I've tried to enjoy the mechanics of this JoY section, but I'm frustrated. I think it was designed to convince me to buy a second set of dice. My PCs have come nowhere near to winning this race. Try try again.

We haven't finished JoY yet and since this is not the GM section, so I will probably check in on this thread once we are finished with the adventure.

With that being said, we just finished this encounter last session and you aren't wrong. That race was hard, but we won. It was a hard win too. To avoid spoilers, Our group did a lot of work before hand to put the odds in our favor and that it was still tough.

The biggest change I might look at when running this for my usual group would be to take out the linked weapons on the cloud car and replaced them with something without the linked quality.

I've tried to enjoy the mechanics of this JoY section, but I'm frustrated. I think it was designed to convince me to buy a second set of dice. My PCs have come nowhere near to winning this race. Try try again.

As GM, I knew right off the bat that I'd need more than a single set of dice, so I bought three. I've since acquired three more, for a total of six sets, and we always have enough for everyone at the table.

My group just finished the race. It was not too hard, the GM let the players not in the race play as the other racers. One person in our group was out for blood and was trying really hard to kill me and my co-pilot, so for that I spent 95% of the winnings on my new armor.

The rest goes to the caper.

I've tried to enjoy the mechanics of this JoY section, but I'm frustrated. I think it was designed to convince me to buy a second set of dice. My PCs have come nowhere near to winning this race. Try try again.

So it can be done - you just need to plan out what you are doing, just like the rest of the heist.

I've tried to enjoy the mechanics of this JoY section, but I'm frustrated. I think it was designed to convince me to buy a second set of dice. My PCs have come nowhere near to winning this race. Try try again.

Try reading the description in the book. It is primarily intended for more experienced characters. If your party is pretty green, there are some ways around some of the challenges (like hiring local experts who are surprisingly cheap), but there are limits.

When our Wednesday night GM ran JoY, he was honest with us when he talked about the Cloud Car race. He told us that he had looked at the stats of the other racers, and there was just no way around it — we were "boned". We wound up with an opportunity to bring in another PC as our pilot, and with his Agility and Piloting skill, plus what we were able to get together for good quality equipment, we were in much better shape than we would otherwise have been in, but we were still at a disadvantage.

For other reasons we ended up not doing the race and getting out of Cloud City as fast as we could, after we killed Lando and took his ship — with the assistance of Lobot.

But I do really appreciate that our GM was straightforward and honest with us. I think that means more to me than anything else.

My players just found the entire idea of entering the race to be absurd for a group trying to stay under the radar. They figured that it would be far easier to simply forge invites to the gala and rely on the high Deception skill of the party face to pull them through.

Okay, I finally got a handle on the scoring. All comes down to speed! This is cool, I am enjoying the NPCs, especially "Tearing Racer" and his rivalry with the pompous Mr. Hunn

My players spent a significant amount of time making plans to win the race.

For starters, they poured a significant amount of credits into modifying the Cloud Car and with an expert mechanic on the team, they gained a significant advantage there.

On the first day, they invited Carbine to a Private game of Sabaak at Vorse Tabariath's Cassino using their connection were they plied him with drinks and cheated him. Eventually they talked him into betting the keys to his cloud car. After Carbine lost a fight broke out and they arranged for him to be arrested and incarcerated until the race was over. Later on that night they broke in and stole the Cloud Car as it was still being guarded by a few Hutt Cartel guys. Once they stole the Hutt Cartell's speeder they arranged to have it destroyed since they figured it was too hot to actually hold on to.

While practicing for the race the PCs challenged Garrel Hunn to a friendly bet. Being a Corellian and the fact that the PCs passed the charm check to convince him, he readily agreed. The mechanic in the party passed a Bad Motivator check to cause Garrel Hunn and Chara Thul's Cloud Car to spontaneously fail. They were about to fall below Bespin's habitable zone and failed their mechanics checks to restart their engine. Furthermore their attempts to repair to the cloud car involved a despair. However, they were rescued by the PCs who matched speeds with them during the descent and pulled them out of the car as it was falling to Bespin's surface with with excellent coordination and pulled Chara Thull and Garrel Hunn to safety and an uncomfortable lap ride back to Cloud City. With only a day to go until the race began, Garrel Hunn and Chara Thull weren't able to get new Cloud Car in time for the race and were forced to sit out, but they owed the PCs for saving their lives and the PCs would collect on that debt later as a back-up plan for getting off of Cloud City after the heist (which was necessary because they intended to betray Arend Shen from the beginning, however their original plan to get off the station failed.)

After Carbine and Garrel Huun were both eliminated from the race, the odds spiked up local underdog Tarryn Razer. They straight up planted a bomb on Tarryn Razer's Cloud Car. Since they were pressed for time, all pretense of subtlety went out the window. They planted a proximity detonator on the 5th Buoy without knowing how long the race was going to be, or how the track layout was going to turn out I even threw in extra Buoys which weren't being used for the face. Turns out that was right next to a bunch of Beldon they didn't know were going to be there. Not only did Tarryn Razer die in a firery explosion, but said explosion a nearby Beldon to detonate in a giant fireball which damaged some of the other cars in the race pretty substantially, although the PCs managed to evade the explosion

On top of that, the creatures and various obstacles on the track took their toll on the other racers. By the time everything was said and done, not only had the PCs managed to finish first, but they also were the only Cloud Car to successfully complete the Grand Prix that year.

You know I can't help worrying that the spectators will be a little disappointed with how few cars / pilots actually survive to compete on race day. It sounds like they'd have more fun watching the actual build up to it.

Finally won the race. Dedicated the victory to Tearing Racer, who as tragically killed by a Velker. I'm going to walk this race again soon

Our GM gave control of the NPCs over to 2 of us while he took the others and my NPC just made every single roll. We came in 2nd but only because I couldnt miss.