Tricks & Tips wanted! From social skill encounters to chases. How would you build encounters around skills like astrogation, computer, mechanics and knowledge skills for example?

Have any good ideas or experiences? Please share!

Astrogation is something done by machines. I've never understood why there's even a roll for it in every SW game I've played so far. You have a nav computer. It plots a course for you and does massive amounts of complex math that would take you weeks if not months if you did it by hand.

Mechanics is great when you're in a situation where a repair matters dramatically. Survival or scavaging scenarios, particularily. It's also a conversation piece with NPCs. Mechanics relate to mechanics better, because they have more to talk about.

As for knowledge skills, unless the character has a backstory or roleplay in the past for which he'd know the answer from memory, knowledge means knowing where to look it up, which can be a quest hook in and of itself. And, as with mechanics, the same is true here: academics talk best to other academics.

Astrogation - It's like a chase seen but with more sitting around at the start of it and then ZOOOOOOM! Someone wins in the blink of an eye. Honestly, if I were building an encounter around astrogation, that almost turns into the deep space equivalent of a rally race, where the astrogator begins plotting the long straights and then the pilot has to deal with the fact that "To shave 8 parsecs of that last jump, we're gonna come out in an asteroid field, ok?" Though you could do that for any sort of "race to the finish" type encounter where you have to get from planet A to planet B to get the powerful force artifact, the holocron, the rare material for the bad guy's super weapon, or the macguffin before the bad guys do.

Mechanics based encounters go one of two ways in my mind. Both of them are pretty 80's. Either you have the A-Team style rushed build to get out of a jam, or you go MacGyver and need to stop a starship's reactor from blowing with a chocolate bar, a pack of cigarettes, a camera lens, and.... I can't remember the other things he used in the pilot.

Now, the social encounter can be a fun thing, especially if Morality is in play. It helps if you make the social encounter not look like a social encounter at first blush, say your players are suddenly surrounded by gun toting people demanding that they drop everything they own and move along. Other prime targets for the social encounters include gathering information, the high society contact approach, and one of my personal favorite possible social encounters, the "big ticket item shopping trip."

For an example of the "high society contact approach" I would encourage you to check out one of my favorite episodes of Firefly, Shindig (Episode 4). A bunch of rough and tumble fringers having to pass for upper crust has lots of opportunity for great social conflict, especially knowing that a more expedient and deadly solution is just a blaster draw away. That temptation can certainly add tension to a social conflict.

As for the "Big ticket item shopping trip," I would save this for a really big set piece kind of item like a new ship. This sort of social encounter may need lots of wheeling, dealing, and may need some sort of "barter chain" to help get a deal on something expensive (Deep Space Nine, I am looking at your stoopy self sealing stem bolts...). Every link in the chain provides additional opportunity to do some choice social fu.

Hope this helps!

If I'm designing my own adventure I will often consider what the individual players like doing and create something they might enjoy. It's quite hard work to think of original ideas though and also not make it seem contrived.

(This probably ought to be in the GM section)

Astrogation is something done by machines. I've never understood why there's even a roll for it in every SW game I've played so far. You have a nav computer. It plots a course for you and does massive amounts of complex math that would take you weeks if not months if you did it by hand.

Sure, the math is there, the pragramming and routes. But then you might want to change the programming around, do some adjustments, cut and paste the "syntax" to jump a little to the side or to jump from one destination to another and then straight into a new one. Maybe you are being chased, don`t know where you are and have to feel it out with the nav-computer and throw some coordinates around in a hurry. Or maybe you do a "feint jump" to throw off any imperials who might want to follow you.

In a recent mission, I had Norwegian hat kicking for Coordination followed by drunken Swedish karaoke for Charm.

In another, the PCs went up against a ruthless clan of Rodians... in a game of The Price is Might. To guess the correct retail price of an item, the players used whatever skill that might help. Mechanics for tools, Medicine for medical equipment, etc.

In a recent mission, I had Norwegian hat kicking for Coordination followed by drunken Swedish karaoke for Charm.

In another, the PCs went up against a ruthless clan of Rodians... in a game of The Price is Might. To guess the correct retail price of an item, the players used whatever skill that might help. Mechanics for tools, Medicine for medical equipment, etc.

Haha, cool! Er du skandinavisk eller?

No, just a fan of that neck of the woods .

A technique for complex encounters that I like from the Cortex system, which covers longer checks that must be made over a length of time, involves setting a difficulty for the complex check, which measures the number of successes needed to complete it. For example, fixing a heavily damaged hyperdrive may require 10 successes. Then, the player may make any number of checks at whatever difficulty is appropriate, tallying their total successes from each roll towards the check. So, the first time they net 4 successes, then 1, then 3, then they fail, then 2. So it takes them 5 checks in total to repair the hyperdrive. Advantage and Threat are spent separately, on each individual check. Maybe for a boost towards their next check, or to reduce the time taken. For these complex checks, the question is less "can they do it" (although, they still need to succeed each individual check, so it's not guaranteed), and more "how long does it take"? Perhaps they're being pursued by Imperials, and the more rounds it take the mechanic, the longer the pilot needs to dodge them. Or it could be a social check to negotiate a deal, with each roll taking an hour of game time, and a certain number of credits as they wine and dine their contact: can they persuade her before they run out of money, or things close?

Basically, it lets you put things on a clear time limit and make a player feel involved when the narrative develops along the lines of "Okay, she's doing this one thing which will take a while...what do the rest of you do?"