Thought I'd start this thread for coming up with good space encounters beyond the "standard" fight to the death, as well as give people a place to discuss what they like about space travel and combat in Star Wars. Another topic is encouraging participation from characters with atypical abilities and helping them feel useful.

Smuggling: Bluffing past customs, slicers messing with sensors.

Melee characters: Fighting boarding parties, fighting sabotage droids or space critters on the hull, trying not to get their spacesuits ripped open in the process.

Tactical characters: Submarine-like battle in a nebula, asteroid belt, or, to borrow from Star Trek: DS9, the atmosphere of a gas giant.

Rogues: Perform a heist inside a station's giant dock without raising suspicion, blending into the traffic.

Force users: Navigate a space anomaly blind to find a planet with a lost Jedi temple.

Archaeologist (or other Explorer/ Scientist career): Classic ghost ship/ station encounter. Research the history, translate the ancient markings, discover what happened, locate the macguffin responsible.

Politico: Organize an evacuation of a large civilian vessel that has suffered a pirate attack and is about to break up.

Slicer: Deactivate or reprogram the Clone Wars-era AI that controls a minefield as the rest of the crew deals with the Vulture droid fighters trying to drive their ship into the mines.

Fringer: Plot a safe and surreptitious hyperspace route for an overloaded transport full of refugees fleeing a slaver attack.

Trader: Negotiate with the small fleet of agressive salvagers (that are scavenging a battlefield) for the important item/information that the party needs.

Scholar: Search the holo-pedia and apply the character's zenology or lore to deal with the space barnacle infestation that is draining power from the ship's hyperdrive and has tapped into life support.

Great ideas, guys! Submarine-like battle - just classic!

Will definitely try to work something out around these ideas and keep them at hand for a suitable story turn.

In terms of game mechanics, I would probably run these skill checks. E.g. slicer needs 20 successes on hard computers checks to deactivate the minefield, so the rest of the crew can either provide assitance or do their own job to keep the ship flying to buy the slicer enough time.

14 hours ago, thesaviour said:

In terms of game mechanics, I would probably run these skill checks. E.g. slicer needs 20 successes on hard computers checks to deactivate the minefield, so the rest of the crew can either provide assitance [sic] or do their own job to keep the ship flying to buy the slicer enough time.

Oof! Please don't do that. I'm a fan of one-roll resolution, personally, but having your player keep rolling over and over until they achieve a success threshold isn't really in the spirit of the dice mechanics. By any chance do you have the book Special Modifications? It has some great tips in it for running Slicing encounters, as well as guidelines for spending Advantage, Threat, Triumph, and Despair results.

I'd try to set the encounter up like a scene in a movie or TV drama. Each time a new dramatic element appears, you can call for another roll. The initial roll is the slicer accessing the system. When she tries to bypass the firewall, make another roll. When the Imperial/Bad Guy counter-slicer starts trying to boot him from the system, that's another roll. Switching "off" the mines and covering her tracks is the final roll. Dice results from each step have direct bearing on the next, making it easier or harder, or creating interesting wrinkles. Intersperse each of those scenes with actions from the other PCs and you'll keep it tense, interesting, and mercifully brief.

On 10/9/2017 at 5:35 AM, SFC Snuffy said:

Oof! Please don't do that. I'm a fan of one-roll resolution, personally, but having your player keep rolling over and over until they achieve a success threshold isn't really in the spirit of the dice mechanics. By any chance do you have the book Special Modifications? It has some great tips in it for running Slicing encounters, as well as guidelines for spending Advantage, Threat, Triumph, and Despair results.

I'd try to set the encounter up like a scene in a movie or TV drama. Each time a new dramatic element appears, you can call for another roll. The initial roll is the slicer accessing the system. When she tries to bypass the firewall, make another roll. When the Imperial/Bad Guy counter-slicer starts trying to boot him from the system, that's another roll. Switching "off" the mines and covering her tracks is the final roll. Dice results from each step have direct bearing on the next, making it easier or harder, or creating interesting wrinkles. Intersperse each of those scenes with actions from the other PCs and you'll keep it tense, interesting, and mercifully brief.

you are right - and most of the time I run slicer encounters through series of checks. I've picked up the book recently though I've been doing more or less the same before as well.

I should have probably explained my idea a bit more. It is not just about rolling and rolling till the PC gets to the right result.

The thing with this is that not all encounters logically provide for series of challenges for the slicer (e.g. there can't be always an opposed slicer involved or a few layers of firewalls/passwords - it would be boring if they would all go down along the same path). Sometimes it can be just one task, which is not easy, but doable provided that you have sufficient time complete it.

In this particular example with the space encounter proposed by O the Owl above : the ship is driven towards a minefield and one of the ways out of the situation is for the slicer to deactivate it. if the PCs decide that this is their way to esacape, you want the situation to be tense, but you also wand them eventually to succeed.

If you make a computers check reasonably easy and your slicer can pull it off in just one good roll - good opportunity for some epic situation wasted. If you make the check hard enough and the slicer may never make it if the dice keep failing (even if you don't up the difficulty on each next repeated check). Also, if the check is hard the PCs may well think that this is GM's way to tell them that this is not possible or not worth trying.

Instead - once your slicer assesses the situation - you can say that the minefield is activated through a net of transmitters and to bring it down you need to de-activate significant number of those. It is possible but takes time. Let the slicer do average checks on each turn and count successes. You may or may not even give the players the target number, not to turn it to a mini-game. Just keep it for yourself, keep track of the slicer's progress and decide when the field is deactivated when appropriate.

While the slicer is taking care of this the rest of the team can help to buy more time - pilot can keep the ship away from the mines, gunners will be engaged in combat. this can be played out in a very tense and cinematic way and offer a lot of role-playing opportunities. The group's leader can basically go: "Get your s**t together and break the gorram code!" to give boost to the slicer. Or a thug can put a gun to his/her head and go: "You put this darn minefield down, or I put you down" and so on.

skill checks is just a different game mechanic. it does not take away the fun if used correctly.

My apologies; I misunderstood your intent.