This question has probably been asked before but...

I'm currently developing the next campaign for my group & we're moving from an Edge of the Empire style to working with the Rebellion (or Resistance, we're currently playing in the period about 2 to 3 yrs before A New Hope & the Rebellion as it stands isn't yet an entity)

I'm planning to run it as a sandbox style, using a lot of the ideas that Concise Locket had been talking about in his excellent thread on the Gamesmasters Forum, see below :

The campaign will be set in a small star cluster of my own design that's situated on the edge of the Mid Rim.

I was wondering how people are running their Rebel based games... Do you run it in a episodic style having objectives that can be completed in a few gaming sessions or do you go for the big picture approach where there's a definitive objective to complete along with the climatic encounter at the end?

For my self I do a mix of both. My curret group we had the prelude and background arc that set some tone and some of the npcs up. We did a end of the clone wars, early empire ( the last month of the clone wars, and the first few months of the empire being formed. ) In the first arc I built up the first part of a sector with a loose goal of trying to find out a separatist secret weapons project. After order 66 happen they fellow their commanding officer to try to build the rebellion. In the end they got betrayed and lost most things including their main flagship got destroyed and they where on the run. We closed that arc and we started a new group set 5 years later after this event right now its more of a rigid mission structure till they got more pull with the rebellion. Whats nice if already despite it being a more fixed mission structure they have already mini missions they set to them selfs like trying to recruit a few disgruntled bar patrons or trying to get more info. So in the end what you can do is a blend and a build up. As a gm I want them to feel part of a lviing universe so I build alot of background and little npc stuff, also have to be flexible for them to do these mini mission they set there goals on so even as you build a slight episodic its more open ended and then you build up to a more open ended as the group builds up. So you can do both in all honesty even with the same group and even with in the same game session.

Depending on how you and your players look at it, the Edge and the Age game can look quite different. In Edge it's about money at the end of the day usually. Sure it's not always like that, but that seems to be the big motivator in a lot of Edge games and with the whole "keep them hungry" thing. I figure if I'm going to run an Age of Rebellion game then the focus has to shift away from money. Instead the stuff that happens may have a money aspect, but primarily the stuff that goes on should somehow touch the central conflict of the Rebellion to restore the Republic. The characters now have Duty? They now serve the rebellion? If that's true its a big deal in their lives, the characters have now chosen a side and though you can of course play out the growing pains of that, they are somewhat committed to a cause now other than stacking fat bills. If they keep on just trying to play the Edge mentality then NPCs in the Rebellion will not trust or rely on them, and won't back them in operations. If it gets bad enough they will be classified as a liability and that can be bad for them.

I personally run a mix of everything in my games to keep it fresh for the group and to give myself something to look forward to when I'm writing. When you're running a linear, objective-based story line for three months straight, it gets kind of stale. Think how stale Oblivion was when you had to close gate after gate after gate...

My current group has been running for six months now. We started out with a very EotE feel and we're starting to transition into more AoR focused game. We started out on a more linear path to get the characters established and working together before we expanded into a more sandbox feel. The group is currently building a Rebel cell on a backwater world where they can select their missions instead of me putting them on a train ride.

I'm liking this advice P-Dub663, I hadn't considered it getting stale, so I'll go down the route of mixing things up a little... I've already got some edge type characters written up in the setting I'm working on so they should be easy enough to expand!

And yes I do remember Oblivion... Those gates were a real chore