Spoilers for both Return to Hoth and Jabba's Realm below:

I think the HotE mechanic of letting the winning side pick the next mission will be sufficient for my group.

I love the idea of bonus objectives.

The Favor idea is interesting, but I worry the examples you've presented could be incredibly swingy. In missions like Friends of Old or A New Threat would become total cakewalk for the Rebels. There's also the reality that this "choice" is only available because the game or the IP presented it to them. Suppose the Rebels decide they want to take some credits they've built up and just make a donation to the planet to gain Favor? Would you allow this? This Baron character does feel a bit... omniscient.

I think an easy way to give players choice would be to just let them carry supply crate items from one mission to the next, but give them other constraints. Maybe only Gaarkhan is strong enough to lug around that Power Generator to the next mission.

Another thing I'm thinking of using is ripped straight from the 1980's D6 RPG. Giving the players Force Points. The absence of the Force is something that is sorely felt in my games. At first this seemed impossible to accommodate. Not everyone can be a Jedi. The current structure isn't there, and even if it was it would get boring FAST. But as the D6 Source Book points out, the Force is in all living things, and one need not be a Jedi in order to access it. Luke "used" the Force to blow up the Death Star long before he became a Jedi.

I've got a weekend with my old gaming group coming up. We're going to play a mini-campaign and I plan on giving them each one Force Point, except for Diala, who will get two. They can redeem these Force Points to "Feel the Force flow through them" and get one time special abilities (mostly things that are taken from the Command Cards, but there are a few others that I've made myself). Since Diala can actually "use" the Force, she'll get access to a few other special abilities that will cost her both Force Points.

I have to get ready for an event tonight, but I'll expand more later.

1 hour ago, Pollux85 said:

I think the HotE mechanic of letting the winning side pick the next mission will be sufficient for my group.

I love the idea of bonus objectives.

The Favor idea is interesting, but I worry the examples you've presented could be incredibly swingy. In missions like Friends of Old or A New Threat would become total cakewalk for the Rebels. There's also the reality that this "choice" is only available because the game or the IP presented it to them. Suppose the Rebels decide they want to take some credits they've built up and just make a donation to the planet to gain Favor? Would you allow this?

I think that's a great idea- if favor can be translated to threat on a mission, I think it should probably have some sort of currency exchange for Credits after missions- either granting more credits by cashing in Favor, or buying Favor with credits.

As far as swinginess goes- the Favor events that I'd listed would only be available in this campaign's story missions. As for spending Favor for threat or credits- that could happen in any mission, but I see it this way- it's not totally unlike spending threat on allies, or buying a new weapon. Sure, it's a new moving piece, but spending Favor for an item or effect will mean that down the road you won't have that favor later.

As for choice- well, obviously we're not going to be able to offer the Rebels true and complete freedom. We're not D&D. But I think this could up what I like to call the "Mass Effect Factor" quite a bit, whereas it's been something otherwise very seldom seen in this game (but I think it's been really cool so far.

Quote

This Baron character does feel a bit... omniscient.

Haha, sure. He's really more of an example to see how this campaign could work.

I like to throw in some flavor here and there.

Quote

I think an easy way to give players choice would be to just let them carry supply crate items from one mission to the next, but give them other constraints. Maybe only Gaarkhan is strong enough to lug around that Power Generator to the next mission.

Another thing I'm thinking of using is ripped straight from the 1980's D6 RPG. Giving the players Force Points. The absence of the Force is something that is sorely felt in my games. At first this seemed impossible to accommodate. Not everyone can be a Jedi. The current structure isn't there, and even if it was it would get boring FAST. But as the D6 Source Book points out, the Force is in all living things, and one need not be a Jedi in order to access it. Luke "used" the Force to blow up the Death Star long before he became a Jedi.

I've got a weekend with my old gaming group coming up. We're going to play a mini-campaign and I plan on giving them each one Force Point, except for Diala, who will get two. They can redeem these Force Points to "Feel the Force flow through them" and get one time special abilities (mostly things that are taken from the Command Cards, but there are a few others that I've made myself). Since Diala can actually "use" the Force, she'll get access to a few other special abilities that will cost her both Force Points.

I have to get ready for an event tonight, but I'll expand more later.

Sounds like interesting stuff!

3 hours ago, Pollux85 said:

But as the D6 Source Book points out, the Force is in all living things, and one need not be a Jedi in order to access it. Luke "used" the Force to blow up the Death Star long before he became a Jedi.

Well, that's not entirely accurate.

The force is in everything, but you must be 'Force Sensitive' to access it. All Jedi are Force Sensitive, but not all Force Sensitive are Jedi.

Luke was a Jedi in training when he used the force to blow up the Death Star, so hardly "long before he became a Jedi".

Not everyone can use the force.

3 hours ago, Majushi said:

Not everyone can use the force.

Can't help but think about that quote from TFA

7 hours ago, subtrendy2 said:

Spoilers for both Return to Hoth and Jabba's Realm below:

One of the coolest moments that I'm looking forward to in my upcoming Jabba's Realm campaign is the part in Moment of Faith where the Rebels have to decide where their loyalties lie. It's almost like a Mass Effect style decision. I really wish campaigns had more of this, but I realize that an increasingly branching mission structure would make for an inordinate amount of missions in an expansion.

However, I think that choice doesn't necessarily have to be reflected only be what mission follows.

Consider, for a moment, the Agenda missions in Return to Hoth- in my opinion, they were flawed. What may have intentionally started as a method to make the campaign more replayable by not requiring side missions that may have been attempted in the Core campaign, the problem is that these essentially necessary threat missions only have 4 different versions- so, what may have originally had been a plan for variety now cripples variety, particularly for anyone who owns multiple expansions. What I did like about the Threat missions, though, is how their attempts or lack thereof were always felt in each mission. If the Rebels let these threat missions build up banes, they would suffer for it. If they reduced the banes or gained boons, they'd see their efforts reflected in story mission triggers.

So, what if we merged these two ideas together- Bane/Boons and Choices?

Here's my proposal- let's say we have a campaign in which the Rebels are working toward building relations with another planet and trying to win support for the Alliance. For this example's sake, let's say it's Shu-Torin (which would also allow for volcanic and subterranean tiles, which would be cool for other settings like Sullust and Mustafar, too). Now, at certain points in the mission, bonus objectives might appear. For instance, imagine this example:

"You're downloaded the Imperial intelligence. Now, all you need to do is escape the base!"

Missions ends (rebel victory) when all Rebel heroes are on the clearing.

"Just as you're about to leave, you hear a voice on your comlink.

'This is Baron Karth. A valuable Imperial officer has been spotted in your area. Take him down, and the Loyalists will be quite grateful."

Spawn an elite Imperial Officer on the blue point.

As an optional objective, kill the Imperial officer.

At the end of the mission, if the Rebels managed to defeat the officer, they win a certain amount of Favor. If they do not, the Imperials win that amount of Favor. In addition, each side wins a certain amount of their respective Favor based on the results of the mission. Favor will act as a new ingame currency that, like Threat, will typically be spend inside missions.

For example, another mission might see something like this:

"Our Snipers have got the enemies in our sights', you hear Baron Karth say over your earpiece. 'Just give the word, and we'll lend you a hand."

The Rebel Players may discard up to 3 Favor tokens. For each token discarded, they may choose an enemy unit with threat cost 3 or greater. That unit is defeated.

In the first example I gave withe the Imperial officer, the trade off was obviously risking the mission for the extra favor.

Other in-game choices could offer a bit of a different type of trade off- perhaps a thug offers to collect some information on the Shu-Torin royalty for the Empire. You can sell the information for the Rebels to gain a good amount of Credits, but at the cost of giving the Empire favor.

Or, conversely, there could even be bidding wars:

"As you hear the Imperials battering on the door to your room, you can only hope that the steel will hold.

'Greetings, friends,' the Baron says, appearing on a screen in the room. 'The Empire is asking that we grant them permission into the room you're holed up in. I do hope that you'll be able to convince me that I needn't do that."

Starting with the Rebels, hold a Favor bid.

If the Empire bids higher, remove the door.

If the Rebels win the bid, the door is locked. Give it 7 health, with a block of one.

I'm also toying around with some ideas like making Favor able to be spent as Threat for the Empire, or for bidding wars to determine who chooses the next story mission.

Basically, I just really like the players having more agency and choice in campaign that translates to thematic events, and I think this would be a far more feasible way than to have a branching mission structure that could quickly get out of hand.

Let me know what you think!

You have some cool ideas here! I like the bonus objectives! Count me in! The Favor idea is great too, but I'm with Pollux about how swingy they could make a mission. I understand though that you suggest that could be part of a new campaign which would receive a fair amount of play testing for incorporating in-build mission choices. Maybe that could possibly work I suppose.

My idea of giving the rebel players more choices have been written in another thread, but briefly it is related to the upgrade stages between certain missions. I've set up a cantina map where they can go and visit a few sellers. The choice of the seller belongs to them. And the way they want to interact with he seller (through one of 3 attribute test) is also based on their choice. They will even be given the choice to step up in a possible altercation between imperial patrol and a rebel figure to earn them as a one-time ally in a future mission (unless they unlock the ally per the rule at a later point). (one such scenario could be Biv being ambushed by a patrol leaded by Kayn Somos, if of course, Biv is not part of the rebel heroes. If they succeed in helping Biv, Biv can be earned (using his skirmish deployment card) as a one-time only ally in an upcoming mission of their choice. If they fail, heroes could retain part of the damage they suffered when entering the next mission)

6 hours ago, Pollux85 said:

I think an easy way to give players choice would be to just let them carry supply crate items from one mission to the next, but give them other constraints. Maybe only Gaarkhan is strong enough to lug around that Power Generator to the next mission.

Yes I do that already, but without the limitation you suggest with the example of Gaarkhan. In fact, at the end of a mission, I give them the choice to sell the crate for 50 credits (an return the card in the crate deck), or keep the card for the next mission, in which case, they do not get the 50 credits reward.

7 hours ago, Pollux85 said:

I have to get ready for an event tonight, but I'll expand more later.

Yes! Please do so! I'm curious and would be happy to learn more about your ideas!

30 minutes ago, IanSolo_FFG said:

Can't help but think about that quote from TFA

Not everyone can use the Force, but the Force will be with you always.

It's true though. I like to think of the Force as behaving much more like the One Power in the Wheel of Time series. Yes, some people can use the Force, and those people can do impossible things. But sometimes, The Force will use you, and then for a brief moment you can do things that are merely extremely unlikely. You might think you just got lucky, and maybe that's a distinction without difference, but it solves the problem of incorporating the Force without everyone and their mother running around with lightsabers.

Okay, so here's my list of Force powers. They would only get to use one power off this list one time during the entire mini-campaign, unless they use the Force Point for good, and at an appropriately dramatic moment, which is totally up to me to decide as the Game Master. So using the power to run away from a fight, or to kill an already weakened opponent would clearly be bad or neutral, while using the power to help save an ally would be good. I wanted them to be powerful, but not so much that they break the game. My other balance to them is that some of the unique enemies will also have Force points that can be used against the Rebels. They can decide to use a Force Point at any time, even after a roll has happened.

10 hours ago, IanSolo_FFG said:

You have some cool ideas here! I like the bonus objectives! Count me in! The Favor idea is great too, but I'm with Pollux about how swingy they could make a mission. I understand though that you suggest that could be part of a new campaign which would receive a fair amount of play testing for incorporating in-build mission choices. Maybe that could possibly work I suppose.

Yeah, definitely it would need some playtesting. And I'm beginning to think that allowing for a fluid exchange of Favor for Threat (and vice versa) might not work, given that could be used in missions that were not originally tested for it. But Favor for events in a campaign that was tested with it seems doable- after all, Return to Hoth was presumably tested for any combination of Banes and Boons that were in play.

One other idea that I had was to make the campaign's finale very heavy on the amount of favor that could be gained and spent- then, at the end of a certain amount of pre-decided rounds (let's say seven for now) the team with the most leftover favor would win the mission (and thereby also winning the campaign).

What makes that interesting to me is that it seems to make the campaign a more unified experience. It kinda bugs some players when an entire campaign comes down to a single mission, particularly like in campaigns like my recent Return to Hoth one, where one side dominates for most of a campaign but fumbles in the end. By making the winner the one with the most favor, you're making the campaign objective something that the heroes have been working toward for the entire campaign. Plus, given that you're counting the Favor, it's thematic in the sense that the campaign is already about trying to win (or block) an alliance between the campaign's planet and the Rebels.

Quote

My idea of giving the rebel players more choices have been written in another thread, but briefly it is related to the upgrade stages between certain missions. I've set up a cantina map where they can go and visit a few sellers. The choice of the seller belongs to them. And the way they want to interact with he seller (through one of 3 attribute test) is also based on their choice. They will even be given the choice to step up in a possible altercation between imperial patrol and a rebel figure to earn them as a one-time ally in a future mission (unless they unlock the ally per the rule at a later point). (one such scenario could be Biv being ambushed by a patrol leaded by Kayn Somos, if of course, Biv is not part of the rebel heroes. If they succeed in helping Biv, Biv can be earned (using his skirmish deployment card) as a one-time only ally in an upcoming mission of their choice. If they fail, heroes could retain part of the damage they suffered when entering the next mission)

Oh yeah, I remember reading that! Very cool idea! I like it, adds some good thematic flavor to one of the more otherwise dry segments of the game.

DAMNATION! CAN SOMEONE EXPLAIN HOW TO USE THE SPOILER TAGS?

2 minutes ago, Pollux85 said:

DAMNATION! CAN SOMEONE EXPLAIN HOW TO USE THE SPOILER TAGS?

Like this (minus the spaces between characters in the code bracets):

[ s p o i l e r ] Text and stuff [ / s p o i l e r ]

Example:

There's a trick that allows you to write also [spoiler][/spoiler] .

Pollux85 - the Force idea is nice, but the list seems way too long, especially if you're only doing this for the first time. With so many options, there's a huge probability that some of them are way more/less powerful than others and it's difficult to tell when preparing this (ie. Serendipity, Initiative). It also gives the Rebels a huge amount of options to think about at all times, which might just confuse them more than it actually helps.

Hi all, long time stalker of this forum, first time posting

I actually really like Pollux85 idea with the force a lot. Even tho you have a lot of options.

My idea stems from that, perhaps each mission you could roll the force die from the Edge of the Empire RPG and that’s the force pool for the mission, both sides get a certain amount of force tokens based on what was rolled and they can spend them just as you suggested.

You could even go so far as the RPG does and when you spend them, they get flipped over to the other side and the other team could use them then.

This may end up changing the game extremely tho if there are force tokens being used left right and centre.

12 hours ago, Mattixinc said:

Hi all, long time stalker of this forum, first time posting

Welcome!

On 10/5/2017 at 3:07 AM, burek277 said:

Pollux85 - the Force idea is nice, but the list seems way too long, especially if you're only doing this for the first time. With so many options, there's a huge probability that some of them are way more/less powerful than others and it's difficult to tell when preparing this (ie. Serendipity, Initiative). It also gives the Rebels a huge amount of options to think about at all times, which might just confuse them more than it actually helps.

Oh I definitely went overboard with the list. I figured it was better to have too many than too few because I knew if I didn't they'd think up something I didn't and I'd get caught flatfooted. A lot of them are also ripped straight from Command Cards, so I hope it won't upset balance too much. If it does though, I'd rather it do so in their favor.

And hey, would you believe there are eight more powers that I priced at three Force Points and already cut?

Welp, I did it. I finally broke the game. The mini-campaign with Force powers was a total blowout for the Rebels. The Force powers allowed them to ****** victory from me in two of the four missions by killing off critical units when I would have otherwise run out the clock or had them in my grasp.

IA's campaign stories have always been pretty threadbare, and in this instance my attempt to add more RPG elements that might compensate for that just highlighted the fact that there's nothing really in the gameplay to reinforce it. It just felt weird and tacked on, like a different game we were just messing around with until we got to the real meat of combat when things would return to the safe, comfortable, place. The group had fun, but I don't feel like the experiment was successful. Oh well.

Also, funny thing. The profanity filter evidently thinks that a six letter synonym for "grab" starting with "s" is a swear word. So that's interesting.

8 minutes ago, Pollux85 said:

Welp, I did it. I finally broke the game. The mini-campaign with Force powers was a total blowout for the Rebels. The Force powers allowed them to ****** victory from me in two of the four missions by killing off critical units when I would have otherwise run out the clock or had them in my grasp.

IA's campaign stories have always been pretty threadbare, and in this instance my attempt to add more RPG elements that might compensate for that just highlighted the fact that there's nothing really in the gameplay to reinforce it. It just felt weird and tacked on, like a different game we were just messing around with until we got to the real meat of combat when things would return to the safe, comfortable, place. The group had fun, but I don't feel like the experiment was successful. Oh well.

Attack of the midi-chlorians ...

5 hours ago, Pollux85 said:

Also, funny thing. The profanity filter evidently thinks that a six letter synonym for "grab" starting with "s" is a swear word. So that's interesting.

I feel your pain, broh. The filters routinely censors my use of the Latin loan word for "with"

5 hours ago, Pollux85 said:

Welp, I did it. I finally broke the game. The mini-campaign with Force powers was a total blowout for the Rebels. The Force powers allowed them to ****** victory from me in two of the four missions by killing off critical units when I would have otherwise run out the clock or had them in my grasp.

IA's campaign stories have always been pretty threadbare, and in this instance my attempt to add more RPG elements that might compensate for that just highlighted the fact that there's nothing really in the gameplay to reinforce it. It just felt weird and tacked on, like a different game we were just messing around with until we got to the real meat of combat when things would return to the safe, comfortable, place. The group had fun, but I don't feel like the experiment was successful. Oh well.

Sad to hear. Though, I guess not too surprising- balance is already a precarious thing in IA- stuff as big as the new force powers no doubt can upset that balance.

Anyway, mind if I reference this in a paper I'm working on regarding thematic changes in campaigns?

7 hours ago, Pollux85 said:

Also, funny thing. The profanity filter evidently thinks that a six letter synonym for "grab" starting with "s" is a swear word. So that's interesting.

If your word is what I think it is, then yes. It's a slang term for a woman's genitalia. (at least in the UK)

(I believe the word is also the title of a Guy Ritchie movie starring Brad Pitt, Jason Statham, Vinnie Jones and a few other semi-known actors)

16 hours ago, subtrendy2 said:

Sad to hear. Though, I guess not too surprising- balance is already a precarious thing in IA- stuff as big as the new force powers no doubt can upset that balance.

Anyway, mind if I reference this in a paper I'm working on regarding thematic changes in campaigns?

Go right ahead. I'm humbled.

1 hour ago, Pollux85 said:

Go right ahead. I'm humbled.

No need to be, I'm nobody important. But thank you!