I think Imperial Assault is a fine tactical game, the but storytelling left me a little underwhelmed, so I thought that perhaps the best way to improve the storytelling experience and bring more stakes into the game might actually be to incorporate the SW:RPG as part of the overall experience. You can build a campaign that helps create backstory for the IA missions, fill in details, and give a lot more context to each mission and use the contents of Imperial Assault missions as a base to build your AoR adventures, each helping feed the other. I think it might also be a nice way to naturally introduce RPGs to my boardgamers.

I think basic structure would have us alternating between AoR and IA, AoR acting as the storytelling glue between IA missions and players would pick one of the included characters to play for both.

Anyway, I'm posting here to see if anyone's done this (or something like this) and might already have some resources or tips on conversions. Also, does anyone have any ideas on how to deal with explaining how characters escape when they lose or how "loss situations" like players running out of turns in IA can be explained? I'm thinking in the case of a player loss scenario, the next AoR session would actually play out the "escape" or "failure" as it were, instead of the abstraction that SW:IA uses.

I'm hoping to have something put together by the time we're able to safely meet in person again.

If you look through the history of the various Star Wars RPG forums, you’ll find it littered with the burnt out souls of others who’ve tried to integrate the RPG with one or more of the miniature games. They began with the purest, most optimistic of intentions, but became shells of their former selves, having been driven to madness.

But, seriously.... Others have, indeed, brought the idea up with one or more of the mini games. They’re just too different in construction to meld well. If, for example, you shift to the mini game rules for combat, you’ve got talents that player have spent valuable XP on that are tossed out the window. And, depending on which mini game is in play, you’ve even possibly got players sitting around for an hour or two while just a pair of players handle the combat.

Using minis in the RPG can be useful (but not required) to keep track of where everyone is in a given encounter, but the general consensus has been that trying to merge a tactical mini game with a narrative RPG is just more trouble than it’s worth.

I wasn't actually trying to combine them to play together at the same time, more like use the RPG to tell the story around the Imperial Assault campaign. I've run something similar before with playing Call of Cthulhu and then transitioning into a scavenger hunt--the RPG part didn't happen during the scavenger hunt, but it helped set to stage for the scavenger hunt and gave the different clues and context around the hunt a lot more meaning. Then when back in RPG land, the results of the scavenger hunt further fed the story we were telling.

So, in this case, when we're playing the RPG, we're playing the RPG. However, the characters the players are playing in the RPG will all be built on the characters they'd play in IA. Similarly, when we're playing IA, we're playing IA, but what happens in IA will affect what happens in the RPG when we return to it. Does Garkhan pick up a rad new vibroaxe in IA? When we get back to the RPG, he'll now have the axe.

I think because the game is balanced in a particular way, the RPG won't affect IA, in terms of gameplay or gear--the primary idea of playing them together is for the RPG to help IA actually have something resembling an immersive story, but maybe I'll tweak the game a little based on events in the RPG. I think this should be doable, but if no one's done anything more specifically like this, then I'll just have to go it alone.

I'll report back if anyone's interested in hearing how it went.

10 hours ago, refresh_daemon said:

I think because the game is balanced in a particular way, the RPG won't affect IA, in terms of gameplay or gear--the primary idea of playing them together is for the RPG to help IA actually have something resembling an immersive story, but maybe I'll tweak the game a little based on events in the RPG. I think this should be doable, but if no one's done anything more specifically like this, then I'll just have to go it alone.

I don't play IA, but the first problem I see is how are you going to incorporate the combat skills or talents? If you have a Commando/Sharpshooter with a slew of combat-focused talents and skills, will that affect IA at all? Will the talents and skills just be useless because there's no combat outside of IA?

I'm just not sure how you're going to be able to farm out an entire segment of the game to another medium without breaking the parts of game that connect to that segment.

The plan isn't as much to have all the elements translate directly from one game to another. When building the initial PCs, I'll base them on the characters in the IA box and try to match what they're trying to do. When players upgrade in the RPG, they upgrade in the RPG and it doesn't impact IA.

I don't think it's clear what I'm trying to do--I'm not mixing them together at the same time. They are played in separate sessions and are linked by a connected story. Let me try to sketch it out:

Session 1: We play AoR. It's a mission that the PCs go on to find some intel about a secret base the Imperials have. Everything is done entirely by RPG rules with RPG characters. Those RPG characters are based on the IA characters and whichever character the PC players in the RPG is the same one they'll play in IA. At the end of the mission, they learn about an R&D facility that is building a new tech and decide to investigate.

Session 2: We play IA. It's the first mission of IA and the PCs play it entirely by IA rules. This mission has the PCs infiltrating a secret Imperial base to learn about the tech that's there. What happen in this game will impact the next session AoR.

Session 3: We play AoR. It's a session that puts the players in the outcome of the IA mission. They have to either deal with their loss (and how it relates to the next IA mission) or learn something from their success, which leads into the next AI mission).

In each case, the two games are being played separately. If there's combat it's done by the rules of the game that we're playing at the time. Mechanically, the games will not be connected except that maybe finding/buying equipment in one game will lead to acquiring that same gear in another (primarily going the way of IA->AoR because of game balance issues).

The goal is to use AoR to add story and context to IA, which is quite light on both, to help enhance the feeling of immersion and the stakes of IA, but the games will not be mixed in any given session.