On 2/13/2018 at 7:38 AM, Nytwyng said:

I will indeed.

So, how well did those work with your circle punch?

Haven’t picket them up yet. Been a busy work travel month. I don’t know which way is up right now.

On 1/27/2018 at 1:34 PM, Nytwyng said:

FFG’s adversary decks are a fantastic resource for grabbing quick NPC’s, especially when your players make a sharp turn from what you had in mind, which they will. Often.

At first I didn't think the Adversary Deck were necessary, but then I had a little extra money on me after getting a good deal on a sourcebook so I bought a couple and OMG they are amazing.

3 hours ago, HistoryGuy said:

At first I didn't think the Adversary Deck were necessary, but then I had a little extra money on me after getting a good deal on a sourcebook so I bought a couple and OMG they are amazing.

They really add to the GM Flare when you can slap one of those badboys down when your PCs take a left turn and go off-piste.

They are also great for the squad rules, or friendly NPCs under PC control, as you can hand them to the player to run.

And a massive plug for Rebeldave's vehicle card decks. Printed them off on gloss card last week for our Easter loong weekend marathon and oh boy did they come in handy

Not to open a new topic, I will allow myself to ask a question here.

I am a veteran GM with the EotE system, but frankly I have never run a Jedi campaign which I am planning to attempt. I know system pretty good, but I have really shallowly touched the Force part apart from the basic powers and universal specs from the EotE/AoR. Any advice, anything I should have in mind while running a Jedi campaign? From O66 podcast I know there are nice duel rules. Any other universal house rules to recommend? Something not to forget when starting a force-campaign for the first time? Anyone have used Duty for Jedi Order in the Clone Wars campaign? Thank you.

42 minutes ago, NicoDavout said:

but frankly I have never run a Jedi campaign which I am planning to attempt

Just from my own experience, I think it really depends how you view the Jedi relative to the power levels and capabilities of the other careers. I'm in the "Jedi are better" camp...not because of anything inherent in their stats, but because it takes long hours and hard work to become a Jedi, and that can only be reflected in the rules with lots and lots of XP. But this carries a danger, because if your players concentrate all their XP in one or two places, they'll be supergods in some areas and lame in others. The way I approached it was to open up 3 specs to the players right from the start, limit stats at chargen (strongly encouraging a 3/3/3/3/2/2 split), and limiting purchases of Dedication and FR. I gave the extra specs because it seemed silly to me that a Padawan would have to choose between a lightsaber spec and one without, so I made sure at least one of the three was a lightsaber spec. I gave them DoubleKnightLevel XP (300) to spend, but with a few initial limits: no skill ranks above 3, no Talent ranks above 4 except for their favoured spec. Lastly, I wrote my own Move power which I think does a much better job of accounting for what we see in the media.

In practice it works just fine. Nobody is a god and they still have weaknesses, those irritating 2 dice/no skill places I like to hit them with but they have a lot of tricks up their sleeves if they need them, one of the key features of being a Jedi IMHO.

Of course, YMMV. Some people prefer a more minimalist approach, some are fine with a party of one-trick ponies, some people are fine with Move allowing a Force Unleashed-style experience. But you kind of have to decide up front what flavour you want and adjust accordingly.

As for Duty/Morality etc...I have no use for either other than initial character background and the free XP it provides, so I can't help you there. But I would think Duty would work fine if you wanted to use it.

1 hour ago, NicoDavout said:

Not to open a new topic, I will allow myself to ask a question here.

I really feel like this deserves its own topic.

For me, apart form all the things mentioned here, an essential tool is Excel or Google Sheets!

Use it to set up a GM Holocron with some tabs for your use. My tabs look like this:

Tab 1. PC Data - party and PC information - total exp, obligations, motivations, morality, duty, PC relations and short backstory notes.

Tab 2. Session Notes: Short notes on what happened in previous sessions and loos plans for coming sessions.

Tab 3. NPC Data - Name, Occupation, Species, Sex, Affiliation, Current Location, Rank, State, Characterization

Tab 4. Ships - Name, Model, Location, Owner/Captain, notes

Tab 5. Planets - Planets and what the can be used for. Just some quick data. For easy reference.

Tab 6. Scene Notebook - ideas for campaigns, encounters, locations and scenes that I haven't used yet - serves as a note pad

Tab 7. food/drinks - just to add local flavor

In my Holocron I have way more things then I need and constantly add to it, form multiple campaigns. I can easily grab something on the fly and just make it work.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned a healthy dose of perseverance, a good sense of humour, the patience of a saint and imagination.

They are essential for being a good GM in my opinion ?

On 5/11/2018 at 7:56 AM, SirSaiCo said:

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned a healthy dose of perseverance, a good sense of humour, the patience of a saint and imagination.

They are essential for being a good GM in my opinion ?

I've been told I have the patience of Job (just in case there was any confusion Im referring to the biblical character, not Steve Jobs who by many accounts wasn't very patient with people)

On 5/11/2018 at 9:56 AM, SirSaiCo said:

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned a healthy dose of perseverance, a good sense of humour, the patience of a saint and imagination.

They are essential for being a good GM in my opinion ?

This is very true. No matter what you plan and prepare for, players have a tendency to go a completely different route. So it is a good idea to have random encounters that have nothing to do with pushing your primary story arc forward.

2 hours ago, Varlie said:

This is very true. No matter what you plan and prepare for, players have a tendency to go a completely different route. So it is a good idea to have random encounters that have nothing to do with pushing your primary story arc forward.

Just don’t let those sidetrack to the point that the players feel like they’ve been spinning their wheels and accomplishing nothing.

2 hours ago, Varlie said:

This is very true. No matter what you plan and prepare for, players have a tendency to go a completely different route. So it is a good idea to have random encounters that have nothing to do with pushing your primary story arc forward.

Even better, one can prepare to wrap tangents into the story. If the story is 100% pre-built, most tables are going to have a bad time with that. A Wise gm might only build one or two steps ahead of the players and keep everything else loose so that not only can the GM accomplish the story they want to tell, the players have full agency to pursue the best fried rice on Nar Shadda if they choose to spend their game time doing so. This is, to me, the key to the concept of narrative storytelling for this system, but it works pretty well for most games I run.

I agree with @themensch . Something I learned a long time ago when GMing was to come up with the plan for the bad guys rather than the players. I set up a general timeline of what the bad guys are going to do, how they will react if their initial plan gets interrupted, and what their bug-out plans are if it goes incredibly awry.

Then when the players get involved, I can compare their actions with what I had planned, adjust the timeline as necessary if the players are working towards the main goal but took an alternate route. There have been a couple times where the players went off on tangents and the initial plans went off smoothly because of it.

I've also been on the other end of this. the GM I learned this trick from had me (a warrior type) leading a bunch of ambassadors and diplomats through a strange land and we saw signs of vampires. Deciding that the other PCs (ambassadors and diplomat types) wouldn't survive the first encounter, I lead them on past the vampires only to find a few months later that the city was overrun. Inaction on the players parts can have repercussions just like actions.

28 minutes ago, Varlie said:

Inaction on the players parts can have repercussions just like actions.

This is an often-overlooked consequence and deserves to be called out on its own.