I would really love to play a couple of sessions of this game with the devs so I can see how they envision this game. It can really be frustrating some times for me. I cannot find a comfortable way of playing the game. I will try to explain.

We met last Saturday to play a couple of sessions (8 hours). It was me, the GM, and six players. The PCs have 200+ XPs, which means that most skills are covered with 2, 3 or even 4 expertise dice. This means that a lot of symbols come out every dice roll. Just to mention a few outcomes we had, things like 4+ advantages, one triumph (even two at a time!), a triumph and a despair at the same time, are not uncommon outcomes. It can be very exhausting, especially taking into account that triumphs (or 5 advantages) and despairs are expected to mean something significant to the scene (according to the rules).

In my sessions I already keep the rolls to the minimum.

I never ask for everybody in the group to roll for things like Perception, Stealth, etc. I ask for the best (or the worst) PC in the group to the roll, aided by another PC if they want. If every single PC rolls, it becomes just impossible (for us) or silly to implement into the story all the triumphs, advantages, despairs... in a single action.

I only ask for a skill check when it is very significant to the plot. Otherwise I say, you succeed.

Yet, there are situations where I cannot go around. Last session there was a chase. The PCs freighter vs 4 ties. Every one of the PCs was doing something each turn (as it must be), piloting, plotting course, damage control, slice enemy ship... That is 6 skill checks per round (the chase lasted 3 or 4 rounds). It was so **** frustrating! There was no round with where we did not see one or two triumphs, a despair, zillions of advantages... There was even one skill check with two triumphs, two advantages and a despair! We really got fed up of it and we just started ignoring it.

On the other hand, the chase ended up with the PCs freighter getting shot down to 0 HT by the last tie. I then told the PCs to do the Hard Mechanics check to keep the ship alive (the standard one appearing in the rules). We defined which would be the meaning of the different symbols if they would appear on the outcome of the roll. That roll turned up very epic, we managed to interpret all the symbols to create a very nice and dramatic moment. It was definitively a top moment of the session. Yet, it was not because of the dice, it was because the story was dramatic at that moment, the dice adjusted wonderfully that is true, but the dramatism of the moment was brought by the story built by players and GM.

I like the idea of the system, but a game session cannot soak that many symbols! The way we play, sometimes it is enough to know if your character succeeds or fails, point! We don't need to turn every roll into a story by itself. The rolls have to help us defining the story, but I feel sometimes they interfere too much with the flow. On the other hand, as with the example of the mechanics test, the dice played wonderfully.

How do you guys play? I need ideas, some help.

How do you guys play? I need ideas, some help.

If a ton of dice is the issue, it might be too late for this advice - but you should encourage spreading out, not up. A balance of talents from the tree and a good spread of dice should nip problems like that in the bud. My group is just slightly south of 400 points and I think the highest dice anyone has is a 3 in one skill. Otherwise, it's an assortment of more trees, talents and skills all over the map.

How to fix it? Perhaps talking to the group, saying "Hey, we're running into this issue. Who don't we dial back the dice and work the talents for a while?" and let them respec a bit. Not all the dice or anything drastic like that, just file the razors edge off.

Just a thought. . . .

put your enemies about where your PCs are, and you'll start to see less advantages and stuff, as they will.cancel out more. honestly, having more powerful characters shouldn't be a chore or something bad for your players. that chase shouldn't have been frustrating for your players, it should have been "look how awesome we are." this is one of the reasons we play, to do things we can't do in real life.if it does become too much for you, you can use their triumphs to end something. like in the chase, 2triumphs, you catch up with him.

if this is a big issue for you, though, I do have a couple of ideas: it sounds.like.they have.bought very heavily into skills. you could encourage.them to put more into trees, or get new trees. that will diffuse later XP. secondly, you could go.the mutants and masterminds rout and not give any. this is cinema, and not all characters get better. spider man, captain America, chewbacca.they don't become more powerful.

ultimately, this is a situation that arises in any game where you can leve up. players get too powerful for the gms liking. approach it like you would any other game. give more powerful enemies and start using the terrain to give set back dice. for instance, in that chase, a fruit cart could have given one, or if they hit it, slowed them down.

Advantage: Don't be afraid to use advantage on Boost and Setback dice (particularly the latter). These can burn a lot of advantage very quickly. In the chase example, It would take eight to give every Tie 1 setback.

Triumph: The book's fluff really oversells what a Triumph should do. Achieving a Triumph should tip the balance of the encounter in your favor, but doesn't have to radically change it or be an I-win. Consider it more like a super-advantage. In one particularly triumph-heavy combat, our enemies (who had night vision) kept shooting out lights, and we (who did not) kept lighting the room again. It actually made for quite a memorable combat. We've also used it to upgrade enemy difficulties or other significant but not crazy bonuses. In many cases they can also become longer-lasting Advantages (everyone gets a blue, or one person gets a blue for the rest of the encounter.)

Dispair: I like to make dispair results cost money, often in the form of loosing equipment or taking hull damage. I've also often used them for negative environmental shifts. (Everyone gets a black, or one player gets a black for the rest of the encounter)

(As an aside, there is a 16% chance of getting a Triumph on 2 dice, and 23% on 3 dice)

Despair can also bring in reinforcements.

Upping the power level of your adversaries will help.

Thing a like the adversary talent also help.

Liberal use of setbacks will encourage talent purchases and will cut down on advantages.

Thanks, I am taking notes

A few comments though:

- Setback dice won't cut down the number of triumphs, they will cancel success and advantages though. I think I throw them there quite often (but I give also advantage dice for good ideas and the like)

- Actually, upping the power level of adversaries... Does not it also mean more triumphs? Now, I won't only have a lot of triumphs from the PCs side, but also from the NPC side!

- Indeed, if the PCs will spread over other specialisations, their advancement in some skills will be slower. I see this will do the trick, but... How can I motivate them to do it? They of course want to have good characters and rising skills is the quick way to go. Notice that I have 6 players (at least! sometimes 7 or 8) and they are very complementary. The group is very well balanced, which makes the need of a single character spreading over different talent trees minimum. What my PC are doing is investing in their talent tree, rise career skills, and then cover some gaps in their characters (like combat skills, pilot, resilience etc.) by paying the extra price rising non-career skills.

- I like it. May be lessening the "relevance" of triumphs is the way to go.

In my experience, the FFG Star Wars Roleplaying games have tended to be optimized for four to five players, or less. So, having more than five players is more likely to bog things down a bit and make it more difficult for the GM to keep up.

The other place that the FFG SWRPGs fall down is in the “fistful of dice” area. If the PCs have too many attributes that are really high, and have really high skills to match, then they tend to be throwing so many dice that the game starts to get unbalanced.

Seems to me like you have both of these problems.

For problem #1, the only solution I can think of is to find ways to split the party up, so that you can be dealing with two smaller parties instead of one huge one.

For problem #2, there are some ways that you can address the issue.

First off, hand out a lot of setback dice, and do so frequently. This won’t curb the Triumph/Despair problem, but will somewhat reduce the amount of excessive Success & Advantage, and encourage the players to put points into talents that remove setback dice.

Secondly, if they’re really talented and really skilled in an area, I would try to find ways to avoid having them roll dice — just narrate the outcome based on their roleplaying and how you think the NPCs would react. Try to keep the dice rolling to areas in which they aren’t so good, or where the character that is the best at something is detained or otherwise engaged somewhere else, and so the others have to step up and fill in. This also encourages them to start spending points in other areas, because they’re already good enough that they aren’t rolling very often for their main areas of expertise.

Third, give the NPCs multiple ranks of Adversary and other talents that make it a lot more difficult for the PCs to just steamroller them.

Fourth, if you Increase or Decrease pools instead of Upgrading or Downgrading them, then you’re adding or removing a green or purple die, instead of swapping a green for a yellow, or swapping a purple for a red. So, you still make it more or less difficult, but you do so in a way that avoids the higher likelihood of Triumph/Despair. In this game, it is a really good skill to have to know when to Upgrade vs. Increase and Downgrade vs. Decrease the respective pools.

Fifth, and this is way outside the rules, but if you want to resolve the issue of too many Triumphs combined with too many Despairs, is to have two of one type cancel out one of the other type. So, two Triumphs and one Despair could be turned into just one Triumph. Likewise, two Despairs and one Triumph could be turned into just one Despair. A normal Triumph+Despair combination don’t cancel each other out, but that doesn’t mean you can’t create a house rule to help reduce the amount of excessive Triumphs and Despairs that you get in a single result.

Just some ideas off the top of my head.

I guess the first thing is to not give the Triumphs and Despairs undue importance. Sure, they're talked up as "game changing" in the book, but that's for fresh characters who are itching just to get one every blue moon. Otherwise they can be subtle. In a combat situation I've found it's pretty easy to narrate a reason a triumph helps a different player in the group by upgrading their roll, and narrate a reason for the player to lose a round in the next turn because of a despair. It really doesn't have to be more complicated than that unless you're suddenly inspired by previous events or future goals. IOW, don't try too hard to make every triumph or despair an amazing narrative experience. Save it for when it matters.

Last game we had a brief space combat (I always keep mine brief, and almost always treat them like chases). A player wanted to fire a warning shot across the bow of some pirates chasing them...success, with triumph and despair. So the triumph was that the other pilot flinched and lost ground, but the despair was that the auto blaster turret overheated, so he couldn't fire next turn...basically an Out of Ammo result, adapted for the situation.

Oh — another idea regarding dice rolls.

When possible, make it so that dice rolls are not about outright success or failure, but how long it takes to be successful at achieving the goal, and whether or not that fits within an appropriate situational time limit — it’s not “Do you open the door”, it becomes “Do you open the door before the security patrol comes around to find you trying to hack the lock”?

In the latter situation, a “failure” on the roll then leads to a different circumstance which they could then still get through the door — maybe they convince the guard that they actually belong there and just lost their keys, or maybe they get taken prisoner, or maybe they take out the guard and steal his keys. Or maybe they take the guard out, he doesn’t have any keys, and they get another attempt at cracking the door, but now if they don’t get it in time then there will be a whole squad of guards that they have to deal with.

Try to always give yourself a way to “fail forward”, if a given roll is not successful.

If you can change your way of thinking in that respect, that may also help give you room to handle the opposite situation where you set up a situation that should theoretically be impossible for them (and where for narrative reasons you wouldn't want them to succeed), and yet they still succeed anyway.

I have 5 players in my group, soon to be 6 and they're all very high level now (been playing since release). I think the way I've dealt with it the best is just by downgrading the importance of triumphs and despair. A triumph doesn't have to be a game changing thing. It can be as simple as "you unleash a barrage of well place shots into your foes, seeing your accuracy their resolve wavers and be minion group increases the difficulty of their next check". Where as a second triumph could turn into "your enemies shaken moral has also left them less aware of your nearby ally leveling his gun in their direction, upgrade his next check once".
Secondly put some of the narrative weight on the players, by this I mean let them come up with ideas on how they want to spend their triumph and advantages and if it's not to absurd then roll with it. I printed out small advantage/triumph charts on cards for each player which I told them is just a guideline for how much mechanical value each symbol is worth.
Advantages are easier to deal with, tougher bad guys and jobs means more difficulty dice and narrative wise it makes sense that a group known for being really good at what they do are going to be hired by people with tougher jobs looking for someone of their skill level while those with easier jobs likely won't think they can afford to pay for the players help or make it worth their time when they don't need Hero's but just someone to clear out a cave of Mynoks.

Oh — another idea regarding dice rolls.

When possible, make it so that dice rolls are not about outright success or failure, but how long it takes to be successful at achieving the goal, and whether or not that fits within an appropriate situational time limit — it’s not “Do you open the door”, it becomes “Do you open the door before the security patrol comes around to find you trying to hack the lock”?

Yes, this helps indeed, The Burning Wheel approach. For some skills / situations I find it very easy to do, like with Computers, Mechanics, Skulduggery... For others, like Perception, I find it more difficult to define the "side effects".

Oh — another idea regarding dice rolls.

When possible, make it so that dice rolls are not about outright success or failure, but how long it takes to be successful at achieving the goal, and whether or not that fits within an appropriate situational time limit — it’s not “Do you open the door”, it becomes “Do you open the door before the security patrol comes around to find you trying to hack the lock”?

Yes, this helps indeed, The Burning Wheel approach. For some skills / situations I find it very easy to do, like with Computers, Mechanics, Skulduggery... For others, like Perception, I find it more difficult to define the "side effects".

A few idea's for perception.

Let's say a group of badguys is waiting to ambush them. A success just tells them the enemies there, they see the top of their head peaking over a box or their shadows cast against a wall or something. A few Advantage might tell them how many are waiting, whilst several advantage might tell them some of the gear they have while a triumph lets them react before the enemy can or make their presence known to all their allies even if they failed their own roles, or perhaps a few triumph not only lets them do that but also tells them exactly who they are and why they're after them or even allows them to divert direction before the enemy even knows their there leaving them waiting in ambush for players that now can avoid the trap.

If your group has very high skill levels and/or characteristics it's perfectly justifiable to introduce them to more difficult adventures. Instead of breaking into some low-level thug's apartment (Average: Skulduggery to bypass the lock) they're breaking into the home of someone who can afford state-of-the-art security systems - Hard or Daunting Skulduggery checks, with 2-4 setback dice for darkness, tension due to nearby guards, or whatever.

My point is, if there's too many Advantages/Triumphs floating around, introduce more negative dice to cancel them out. As the characters get better, the challenges get tougher.

Also, let the person who rolled the dice come up with stuff to spend his Advantage or Triumph on. The GM takes care of Threat and Despair. When the GM rolls, it's the other way around. In a narrative system like this it's not only OK to dump some of the workload onto the PCs, it's actively encouraged.

When describing a scene i try to hold back some information, to trickle out when the inevitable advantage are rolled even during combat.

Another tactic i use during encounters is the "Cheap Minions" aka the Dynasty Warriors approach, minions where some of the best rules introduced in this game (I used them a lot in WFRP3E!). A triumph will remove a single minion from a group, if there are 3 groups of 8-10 weak minions with practically no skills then thats 24-30 triumphs that can be soaked from a combat or even social encounter (Rowdy crowd disrupting the tense negotiations between party and merchant).

Remember that a minion group won't upgrade every check by n-1 upgrades, only the skills you give to them (not usually combat skills for me, but great way to have an npc slot go first in initiative with vigilance, or hard to persuade with Discipline). there pool will still be limited to a maximum number of yellow equal to the relevant stat, with a total pool no greater than 6 ability/proficiency. essentially once you go over 7 minions in a group then all your adding is extra wounds for extra staying power.

Also remember their wounds are counted together, if they have 5 wounds each with 3 soak and a PC does 15 damage then the whole minion group takes 12 damage, removing 2 minions and reducing 1 minion to 3 wounds. if that same roll had 2 triumphs then thats 4 minions removed with 1 wounded. thats a lot of effort just to get rid of 4 minions out of the 30 or so in an encounter.

I really like the roll for quick success method too, talents that make a character perform actions faster (e.g. Technical Aptitude) suddenly become useful, but only in the right circumstances.

Lots of Setback is great too, encourages talent purchase, gratifies they player when they get to say "Nope, not 4 setback for me, only 2!"

Basically everything everyone else is saying!

With 6 players and about 24 skills if each player specialised in 4 skills with 2/3+ there is pretty much every skill covered at a reasonably high rank. So just in a pure mathematical sense you are going to face a situation where players have the roll covered.

In my thoughts I keep seeing situations where you have to create two groups and split the players up. Perhaps the slicer and a bodyguard have to work their way into a facility here to deactivate the alarms and allow the players over there to do something.

Then while the second group gets to enter facility B the slicer and the bodyguard have to run a chase as a diversion then swing by and collect the group for a clean getaway.

You could also try and have a guest GM each session and have the players take it in turns of being a helper. This may take a little extra work as you will have to build up the help they are giving more than you would for yourself. For example if you have help running the slicer/bodyguard you may need a map and some encounter notes.

If you can’t get the helper GM, then as long as you pace the action and scene changes fairly well the players should end up getting equal(ish) amounts of your time and may find the session more enjoyable.

Yeah, we're a big group (8-9 player if everyone's there) but we have a SOP that involves splitting the party, and most of us have gotten used to writing that into our adventures. It's almost never optimal to keep everyone together except for a few critical scenes. This means nearly every skill needs two people who are decent at it, so most of us are specialized, but also spread out on secondary skills, and a lot of the great stories come from using these secondaries.

We have also often stopped rolling for Average difficulties for people with YYY or better sets. At that point unless it's story-critical to know how well they succeeded, the roll doesn't do much. Though on occasion, particularly for S1R1 (our scholar droid with 3 in every knowledge) we've done "roll for Triumph" tests to see if he happens to know the particularly useful piece of information, which makes those three Yellows still feel worthwhile.

With 6 players and about 24 skills if each player specialised in 4 skills with 2/3+ there is pretty much every skill covered at a reasonably high rank. So just in a pure mathematical sense you are going to face a situation where players have the roll covered.

In my thoughts I keep seeing situations where you have to create two groups and split the players up. Perhaps the slicer and a bodyguard have to work their way into a facility here to deactivate the alarms and allow the players over there to do something.

Then while the second group gets to enter facility B the slicer and the bodyguard have to run a chase as a diversion then swing by and collect the group for a clean getaway.

You could also try and have a guest GM each session and have the players take it in turns of being a helper. This may take a little extra work as you will have to build up the help they are giving more than you would for yourself. For example if you have help running the slicer/bodyguard you may need a map and some encounter notes.

If you can’t get the helper GM, then as long as you pace the action and scene changes fairly well the players should end up getting equal(ish) amounts of your time and may find the session more enjoyable.

Great technique, comlinks can also be a good explanation as to why they all know whats happening even when separated, less Meta Gaming

True true! Splitting the party!

I do it, but not often enough! I guess that is because I have typically been a GM in fantasy games where splitting the party involves a lot of meta gaming, but here we have comlinks true!

I think also, a problem I have is that "in theory" I know better how to handle the system, but afterwards, in the heat of the game, I forget some of these "tricks". It is mainly because I want to resolve the dice pools outcomes fast in order to move on with the story.

I am taking notes (literally) of the ideas here. I will keep try to remember them for next time. I think the one that works better for me is defining the skill check in more depth before rolling.

A bit offtopic but, anyone here also supports the idea that would be awesome a Youtube (or other alternative) video with the developers playing a few game sessions and that this will help us a lot to interpretate the game system mechanics from their point of view?

For me it will be useful to see such a video, specially with a table of 5 players and 1 GM

This is a narrative system, that means that all rolls give opportunity to contribute to the story.

Even if they succeeded in most rolls, some rolls that provide Threat or Advantage, tell something about the action... Perception and Stealth, as in your example, can have interesting results to spot extra stuff or provide wrong details (Perception), or being uncovered by someone else that isn't the target (Stealth) ...