6 hours ago, Mark Caliber said:

Oooo!

We had another relevant experience during our latest RPG session.

The GM was running us through a canned module (Don't ask, I have NO idea what FFG adventure the GM was using). However it was a treasure hunt in an old Hutt Palace (Bonus points if you can identify the adventure based on that scant description).

EVERYTHING that we tried to do to get to the treasure failed. We burned through 6+ Destiny Points to get ANY kind of edge. Every obvious and available obstacle was not only NOT defeated, but we made things WORSE at EVERY turn.

And while we BARELY got away with the needed items, we lost the whole treasure and barely escaped with our lives with the whole palace crumbling to pieces around us.

Multiple Despairs man!

The ONLY thing that worked for us was when we took a welding/blow torch to a metal grate, which was the ONLY thing that didn't require a skill check, and cut a hole through the floor! (Heaven knows that if we would have required a skill check, we would have failed that too)!

And you know what? If we had failed that mission, we would have needed to plan a rescue/cat-thief heist vs our 'client'. I think we got lucky, now that I consider the alternative.

...How? Just... how? Were all of the players droids with 1's for all stats? Did the entire party incur the wrath of a voodoo priestess right before your session started? That kind of bad luck defies probability!

Yup. Dead road it is.

Sometimes things just go south. Sounds like you could still move on with the story regardless.pfnfailing your rolls, and built the story from those failures. I call it a success

13 hours ago, Degenerate Mind said:

...How? Just... how? Were all of the players droids with 1's for all stats? Did the entire party incur the wrath of a voodoo priestess right before your session started? That kind of bad luck defies probability!

Actually the GM had us start with an additional 300 Exp to be spent on skills and talents. The Slicer has YYG for their skill checks and my mechanic is rolling YYY.

However, most of the contested checks were against PPP or PPR. And my goodness how many faces on a Red dice do those despair results featured on? Just ONE? Impossible!

So, nope. It wasn't a lack of skills or talents. We just rolled horribly! Over and over and over again. We had SO many results where all of the successes were canceled by a like number of failures. The advantages were generally pretty generous, but for as many series of advantages, we'd be plagued by a like string of threats. (STRESS! MY PC IS TAKING STRESS!!!!!)

And those cursed yellow dice kept coming up with blanks! With odds defying regularity!

There was a moment of awesome when one character, facing imminent death, had to leap to 'safety' with a dice pool of GGPPPP! And succeeded with aplomb! But that was an exception to the night.

2 minutes ago, Mark Caliber said:

Actually the GM had us start with an additional 300 Exp to be spent on skills and talents. The Slicer has YYG for their skill checks and my mechanic is rolling YYY.

However, most of the contested checks were against PPP or PPR. And my goodness how many faces on a Red dice do those despair results featured on? Just ONE? Impossible!

So, nope. It wasn't a lack of skills or talents. We just rolled horribly! Over and over and over again. We had SO many results where all of the successes were canceled by a like number of failures. The advantages were generally pretty generous, but for as many series of advantages, we'd be plagued by a like string of threats. (STRESS! MY PC IS TAKING STRESS!!!!!)

And those cursed yellow dice kept coming up with blanks! With odds defying regularity!

There was a moment of awesome when one character, facing imminent death, had to leap to 'safety' with a dice pool of GGPPPP! And succeeded with aplomb! But that was an exception to the night.

PPPP to jump somewhere? Sounds to me like your GM was ratcheting the difficulty up a bit more than necessary. Also, you guys definitely pissed off a voodoo priestess right before your session, with luck that actively malicious.

I found this article very helpful when thinking about story choke points and how to avoid them. Ironically the author isn't a fan of FFGSW but thats okay because they get this right...

http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1118/roleplaying-games/three-clue-rule

On ‎10‎/‎27‎/‎2017 at 7:07 AM, Mark Caliber said:

Actually the GM had us start with an additional 300 Exp to be spent on skills and talents. The Slicer has YYG for their skill checks and my mechanic is rolling YYY.

However, most of the contested checks were against PPP or PPR. And my goodness how many faces on a Red dice do those despair results featured on? Just ONE? Impossible!

So, nope. It wasn't a lack of skills or talents. We just rolled horribly! Over and over and over again. We had SO many results where all of the successes were canceled by a like number of failures. The advantages were generally pretty generous, but for as many series of advantages, we'd be plagued by a like string of threats. (STRESS! MY PC IS TAKING STRESS!!!!!)

And those cursed yellow dice kept coming up with blanks! With odds defying regularity!

There was a moment of awesome when one character, facing imminent death, had to leap to 'safety' with a dice pool of GGPPPP! And succeeded with aplomb! But that was an exception to the night.

Sounds like your GM is increasing the difficulty instead of adding setback dice, which is bad on multiple levels... getting that balance right is a big thing for some GM's moving to this system. They really need to review the dice pool generation rules over and over and over and over...

4 hours ago, Bishop69 said:

Sounds like your GM is increasing the difficulty instead of adding setback dice, which is bad on multiple levels... getting that balance right is a big thing for some GM's moving to this system. They really need to review the dice pool generation rules over and over and over and over...

He's getting the stats from one of FFG's "canned" missions . . . so it's not the GM

I have not read the whole thing (only the first couple pages) but i will say there are multiple ways you can handle this. If you NEED your players to get in that door and they fail the check with advantage they FAIL to pick the lock, but thankfully someone inside the door opens the door because they heard a commotion outside. If they Fail with Disadvantage they FAIL to open the door they get spotted and a shoot out happens, again someone inside is wondering what the commotion is... they open the door. Failure with Triumph some one opens the door because they were on their way out and maybe they are the only one, or maybe a prisoner got loose and went through the vents and opened the door trying to get out so now they have a new ally that shows up.... All of this is assuming they fail to pick the lock. If you don't like that there is always other options especially with those books, sure it says they need to get in that door, maybe they fail to pick the lock, but I am sure there are NPC's around they can deceive or beat up that can conveniently have a Key Card that opens the door, or there are vents that one of the smaller characters with good coordination can sneak through, so on and so forth. If they absolutely MUST get into that room or the plot halts completely a failure simply means they failed to pick the lock, that doesnt mean the door HAS to stay shut and it definitely doesnt mean that is the only way to get the door to open, heck they fail to open it so they decide to knock on the door and go "hey man let me in I forgot my key card" and roll deception, guy opens the door....