I'm running the party act next week and have picked up from the group that chatting in a room without shooting something will be hard from them. The group are using the pregens (all 6 including the two downloadable) and have thought of the following seeds for vignettes to keep them engrossed:

Offer for a character (inevitably the wookie) and one observer to go to a shady basement for an off the books fist fight/gladitorial event.

CCTV room door left open (to entice droid and mechanic) leading to slicer shenanigans and possibly gaining knowledge of what is happening to the others (including how someone is being swindled in another vignette).

Female character offering 'information' if a character can win a dance/singing competition, possibly with a bit of role playing for this to encourage some humour amongst the beers from the two lotharios in the group.

Any thoughts gratefully received as I have only GMd twice in my life (previous 2 sessions) despite being a keen reader of rule books from across the rpg pantheon.

Those sound like great ideas to me!

Very much in keeping with the style of the adventure.

When our group played "Long Arm of the Hutt", spiced up the segment on Ryloth by adding a teenage Twi'lek in love with one of the thugs who were threatening the camp. She later gets herself into trouble by sneaking off to their camp while the thugs are trying to corral a lylek in order to threaten the miners with it. With the PCs' help the lylek gets free and starts chomping on the thugs, including the girl's boyfriend.

I embellished the Geonosis party a little with the substitution of an NPC of my own, a Mon Calamari gangster named Ockam Senowick, who offers the PCs passage to Teemo's palace, where he's planning to sell some Twi'lek dancing girls.

Thanks, I was thinking of a shooting test (imagine duck shooting at a carnival, but fixed), but that felt too contrived. A bit too jrpg tutorial when taken with the brawl encounter.

Also the 'CCTV' scene feels a bit light so maybe success leads to seeing interaction between two NPCs or viewing troop numbers around the ship with audio added on a triumph.

There is a band setup in the garage (irl) so the lotharios could have to play a guitar solo for the group to impress the party. Gives a smoking/drinking break in a long session.

The difficulty will be keeping them from killing someone at the party or getting aggressive and being 'yellow carded' by the authorities. Especially as I will be tempted to goad them with NPCs to generate some mild peril within the group.

One of the group enjoys testing the limits of my preparation, but all of these encounters could probably be shifted to reactive from proactive to up the ante.

I hope I'm getting it right and any feedback from other GMs on going off piste in a defined module would be excellent.

Our assassin droid ended up physically intimidating the Gand into spilling the beans on what he was doing(IE: lifting him a full meter off the floor by his neck)

Which prompted Piddok to diffuse the situation, and making clear that further violence would mean ejection from the party.