How long is a session?

By Squirrelsan, in Star Wars: Force and Destiny RPG

RAW XP and Morality rolls are done on a "per session" basis, but how long is a typical session? My current group mostly plays a couple of hours per session, a 3 hour session being about the longest we go to, but the suggested XP per session is, in our experience, too high to be giving out every few hours, so we give out less. Now that we're including FaD characters, it becomes more important. If we roll Morality too often, PCs will be more quickly drawn to the light side, too infrequently and they'll be more drawn to the dark side.

2-3 hours for a session sounds normal. You probably want to dole out XP based on how much the PCs accomplish in a session as well

Typically I just use a standard 15xp per session. When the PC's hit 150XP or Knight-Level Play, I will up it to 20xp per session. Probably around the 300xp mark it will be 25xp per session.

Any session that resolves a player Obligation/Duty completely or sees a huge moment where the FaD player overcomes their Moral Weakness gives the party an extra 5xp for that session.

As far as rolling for Morality, I have the players do that at the end of every session that they participate in, provided that there was a Moral choice that had to be made at some point.

Edited by GroggyGolem

Yes, we vary XP based on what is accomplished/cover in the sessions. Sometimes nothing really happens and there's no XP, sometimes there's epic battles, plot twists and character development and lots of XP gets handed out. I just meant that overall the rates are below the norm suggested in the Core books. EotE suggests 10-20XP per session with bonuses on top, but it also suggests a session might have 2-3 major encounters. We normally do about 5XP per session plus bonuses, and very rarely have more than 1 major encounter.

But I am more specifically interested in Morality, we seem to have got XP right for our group.

If it was just the GM giving out conflict I'd think it would be every 10 points worth of moral choices, but since PCs can get themselves conflict, i.e. when rolling Force dice, that doesn't really work.

I mean, basically, the whole Morality thing is less of a mechanical aspect of the game like Obligation and Duty and more of a character arc/narrative aspect of the game. If the player truly wants to become a darkside player, they can commit some super selfish acts and drop their Morality fast. If the player wants their character to be a lightside paragon, they simply choose to do what's right and try not to give in to the darkside. If they want to struggle then they can do that and if they want a fall/redemption story, they can do that.

The player should be aware of how they can acquire conflict and for how much... I suggest maybe printing out the Conflict table and handing it to the players so they can get familiar with it. This will give them an idea of how to go about telling the story they want to tell for their character.

If you as the GM want to throw things in their way every now and then, create encounters that play on their Moral Strengths and Weaknesses. Give them a Master of the opposite allignment, that isn't an antagonist but someone who truly wants the PC to become more powerful for various nefarious reasons. Give them some cool artifact, weapon or armor that strengthens their use of one of the aspects of the force that is opposite to their intended progression.

My players usually play for a solid 6-8 hours, we have the whole day set aside for RPG Day.

We typically aim for about 4 hours a session now-a-days since we can rarely schedule more than a half a day at a time together, but we live too far apart to justify shorter sessions (if we are getting together for other reasons we've been know to squeeze in a quicky before or after).

We reward experience for accomplishments and story reasons only. If the story doesn't advance, neither does experience. . . except that has never happened.

As GM, I aim for 5xp per hour of play.

That said, when it is just my old high-school buddies, we've never earned less than that, and more often than not, we exceed it - after years of squeezing games into any little break has made us a very efficient bunch. When we play with our college buddies, we tend to hold a more laid-back pace, and tend to hover right on the 5 xp mark, but fluctuate both high and low.

If we expect a game to have a limited number of sessions, we will accelerate the pace of xp earnings, doubling or tripling the expected rewards. . . though the last time that happened was a d6 game, a half dozen years ago (in other words, I haven't done that with FFG's system yet).

It's recommended to be 5xp per hour of play plus 5-10 more for accomplishing goals. Our sessions are 3-4 hours and for me it depends on how much actual play we get in and how much of the adventure we got through, sometimes I give only 5-10xp if we spent a lot of time in a combat or lost in the weeds on a shopping spree. On the other hand I've never given more than 25xp either.

We generally play for 5-9 hours, at a base of 5 per hour with rewards for major accomplishments and roleplaying. That said we house ruled that you had to have more that 1 conflict to get a role. No matter how small the chance there had to be one to fail.