I thought, for some ideas about using Triumph and Despair, we could share the times we've used either to brighten or ruin someone's day during a game. I'm not really looking for uses of Critical Hits, but things described during a really good skill use. (Critical HIts are still cool though)

Personally, I can remember two:

During a skiff race, through a long cavernous tunnel, our skiff was side-by-side with another. The passengers on their skiff were trading shots with the passengers on our skiff. My character Mina, the pilot, had to make a Piloting (Planetary) skill check to avoid the opponent's skiff careening off of the cavern wall. Rolling a Triumph, I declared that not only did we avoid the crashing skiff, but I rolled the ship in a circle using the walls and ceiling to escape disaster.

Another use was leaping out of a tree with my Cathar Marauder Force-Sensitive, J'Gira. Latching onto the back of this 8' tall alien being who was advancing with his troops on my team mates' position. During his turn, the GM did an opposed Athletics roll against my character and came up with a Despair, even though he succeeded in throwing J'Gira off of him. Using the Despair as her Triumph, J'Gira hit the ground on her feet and looked up at the alien. Clutched in her hand, was the alien's ear piece that he was using to communicate to his troops. J'Gira crushed it in her hand and lept back up into the trees, leaving that alien without the ability to coordinate with his troops.

3 Triumphs tossing a mini thermal detonator..............boom...............

In my Force & Destiny game, we had our stealthy character sneakily following a spice dealer the party just chased off. His Stealth check rolled a success, but with a Despair.

So the spice dealer didn't notice him, but he did feel a hand on his shoulder as he was confronted by two Stormtroopers asking him what his business was. This led to some fun roleplay and attempts to charm and deceive the troopers.

Got a Despair result on a successful Piloting (Planetary) check, which also turned out to be the final roll I needed to escape what was left of the pursuing bad guys on their speeder bikes (having a sniper with blaster rifle picking the closest of the group off helped).

I pull up to the waiting (and stolen) Imperial shuttle in the rent-a-wreck speeder, and just I and the NPC I was ferrying step out... the speeder falls apart Blues Brothers style

Got a Despair result on a successful Piloting (Planetary) check, which also turned out to be the final roll I needed to escape what was left of the pursuing bad guys on their speeder bikes (having a sniper with blaster rifle picking the closest of the group off helped).

I pull up to the waiting (and stolen) Imperial shuttle in the rent-a-wreck speeder, and just I and the NPC I was ferrying step out... the speeder falls apart Blues Brothers style

Repost...

"Sometimes I like to use despair for less immediate effect.

Recently one of my players (A bounty hunter) was tailing an extremely cautious suspect and rolled a despair. I told him casually to not worry about it but secretly the real acquisition spotted his character and the next day was waiting with his gang to ambush her.

She and her partner got out but only after an epic barroom brawl and a mad chase."

When trying to get a runaway and her boyfriend to return to where they came from, a Triumph and Despair were both rolled on a check to persuade them to return home. As a result, the girl believed our group completely and agreed to return home but the boyfriend went ballistic and swore to never return with us! Had to 'off' the boyfriend and take the girl back.

In another case, rolled a Despair on a shot to free the hostage. Of course, hit the hostage.

So, we’re tired of having Teemo or his goons on our ass, and we’ve decided that we have to take him out. We’ve managed to crash our way in through the back door, and fight through a couple waves of Gamorrean guards. We’re fighting the third wave, and finding them much tougher. Our whole party keeps shooting them, but they just don’t go down.

My Wookiee Marauder decides to charge into combat, with vibro-axe raised high. His best friend (a Klatooinian Heavy) fires into the group, and wouldn’t you know it — rolls a Despair. He rolled enough success and advantage that he got a lot of damage, and multiple shots from his auto-fire rifle. And one of those shots hits my Wookiee.

I think that remains the largest amount of damage that my Wookiee has ever suffered in a single attack. He’s still friends with the Klatooinian, but rare is the game night when he doesn’t get a reminder that he managed to shoot my Wookiee in the back.

[ EDIT: Fix typo ]

My group was running the airspeeder race from Jewel of Yavin, and in the final leg while neck and neck for the lead, the PC pilot rolled a triumph, several successes and a despair. I had the two rubbing up against each other, having the frames lock together, one engine shut off, sending the pair into a flat spin crossing the finish line, PC's first. Then they hit the wall. Kindof hard on the craft, but everyone walked away with the PC's in first place.

Last night my politico, running for local City Council on the planet the crew is currently calling home, was in the final debate before the elections against her opponent. She rolled a despair . . . and suddenly was Nixon to his Kennedy, thanks to some bad food just an hour before. Half way through she had to flee the stage with the Hershey Squirts and utterly destroyed the auditorium bathroom - with her mic still live and broadcasting every moment.

Not her most stellar moment. . . .

A customs official manages a failure with a triumph while searching for weapons...

In yesterday's game a missed shot at a pirates YT-1300 combined with a Triumph and 4 advantage hit and blew up a sattelite that was beind the freighter. Shrapnel entered the ship's engine reducing it's top speed by 1 for the remainder of the encounter.

Autofire, some people can't help but do it.

I know they can't help it, so I always love to pop in a DS point to make the Despair outcome even worse than it normally is. Had PC's shoot their 'friends' in the back for about 20pts of damage, shot up a navigation computer and once managed to blow off someone's arm.

Its great, most of the time they hurt themselves more than the mooks do.

In one game my players were attempting to defend a small and hopelessly defensless mining camp. While at the camp, the raiders attacked and one of the players thought he could use some of the mining equipment as an impromptu tank of sorts. Under fire, tackling the controls of a foriegn vehicle, I had them toss a red die and they succeded, but with a despair. He gained control of the vehicle, but while wrestling with the controls he ran over a nearby dwelling and killed the occupents.

Another player thought this was a great idea, so tried the same idea. Succeded with a despair. He gained control of the machine, but the enemy hit the fuel line. Fuel started spilling out and started on fire. As it was behind the drivers location, I had him and the rest of the team roll checks each round to see if they noticed the fire. They all continually failed this check. Round three had the machine explode in a ball of flame. Had anyone noticed, he could have escaped, but they kept failing! Sad part was he used it to block a road in the town to provide a defensive point, so when it blew, it took out more buildings/miners/civilians.

They won the fight, but the miners weren't too happy. They destroyed one piece of mining equipment and heavily damaged another. They also killed many a civilian miner/family members (although not intentionally) and destroyed several structures. They were shunned by the community after that, some even believing they were in league with the raiders. The players were hoping to get some vital info from the miners, so it was a bit of a setback.

In another adventure, the players decided they were too weak to finish off the Hutt in combat. So they had an idea to fly their ship into the palace hopefully killing him (while using the escape pods to escape the destruction). They used a lightside point to upgrade their chances. I had them pick the part of the building they were targetting and had worked out a system to determine how accurate they were. Minor succes would have hit the palace, but not where they were aiming. High success would have been hitting the exact spot they were aiming for (the 'throne' room).

They ended up with 1 success and the triumph after all things were considered. So they hit the palace, but missed the throne room. But the triumph was utilized by the crash hitting a major support structure of the palace and the entire thing end up collapsing in on itself killing the Hutt anyways.

It was such a great scenematic moment. The three sketchy 'heroes' with their faces smushed up to the 1 viewport of the escape pod watching their freighter plummet towards the palace. Getting more and more excited as it appears to be staying on target. Then sorrow as it hits the palace, but in the wrong spot. Smoke and dust starts to settle. Then the rest of the palace begins to collapse followed by the cheering of the small band of misfits in the pod. Only then did the despair set in as they realized they just blew up their only way off planet.

Seriously, they were so phyched about their plan that they hadn't considered that part.

"Wait a minute. That was our ship, what are we going to do now?."

"Oh crap, I hadn't thought about that."

"Who idea was this anyways?"

Had an interesting one last weekend. The setting is the Sith/Republic Cold War (that just turned into a shooting war again). The characters are heading to the deep core to investigate some old ruins they found on a previous trip. Normally I dont have them roll the astrogation rolls except when things get a bit hairy, like traversing the Deep Core. So, had them roll against two reds and a purple.

The result? Success with two triumphs and a despair. Hmmmm, what to do with that. . .

Ah! "So, with the first triumph, you find a reasonably fast and safe corridor that was previously unknown and not on any of the charts. The despair is that during one of the navigation way-point stops, you come out of hyperspace smack dab in the middle of a Sith invasion fleet, heading for Courscant. With the other triumph, you can escape without taking too much enemy fire, get back to Courscant JUST in time and warn them that hell is coming."

Not a huge change to my storyline, but I thought it was a cool simultaneous use of triumph and despair.

From the other day: I had some large spiders nesting in the intersection of a ruined city, one of the PCs got stung. I had been hoping for a lingering effect, but the player averted the immediate effects even with their feeble GG Resilience dice roll (against RRP which completely blanked). The medic didn't have time to look at it, they had to bolt. Later I said he was still feeling woozy from the poison, and to make another Resilience roll. This time he flips a DP, and the medic (whose dice pool is YYGGB) asked if he could look at it too. After two Triumps and several advantages, the player looks at me and says "I guess I'm immune to spider poison from now on?"

Can't say no to that

In my campaign, Despairs generated by PCs tend to have a positive effect down the road because they alter the direction the adventure is going in. For example:

The PCs were infiltrating a star destroyer to rescue the members of a mercenary band working for the Rebellion which also happened to be the group our Wookiee used to run with (he was fiercely loyal to his old captain). They arrived on a stolen Imperial patrol craft and the group’s twi’lek Mystic (robes and all) wanted to pass herself off as an Inquisitor. They didn’t want anyone to search the ship since… well, taking it was an extremely bloody affair and the inside was a mess, complete with grenade blasts, decapitated stormtrooper bodies (hey, there’s a Wookiee in the group), and a terrified Imperial crewman locked in a cabin. They were met by a non-nonsense Imperial officer and a contingent of stormtroopers who wanted to know why the patrol vessel was late in arriving. Keep in mind that they were on the main flight deck of the star destroyer, and there were literally hundreds of Imperials around, including marching companies of stormtroopers, TIE fighters preparing for patrols, etc. If something went wrong, the mission could go south really quick.

The twi’lek rolled her charm and succeeded, but with a Despair. The entire group did a “gulp” at the same time. Thinking quickly, I had the officer convinced that the twi’lek was, indeed, an Inquisitor, so much so that he immediate contacted the actual chief Inquisitor on the ship (who was the group’s nemesis du jour and was part of the twi’lek’s backstory) and told him that one of his contingent had arrived.

“I am not expecting…” Pause as the Inquisitor uses the Force and detects the twi’lek Mystic. In a much more sinister tone, “Send them directly to me.”

Panic ensues amongst the PCs, of course, as the officer escorts them all to a waiting hover platform with two apprentice Inquisitors and two red-robed Royal guards on board, ready to take them to their doom. As the hover platform begins to rise several stories within the cavernous interior of the star destroyer, lightsabers and force pikes are drawn and a very cool and epic battle commences, hundreds of feet in the air on this flying platform.

They somehow manage to subdue the escorts without anyone falling off the platform and are eventually able to use the guard robes to disguise themselves and gain entry to the detention block. As it turns out, the Despair took the adventure into a direction that I wasn’t even anticipating, and ended up making the rescue easier than they had anticipated. They also managed to bring one of the apprentices back with them for Alliance interrogation, and the twi’lek had a sit-down with him and tried to swing him back to the light side of the Force. To top it off, they escaped (with help from an arriving-at-the-last-minute Alliance fleet; had to have a deus-ex-machina moment) in the chief Inquisitor’s decked-out Lambda shuttle.

Of course, there were repercussions to this fiasco that the Inquisitor had to deal with. Those can be found in a story I wrote as a follow up to this adventure:

The Power of the Dark Side

It alludes to some other past events, but you’ll get the gist of the story

A brief use of a Triumph:

I want to think it was the Jewel of Yavin module we were running. There was a point where part of our team was invited to board a taxi speeder to meet with some associates, and the characters that boarded happened to be our face and doctor characters, as well as my bounty hunter. As we're riding along, we discover a larger-than-strictly-necessary explosive charge with it's timer down in the single digits. We'd pretty much blown every check to notice the thing until the GM graciously had us hit some turbulence, had a panel fall, and expose the device to give us time to bail out. Without missing a beat, our face (Very new to RPG gaming) says, "I'm gonna use Cool and whack the bomb like the Fonze would." The doc and I both state very matter-of-factly that we'd like to get off the ride now, but the GM gives the face some ridiculous difficulty for his check, and says "roll it."

One success, from the triumph.

Face: "Aaaaaaayeeeee."

Triumph on a stealth check for an Ewok sneaking past several Stormtroopers up into a Lambda shuttle in the middle of combat/being chased by others.

Things tend to get very hilarious when the group comes up with suggestions for dice adjudication so in this case, the player closed the ramp to the Lambda. In the process, he asked if the Troopers were still standing guard at the ramp. I said yes. One of the troopers was slowly picked up and crushed by the ramp.

I feel like I need to create some sort of Darwin awards for the most ridiculous deaths.

My party is on Tatooine in an X-34 landspeeder chasing a guy on a speeder bike. The chase scene ends with a successful piloting check that also had two despairs and a triumph. So a rock column gets hit and tipped over as they pass the speeder bike, landing on both craft (two despairs), as the people are all flung forward into the sand relatively safely (triumph). They continue running down the canyon after the guy, away from angry Tusken Raiders (from an earlier despair) and head into a cave. Inside the cave, a despair is rolled, so I add in a nest of Sand Panthers (I don't remember if those live on Tatooine but it's moot). They blitz past the angry critters and out into the desert again. This time, on the run from the angry kitties athletics checks, two despairs are rolled collectively. So the whole group of people, angry kitties, and fate tumble down a sand dune after each other, and wake up a sleeping krayt dragon. Which promptly leads to everything running away from the krayt. Into a herd of Reeks (yet another despair). At this point, the krayt bags itself a reek and leaves everyone alone (triumph), the herd is on the stampede, one of the players is riding a panther gloriously (triumph), one is hanging on to a panther's tail, another is unconscious and draped over a reek's tusk, the guy they were after is clinging to the side of a reek. The stampede hits Anchorhead (where they landed) and pretty much destroys the settlement and wrecks the party's ship. As all 4 of them (party and guy) are now the subject of much hate and anger from the residents, they end up fleeing aboard his ship. Collectively I think the group (players and GM) rolled 11 or so despairs over the entire session, and a half dozen or so triumphs. It was a blast of pure shenanigans and everyone had fun.

Our part-time game involves a wing of starfighter pilots who patrol the 'Warrens', a sector of space clustered with nebulae, black holes, and hyperspace anomalies. Needless to say, this makes navigation difficult, and only practical by jumping from one hyperspace nav beacon to the next.

The party was navigating their fighters through a cluster of space junk, leading a freighter to the exit point from that area marked by a beacon.

One player, keeps racking up the Threat, and is busy dealing with 3 flocks of mynocks, when he rolls a Despair. I've never seen such an 'oh s#!t' look on someones face, as when I told him that the mynocks suddenly took off at top speed, leaving him completely alone. It turns out, full-grown, *mobile* space slugs don't get along with mynocks. Three turns later, he rolled a Triumph *and* a Despair, and was more than a little confused when I told him that *another* space slug had appeared on his sensors. (It turned into a territorial dispute, and they had to get the freighter out of harm's way, but the first slug was no longer focused on *them*.)

In my game, one of my players plays a Droid Hired Gun/Heavy & Gadgeteer, who carries a heavy repeating blaster, obviously, he is one of the two main combat characters (They are all around 400 xp so nobody is a real slouch in combat but he's one of the stars). They are in the middle of stealing a hyperdrive for their derelict Venator Class Star Destroyer (thank you forums) off a mag-lev train on Corellia that was destined for a Victory Class that was undergoing a refit. So they are on this train full of stormtroopers and the BBEG Inquisitor and two of his minion Inquisitors. So long story short, he's on the roof of the train as the three Inquisitors are sprinting towards them on the top of this train, and so he pulls out his HRB and unleashes hell, Rain of Death, Heavy Hitter, its his knockout punch, and he rolls really well getting a triumph to activate Heavy Hitter but not enough advantage to activate auto-fire, but, up comes a despair and of course my Inquistors have Improved Reflect, so all that damage at Breach 1 no less comes right back at him and he gets KO'd with his own blaster.

I was GM'ing Jewel of Yavin and my players simply couldn't hack the security droid. (Seriously, they tried two of them!) So they decided to go to the bank and simply rob it with a thermal detonator. On the way out the PC with the thermal detonator threw it into the bank and rolled despair.

It turned out that he wasn't out of range when it went off and triggered the second one on his belt. The result was a large hole through three floors of cloud city and a casualty rate of 500 people.

During Saturday's game, I had a player roll both a Triumph and two Despairs during an Athletics check. The result was one of the most interesting sequences during the game. The PC managed to swing himself at a 90-degree angle, off of a platform, around a corner into a control booth while crashing through a window. But three modified cam-droid bombs followed him into the booth and exploded in his face.