We finished all seven classic campaigns a while ago and have decided to start again. We are thinking of playing through all seven classic campaigns and linking them together in some way. We are trying to hammer together a set of rules that we will use across the campaigns and I would like some opinions if any of them would unbalance or break the campaigns.

After the first win for either side have full exp for both sides at the end of a mission to prevent snowballing.

Only play a side mission once (generous donations only comes up once).

Allies and Villains are available once their mission is won. For example, if Han is won in the core campaign, he is available to choose for each subsequent campaign.

Use the Tyrants of Lothal ally cost system Half the threat up front and two threat each turn for the remainder of their cost, unless they are eliminated. So Lando costing 6 would add 3 threat at the start then 2 more threat for the next 3 turns.

Employ the opposite system for the Villains that have been earned: The Imperial player pays half their cost at the start, then gets 2 threat less a turn unless they are eliminated. We are thinking that Vader and General Weiss would have to have threat equal to the number of rounds in a mission taken off their initial deployment cost, as otherwise they would be discounted in most missions.

Using half the item deck when buying new items in all campaigns instead of 6 for the early ones.

Rebels can keep one reward card per player across campaigns, while the Imperial player can the same number of cards as the number of heroes. So, a Hero could keep their personal reward or a generic one but not both. The only thing I’m concerned about here is if one side wins a few rewards before the other then it might contribute to snowballing.

After a reward mission has been completed, in the next campaign one of other hero reward mission cards is substituted into the deck. The reward for these missions is that you can add their skirmish version as an ally. A hero mission can also be substituted for an ally mission. A hero earned as an ally can be used in subsequent campaigns. The aim of this is to let us play some of the other hero missions and give us the option to change heroes every so often if we get bored with playing the same group.

One accessory a hero has in the previous campaign can be kept that costs up to 300 credits. I’m dubious about this, as it hands a advantage to the rebels, while the imperial player gets nothing. Some 300 credit items are also quite powerful (bacta pump for example).

Full price for items sold. Again, it favours the rebels. It would result in seeing some items that never get bought actually being used. I’m am a bit worried that it would result in the rebels having lot more tier 3 weapons late in the game. An alternative might be making the weapons half price and other items full price sales.

That is what we are considering so far. Any ideas we could add would be welcome.

if the heroes lose one of the campaigns, you can either have those heroes permi-death so they cannot be used again. or you can play the captured forced mission to start off the new campaign to have them break out.

the mini campaigns, could use different heroes, but you could some how tie a story element into the next campaign with the current hereos. like a 'meanwhile on lothal'.

So how would you handle XP between campaigns? Eventually it'd just be worthless if no one swapped heroes, and it'd ultimately be pointless to tally XP after a certain point by about the end of the second campaign when every single player has maxed out their class decks.

Maybe set some kind of limit on the XP amount of class cards each player brings into each individual mission? Then you could allow the Imperial player to swap between class decks freely (potentially opening up some interesting combos), and maybe the Rebels could swap between Heroes they've earned as a result of their side missions (or if specific heroes are eliminated in some fashion, just pick new heroes altogether). That way, once they're happy with how they've built one hero, they could start spending experience on another hero, giving the Rebels more versatility. Then, like the Imperials, they could adjust their team to match the mission they're facing. Although I think if you were to go this route, the rebels would probably need to assign each earned hero to a specific player so that XP totals could be managed accordingly.

Also, how did you plan on determining the overall winner of the full campaign? Will it just be the winner of the final mission (presumably the Lothal campaign if you're going in release order), or best of seven?

I don't know what order you plan on doing the campaigns in, but release order is probably the most obvious. But maybe doing something that's a close approximation of actual historical timing could also work, probably alternating between standard and mini campaigns. Probably like:

Heart of the Empire -> Tyrants of Lothal -> Core Set -> Twin Shadows -> Return to Hoth -> Bespin Gambit -> Jabba's Realm

I'm not sure what the best solution to managing agenda sets would be, since it's kind of the Imperial player's parallel to gaining credits and buying from the item decks. Obviously you'd retain any earned rewards or villains, but if you're playing by more recent rules, you'd only have a limited amount of agenda cards in play at any time. Maybe you could swap out agenda sets between campaigns, but retain all purchased agenda cards, regardless of what set they're from. And then only be allowed to bring 4 agenda cards per mission (and if it's a one-use card bought in a previous campaign, it just goes away for good most likely).

19 hours ago, Annette Soleil said:

So how would you handle XP between campaigns? Eventually it'd just be worthless if no one swapped heroes, and it'd ultimately be pointless to tally XP after a certain point by about the end of the second campaign when every single player has maxed out their class decks.

Maybe set some kind of limit on the XP amount of class cards each player brings into each individual mission? Then you could allow the Imperial player to swap between class decks freely (potentially opening up some interesting combos), and maybe the Rebels could swap between Heroes they've earned as a result of their side missions (or if specific heroes are eliminated in some fashion, just pick new heroes altogether). That way, once they're happy with how they've built one hero, they could start spending experience on another hero, giving the Rebels more versatility. Then, like the Imperials, they could adjust their team to match the mission they're facing. Although I think if you were to go this route, the rebels would probably need to assign each earned hero to a specific player so that XP totals could be managed accordingly.

Also, how did you plan on determining the overall winner of the full campaign? Will it just be the winner of the final mission (presumably the Lothal campaign if you're going in release order), or best of seven?

I don't know what order you plan on doing the campaigns in, but release order is probably the most obvious. But maybe doing something that's a close approximation of actual historical timing could also work, probably alternating between standard and mini campaigns. Probably like:

Heart of the Empire -> Tyrants of Lothal -> Core Set -> Twin Shadows -> Return to Hoth -> Bespin Gambit -> Jabba's Realm

I'm not sure what the best solution to managing agenda sets would be, since it's kind of the Imperial player's parallel to gaining credits and buying from the item decks. Obviously you'd retain any earned rewards or villains, but if you're playing by more recent rules, you'd only have a limited amount of agenda cards in play at any time. Maybe you could swap out agenda sets between campaigns, but retain all purchased agenda cards, regardless of what set they're from. And then only be allowed to bring 4 agenda cards per mission (and if it's a one-use card bought in a previous campaign, it just goes away for good most likely).

I'd just inform the players upfront that if they bring a character that has spent more than a certain amount of XP on a mission with a certain level of threat, they won't be awarded any XP because the difficultly is beneath that characters skills. The lack of progression or reward should be all the disincentive you need to keep people from just playing the same overpowered characters. I broke it out a long time ago, but I think it was something like this:

TR 2 : 2 XP max

TR 3 : 5 XP max

TR 4 : 8 XP max

TR 5 : 11 XP max

TR 6 : 14 XP max (this is the most you can earn in the Core Box campaign)

As for the Agenda sets, I always played it where if my Imperial Player didn't have any of the cards from an Agenda Set actually deployed or in use, they could switch out the entire set between missions. No sense in loading the deck with a junk set that you'll never use, and more fun for the Rebels to have the possibility of new challenges that come up depending on how they progress.

On 9/10/2019 at 3:29 PM, Spidey NZ said:

if the heroes lose one of the campaigns, you can either have those heroes permi-death so they cannot be used again. or you can play the captured forced mission to start off the new campaign to have them break out.

I like both those ideas. I don't know that permi death would work for us though, we have one player who has to play Dalia.

On 9/10/2019 at 3:29 PM, Spidey NZ said:

the mini campaigns, could use different heroes, but you could some how tie a story element into the next campaign with the current hereos. like a 'meanwhile on lothal'.

Great idea as well, but again Dalia.

On 9/11/2019 at 7:43 AM, Annette Soleil said:

So how would you handle XP between campaigns? Eventually it'd just be worthless if no one swapped heroes, and it'd ultimately be pointless to tally XP after a certain point by about the end of the second campaign when every single player has maxed out their class decks.

Maybe set some kind of limit on the XP amount of class cards each player brings into each individual mission? Then you could allow the Imperial player to swap between class decks freely (potentially opening up some interesting combos), and maybe the Rebels could swap between Heroes they've earned as a result of their side missions (or if specific heroes are eliminated in some fashion, just pick new heroes altogether). That way, once they're happy with how they've built one hero, they could start spending experience on another hero, giving the Rebels more versatility. Then, like the Imperials, they could adjust their team to match the mission they're facing. Although I think if you were to go this route, the rebels would probably need to assign each earned hero to a specific player so that XP totals could be managed accordingly.

We had just been intending to reset the xp when we started the new campaign, it something that we hadn't really thought much about. I think that we would have an upper limit of xp equalling the most that can be obtained in the new campaign, if we did decide to make it roll over from one campaign to the next. The imperial player would be able to choose a new class deck in each campaign in the same way that a rebel player could pick a won hero. Part of the fun for us in the campaign is choosing the buying order for the heroes and the class deck. With a lot of the heroes like Fenn, Gideon, Shyla, MHD-19, Verna and Loku off the top of my head. Saving up for one or more of the 3/4xp cards is part of the fun. Weighing up if getting through those missions where you are at a disadvantage to earn a powerful card and which card in some cases is something that it is fun to debate.

On 9/11/2019 at 7:43 AM, Annette Soleil said:

Also, how did you plan on determining the overall winner of the full campaign? Will it just be the winner of the final mission (presumably the Lothal campaign if you're going in release order), or best of seven?

Best of seven.

On 9/11/2019 at 7:43 AM, Annette Soleil said:

I don't know what order you plan on doing the campaigns in, but release order is probably the most obvious. But maybe doing something that's a close approximation of actual historical timing could also work, probably alternating between standard and mini campaigns. Probably like:

Heart of the Empire -> Tyrants of Lothal -> Core Set -> Twin Shadows -> Return to Hoth -> Bespin Gambit -> Jabba's Realm

That is a really cool idea. I think we will go with that order.

On 9/11/2019 at 7:43 AM, Annette Soleil said:

I'm not sure what the best solution to managing agenda sets would be, since it's kind of the Imperial player's parallel to gaining credits and buying from the item decks. Obviously you'd retain any earned rewards or villains, but if you're playing by more recent rules, you'd only have a limited amount of agenda cards in play at any time. Maybe you could swap out agenda sets between campaigns, but retain all purchased agenda cards, regardless of what set they're from. And then only be allowed to bring 4 agenda cards per mission (and if it's a one-use card bought in a previous campaign, it just goes away for good most likely).

We were thinking that won villians cards would be removed, but the imperial player would still be able to pick that adgenda on another campaign if they wished. We would be limiting the number that the imperial player could hold at one time.

On 9/12/2019 at 3:00 AM, Pollux85 said:

I'd just inform the players upfront that if they bring a character that has spent more than a certain amount of XP on a mission with a certain level of threat, they won't be awarded any XP because the difficultly is beneath that characters skills. The lack of progression or reward should be all the disincentive you need to keep people from just playing the same overpowered characters. I broke it out a long time ago, but I think it was something like this:

TR 2 : 2 XP max

TR 3 : 5 XP max

TR 4 : 8 XP max

TR 5 : 11 XP max

TR 6 : 14 XP max (this is the most you can earn in the Core Box campaign)

That looks like a good system if we do carryover some or all of the xp from a previous campaign.

On 9/12/2019 at 3:00 AM, Pollux85 said:

As for the Agenda sets, I always played it where if my Imperial Player didn't have any of the cards from an Agenda Set actually deployed or in use, they could switch out the entire set between missions. No sense in loading the deck with a junk set that you'll never use, and more fun for the Rebels to have the possibility of new challenges that come up depending on how they progress.

That's an interesting idea, we might adopt it.

Thanks everyone for the ideas and advice.