For the adventure in mind I have the following thought:

The premise is that the players are hired to find some lost sites and return with the good. I have new players to the system and I am thinking this will be a good way to get some practice working on Skills. I would like any feedback people may have.

I am thinking about having skill checks being made every 1/2 week and the party will be using an AT-EST.

First, there is a Survival skill to find the location. I am not sure the difficulty yet.

Failure means, failure to locate during that 1/2 week.

Success = finding..with additional successes providing more goodies found in the lost bunker
Advantage can use boost (as with combat) for the next Survival roll OR for the following Pilot Planetary roll

Threat can be system strain OR setback for next roll or following Piloting roll

Next would be the Piloting roll

Failure means a failure to get said location in the 1/2 week and will need to roll for the following week
Success means getting there on time with extra success perhaps getting there early
Advantage can pass on boost to the next Piloting roll or the next Survival roll.

Threat means System strain or setback dice

Finally, a mechanics roll to repair any strain or physical damage.

I am thinking about allowing a failure to be a success but only if the Pilot chooses to take the number of failures as straight Hull damage.


I kinda plan for there to be a time limit for this and thus causing the players to make choices if things go too long especially if there is some other complications I throw in.

I've not tackled Macro time in this system yet as I'm only a few sessions in but I will definitely be doing so in the future. How you approach it will inevitably depend somewhat on your players, as they're new I'd personally be tempted to start off with something a little less abstract, a more standard adventure, though perhaps only a short one for 1 or 2 sessions.

When it comes to macro time, I think the idea of breaking it into time chunks is a good one, it will allow you to structure play for your players so they can put constraints on their actions. Also it will allow you to move between players in a sort of turn order so no one feels left out - macro time can be a really good opportunity for players to split up, attend to business and spend XP (if you like to incorporate that into play). Depending on your intended time scales then 1/2 week blocks might be fine.

For me, macro time is fairly abstract play so I'd be unlikely to impose a regular skill check structure. Rather, I'd consult the players; let them discuss broad plans of action, consequences and events.This is a really collaborative system anyway and this style of play lends itself to that even more so. As the play will take place over extended time frames, I'd probably also try an incorporate some of the player obligations or nemeses to spice things up and help flesh out their character's lives. Ultimately we'd talk out the likely events over the half week as a group and have the player make appropriate rolls. If they have a plans for finding the sites (consulting contacts, tracking down leads, hitting the books, whatever) then the appropriate checks can be made, once they have the location I'd probably apply the normal astrogation checks to reach there but I don't think I would personally have them perform additional checks for locating the exact site - just assume a certain length of time for that and apply it.

Hrm, does any of this help? It's a bit wishy washy!

It helps some. Here is a little more background detail:

They are on an AT-EST, which is an explorer walker and they are in the jungles of an sparsely-populated jungle planet over the period of a month. This is not the total of the adventure, just a segment with the end being a plotted encounter. On one hand I like the idea of forcing difficult decisions ("if we take damage to the vehicle, we will be ahead of schedule"), but I think doing few, but larger chunks has merit (making it seem less like a game)....maybe set the stakes higher.

Something to for me to think about.

So if the party doesn't find anything in a week, or doesn't get to where they're going, what will happen? Be sure you've got ideas for other things the party could run into in the jungle (jungle creatures, tropical storms, Ewok equivalents, lost temples that have already been plundered, etc.) so they don't just say, "Okay, we wait a week and try again."

My plan was for this to take a fairly short amount of time ... maybe 10-15 minutes total, with their choices having potential impact on what follows..both good and bad (planned encounters). Also, this seems like it could provide a way of showing choices to be made with advantage and threat.

I do think you make a good point....namely making the failure interesting and making rolls, merely to be making rolls, isn't normally fun.

Hmmmm.... I think the choice would be to spend more time dealing with the effects of each roll (or perhaps each sequence) OR (pardon the pun) just keep things rolling.

My game got move back a week so it gives me a bit more time to think about it.

I have an idea. It may be a wierd one but here it is.

You can make a table consisting of 2 colomns. The first one is a die roll result (D20 or D100) second is what happens on that roll. It would be random and fun.

For example,

D20

1-4 nothing happens
5 Some trandoshan poachers
6 high vegitation, difficult terrain
7 nexu (that thing from the Episode 2)

8 remnants of an old camp left by another expedition years ago!

9 a stray pet

10 some antiquited droids, deactivated

11 it's a trap!

12-15 mid size wild animals

16 AT-EST breackdown

17 huge predator

18 rare birds/ animals spotted, PCs can examine them

19 rare plants, PCs can examine them

20 roll twice and combine 2 ecounters

Nice.

Games like Ryuutama and The One Ring make wilderness travel a big thing in their game experience. You might want to look to them for inspiration for this kind of activity. I like the OP's idea of having a couple of skill rolls to track the general wear-and-tear of exploring the wilderness. A Pilot (or even Astrogation) roll to find your way, and a Survival roll to say how much it takes out of you. Most of the time, not much interesting will happen, so you can get through it quickly. If some rolls have very positive or negative results, you can throw in some unusual events or discoveries (as per danikstanik's table).