So how have players completly screwed up weeks/days of planning only to come up with a novel idea to circumvent your planning?

I was running the "Long arm of the Hutt" and a player, who was a Female smuggler, attempted to Charm the Gand bounty hunter at the party (I even gave her a setback die on the roll) and succeded. my comment was "Who know, I guess he is interested in female humans". I did a cinimatic "cut and pan" to the reaction of the other guests once they started making out. The music stopped, the Geonosians all tilted thier heads the same direction, the sullesten said "That, that is just not right", and the Toydarian yelled at the top of his lungs "WHAT A PARTY, EH?" while slapping the Wookiee player on the back sending the toydarian in a spin.

This made the confritation after meeting Duke Dimmock a bit more interesting

Hmm. That's interesting. See, I'm not sure I'd let them attempt that personally. Gand are... really weird. If anything, I would have made that a "Never tell me the Odds" check at 5 difficulty, with spending a Destiny Point just to allow the check. But that's just how I would have done it.

That is really hilarious though!

Hmm. That's interesting. See, I'm not sure I'd let them attempt that personally. Gand are... really weird. If anything, I would have made that a "Never tell me the Odds" check at 5 difficulty, with spending a Destiny Point just to allow the check. But that's just how I would have done it.

"You may not wind up failing the check, but you fail at life for asking me to let you make it."

My players have taken out the water tower in Mos Shuuta, tried to kill Anatta after revealing too much about themselves to him at Duke Dimmock's party, sold the Krayt Fang on their way back to Tatooine, crashed the Lucky Guess into the roof of Teemo's palace to destroy a communications array and used a Triumph on a Perception roll to find a stash of spice in said palace to sell later. They have decapitated two bound and defenceless thugs in the hire of Ang Drombb in New Meen and when told that a crew-mate's leg would need a day and a half to repair, decided to buy her a wheelchair instead (they wanted to go all Tarantino on the leg, but the medical droid wouldn't allow it...). One of them also used the Force to push a guard into a closing cell door, made of pure energy. It made a nasty burning smell... and the PC escaped.

I literally have no idea what's going to happen next.

My players have taken out the water tower in Mos Shuuta, tried to kill Anatta after revealing too much about themselves to him at Duke Dimmock's party, sold the Krayt Fang on their way back to Tatooine, crashed the Lucky Guess into the roof of Teemo's palace to destroy a communications array and used a Triumph on a Perception roll to find a stash of spice in said palace to sell later. They have decapitated two bound and defenceless thugs in the hire of Ang Drombb in New Meen and when told that a crew-mate's leg would need a day and a half to repair, decided to buy her a wheelchair instead (they wanted to go all Tarantino on the leg, but the medical droid wouldn't allow it...). One of them also used the Force to push a guard into a closing cell door, made of pure energy. It made a nasty burning smell... and the PC escaped.

I literally have no idea what's going to happen next.

A-MAZING! Hahah.

And that's why we love this game. Never had a module run as it 'should' yet!

I'm a bit terrified at what will happen once my players get a hang of the more narrative and abstract nature of this system.

My players have taken out the water tower in Mos Shuuta, tried to kill Anatta after revealing too much about themselves to him at Duke Dimmock's party, sold the Krayt Fang on their way back to Tatooine, crashed the Lucky Guess into the roof of Teemo's palace to destroy a communications array and used a Triumph on a Perception roll to find a stash of spice in said palace to sell later. They have decapitated two bound and defenceless thugs in the hire of Ang Drombb in New Meen and when told that a crew-mate's leg would need a day and a half to repair, decided to buy her a wheelchair instead (they wanted to go all Tarantino on the leg, but the medical droid wouldn't allow it...). One of them also used the Force to push a guard into a closing cell door, made of pure energy. It made a nasty burning smell... and the PC escaped.

I literally have no idea what's going to happen next.

That's a terrific story. I have a feeling once my group gets use to the open-ended style of RPGs we will have similarly wild adventures.

So how have players completly screwed up weeks/days of planning only to come up with a novel idea to circumvent your planning?

I was running the "Long arm of the Hutt" and a player, who was a Female smuggler, attempted to Charm the Gand bounty hunter at the party (I even gave her a setback die on the roll) and succeded. my comment was "Who know, I guess he is interested in female humans". I did a cinimatic "cut and pan" to the reaction of the other guests once they started making out. The music stopped, the Geonosians all tilted thier heads the same direction, the sullesten said "That, that is just not right", and the Toydarian yelled at the top of his lungs "WHAT A PARTY, EH?" while slapping the Wookiee player on the back sending the toydarian in a spin.

This made the confritation after meeting Duke Dimmock a bit more interesting

For information purposes only, on pg. 37, second column second paragraph, the adventure states that "it is not possible to Charm or Coerce Vrrixx'tt (the Gand)." He can be bought however. That aside, an interesting turn of events.

Axiom: No adventure has been written that Adventurers have not circumvented.

After listening to the end of Timothy Zahn's 'Scoundrels', I've learned two things: 1) my tales of triumph, despair and player initiative are nothing (yet); and 2) I really don't want a four-way split in my party...

I avoided players throwing me for a loop by deciding I wasn't going to plan anything before going into a game. Crazy, I know; with D&D I spend months planing out games and what not, but with this game I decided to put my Star Wars knowledge to the test and let the players decide completely what they wanted to do. If they want to smuggle, I'll come up with a job on the fly, if they want to bounty hunt, I make up a quick backstory and so on. So far it has gone REALLY well and my players have loved it.

There is a random job generator for the Firefly RPG that is really helpful for that.

I avoided players throwing me for a loop by deciding I wasn't going to plan anything before going into a game. Crazy, I know; with D&D I spend months planing out games and what not, but with this game I decided to put my Star Wars knowledge to the test and let the players decide completely what they wanted to do. If they want to smuggle, I'll come up with a job on the fly, if they want to bounty hunt, I make up a quick backstory and so on. So far it has gone REALLY well and my players have loved it.

This works really well. To help this type of game out, your best bet is to generate like 10 or 20 random NPC"s with interesting quirks and then random missions from them or involving them. "Guy #2 is blah blah, and he wants the PC's to sneak into Centerpoint Station and steal some technology for the arkhanians" or something. Sure they can say no, but you have a ton more. Plus if you write some based on player motivations and they play properly, you'll normally hook one of them.

A fluid system, which isn't mechanics heavy (so not d20 in its various incarnations) is probably best planned in a very loose manner. Players are going to screw your plans up, so just think about the 1 thing you want to happen, or the one cool scene you want, and find a way to fit into what unfolds or gently guide the players towards it. Everything else you play purely as the consequences of the PCs' actions.

Can be quite fun that way: Players come up with dumb stuff... play it out, and it should be fun.

Note, this is very dependent on feel and theme of the game. A serious conspiracy game (for example) will not be served by this suggestion... a bunch of half-arsed smugglers bumbling about running into scrapes will be though.

Note, in Star Wars d6, knowingly force pushing a guy into a lethal energy doorway would be the start of a quick route down into the dark side and loosing your character... man RPGs have got soft nowadays. This is actually one thing I feel is lacking in the current game: the Dark Side of the force is mainly a nuisance to the players in this (represented by Destiny points for the GM, or needing strain to use it for force powers). As far as I can tell it doesn't feel like it is any threat to the soul of the characters. Obviously this is probably because 1) the portrayal of the force has changed a bit since the original films, with Jedi being a lot more aggressive with their force use than suggested by the original films, and 2) this game doesn't focus on temptation and falling to the dark side, it will probably feature more in the Jedi one, but it does bother me a bit.

Note, in Star Wars d6, knowingly force pushing a guy into a lethal energy doorway would be the start of a quick route down into the dark side and loosing your character... man RPGs have got soft nowadays. This is actually one thing I feel is lacking in the current game: the Dark Side of the force is mainly a nuisance to the players in this (represented by Destiny points for the GM, or needing strain to use it for force powers). As far as I can tell it doesn't feel like it is any threat to the soul of the characters. Obviously this is probably because 1) the portrayal of the force has changed a bit since the original films, with Jedi being a lot more aggressive with their force use than suggested by the original films, and 2) this game doesn't focus on temptation and falling to the dark side, it will probably feature more in the Jedi one, but it does bother me a bit.

I thought about that too, but decided it was okay for this game. The FSE can't really develop a deep enough connection to the Force to be swayed one way or the other, or, more importantly, to have much of an impact on the bigger picture. I do hope they'll address it in future games though, and make it meaningful for roleplay.

Back on topic: I always get derailed, and I think I'm going to take a page from messythekoala. Too often I try to tightly script the events of a plot. The best games I've had are where I let the players decide what to do. For example, my son's D20 Jedi Knight decided to just leave the temple one day and "go for a walk".

"What are you looking for?"

"I don't know. The Jedi are too insular, I want to see what normal people are up to."

After meeting some interesting NPCs and some fun-but-not-storyworthy dialog, I finally hit on him sensing fear emanating from a woman hiding, waiting, in a doorway and kind of made it up from there. She was the daughter of someone wealthy, and somebody had her kid. They showed up for the money, but didn't bring the kid. The Jedi was hiding behind a billboard, having taken out the sniper who was already there covering the scene until they started to rough her up... The locals got involved because the thugs were a "new gang" (controlled by higher ups, but the locals didn't know that), capped off with a changeling bounty hunter who actually had the kid nearby. The bounty hunter was much higher level than the Jedi (I wanted the BH to get away for future use) and there was a tense standoff which eventually resolved to the BH backing away, the woman got her kid, the citizens arrested the thugs, and the Jedi got a little cred back with the common folk. All in all, probably the best single-session adventure I've ever run, and it all started with "let's go for a walk".

I avoided players throwing me for a loop by deciding I wasn't going to plan anything before going into a game. Crazy, I know; with D&D I spend months planing out games and what not, but with this game I decided to put my Star Wars knowledge to the test and let the players decide completely what they wanted to do. If they want to smuggle, I'll come up with a job on the fly, if they want to bounty hunt, I make up a quick backstory and so on. So far it has gone REALLY well and my players have loved it.

This works really well. To help this type of game out, your best bet is to generate like 10 or 20 random NPC"s with interesting quirks and then random missions from them or involving them. "Guy #2 is blah blah, and he wants the PC's to sneak into Centerpoint Station and steal some technology for the arkhanians" or something. Sure they can say no, but you have a ton more. Plus if you write some based on player motivations and they play properly, you'll normally hook one of them.

I know this is REALLY nerdy of me, but I used to write Star Wars fan fiction all through High School, so I can come up with names, backstories, and home planets in nothing flat lol.

I just ran a one-shot. They were a bunch of inmates trying to escape from Belsavis, a secret Republic prison world during the Old Republic era.

After throwing one guard at another guard, killing him, my Herglic Macho-Man Randy Savage proceeded to wrestle his way to the shuttle with his Dashade friend and a sith apprentice. They got to the shuttle after much conflict (and deus-ex Esh-Ka warriors attacking the outpost they got brought to when the Devaronian SIS agent they were imprisoned with sprung his trap).

They found a Jedi guarding the shuttle. I basically used the Forsaken Jedi with a few modifications (Gave him some discipline, etc). He rolled dark side points on all of his force attempts to throw droids (that they killed) at them. He readied his lightsaber... just in time for the Herglic to run up and roll TWO TRIUMPHS, dealing a buttload of damage by uppercutting him, and destroying his lightsaber in the process using the two-triumph trigger. The Dashade and Sith finished him off, again after failing to smash people together with the force. Some Jedi he was. XD

We played a modified beginner adventure again, where I played VEX. I failed every roll I made and ended up just short-circuiting the whole time. Except for when we walked into the cantina, it was then that I hatched my ultimate plan of placing a concussion grenade in the rafters above the door. When the gamorreans entered I tossed another grenade across the cantina and killed all of them with one shot.

I then failed the rest of my rolls and we proceeded to end the adventure by not escaping on the Krayht Fang but by VEX dragging a drunk and passed out Pash by the leg out of the city gates and into the sunrise.

I'm a bit terrified at what will happen once my players get a hang of the more narrative and abstract nature of this system.

Me, too. I've never GM'd before (but I've played D&D as a player many times), so I don't know how my improvisation skills are. However, my friends are usually content with just following the story as laid out by the GM...so, I hope it's not too boring.

My players regularly throw me for a loop, but that is kinda what I like about this system.

My players found an old Clone Wars era transport filled with military supplies. They started looking for a way to sell them off, so they went to talk to Jabba. He was about the only one they knew who could handle something that large. While they were on Tatooine, a Rebel infiltrator snuck on board their ship to see if the rumors of their cargo was true. She got caught, but the players decided to use her to contact the Rebels to see what they could offer. So far, according to plan.

Then one of my players says 'I want to find the Rebel'. I say make a perception roll to see if you spot her as you are aimlessly wandering around Mos Eisley. 1 yellow and 2 green vs. 2 red and 2 purple. That should keep this from progressing.

'1 success and 4 threat'

So, he ends up walking into the Rebels safe house, rolls an even more rediculous charm roll (a triumph there, IIRC) to keep the rebels from shooting him, and now, about 15 sessions later, she is part of the crew, their part time rebel minder.

Then there was the time where they needed some probe droids to keep an eye on some pirates. They also have evidence that the sector admiral may have gotten the local moff hooked on spice so he could run the sector himself. So their plan is: Dress up like Impy officers, a tech crew from the core, sneak onto the Imperial Enclave on the planet they have been based on, go to the navy base to reprogram some probe droids to work for them instead of the imperials, then head over to the Moffs residence to see if she needs rescuing.

First they con some poor guy into driving them to the navy droid storage, then con the droid techs into thinking that they are on a super secret mission from the admiral. Their main mission accomplished, they dismiss their driver, and then drive themselves over to the moffs residence. Turns out the admiral was being quite naughty, and the moff was in pretty bad shape. They manage to get her out and off planet, and actually pick up a nice cargo to haul (triumph on a negotiation roll that only occured to enhance their cover with the impys) for when thy did get off the planet.

So, now my players have an imperial Moff on their ship with their Rebel infiltrator.

So yeah, my players fairly routinely throw me for a loop