I am finishing 3rd season of my AoR camapign but it doesn't go so well. 3 of 4 PCs are EotE characters with less than ideal motivation for fighting for the rebellion just for sweat and tears while the idealistic leader of the group is pulling his hair off... My fault. So to bring more live and resolve the motivation problem I have decided to finish the season with the plot twist - the time travel. After or during the mission they will jump into warp hole dark hole whatever and find themselves thrown away in front of the Republic VSD ... the thing is that they are flying an old CIS shuttle. They will get boarded and stunned so fast that they will not know who hit them until they will find themselves intorregated by a Jedi Knight. The fun stuff starts, they will start telling him probably about the Empire and Jedi execution...there will be CIS spy on board who will pass info to count Dooku who will be interested to catch them....Republic will think that if they are being rescued they are really CIS spies...

How can I make it even more twisted?

Just some more information, what is the setting and what do you feel is going wrong? Do the group at large dislike working with the alliance on big operations? Or is there a bigger issue here? What era is it?

The other thing is what purpose does jumping in time mean and how attached are they to the galaxy of the past? Are your group more story driven or personal motivation driven?

2-3 BBY set in the Yavin Sector, as this is a discord game and players are coming and going in such games, I have tried sandbox with open missions as the story driven games tends to fall apart with random players, but with time I got the core group of players, but as the created PCs have little motivation to work for the rebellion what annoys the idealistic PC leader, so he wants to change the PC, the other also sees that his Jawa does not fit the rebellion and thinks about changing his PC, so I think that best would be throwing the whole rebellion away while keeping the PCs which are fun and they know each other. They are not attached and the purpose is to do the reset without resetting the PCs, do something fun and unexpected, if they like this and I think they will, the game will become story driven with the story created by their actions, if not , they can find their way back just like in that movie with that US ship. Other fun thing is that they can now meet NPCs from their times, Saw Gerrera whom they were helping, their base general, Republic ship captain who will become one of the murderes of one the PCs family...their actions will create story driven campaign. That is the idea.

Time travel tends to make more problems than it solves. If you are going to do it, then maybe go full out, and put them in the Old Republic.
Or chuck out time travel, but put them out in Wild Space via Hyperspace mishap. If they want to get back to familiar ground, it's going to take luck, guile and working together to do so.

Or send them to the Corporate Sector on a secret, long term mission for the Rebellion (hunting people, items, safe houses/worlds).

It sounds like a serious mismatch in party motivation, what do your players think? From your description it sounds like you have a heck of a task to handle with people coming and going and the original theme has been supplanted. Maybe it's time to change gears for a more episodic format so you don't have to force the plot. But this is just food for thought and doesn't answer your question.

I'm not a fan of that sort of GM "gotcha," players tend to not like to just be overwhelmed and stunned like that. Far be it for me to tell anyone how to run their game, but when I tried something like that, the player was pretty mad.

I agree with @Urbane Spaceman that time travel is fun for a session or two but then it starts to go off the rails, in my experience. You might flip that over and have someone else have a hyperspace time travel mishap - say, a damaged CIS or Republic cruiser.

1 hour ago, Urbane Spaceman said:

Time travel tends to make more problems than it solves. If you are going to do it, then maybe go full out, and put them in the Old Republic.
Or chuck out time travel, but put them out in Wild Space via Hyperspace mishap. If they want to get back to familiar ground, it's going to take luck, guile and working together to do so.

Or send them to the Corporate Sector on a secret, long term mission for the Rebellion (hunting people, items, safe houses/worlds).

Wild Space would be the way forward for me on this one as well... maybe they find some hidden Imperial project out there that gives them all a reason to buy into the Rebellion? Even without that, by the time they find their way back they’ll hopefully be a tight unit that are willing to die for each other.

13 hours ago, AceSolo5 said:

Wild Space would be the way forward for me on this one as well... maybe they find some hidden Imperial project out there that gives them all a reason to buy into the Rebellion? Even without that, by the time they find their way back they’ll hopefully be a tight unit that are willing to die for each other.

Agreed.

Is there any particular reason why you can't simply break away from the Rebellion? Is the leader's PC so strongly bound to the Rebellion there's no conceivable way to splinter off.

I have to admit, how a rebel would deal with the Republic, considering it morphed into the Empire rather than overthrew it, is at least intriguing.

In my experience AoR needs players who are ok with a concept of at least on the meta accepting that the game is about being the good guys in a fight against the Empire/CIS. It can be a war game, a spy game, a fighter jock game, but in all those cases the characters need to be actively participating in the Rebellion. They will be executed or imprisoned at the very least for just being around Rebels so no one is going to be an accidental Rebel unless it's purely for money and that will be easy enough to see.

A lot of players are not willing to nail down a personality for their character so that when it comes time to make decisions for the character they can do whatever is convenient. Also if you are boring the player (especially non-setting fans or low enthusiasm players) they will lean toward causing mayhem, so it's important to know what the player wants and to see if that fits within your idea of fun.

I also don't believe in Player secrets, so out side of the game the players should be able to discuss the whole situation and disclose why their concept for their character is what it is. No one should be secretly making a criminal or a serial killer or a sith unless it is known so the other players can adjust for it OOC and not react out of meta-anger/disgust/etc.

With Roll20 and Discord what I have found is that there is often not a lot of discussion outside of play and the groups can be horribly mismatched as far as motivation and level of quality of the actual play. If at all possible try and coordinate out of play with the players and get them on the same sheet of music as much as possible.