In anything, if you want to go
from just a beginner to a pro,
you need a montage (Montage!)

- DVDA

It looks as though my group of players is about to jump into the deep end in the fight against the Empire next session. They're joining up with a burgeoning Rebel cell for a three-part raid. First, they're doing a covert landing on Utapau, with forged Imperial credentials. They're splitting up as crewmen aboard and Action VI Transport and its Gozanti Carrier escort, so that halfway through the journey, they can disable things like hyperdrives, shields and cannons. This will make it easier for their Rebel friends to disable the ships without too much damage, load them with commandos, and then blitz the orbital research station that they've chosen as their objective. Should be fun on a bun, but I was thinking I would start the session off with a training montage. Such a mission takes a bit of prep, so I'll be firing up some Eye of the Tiger and You're the Best Around, and then asking what they're doing with the couple of weeks they have to get ready.

I'd like there to be some rewards, but I'm not sure what they should be. Just some extra XP would be fine, but kinda boring. Maybe have them make a few rolls, and successes will earn little "boost bennies," which they can spend whenever they want? Help me, Rocky Balboa, you're my only hope!

Maybe if they add something cool to the montage it can affect how the outcome goes. A lot of time in the A-Team montages they are working on the actual device they will use so there is a direct connection. You could pass out index cards or slips of paper and have them describe a scene where they are doing something in the prep. Fire up the music while they write them up. When they turn them in you stop the music and then check them out. Then when you are ready fire up the music and describe the montage, maybe prompting the players to jump in and do some description of they can handle the narrative control to your liking. This thread made me laugh btw, so awesome.

This may not be apropos to your question directly, but may provide sufficient insight.

HappyDaze does something interesting in his campaigns involving long task skill checks and it's a device which has been used to good effect twice so far.

In our most recent adventure, we were repairing our ship which had taken extensive damage in a recent space battle. (We had suffered 75% damage!)

First, he determined that we only had 12 hull damage worth of repair components (out of 18 damage). But to determine the duration of the job we did daily mechanics checks to see how much was repaired. Each success resulted in 1 point of hull damage being repaired.

The dice yielded some interesting results, which we then used to interpret the success.

Examples: On the first day there were a bunch of blanks, which we interpreted as the two mechanics socializing and goofing off (only two points of damage repaired that day).

Later we had a result of NO successes, TONES of advantages & 1 Triumph. So we didn't actually do anything to repair the ship THAT day, but we sorted and organized a bunch of supplies that we had found on site and converted them to usable repair components. (One damage repaired, we got another 6 damage points worth of needed supplied, and added a blue dice to the next day's check).

And the next day we finished the repairs to the ship with a George load of successes.

SO, are there some tasks that would be useful in preparing for the mission? That can be adapted to with a skill check? Use the narrative results of the dice to come up with some interesting results.

So if the slicer spends time preping a cracker code for the mission and they get a couple of advantages, let them use a blue die later during the mission at their discretion for a computer skill check, or if a Triumph comes up, let the PC's have a related upgrade to a later check, during the mission.

Maybe something like that may help out.

In one of the F&D books there is a piece of equipment that allows the character to make a training roll and gain a skill value of 3 for the remainder of the adventure. You might want to do something like that: make a hard Discipline check and you will gain [appropriate ranks in skill for the mission] as pertains only to this scenario. For instance, if none of your PCs has Computers, drilling them on the exact process they need to use to shut down the Gozanti's sensors might allow them to attempt the check with a 3 Computers skill for this mission.

8 hours ago, JRRP said:

In one of the F&D books there is a piece of equipment that allows the character to make a training roll and gain a skill value of 3 for the remainder of the adventure. You might want to do something like that: make a hard Discipline check and you will gain [appropriate ranks in skill for the mission] as pertains only to this scenario. For instance, if none of your PCs has Computers, drilling them on the exact process they need to use to shut down the Gozanti's sensors might allow them to attempt the check with a 3 Computers skill for this mission.

If you could get back to us on which book it was in, I would owe you one. That sounds quite useful, and might just change the order in which I plan on investing in F&D supplements.

On 10/28/2017 at 4:35 AM, Degenerate Mind said:

If you could get back to us on which book it was in, I would owe you one. That sounds quite useful, and might just change the order in which I plan on investing in F&D supplements.

That would be Disciples of Harmony, with the item being called a "Synoptic Teacher" (p.49).

Why are you not using the greatest montage music of all?

Sorry about the delay in replying. The equipment I was referring to is the Synoptic Teacher from Disciples of Harmony.

We already did a little bit of the prep work in the previous session. Using the rules from The Jewel of Yavin, they built a couple of data spikes to use on the ship computers. Those will come in handy, as hacking those things will not be easy. I'm actually building the computer systems as small "dungeons," with the sysadmins as the "boss" and you have to attack the various "rooms" to take control of different systems in the ship. (Actually, if anyone reading this has an iPad Pro, I would be much obliged if you could tell me how this looks on it. That's what both of my players will be using at the table as their "datapads." If resizing downgrades the quality, I think it's at full here : https://i.imgur.com/f2X3i6Q.png )

So yeah, our slicers have already done some prep, but I'm pretty sure the Hunter and would-be Jedi would like to have a bit of stuff to do. I'm really thinking that I can give them each a series of checks, and successes will give them little beads they can exchange for Boost Dice, while Advantage might let them mess with the narrative.

EDIT: I should point out that this is a work in progress. There will be data links connecting all the systems, basically acting as hallways, and such. I mostly want to make sure that the little lines show up properly, as they look better or worse on different screens.