I bet Luke and Obi-Wan knew the name of Jabba, he was just irrelevant to the part of the story they were in. And it's not like Han told them about his problems at the beginning.

Well, I was going to put both versions of his background here, but I just noticed that I don't have his original anymore. Anyway, we spoke face-to-face on sunday, and he agreed to keep the version I wrote. He told me the main reason things didn't really add up in his version was because of the little amount of time he had spent on it due to his busy schedule. So together we went over my version, and even came up with some new exciting elements that will certainly come up during play.

To give a short list of the things I changed:

He still meets Bail and Leia, but instead of growing up with them, he goes to live in a town not far from the capital. There he meets them occasionally. So he doesn't really know the characters that well.

Vader is not mentioned anymore.

Obi-wan is replaced with a Jedi Knight of his own design.

He now accidently arrives on Tatooine, but on Mos Shuuta instead of Mos Eisley. Jabba is replaced with Teemo. I did this in case I want to implement pre-made stuff from Long Arm of the Hutt. (Plus my players have played the Beginners Box, so I thought having a link to our first session would be fun.)

More stuff happens, of course, but this is just the gist of it. I decided to keep Bail and Leia in there, but as very minor parts of his backstory. So the link to the movies is still there, but not so 'in your face' anymore.

Obi-wan is replaced with a Jedi Knight of his own design.

A new Jedi is always cool (as long as you don't overdo it). The jedi is probably dead (with all jedi having been hunted to extinction) or in hiding and impossible to find, but he can still be a cool source of adventure hooks or other twists. Jedi tend to be involved in all sorts of things at the same time, so there's all sorts of places where he can end up on the trail if this jedi, and discover more about his jedi in play.

On the whole, with situations like this, it's important to figure out what the player really wants, and hive him that. Too often, I've seen (or been ) the GM criticize someone character idea, background or name, which lead to the player losing interest, or being less immersed in the game. You need to have your players on board. Nothing in the game is more important than that, because without players, you don't have a game. Compromise. But also, turn their lame cliche ego-trip into something unique and cool and full of adventure. "Yes and... "

For the original poster and anyone else looking for ideas on how to set up a campaign: here's my views on that:

• Don't plan everything out. If the game is any good, the players will derail anything you plan. Be flexible. Learn to improvise (it's not that hard).
• Listen to your players. To what they want, but more importantly, to what they think . Throw random stuff at them without yourself knowing what it means, and listen to them speculate. They'll have much better ideas than you. Write them down. Take notes of everything they say. Everything that they ever mentioned that you can make relevant in the game, is win.
• Start simple. Don't start with a campaign, start with an adventure. Look at how Order of the Stick started out as a simple dungeon crawl with some jokes, and later grew increasingly epic. Start with a simple published adventure. Beyond the Rim is excellent for this (though rather big already), or take the Beginner Game + Long Arm of the Hutt (though I haven't read that yet), throw some extra random ideas in, and let the players derail it. Once they derail it or invent some extra meaning behind something, you've basically got your campaign.
• If you start with a short adventure, ideally, when you get to the climax of the adventure, you'll have developed some idea of where the campaign might be going. Work that into the climax. It could be as simple as a note or some cargo aboard the ship they steal, or the objective turns out not to be what it's supposed to be. Maybe it's something different, or something took it, or their target becomes their new patron or something. Twist the ending.
• Don't railroad. Adventures or linear published campaigns are for railroads, but if you want to have your own sprawling campaign, learn to let go. Let your players do your work for you. Go where they want to go. Take their ideas and make them awesome.
• Embrace the unexpected.
• Prepare. Yes, this sounds like it goes against everything above, but even in a freeform sprawling campaign, you still need to fill your session. Once they're off the track, make sure you always have some ideas ready, some encounters prepared, etc. If they don't go where you expected or prepared for, loot the coolest bits that you did prepare, and reuse them in the new direction. Replace your stormtroopers with droids, your Gamorreans with nercenaries or thugs, turn the McGuffin into something else, and run with it.

After a while, you should have a reasonable collection of prepared and semi-prepared encounters, as well as a good list of player-provided plot ideas. This toolbox will grow. Consult them regularly, and weed them out and expand on them.

If you need more structure, read Never Unprepared by Phil Vecchione.

Sounds like a win overall. Even if the original background was less than optimal the player still put forth the effort to write one. I am glad you came up with one you both like.

As an addition to MCV's advice I often write up encounters and plot points that can be dropped into the game whenever the right trigger occurs. The group is in a cantina when... An astro navigational error leads to... An NPC asks the characters for help with...

By keeping a stack of these available on note cards I can drop little plot twists into the game when the players zig when I expect them to zag.

The key is not to tie the event to the Sleeping Bantha Cantina, but rather have it take place in any cantina. That way if the players never visit the Sleeping Bantha your idea still gets used.

I agree that you have to respect the player's background... to a certain point. That's why, when I wrote my own version of his background, I made sure I kept all the things I was sure he felt were the important bits. I just made the fluff around it feel more logical, and once I explained why I changed what I changed, he agreed with me that the way I saw things did feel more natural.

We actually came up with a nice addition together: the story goes that he and his mother have been hiding for the Empire for year. When the Empire finally comes knocking, and kills his mother in the process, the player flees. He finds a hiding spot in the local cantina that's being run by a woman his character has grown up with. On the spot, we added that this woman actually gives the player a holodisc that contains a message from his mother. This holodisc has great sentimental value to the player, because it contains the last images of his mother, so he watches it often.

Now the next bit i'm gonna put in spoiler tags, just in case my players come snooping in here (which I told them they shouldn't ). So if any of them are reading this, you are only ruining the fun for yourself.

And keeping encounters at the ready is something I'm beginning to learn. I already wrote this elaborate storyline, but I've now come to the conclusion that I should just simply tear it apart and keep all the bits lying around so I can access them at any time they feel appropriate. I'm also going to go for a more 'one session at a time' approach. I have an idea of where I want to go with the campaign, but I'll probably start working on the next session when we played the previous one. That way it's easier for me to adjust the story to what the players are doing, while still adding things that might lead to the ending I have in mind.

On backgrounds, I also prefer players to do that together during the first session (or zeroth, if you like). This way, they can bounce ideas off each other, correct each other when someone goes overboard, and work on some relationships between the characters. You get a lot more cohesion that way. Hopefully.

An interesting game to take a look at is Diaspora , a hard-SF RPG that makes it official that the first session is about creating first the cluster of worlds together, and then the characters. You probably get a lot more buy-in that way, though I haven't tried it yet.

Thanks everyone for the posts. They helped a lot. MCV, I grabbed that book, it was a good buy.

Veruca, hope your campaign is going well!

Hello again, everyone! I have a few more questions about being a new GM, and the system in general.

• First point I'd like to bring up, is I have 3 people who are brand new to role-playing AND pen and paper. As a new GM, I find this really exciting, because I've seen what bad GMing can be like and I'm happy to let these guys see good things happen for the first game. But I'm also a little worrisome as to how I can keep them interested beyond gimmick of Star Wars/Role-playing/Social activity scenario. What steps can I take to ensure these 3 aren't left behind, and keep them in the fold, as it were?

• One player in particular has chosen to make a character slightly harder to work on. She's a twi'lek BH gadgeteer. Ex-slave, who has found little reliability in working with guns, and thus devoted herself to using her own physical prowess with personally manufactured and maintained gear. Interesting, no? The player herself also doesn't like guns, and would be more interested in bows and arrows, generally. As much as I like this character concept, I ran a little impromptu encounter with most of my players this past weekend, and found that overall, she wasn't standing out in combat... Which makes sense, as she was facing off against two minions in a fist fight with brass knuckles. Has anyone had a character that specifically ran with brawl as a first-line of defense? Is it viable? I've already planned to start making some homebrew fisticuff weapons (wolverine claws, metal plated gloves, shockboxing ergo worthwhile shock gloves)

• In an unrelated concept, I'm going over planning for my character's obligation rolls. When writing up everyone's trigger/stressor which forces them to have a reduced strain threshold. The more I thought about it, the more I started to think maybe I should write these down as cards and slip them toward the player. In other words, inform the player secretly. And in turn, I had the idea that maybe I handle all obligation rolls that way: all personal strain threshold reduction handled in secret, giving the character the chance to bring it up to his fellow crew members, or to keep it to himself, opening up story and progression options.

• On one last note, during the impromptu encounter we had last weekend, the question of weapon ranges came into player. Now from what is in the core book, I assume that a weapon is straight incapable of causing any damage outside of its range. This is all well and good, but if I didn't want to limit my players (who are mostly incapable of acquiring anything beyond a holdout blaster in addition to other gear) to simply short range shooting in our first encounter. Does anyone have any opinion on this should be handled? I can think of a multitude of ways it can be altered: adding setback dice, reducing damage, treating the weapon as inferior, or even going so far as to increase or upgrade difficulty. I would like to see what anyone has thought of.

Thanks for the responses, guys.

Cheers

"Has anyone had a character that specifically ran with brawl as a first-line of defense? Is it viable?"

It's more viable if she goes into Doctor and gets Pressure Point. But Brawl is generally going to be worse than swinging a vibrosword or shooting…as it should be, IMO. I think it's going to be more build-intensive to be viable, and any non-mechanical bow and arrow system probably should count armor soak as double or something because it'd be quite inferior to modern armor technology. No interest in a Bowcaster and some weird reasons to go along with it?

"This is all well and good, but if I didn't want to limit my players (who are mostly incapable of acquiring anything beyond a holdout blaster in addition to other gear) to simply short range shooting in our first encounter."

This isn't entirely correct. They can take more obligation for money and better gear. Some specs don't need much gear to begin with and can thus afford to pay 400 for a blaster. But with that said, I think at least one upgrade is appropriate. A Setback isn't enough, imo.

Thanks Kshatriya, I appreciate the feedback.

Personally, I don't think a person should be penalized for picking something out of left field. I always thought that was the beauty of am RPG: you should be able to fly off the handle in any direction you feel like with your character. You should feel that picking any particular class, race, weapon-type or talent is just as useful and easily adjustable to the appropriate playstyle you wanted compared to the "best" choice.

And it's really disheartening to realize a few levels later "wow, this just simply sucks. I picked class A to fill role B, but I wanted to use skill X, instead of C, and now I suck at role B." That's half the reason I can't stand D&D. Yes, you can be really awesome, but you're only gonna be super awesome by doing A-B-C. This person being new, I really don't want them to come to me and be like "I'm not having any fun, because I feel next to useless" and then I have to respond "yeah, you made useless choices in character creation."

As far as obligation and credits: you are absolutely right. But then I had one player come up to me and say "yeah you pretty much HAVE to get extra obligation to make a lot of specializations useful in combat, or to buy the right gear you need, or else the points I used in character creation are useless and wont help me til later." He topped out his ranged heavy, then realized that ranged heavy weapons are expensive, so he didn't want to have experience points being wasted until he lucked upon a heavy weapon. I had my first 3 players (all vets of RPGs in general) say they had no other choice but to use extra obligation because they felt this way. Now, a lot of this is from the player-vs-GM mentality.. which, at the time, I didn't quite understand what was happening. I've since had that first character lower his obligation, and re-distribute his experience (of his own choice. But that's basically my point: I don't want players to think "the only way to survive is pay for it in obligation." Also, all but 1 of my 6 players elected to take additional obligation. Most put it in experience. I probably should have discouraged this a bit more, but I'll file that under live and learn..

But going back to the range-modifier... I agree, an increase in difficulty is the first step. But I think that's too little. I'd also enforce only a maximum of one range band increase. Also, thinking in terms of real-world weapons, at maximum range, most small arms fire has a significantly reduced velocity. So I'd also argue a -1 or -2 penalty to damage.

At the same time, it's logical that punching someone is less effective at taking them out than stabbing with a vibrating knife or shooting with an energy weapon.

I think starting money is too low, especially for careers that require certain tools to function (doctor, slicer, mechanic, etc). 500 barely covers doing their job let alone doing anything else. Also hate the "well you're on the fringe" justification for it. Meh.

Kind of funny you should discuss brawl. The Mechanic for our game (the most powerful warrior in the group) relies on it and she kicks butt. It was hilarious watching her beat the tar out of one of her prison guards with her bare hands, then toss his blaster to the bothan because she didn't need it. It also means that she can fight in civilized environments without drawing too much attention or having everyone resort to lethal weapons. Brawl is supposed to be less powerful than Melee because it is more versatile than impaling things on pointy sticks. Grappling, disarming and so forth are all built out of Brawl.

Granted, the Gamorrean encounter at the beginning of Escape from Mos Shutta almost killed the group. It might not be the best solution for pitched battles.