Star Wars Doesn't Have ______

By Tesoe, in Star Wars: Edge of the Empire RPG

Yeah the main thing is that some things can run amok if you let them out of the bag. That's the main warning.

15 minutes ago, Archlyte said:

Yeah the main thing is that some things can run amok if you let them out of the bag. That's the main warning.

Run amok in what way? I run pretty much "if we have it, they have it" campaigns, and I've never had a situation that I couldn't find a parallel for in the media.

The flip-side warning is letting the game and the action bog down into a debate over whether something is Star Wars-y enough.

Does Star Wars have ubiquitous social media?

20 minutes ago, HappyDaze said:

Does Star Wars have ubiquitous social media?

I hope not!

53 minutes ago, HappyDaze said:

Does Star Wars have ubiquitous social media?

Our heroes and villains live lives with meaning, so they don't waste any time on it. But the average citizen? Sure.

14 minutes ago, whafrog said:

Our heroes and villains live lives with meaning, so they don't waste any time on it. But the average citizen? Sure.

I prefer a 70s/80s feel to my GFFA, so media is equivalent to what was broadcast back then. I don't have a Galactic Facebook, Space Google, or any of the rest being things.

31 minutes ago, whafrog said:

Our heroes and villains live lives with meaning, so they don't waste any time on it. But the average citizen? Sure.

Holo-Instagram.......

tfKmCw6.jpg

5 minutes ago, 2P51 said:

Holo-Instagram.......

tfKmCw6.jpg

I assumed he was taking notes for when he writes his autobiography.

Why would you make a visual record if you only intended to write it in text? To say nothing of posing and acting while you're doing it.

3 minutes ago, Tesoe said:

I assumed he was taking notes for when he writes his autobiography.

From reading the first two issues of Lando: Double or Nothing, “The Calrissian Chronicles” sounds more like a cross between Instagram and a podcast than an autobiography.

5 minutes ago, 2P51 said:

Why would you make a visual record if you only intended to write it in text? To say nothing of posing and acting while you're doing it.

Because it's Lando. Also, how often do they record anything and NOT use a hologram? It doesn't happen very often.

5 minutes ago, Nytwyng said:

From reading the first two issues of Lando: Double or Nothing, “The Calrissian Chronicles” sounds more like a cross between Instagram and a podcast than an autobiography.

That's awesome that they carried it over.

5 minutes ago, Tesoe said:

Because it's Lando. Also, how often do they record anything and NOT use a hologram? It doesn't happen very often.

And how often do they record a hologram and not broadcast it as a hologram? Pretty much never. That's like making an oil painting of your shopping list imo.

10 minutes ago, 2P51 said:

And how often do they record a hologram and not broadcast it as a hologram? Pretty much never. That's like making an oil painting of your shopping list imo.

Maybe it's a holoautobiography. :P

Speaking of using holograms for everything, I wonder if that was part of the security on the Death Star plans.

Imperial Tech 1: "Yes we've encoded it so it can only be played on monitors. Won't work on a holiday emiter."

Imperial Tech 2: "Biliant! Not even the rebels are so backwards as to have one of those lying around."

2 hours ago, HappyDaze said:

Does Star Wars have ubiquitous social media?

ForceBook? (Also has cats with sabers holovids)

My biggest problem I had with any Star Wars tech was in Rogue One on Scarif. The ship can't communicate with space without being hardwired. In addition let's go ahead and put the main switch for those communications on a computer terminal in the middle of a beach exposed to the elements.

29 minutes ago, ThreeBFour said:

ForceBook? (Also has cats with sabers holovids)

My biggest problem I had with any Star Wars tech was in Rogue One on Scarif. The ship can't communicate with space without being hardwired. In addition let's go ahead and put the main switch for those communications on a computer terminal in the middle of a beach exposed to the elements.

The reason why the ships needed to be hard wired in was because of a jamming signal being broadcast by the Shield Generator surrounding the planet. This prevented any signals getting through the shield, except those being transmitted by the main communications tower.

Technology in Star Wars is very plot dependent. There are technologies in some books/movies/shows that don't exist in others. You really just need to choose what you want in your game and go with it. If you are looking for consistency in the whole of Star Wars you're going to go crazy.

2 hours ago, ThreeBFour said:

ForceBook? (Also has cats with sabers holovids)

Image result for cats with lightsabers

4 hours ago, Tesoe said:

That's awesome that they carried it over.

Here's the page in particular that gave me the impression that it's an ongoing, serialized sort of thing (third panel specifically...he teases the next installment, which would be odd for a full work).

Iw3K0rO.jpg

In my game session tonight (ep1 era), my character was skimming through Space Tinder (we need to come up with a good name for that) and trawling through the local bounty listings on his datapad using the Binder app . The same person appearing on both apps became a plot point. Meanwhile the group is on Drall so our Whipid Scholar can search the Great Archive for info pertaining to a potential plot point.

In our group, the rules we play by are if it doesn't matter to the plot and makes overall sense, then it exists. If it is important to the plot, then it is as our GM wants it to be. Tonight we had to discuss whether IDs and registrations are physical things, do wallets exist and if physical books are made out of paper or plastic. Equally important is to not get hung up on things, the GM makes a quick call and we get on with playing the game rather than arguing about space wifi, datapad memory storage size or whatever.

5 minutes ago, DarkHorse said:

In my game session tonight (ep1 era), my character was skimming through Space Tinder (we need to come up with a good name for that) and trawling through the local bounty listings on his datapad using the Binder app . The same person appearing on both apps became a plot point. Meanwhile the group is on Drall so our Whipid Scholar can search the Great Archive for info pertaining to a potential plot point.

In our group, the rules we play by are if it doesn't matter to the plot and makes overall sense, then it exists. If it is important to the plot, then it is as our GM wants it to be. Tonight we had to discuss whether IDs and registrations are physical things, do wallets exist and if physical books are made out of paper or plastic. Equally important is to not get hung up on things, the GM makes a quick call and we get on with playing the game rather than arguing about space wifi, datapad memory storage size or whatever.

IDs are apparently physical. We see them a couple times in the TV series.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Identichip

I've never seen a wallet before, but now I'm amused by trying to figure out what the wallets of various main characters would look like.

2 hours ago, Tesoe said:

IDs are apparently physical. We see them a couple times in the TV series.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Identichip

I've never seen a wallet before, but now I'm amused by trying to figure out what the wallets of various main characters would look like.

We also saw Bohdi’s scandoc in Rogue One. I’ve got a screenshot at home that I’ll try to remember to post later. Because I’m certainly not trying to design something like it that I can print out for a player who has multiple aliases. ?

On ‎9‎/‎26‎/‎2018 at 12:40 PM, whafrog said:

Run amok in what way? I run pretty much "if we have it, they have it" campaigns, and I've never had a situation that I couldn't find a parallel for in the media.

The flip-side warning is letting the game and the action bog down into a debate over whether something is Star Wars-y enough.

I assume Arch means in the same way that "Hacker" is often a synonym for "Wizard" in a lot of fiction these days. If you don't rope in the Slicer they will often attempt to just hack everything. Need to scope out someone's house? hack their Wifi enabled toaster and now you can see in his kitchen! I recall someone here with a slicer droid attempting to turn a single "jam that one guy's handheld comlink" action into full on backdoor access to remotely self disable and clear a starship in orbit.

Of course the counter is to, just like real life, not have everything hackable. Some things aren't on a network, not all networks are hooked up to the outside, not everything is wireless, and some things aren't even computerized at all. Even in a super connected location it's fine for the GM to limit things logically.

If you hack the toaster you're not going to see into his kitchen because it doesn't make any sense to equip a toaster with a camera. But you might be able to use it to figure out what time of day he usually makes toast, which combined with other information might help generate a routine to take advantage of....

And that does extend elsewhere. The General Purpose Scanner is supposed to be a nice bonus that allows a player to make checks and get information that might not be available with natural senses. I could see how a overcompetitive player would try and abuse it though.

13 minutes ago, Ghostofman said:

I assume Arch means in the same way that "Hacker" is often a synonym for "Wizard" in a lot of fiction these days. If you don't rope in the Slicer they will often attempt to just hack everything. Need to scope out someone's house? hack their Wifi enabled toaster and now you can see in his kitchen!

I'm not sure how that relates to "if we have it, they have it". We don't have that. I'd say it comes down to common sense, but given how much myth there is surrounding what we can currently do, never mind an imaginary hyperspace-capable society like Star Wars, that common sense doesn't seem to go very far.

But you don't have to know how real tech works to make a judgement call in a game, there's a far easier way. The guiding principle for dealing with Hackers is the same as for dealing with Wizards: the more complicated it sounds, and the more power it gives to the PC, the more time, energy, and risk is involved . I don't know how magic is supposed to work either, but I can still make a game ruling on whether the spell's effect is too potent for the amount of energy put in. You can't hack a Star Destroyer through a comm link for the same reason you can't change the weather on a regional scale without special materials and probably a very long ritual.

5 minutes ago, whafrog said:

I'm not sure how that relates to "if we have it, they have it". We don't have that...

Ok, I wasn't able to find a WiFi toaster, but I did find a WiFi slow cooker. That's pretty close as far as analogies go.

Crock-Pot Wemo Smart Wifi-Enabled Slow Cooker, 6-Quart, Stainless Steel https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IPEO02C/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_LnuRBb2V86EPR