Lessons of the Past Difficulty and Issues

By Arasaka76, in Game Masters

Posted at
Hi everyone,


I'm new to the system as a GM, and last Saturday I ran my group of 4 players (a Jedi Guardian, Jedi Seeker, Soldier and Smuggler) through Lessons of the Past. I've reworked it to be compatible with my chosen setting, which is 3,000 years BBY - roughly Old Republic era, but several hundred years after the MMO). They are Republic Agents and we are using the Duty system, with the Jedi tracking their Morality separately as an indicator of LS / DS leanings.


After the game there were a lot of complaints about the difficulty of the session, despite me pulling several punches. 500 credits does not go far for initial equipment purchases, so everyone is wearing Heavy Clothing and armed with Training Sabers for the Jedi, and Holdout Blasters for the others. I did strongly recommend that the players spend their 10 Duty at the start on the extra XP as it is the only time to buy Stats. Was this a mistake?


SPOILERS FOR "LESSONS OF THE PAST" FOLLOW:





So what happened was that the players attracted the suspicion of the ISB Agent (rebadged to Imperial Intelligence) and were followed from Eriadu to the Koler System. The Guardian had put on the Ilum Talisman and was therefore aware of the Stern airlock, where they docked their ship. They headed straight for the Jedi Training Room and thus encountered the Basilisk War Droid. Because they had not yet had a chance to explore the ship to find a means of defeating it, I didn't have it notice them immediately despite the fact that I had described the ship's blast doors opening with a scream of ancient and rusting mechanisms. They had previously made Fear checks from hearing it roaring and carrying on so I figured it was doing that again when they opened the door.


They then backed off to explor the Science Labs, finding and repairing the EMP device and the Blaster Cannon - the latter of which they moved to their ship's airlock to blast a hole through the tube and into the Sanctuary's hull if the Basilisk came after them. They then went exploring the Engineering section of the ship and decided not to create the feedback loop. They also found the salvage which the smuggler then wanted to take.


After all the repairs, jury-rigging, and exploration, (including some failed checks to initially find the Sanctuary when they arrived in-system) I figured that it was time Eren'gai (modified into a Chiss called Erengar) arrived to keep the pace following and dissuade idle looting that would take time. I had him cut into the middle of the ship and shout a challenge to his quarry, so the PCs tried to lure him into the Basilisk, which they did.


Realising he was outclassed, I had him leave two of his Assassin Droids to hold it off while he hunted down the other PCs with the remaining two. At this point the group split up, with the Smuggler making a dash to install the repaired Droid Control Module on the Basilisk, and the Guardian trying to find the safe with the holocron. The Seeker and Soldier moved the Blaster Cannon to cover one of the corridor's he was likely to approach from.


Both Assassin droids attack these two, injuring the Jedi badly. The blaster cannon leaves one droid on 2 Wounds but I have it explode - it was nicely cinematic and I have a bad feeling bout how the encounter is going. Erengar arrives and crits the Soldier with the Disruptor pistol disabling an arm and leaving him on 2 Wounds. Because initiative slots aren't fixed, he attacks again and guns down the Seeker.


The rest of the group arrives shortly after, having managed to install the controller and retrieve the holocron. The other Jedi gets a taste of Disruptor and is crit twice with 2 Triumphs (I didn't know that I could destroy an item with that, which I would have done). Because I forgot about Vicious 4 the worst crit was a 108 (as opposed to 148), but they wound Erengar twice in the meantime, leaving him on half wounds in one round (I forgot about Adversary 2). So I have him retreat - he will be a recurring villain that the party already hated, and after that skirmish even more so. I have them overhear him shouting into his comlink to power up the ships weapons and scan for their vessel as he runs. They narrowly dispatch the last droid impeding any pursuit and because it was late, I hand-wave their escape from Erengar's ship. The Republic would pay for any ship repairs anyway as that was their choice of starting support. So they spend a few days in Bacta tanks on Coruscant in the aftermath.


So what did I do wrong? What did the player's do wrong? It was rougher than I expected for session 1. If I had remembered abilities properly, or had not split attacks I could have wrecked the group easily. I'm planning on running a rebadged Hidden Depths next, and I am not sure if they are going to get destroyed in the last encounter with Ironarm. The Sith are Soak 4, as is the Probe Droid, and Ironarm hits like a truck. 1G2Y is good with a disruptor - I expect 3Y with a vibroblade is going to hurt almost as much. Add in two minion groups of Sith Troopers and a Viper Droid and I'm getting worried. They'll still have the same weapons, though the Jedi will craft their lightsabers after Hidden Depths, and I'm giving the other two players 9,000cr worth of gear to compensate them.


I haven't seen any posts on the forum decrying Lessons from the Past or Hidden Depths as being too hard, so I am left to wonder what I / we are doing wrong. If anyone has any insights to share they would be most welcome.


Thank you for reading this far!

Edited by Arasaka76
Posted at

I would be weary about using disrupter so early on players; it's devastating to hit a player with that and, unless the upgrades are on house, really difficult to recover from crippled hits, rather then worse. Multiple rival/nemesis class type characters early on may also be difficult, largely because players using training sabers only really deal about 6 damage + success against soak,difficult to get through good soak with that.

Otherwise, as I'm at work, I might have to check back later.

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Generally, most PCs tend to either reduce their Duty or take extra Obligation to get extra starting money. To be honest, you can make do with a characteristic spread of 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2 and be perfectly fine, which generally runs 80 to 90 XP, thus leaving 20 XP for things like extra skill ranks and row 1 talents. Having four characteristics at 3 might be nice, but it's not going to gimp a character unless the concept requires that character to be very broad in what they contribute to the group; in the early going, it's probably a bit more beneficial to specialize a bit and focus on doing one or two things very well.

Lessons of the Past was written for a fully party of FaD characters in mind, and likely with the idea that one or more PCs would opt for some extra credits with which to purchase a bigger gun. The adventure itself also suggests that there might be a couple of basic lightsabers that could be retrieved alongside the holocron, which would certainly give a PCs a leg-up in combat as they'd now be using a far more potent weapon than a training lightsaber.

The Basilisk War Droid encounter also made room for creative solutions from the PCs, such as impromptu explosives or even using a bit of tech from the early part of the adventure and that ancient droid to sabotage the beast.

As for the distruptor, it's limited to short range, plus I believe that bit of the encounter was written with a heavy suggestion of the PCs should grab the holocron and go rather than stick around and fight it out, especially after dealing with the Basilisk War Droid. There's even a very good chance for the PCs to avoid being detected by the Imperials by way of using that rear docking port on the ruined starship, something that my group was very quick to take advantage of. But at the same time, sometimes the dice rolls work out the way they did for your session, and the BBEG gets off a killer shot. I would say that if you don't have a PC that's a skilled medic, then swapping out the distruptor for a heavy blaster pistol works, as it still gives the adventure's main villain some teeth in combat, but the PCs aren't at too great a risk of being crippled or maimed from a single attack.

Admittedly, when I ran my group through the adventure, they were effectively Knight Level, and I did abbreviate a couple of things in the interest of keeping things moving. I also allowed a PC to spend a Triumph to notice a damaged lightsaber that could be used during the fight with the Basilisk; things got a bit de-railed as the same PC got greedy and wanted to keep trying to use the lightsaber in spite of only having 1 skill rank and 2 Brawn as opposed to handing it off to the PC that had 3 ranks in Lightsaber and the Soresu Defender spec. Of course, the main reason I did that was one of the PCs had deliberately gimped themselves combat-wise by making it a point to not bring their primary weapon, and the Hunter/Seeker was simply rolling crap on his combat checks and only managing to do chip damage when he did hit.

This adventure was also used in a prototype form at GenCon 2014, using a group of FaD pre-gens that were built with 100 additional XP and three of them having lightsabers, consisting of one basic 'saber for the Guardian, a double-bladed lightsaber for the Consular, and a modified lightsaber (+2 damage) for the Warrior, and with the final boss fight being notably more difficult as well.

Posted at

Thanks for responses - much appreciated! I had no idea that this adventure actually was initially run for characters with lightsabers and 100xp extra - that would change things dramatically.

I am now more concerned about the Ironarm battle in Hidden Depths - I guess what I'll do is a simulated run. I have copies of their character sheets, and I don't think their combat abilities will be much different from last session - possibly one or two players will have increased their main weapon skill to 2.

So I can throw some dice around and see how they fare. One player may craft their lightsaber hilt while en-route to "Phemia" (changed to Daminia in my Old Republic game) and immediately insert the Damind Crystal (identical to an Ilum Crystal) when they obtain it. I might leave out a minion squad or the Viper Droid - I don't need the disappointment of last session where expectations of a relatively easy introduction to the system were trampled by reality.

Posted at

Thanks for responses - much appreciated! I had no idea that this adventure actually was initially run for characters with lightsabers and 100xp extra - that would change things dramatically.

I am now more concerned about the Ironarm battle in Hidden Depths - I guess what I'll do is a simulated run. I have copies of their character sheets, and I don't think their combat abilities will be much different from last session - possibly one or two players will have increased their main weapon skill to 2.

So I can throw some dice around and see how they fare. One player may craft their lightsaber hilt while en-route to "Phemia" (changed to Daminia in my Old Republic game) and immediately insert the Damind Crystal (identical to an Ilum Crystal) when they obtain it. I might leave out a minion squad or the Viper Droid - I don't need the disappointment of last session where expectations of a relatively easy introduction to the system were trampled by reality.

Make sure your PC's understand that stealth/social way/retreat is a valid option. try to check if the game you run takes that into account and that should elevate any difficulty issue. I see no problem with how you ran that adventure.

Edited by Artuard
Posted at

I think another thing that the players did...not exactly wrong, but definitely not right...was to split the group. Okay, so the Basilisk is dealing with the two droids that the Imperial brought. Okay, fine, let them duke it out. In the mean time, the rest of the gang sticks together to deal with the Imperial. My group just had their first major combat, and got their clocks cleaned. Hopefully, your group did what mine did...sat down and said 'Okay, that sucked...how do we kick ass, next time?'.

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Spiltting the party should be a standard feature in any edge campaign though, otherwise the best guy for the job will handle X situation all the time.

Posted at

It sounds like a fun session to me and I don't think you did anything wrong.

Crit is very nasty in this game, even at low levels and all to often I have found that my players have taken down opponents purely on critical hits even though the opponent has Hit Points remaining.

Remember that the majority of enemies the players will encounter don't have to be Nemesis.. Minions and if I remember rightly, Rivals don't suffer strain so they should go down pretty quickly, leaving the Nemesis to challenge the players.

But it sounds like your doing good. I've had many character deaths as a player and if done properly I enjoy it. Knowing that my character died protecting someone else or that I had the last laugh is pretty much the epitome of my idea of a good game :)