Hi I am a new GM still learning the game. I am hoping you can help me with a few things. 1. How should I have an NPC join the players? Any tips on how to add them into the group? 2. How does combat work between players with blasters against a sith? Is it simple to use combat against someone using a lightsaber? Does combat change at all between those with blasters and those with lightsabers?

1. How do supporting characters get introduced to the stars of you favorite TV shows or films?

2. For an Edge of the Empire answer, assuming an actual Sith Lord, the "Free RPG Day" adventure Rescue at Glare Peak (you might be able to find it on Google) had Darth Vader show up and basically do exactly what he did at the end of Rogue One . Or in Empire Strikes Back against Han. Or in Rebels season 2, against Sabine's blaster. A Sith Lord is unstoppable, unkillable. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear! And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!

If you're talking about much higher-level characters interacting with Jedi-like characters, like Jango Fett against Obi-Wan Kenobi, there are some NPC stat blocks in the EotE CRB with lightsabers. Just narrate soft hits or misses as being deflected with the NPC's lightsaber, and narrate critical injuries as the PCs being awesome and scoring a hit on the NPC. If you want more in-depth rules on lightsaber combat, get the Force and Destiny Core Rulebook, where they have the Reflect talent and, most importantly, Inquisitor creation rules

When the 'proper' core rules for Edge came out there was the GM, myself and my gaming buddie.. we created characters SmugglerPilot and TechnicianMechanic IIRC.

The GM then had several NPC/plot hooks join the group over a few sessions - ExplorerDoctor, Hired Gun(Can't remeber),

so my advice is fill a gap not covered by the PCs

It's important to point out that "an NPC bad guy with force powers and/or a lightsaber" is not automatically one of the Sith. Most are just dark side force users; some might belong to other traditions. On the whole, lightsaber combat is similar to fighting with other melee weapons, albeit with a few talents that specifically require force sensitivity to use; Reflect is the most significant of those for defense, and is essentially just a vs-ranged version of Parry.

1 hour ago, propwizard said:

1. How should I have an NPC join the players? Any tips on how to add them into the group?

What is your goal here? Do you want a PC that you control? For a new GM this is not a great idea (it's rarely good for any GM), you will have plenty to do what with controlling the entire universe, without also thinking about how your PC should act. Or are you wondering how to set up an introduction? A little more info on your situation would be helpful.

1 hour ago, propwizard said:

2. How does combat work between players with blasters against a sith? Is it simple to use combat against someone using a lightsaber? Does combat change at all between those with blasters and those with lightsabers?

There's no difference. The shooting difficulty is based on range, damage is reduced by Soak, etc. Force users can have Talents like Reflect that can reduce the damage they take, at the cost of Strain, a Sith would probably have at least one rank.

There is a general guideline that you don't want to be shooting at someone while they're Engaged with you, but this is true of all melee, whether it's a Sith with a lightsaber, or a Wookiee mad because he lost a game. The melee combatant has to move to Engaged range to take a swing. If you shoot them from Engaged range, your difficulties will get worse. So the shooter generally wants to disengage to Short range before shooting.

Thank you for the suggestions and information. The basic plot in a nutshell is the PCs are sent by a Hutt to retrieve a stolen item. While retrieving the item, the PCs find out it's a young force sensitive child. I want the child to join as an NPC, that they have to protect. The Sith character is hunting for the child and sees him as a threat.

I was asking about combat because in the ending they face the Sith and I was wondering how that battle would work. Am I making this too complex for a newbie and is there anything I should change?

If you're just starting out, I'd say a Sith is a bit overkill. An Inquisitor would be more than a new party can handle, and technically they aren't Sith (yet). Kind of like throwing a bunch of first level D&D characters at a dragon, it's not likely to end well. But even if they win, if you plan to keep playing there might be some pressure to find something even more amazing next time, and you end up trying to one-up yourself until they're putting Palpatine on a leash, making him bark like a dog and shoot lightning at cats. There's also the issue of not being familiar with how all the talents and Force powers interrelate in combat. If you don't give the right talents and force powers to a Sith, it's likely to be anti-climatic because the way the game mechanics work. Get more battles under your belt before you try that.

I'd suggest a bounty hunter (with minion-support) to start with. If the kid is Force sensitive, maybe the BH got wind of something and wants to get the prize before the Inquisitors get involved. If the PCs drive him off, he might try again with a bigger party, and this can be an ongoing theme until the BH spills the situation to an Inquisitor...and hopefully by then the PCs will be ready.

For the NPC, you just narrate what they do. If the players go along with it, then the kid tags along as you see fit. There's no formal way to "join the party". One point of caution:

Players are notorious for ignoring GM plots. You can dangle a lure and they'll go off in a different direction, and it's really bad form to railroad them. Sometimes a player will get what you want them to do and go along with it "just because", but they might not really be invested in it. So the best way to make this work is if the players arrive at their protection instincts on their own. You can always use money: bring this kid to the Hutt, and collect a handsome fee for kidnapping. But maybe the kid helps them out at some point. Maybe they're stuck in the sewers where he's hiding, and he leads them out. Maybe he yells "lookout!" just in time for them to react to an ambush. Maybe he gets a "bad feeling" and the PCs can hide from a patrol. In short, slowly weave in reasons for the PCs to want to protect this kid, and they'll be much less likely to say "Uh, red lightsaber? He's all yours..."

Thank you whafrog for the suggestions! I will incorporate your suggestions in the plot. Any other suggestions for a new GM?

I guess the most useful (and least specific) would be "be flexible". Players may not take the bait and you have to be prepared to adapt. That doesn't mean you have to do a ton of work to account for every possibility, but you do have to know your NPCs well, what their motives and methods are. If you set up the motive and methods properly, then you won't feel as much panic when the players go off the deep end. Example: maybe the BH doesn't know where this kid is, but he knows the Hutt knows, and the Hutt just gave the PCs a mission, so he's really following the PCs. This means if the PCs zig, he zigs with them, and you don't have to waste time trying to herd the PCs into some final confrontation at a specific location.

Other than that, there are a lot of good advisors on this board. There are also more specific resources, starting at your fingertips with the last section of the Core book. I hate to sound like an FFG shill, but every career book in this line has useful information for the GM on structuring elements of a campaign. And most of the adventure modules are pretty good, so long as you adapt them to your needs, take note of how they set up encounters and provide charts for how to spend narrative dice results. Outside the FFG line, if you can handle the language and over-the-top attitude, I occasionally like to read http://theangrygm.com The guy has a long history of ramblings on encounter design, campaign settings, handling social encounters, etc. Also check out DriveThruRPG.com, there are a ton of useful and inexpensive PDFs with general advice about GMing, including how to GM when you've made no plan at all.

Hope that helps...

If I would give one piece of advice for a new GM, it's to plan properly (put some work into the right places, and don't overplan). Here are some examples:

• Write out your Introduction/Recap to set the scene prior to every session, but otherwise try not to script things in such a way that the PCs have to go to some certain place. In other words, don't plan to railroad your players.
• Plan your encounters and scenes in a way that lets you move them and re-skin them. For example, if the encounter is for them to find a Force Sensitive child, and they don't accept the Hutt's job but end up going in a different direction, then they happen to encounter the Force-Sensitive child by some other means. Star Wars is full of happenstance and coincidences, so if the players fly off to Corellia, then it just so happens that the child has actually been abducted by Corellian pirates, whose stats just happen to be the same as the Weequay thugs (I'm just spitballing) who you had originally set to guard this kidnapped child. And instead of a dungeon that the players are infiltrating, it's the pirate's flagship that has captured them by means of a tractor beam. Insert a bit of story about how the Weequays sold the child to the Corellian Pirates, and you're golden.
• One of the most useful tools I've ever had is a simple list of pregenerated NPC names. Nothing else, just names. That way you don't have to think on your feet to come up with a decent name when your PCs decide to interact with that random NPC that you had no intention of naming or including in the story at all.

So yeah. Planning stuff like a name list, movable encounters, even a music playlist; this will set you up for a great session.

There's lots of helpful advice on the Interwebz. Best GM advice I've gotten thus far is from Matt Colville and The Angry GM . Nothing Star Wars-specific, and Colville is more focused on D&D 5e, but it's just great advice for running the game in general.

Good bit about the names, I keep forgetting to do that and I always regret it.

10 minutes ago, whafrog said:

Good bit about the names, I keep forgetting to do that and I always regret it.

I have a couple players that like to bust my balls when I come up with names on the fly (I'm terrible at it!), so yeah I rarely forget nowadays

My advice for GMs (new and old):

When you plan spend more time thinking about the villains/nemesis and their plans than what the PCs will do or how you want the PCs to react ("They'll, do A, then I'll do B, then they'll do C"). Focus on setting a scene and a story and a situation and let the players tackle it and roll with it. If you've prepped properly then all you really do at the table is set things up and then end up bouncing off what they do and having the NPCs react appropriately to complicate what the PCs are doing (the PCs typically start off complicated the villains plans, so it goes back and forth). Most every plan the PCs come up with will have trade-offs, let them try for the upsides and you play up the downsides (pushing appropriate consequences). I find that PCs are great at coming up with solutions - some cause more problems than they solve which is fun too - so I don't stress too much about how a problem can be solved. Set a scene and a scenario and let the PCs go. And don't be afraid to throw out things you've prepped behind the scenes (villain motivations, plans, resources, etc) if the PCs land on something better.

Don't be afraid to let you PCs do awesome things with Triumph to swing an encounter their way.

Fall back on the tropes of Star Wars to keep the game going - things like being captured is more common than the party being killed.

3 hours ago, awayputurwpn said:

I have a couple players that like to bust my balls when I come up with names on the fly (I'm terrible at it!), so yeah I rarely forget nowadays

Yes, NAMES! Names can be a killer, so having a list handy is a godsend. Last session, I had to come up with a vagrant's name on the fly. I choked and called him "One-Eyed Pete." I tried to cover my tracks, saying it was spelled P-I-T. Says one of my players: "Well, that does have one I ."

5 hours ago, SavageBob said:

Yes, NAMES! Names can be a killer, so having a list handy is a godsend. Last session, I had to come up with a vagrant's name on the fly. I choked and called him "One-Eyed Pete." I tried to cover my tracks, saying it was spelled P-I-T. Says one of my players: "Well, that does have one I ."

Ha ha ha, that's a way better story than my night of "Greus, Dreus, Preus." And they all had Russian accents

Of course, there is always, Professor Rudolf Schytzengyggles.

On 7/13/2017 at 2:30 PM, awayputurwpn said:

I have a couple players that like to bust my balls when I come up with names on the fly (I'm terrible at it!), so yeah I rarely forget nowadays

Hey, it could be worse. I have the list of random names, so that's no problem. However, I usually try to do voices for the main NPC's. Sometimes I don't plan ahead, so the PCs meet with the Twi'Lek resistance leader, and when I open my mouth, out comes...

John Ratzenberger

So now I'm very careful. I have a Bothan professor played by Woody Allen, a holocron Jedi played by Nick Offerman, and a Mon Calamari weapons dealer played by Jimmy Stewart. My Dathomiri Force Witch unfortunately is just "generic bad Jamaican accent which sometimes wanders off into Scottish and even Canadian."

On July 13, 2017 at 4:30 PM, awayputurwpn said:

I have a couple players that like to bust my balls when I come up with names on the fly (I'm terrible at it!), so yeah I rarely forget nowadays

Yup, due to poor planning our party has a rebel npc named Dram Atic.

16 minutes ago, The Grand Falloon said:

My Dathomiri Force Witch unfortunately is just "generic bad Jamaican accent which sometimes wanders off into Scottish and even Canadian."

Aw, man! That's who I should have modeled the witch after!

27 minutes ago, The Grand Falloon said:

So now I'm very careful. I have a Bothan professor played by Woody Allen, a holocron Jedi played by Nick Offerman, and a Mon Calamari weapons dealer played by Jimmy Stewart. My Dathomiri Force Witch unfortunately is just "generic bad Jamaican accent which sometimes wanders off into Scottish and even Canadian."

Glad I'm not the only one who does this. I've actually gotten a fair bit of feedback that my NPC's are more interesting when I've got a particular character or actor in the back of my head; even if they don't know who it is.

3 hours ago, Vorzakk said:

Glad I'm not the only one who does this. I've actually gotten a fair bit of feedback that my NPC's are more interesting when I've got a particular character or actor in the back of my head; even if they don't know who it is.

That's a long-standing habit of mine, dating waaaay back to when I was putting together a web site for our old WEG campaign. I had everyone "cast" their characters.

Our group included Bruce Campbell as our smuggler, Chris O'Donnell as my Young Jedi, Matthew Perry and Dana Ashbrook as two of our fighter pilots (with Jennifer Aniston as the NPC squadron leader), Patrick Stewart as the retired Imperial Captain, Tim Thomerson as a laconic scout, and Michael Wincott as an outlaw. On the NPC side, Roddy McDowell was the Imperial admiral nemesis, Mark Metcalf an Imperial Captain, Jenna Jameson and Chasey Lain as seductive undercover ISB agents, and others I'm sure I'm forgetting.

Although my current campaign now has custom art of the PC's, I encouraged the group to "cast" their characters, as well.