I am running the Jewel of Yavin with a new group of PCs that are also newer to Tabletop RPGs. I have several years of role playing and GM experience mostly from Dungeons and Dragons, but I have run a few games of EOTE prior. After reading the adventure I was surprised at the combat to RP ratio. To me, more RP is really cool, but has anyone else added more combat? I've already added in a couple of combat encounters because I think it helps my group coming from board/strategy games. Would you mind sharing some outside the publication combat encounters to get my creative juices going? Even some of your RP encounters would be cool to hear! I think If I ran the book as is it would be over in like 3 months? What length of time did it take your groups to go through it?

thanks!

My experience is that JoY is a pretty high-level game. Starting characters aren’t likely to do well.

But, if you think about it, none of the characters in “Oceans Eleven” is fresh out of high school, so that makes sense.

If they’ve got a couple hundred XP under their belts, and a couple of specialties (or more), then I suspect they would be more appropriately prepared.

I say all this because when we tried going through JoY, we were starting characters, and it was really hard for the GM to adjust things to suit.

So, I can only speak from my own personal perspective on what it was like to go through JoY once, as a starting character.

My experience is that JoY is a pretty high-level game. Starting characters aren’t likely to do well.

But, if you think about it, none of the characters in “Oceans Eleven” is fresh out of high school, so that makes sense.

If they’ve got a couple hundred XP under their belts, and a couple of specialties (or more), then I suspect they would be more appropriately prepared.

I say all this because when we tried going through JoY, we were starting characters, and it was really hard for the GM to adjust things to suit.

So, I can only speak from my own personal perspective on what it was like to go through JoY once, as a starting character.

I appreciate it! I remember reading the recommendation of "more experienced" PCs. I have already had them face three encounters before really starting this thing. I will need to adjust. How long did your group meet for JoY?

I appreciate it! I remember reading the recommendation of "more experienced" PCs. I have already had them face three encounters before really starting this thing. I will need to adjust. How long did your group meet for JoY?

I think we ended up throwing most of it out and just doing our own weird thing — which included killing Lando, because the GM hates that character and we had at least a couple of players who wanted to do anything they possibly could that would screw with Canon and continuity.

IMO, we are not a good benchmark to judge by.

We played through JoY. We meet about once every other week and it took us roughly 4-5 sessions to complete the adventure. It was probably my favorite pre-written so far. The rails aren't very apparentl and (as you pointed out) it's not heavy on the combat. bradknowles is right, It's not a campaign made for PCs with just a handful of XP.

To be honest, if your players mostly care about the combat (I don't blame them. Combat is pretty fun), this adventure might not be for them. It'll take some serious work to throw more combat pieces into the adventure without it appearing too forced. I've been wanting to run this game for another group I am involved in, but all of them rolled pretty narrow-focused combat monkeys, so this adventure would have been ill suited. In the mean time, I'll put the game in my back pocket until the next campaign.

Yes, more introductory-level adventures, which also include much more combat, are:

- Debts to Pay. This is a good beginner adventure that comes with the GM's KIt. It's basically a short dungeon-crawl that shouldn't take more than a couple of sessions and might serve as a good transition for your players.

- Beyond the Rim. This is the first big adventure module and is intended for starting characters. It is heavy on space exploration and both ground and space combat. It is also lighter on roleplaying and is more structured and linear than The Jewel of Yavin.

The Jewel of Yavin is a more advanced adventure that requires much more insight and improvisation by both the players and the GM. It's up to the players to decide how they will approach it and they aren't given very clear guidelines. So different groups may adopt very different strategies and the GM needs to be able to adapt to serious deviations from the intended script.

I'm running it right now, for example, and one of the players is already planning something significantly different than what the module intends which may require me to heavily modify the second and third acts.

Regarding adding more combat, you need to be careful about doing so in The Jewel of Yavin.

The adventure is (by default) built on the premise that combat is to be avoided wherever possible. Engaging in open combat is likely to result in a swift and efficient response from the Wing Guard. And this will tend to mean that either the PCs end up in jail or, at best, the heist (and much of the adventure) is ruined because the authorities are now watching them closely. So any combat needs to be small-scale and discreet.

Also, none of the established characters in the adventure are likely to have any reason to attack the PCs until, perhaps, the final act following the heist. So you would either need to concoct some additional conflict between these characters and the PCs, or you would need to introduce a new, more violent group of adversaries to the story.

Perhaps have a local bounty board or something and allow the players to register for Bounty Hunting permits on Cloud City. They PCs will be held responsible for any damages or unlawful conduct, but the permit allows them to skirt certain laws in order to catch more troublesome individuals within the colony. After that, write up a few bounties and where to find them, sprinkle in a few clues, add an extra day or two until the auction (3 days is not enough to do all the things the module demands plus catching some bounties), and you got the chance for some action and combat.

Yes, more introductory-level adventures, which also include much more combat, are:

- Debts to Pay. This is a good beginner adventure that comes with the GM's KIt. It's basically a short dungeon-crawl that shouldn't take more than a couple of sessions and might serve as a good transition for your players.

- Beyond the Rim. This is the first big adventure module and is intended for starting characters. It is heavy on space exploration and both ground and space combat. It is also lighter on roleplaying and is more structured and linear than The Jewel of Yavin.

The Jewel of Yavin is a more advanced adventure that requires much more insight and improvisation by both the players and the GM. It's up to the players to decide how they will approach it and they aren't given very clear guidelines. So different groups may adopt very different strategies and the GM needs to be able to adapt to serious deviations from the intended script.

I'm running it right now, for example, and one of the players is already planning something significantly different than what the module intends which may require me to heavily modify the second and third acts.

Ooo I like debts to pay. I might run a series of flashback sessions to the time when they first met and went through this mission allowing them more experience going forward with JoY.

Yes, more introductory-level adventures, which also include much more combat, are:

- Debts to Pay. This is a good beginner adventure that comes with the GM's KIt. It's basically a short dungeon-crawl that shouldn't take more than a couple of sessions and might serve as a good transition for your players.

- Beyond the Rim. This is the first big adventure module and is intended for starting characters. It is heavy on space exploration and both ground and space combat. It is also lighter on roleplaying and is more structured and linear than The Jewel of Yavin.

The Jewel of Yavin is a more advanced adventure that requires much more insight and improvisation by both the players and the GM. It's up to the players to decide how they will approach it and they aren't given very clear guidelines. So different groups may adopt very different strategies and the GM needs to be able to adapt to serious deviations from the intended script.

I'm running it right now, for example, and one of the players is already planning something significantly different than what the module intends which may require me to heavily modify the second and third acts.

Ooo I like debts to pay. I might run a series of flashback sessions to the time when they first met and went through this mission allowing them more experience going forward with JoY.

What are your thoughts: am I better off running a flashback series of sessions or restarting a new campaign (beyond the rim)? It might be ok for the latter since our first session there were player conflicts where players were telling other players how to play their character. We've got those issues worked out as I have told everyone to play their own character and allow me to deal with the consequences of character actions.

Yes, more introductory-level adventures, which also include much more combat, are:

- Debts to Pay. This is a good beginner adventure that comes with the GM's KIt. It's basically a short dungeon-crawl that shouldn't take more than a couple of sessions and might serve as a good transition for your players.

- Beyond the Rim. This is the first big adventure module and is intended for starting characters. It is heavy on space exploration and both ground and space combat. It is also lighter on roleplaying and is more structured and linear than The Jewel of Yavin.

The Jewel of Yavin is a more advanced adventure that requires much more insight and improvisation by both the players and the GM. It's up to the players to decide how they will approach it and they aren't given very clear guidelines. So different groups may adopt very different strategies and the GM needs to be able to adapt to serious deviations from the intended script.

I'm running it right now, for example, and one of the players is already planning something significantly different than what the module intends which may require me to heavily modify the second and third acts.

I'll be running Debts to Pay in two weeks. How long are your sessions, typically? I tend to put together smaller prefabs, like from Suns of Fortune, along with my own content and that fills a session - generally 4 hours with a break for dinner. I anticipated Debts to Pay to run about the same.

Jewel of Yavin, I agree, is a much more involved, multi-session experience. I was so enthralled with the content I attempted to run it for my players at the onset, following the Beginner's Box. Leading up to the day of the session, I began to panic - there's just so much content there! I wasn't prepared.

Instead, I decided to do the market row scene and have Aris Shen give the group a job - break into the Tibana Sunset Casino and steal evidence that her mobster husband was doing something illegal so she could get out of the abusive relationship.

It remains one of the best sessions. Now that we have more time under our belts, I have pointed the group toward Bespin once more. They will eventually return after a few more sessions, having a dozen under their belts, and when they return they will have NPCs that mean something more. Aris became an ally they trust and Vorse an antagonist they fear (currently imprisoned on Cloud City but running things like the Kingpin do).

When I ran Debts to Pay I edited out the whole scene and subplot with Bargos the Hutt and jumped right to the mining colony using a different pretext.

[The PCs were delivering supplies to the miners, expecting to be paid and then leave, only to find the place apparently deserted.]

I believe the mining colony took five or six hours for my group to resolve.

On the way to the colony, I planted a seed that rolled into Beyond the Rim and ran that adventure next.

[Near the mining planet the group's ship literally bumped into the message pod from the Sa Nalaor, which had been drifting through that area of space for years. When they powered it up they were able to to discern the address - "To: Ropok, c/o Isotech, The Wheel". I thought it was much more engaging for the PCs themselves to have found the pod than for them to just be told someone else had found it. It also served as a much better excuse for them, personally, to be involved in the whole endeavor.]

What are your thoughts: am I better off running a flashback series of sessions or restarting a new campaign (beyond the rim)?

From the way your describe your group, starting with something like Debts to Pay or Beyond the Rim, and probably working your up to The Jewel of Yavin later, sounds like a safer plan.

However, if you've already started a game the players might not want to do that. How far are you into the existing campaign? Are the players invested in what's happened so far, or would they not care if you started over?

One way of increasing the amount of combat is giving them something they NEED to protect. One way is having Vorice taking a more hands on approch to his minons being injuried, thus he sends minons prowling the city looking for his wife up to the point she hands herself in. Another is to have a secondary race team funded by Shrien, just naturally speaking the Hutts and the imperial doesn't want Shrien turning up to his party. And well, if the party wanted to get hands on, theres always possiblity of being a bit more brute force against the other pod racing teams, at least two of those would have enough funding for security forces.

Truth be told, I find the jewel of Yavin is one such adventure where having very little conflict up to the hiest period itself is better though. Everything up to the hiest is really about using other skills leading up to there and as such a highly public event it seems detrimental to get into scraps all the way up to that point.

My party had taken about 5/6 sessions to complete the jewel of Yavin, the first 4 sessions was clocked full of interactions, data prequirement, gambling and even an element of savatage against people. (Basically, Carbine ended up getting really drunk in a savck game and 'murdered' a member of Vorse's staff, being in comma's because a member of the party stabbed him while breaking up the scuffle. E.g. Carbines car got disqualified.). This was made up with in the hiest and the aftermath of the hiest turned exceptionally bloody. The Jedi was almost outright murdered (one character was the defination of a murder hobo, so I was forced to stun her when he decided he wanted none of that. Came back to bite me in the behind much, much later.) and the aftermath was a series of high speed chases and base raids. Though we were smart enough to withdraw our shares out of the joint account before the inevitiable happened, so we were quite rich.

Unlike most parties we had a legitimate, long connection with Lando (we took part in a hiest while he was a scoundral and we already owed him obligation for a ship he gave to us one drunken evening, though generally speaking we were really good friends doing various tasks and favours.) When things broke down we knew the guy that we could approch to get our revenge (we actually managed to deliver the jewel directly to him. Don't ask where it was kept!). Needless to say the entire underworld had an extremely bad day when we were pardoned in exchange for our services in fixing the entire thing over, which included liquidation of a fair amount of Shiens estate to pay for the money taken from the Hutts bank account. The major fall out from that was that Katho was extremely furious and we ended up spending the rest of that season trying to avoid his wrath (Lando was none too pleased either, it wasn't until that time we preformed an oprea for him on Empire Day that was a resounding success that he forgave us for that banter. XD).

Well, at least until my character, a bounty hunter turned force emergent, decided to conduct the second Jewel of Yavin hiest on the smugglers moon but that my friends is another story for another time.

I am running the adventure currently and it has been going pretty well. If you have PCs who more or less only care for combat then it might not be for them (until act 3). The lack of combat in the beginning can be chamged up. I think it's an opportunity for leveraging obligation, motivation, and poor player choices to more violent ends. Maybe this is when the bounty hunter finally catches up with them, or the crime syndicate they spurned has ties to Vorse, or they're wanted by the ISB Bespin turns out to be a convenient place to eliminate them. Just because the adventure doesn't call for combat doesn't mean there can't be. My impression from the book is the Wing Guard barely cares about the midsle levels and doesn't care about the lower levels (the exception being explosives of course). So there's plenty of room on the station for combat.

Again, though, it would need to be small-scale and discreet. The Wing Guard doesn't care about, say, bar brawls on the lower levels.

But if the PCs have a running blaster fight through the corridors, they will be dealt with in short order. If they're circling Cloud City in a pitched laser battle with some bounty hunter's ship, then they'll be arrested or shot down in minutes.

So while combat is certainly possible, you have to limit it to things like a small, brief skirmish in a secluded alley or a private building.