biggest hammer, and forewarned is forearmed. Search your Feelings to test out possible routes before actually going along them, perhaps?

I think a failure consequence (aside from, fairly obviously, damage to the ship in the ordinary way) might be that a comet hit knocks out the gravity, making it harder to fight off the pirates later on.

Beta Centauri
2015-01-15, 05:22 PM
Good advice on all counts, β Centauri. Thanks. Glad to help.


Can anyone think of how UtF might help in this challenge? There's not much the Force can't do, really. Someone once told me that if you replace the word "Force" with the word "Plot," the dialog in Star Wars still makes sense.


My party's Jedi is bound to try and find a nail to hit with his biggest hammer, and forewarned is forearmed. Search your Feelings to test out possible routes before actually going along them, perhaps? A bit of precognition would certainly come in handy. My guess is that he'll ask to use the Force to push comets out of the way, which, if successful, could short-circuit the whole challenge.


I think a failure consequence (aside from, fairly obviously, damage to the ship in the ordinary way) might be that a comet hit knocks out the gravity, making it harder to fight off the pirates later on. If you really want to run zero-g combat, sure.

Echobeats
2015-01-15, 05:32 PM
There's not much the Force can't do, really. Someone once told me that if you replace the word "Force" with the word "Plot," the dialog in Star Wars still makes sense.

Well observed by someone.

<James Earl Jones>The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Plot.</James Earl Jones>


A bit of precognition would certainly come in handy. My guess is that he'll ask to use the Force to push comets out of the way, which, if successful, could short-circuit the whole challenge.

Well, he'd only get one use of Move Object every 5 mins, and he'd have to roll for it against the size of the comet. So I'm fine with that. It's cinematic, at least.


If you really want to run zero-g combat, sure.

Is it harder than I perhaps think? (Anyone done it?) I wasn't going to try and make it 3D or anything, just read up on the rules about movement in zero-g and roll for space sickness (the pirates of course are all Spacehounds; none of the PCs are). Am I being naïf about running this?

Beta Centauri
2015-01-15, 05:39 PM
Is it harder than I perhaps think? (Anyone done it?) I wasn't going to try and make it 3D or anything, just read up on the rules about movement in zero-g and roll for space sickness (the pirates of course are all Spacehounds; none of the PCs are). Am I being naïf about running this? If there are helpful rules for it, sure.

Whenever odd, non-intuitive physics gets introduced I expect players to start thinking outside the box even more than usual. Those who really know their stuff might even call the GM on something they got wrong (or that seems wrong). I can easily imagine the following:

GM: The blaster fire has set the crates you're hiding behind on fire.
Player: Uh, okay, well, fire burns itself out quickly in zero-gravity, since there's a lack of convection to bring in more oxygen.
GM: Oh.

Things just work differently. Be prepared for that.

Echobeats
2015-01-15, 05:43 PM
If there are helpful rules for it, sure.

Whenever odd, non-intuitive physics gets introduced I expect players to start thinking outside the box even more than usual. Those who really know their stuff might even call the GM on something they got wrong (or that seems wrong). I can easily imagine the following:

GM: The blaster fire has set the crates you're hiding behind on fire.
Player: Uh, okay, well, fire burns itself out quickly in zero-gravity, since there's a lack of convection to bring in more oxygen.
GM: Oh.

Things just work differently. Be prepared for that.

Thankfully I don't have any physicists in my group!

I do have two lawyers, but since I'm a lawyer as well, I can hold my own at rules-lawyering.

If anyone is smart enough to know stuff like what you mentioned, I would probably let them have it if it didn't break the game.