I've run two games using the Beginner Box with my two kids -- first the Escape adventure, then the Black Sun adventure. We loved it! I've now ordered the full Core ruleset as well as Beyond the Rim, and I'd like to try GMing something new. I gather the Core book comes with its own adventure -- should I try that? Or would Beyond the Rim be the next logical choice? Which one is shorter?

To complicate things, my next session will involve a larger party of players, all of whom will be new to the system. Can I play the Core adventure (or Beyond the Rim) with newbs, or should I return to the Beginner adventures? How many players does the system support, maximum? Five or six, maybe? Is four the optimal number? If I get more than 4-6, should I assign two people to control one character?

Finally, is it advisable to work out character creation before people arrive to the session, to save time? Ask people for a 2-3 paragraph bio via email?

Thanks in advance!

I've run two games using the Beginner Box with my two kids -- first the Escape adventure, then the Black Sun adventure. We loved it! I've now ordered the full Core ruleset as well as Beyond the Rim, and I'd like to try GMing something new. I gather the Core book comes with its own adventure -- should I try that? Or would Beyond the Rim be the next logical choice? Which one is shorter?

I haven't even fully looked at the one in the CRB, but I am currently running the Beyond the Rim story. Beyond the Rim is well written, and made for PCs of starting experience or only 2 or 3 adventures under their belt. Beyond the Rim is certainly longer, 3 full episodes, each episode lasting 1-2 sessions, with Episode 2 probably lasting about 2-3 sessions.

To complicate things, my next session will involve a larger party of players, all of whom will be new to the system. Can I play the Core adventure (or Beyond the Rim) with newbs, or should I return to the Beginner adventures?

You certainly can. But if you have enough complete newbies that have never played RPGs before, I would take an evening with just those guys and run them through the beginner box. If these people have played other RPGs in the past, just have them jump in with the next adventure, but try and follow the example of the Beginner Box and introduce them to the game just a few rules at a time.

How many players does the system support, maximum? Five or six, maybe? Is four the optimal number?

That's really a personal choice for the GM. Too many becomes very hard to track and players may find themselves sitting around doing nothing while other characters have he spotlight. The more players you play with, the more you should try and have them carry the game. If they are comfortable enough to pick up a piece of the story and just play off one another, you won't have to do a whole lot of work.

If I get more than 4-6, should I assign two people to control one character?

I do not recommed this. The game isn't too dependent on the amount of characters. If you wan to make encounters difficult then you may have to throw in more adversaries and hazards in their way, but don't make players share characters. After all, the fun the game is playing your own character, not someone else's.

Finally, is it advisable to work out character creation before people arrive to the session, to save time? Ask people for a 2-3 paragraph bio via email?

I recommend having a "session 0" where you spend an evening with all the players, sit down them down, and walk through character creation. Encourage them to talk about what they want to play with one another, and how they might know each other. During this time you can prod them about obligations and work with them if their obligations aren't going to work,

A backstory is a wonderful tool to draw from for story ideas, so encourage them to come up with something, but if you aren't going to make the campaign too personalized, then I wouldn't worry too much if your players don't give you one.

Here's what happened to me when I had an 8-player group (one time). It just so happened that everyone I was gaming with at the time had the night free and really wanted to try out Edge of the Empire.

Everyone arrived, and most everyone hadn't seen the EotE rules beforehand. I was trying to teach the game to the whole group, starting with character creation. We had one copy of the core rules (it was in Beta at the time), and so it was a little slow going.

We had time for a couple encounters, and it seemed like everyone had fun, but after that session I had two of my long-time players drop out of the group. They didn't have fun because they didn't feel like they knew the rules well enough and they didn't get enough attention from me to explain the rules to them because I was running the game for everyone. I had unintentionally burned them out in one session, and it didn't matter that the group went back down to 3-4 weekly players after that. They were done.

Part of the failure was probably my lack of teaching ability. But more than that, the bigger failure was that I just let the group get too big.

I would suggest that you take good stock of your abilities to lead a group and to teach efficiently. Once players get a grasp of the rules they can take the game and run with it, but a large group of newbies can easily lead to a bad gaming experience.

With this in mind, I would absolutely run the Beginner's Game (or a convention adventure like Under a Black Sun). The goal is to teach the game to these newbies, and adventures like this are set up to do just that.

There are lots of official pregens for your players to pick from (4 from the Beginner Box, +2 from the web, and then another 6 from Under a Black Sun), which they should so as to get a feel for the game. Additionally, I'd recommend you check out the Gaming Security Agency for their Heroes on Demand section, wherein you'll find plenty of pregenerated characters for your players to use. In any case, I heartily recommend pregenerated characters. Once your players play through a session or two, THEN let them design their own characters or re-build the ones they've been playing if they so desire.

To complicate things, my next session will involve a larger party of players, all of whom will be new to the system. Can I play the Core adventure (or Beyond the Rim) with newbs, or should I return to the Beginner adventures?

You certainly can. But if you have enough complete newbies that have never played RPGs before, I would take an evening with just those guys and run them through the beginner box. If these people have played other RPGs in the past, just have them jump in with the next adventure, but try and follow the example of the Beginner Box and introduce them to the game just a few rules at a time.

...snip...

I recommend having a "session 0" where you spend an evening with all the players, sit down them down, and walk through character creation.

I agree 100% with running new players through the Beginner set, unless you want to do the work of replicating their stage-managed events in some other adventure. The main reason IMHO is that if you start with character creation, none of the new players will know what to do, and how to allocate certain choices. The Beginner set makes you realize pretty quickly that even if you want to be a gunslinger, it's helpful to know how to negotiate, or be vigilant, or be athletic, or know something about Xenology. Other games often have a dump stat or skills that never get used, but I can't really say that about this game.

I'm assuming other people will be joining your kids, and your kids will be using characters that have run through the previous adventures? If so, you could play through the Beginner set again (letting your kids know that for this session they might have to take a back seat). Once the new players have a handle on the rules, your kids could swoop in and rescue their "old friends" and you can then take the adventure in any direction you want.

A session "0" is also a good idea...maybe run through the Beginner set for a couple hours as a form of intro, and then start character development.

Thanks for your replies. You guys are probably right that it's safest to start with the Beginner set.

So what would you say is the maximum number of players for this system? Is four optimal? Is six workable? If everyone shows, we'll have six (including the kids), and I worry people would get bored -- although I am pretty good about rat-a-tat events that keep people busy.

4-6 is a good number of players.

I have run with twelve or more at the table, but with that many people it is very difficult to keep everything straight.

We have eight to nine players in our regular group, but it's also our regular group, so we're used to all playing togeather in a larger-than-normal game and the occasional delays that come with it. That being said, the game is probibly designed for 4-6. We have found ourselves with redundancies in character roles and other cases of duplications. One distinct advantage of being a big group, however, is you can actualy split the party and be effective.

So, as advice to you, if they're young, try to stay small or run it as two shorter sessions. If they're mature, it can work, however. You just need to keep in mind how many people are actualy doing something, and the players need to realize that every once in a while your going to 'sit out' a scene that doesn't involve or just isn't relivent to your character.

If your teaching the game to a large group, you have to do it lecure style, not individualized like your probibly used to. I've had to do this myself at conventions.

Did you run Long Arm of the Hutt? It's the follow up for the boxed set.

As whafrog said, pre-gens are best for new players to this system. And also FuriousGreg voiced the question I also had for you. Long Arm of the Hutt extends the adventure in the Beginner Box and starts to bridge the gameplay from tricycle to bike with training wheels.

Jumping to full on corebook and chargen with a large group of new players is a recipe for potential disaster as mentioned by awayputurwpn.

That said, if your kids want to you could try some chargen with them ahead of time since they have played already and free up all the Beginner Box pre-gens to the new players. Then follow all of whafrog's advice for involving your kids in the Beginner Box Redux.

Thanks for your replies. Yep, I did run "Long Arm of the Hutt" with my kids. (Not "Black Sun", as I indicated in my original post; I was mistaken.) Honestly, my reason for asking about a new adventure is that it might be more fun for me to try something new, and I'm not sure if this new group will persist. But you're probably right, it's safest to start with the beginner box. Also, it now looks possible that my kids won't play at all, in which case my group will consist entirely of newbs.

One thing I do like about the Mos Shutta adventure is that it has some nice maps -- cantina, town, and especially the transport.

In general, do you guys find maps helpful in this game? Or do you find it more rewarding not to use maps at all -- to encourage players to draw their own maps, or to visualize things themselves?

The Beginner Box is designed to be a good presentation and tutorial style intro to RPGs and EotE's narrative dice system. Running it over and over for different players is akin to the school teacher who has to teach the same material every year. Unlike teaching in a school environment though, the players are empowered to run with it and go off in all kinds of unexpected directions once have learned the fundamentals. That said, the Beginner Box for EotE is currently my go to when I have to show a gamer virgin what an RPG is. I suspect that the AoR Beginner Box may take the place of that soon though since letting people be freedom fighting heroes is more often a better intro to the hobby than playing shades of grey fringers.

Those maps are in there because it helps new players understand what is going on visually while freeing up the GM (who may be novice as well) from the burden of trying to properly describe things with just words alone. Rough maps get the most mileage with newer players I've found. The maps help the players all have the same understanding of where things generally are.

Thanks for your reply. Do you ever run with no maps or visual aids at all? How about miniatures? Do you find those useful?

With EotE's game system, I get away with no maps more often than I would with more mainstream RPGs.

Because I run semi-freeform with modular encounters to cover the needs of making a larger story, I cannot possibly have maps made to cover everything my players may decide to do so I don't even try.

I have a deck plan for a YT-1300 b/c that's their ship. When I know they're committed to a world for at least 3 sessions then I also get some satellite images of appropriate cities/terrain off the internet and photoshop them up to mark out key locations so they have a "world map" for the local area. Otherwise I just run without maps.

With RPG novices though, I make heavy use of set piece maps because adventures for that crowd are far more scripted and they usually need the visual aid more.

Thanks once again. That's really helpful.

I just clicked on the link in your sig. Your campaign looks great! Did you write it yourself? If so, did you plot the whole thing out before you started the game? Looks like you're having a great time with it!

Yeah, Hard Luck Criminals is a real trip. I ran a Session 0 where they each took turns having to either add an Element (Person, Place or Problem) or add a Modifier statement to an existing Element. Went through the group repeatedly until they each had coughed up at least 3 Elements and all Elements had at least one Modifier statement. I basically played referee to prevent god-moding and occasionally added Modifier statements of my own to tie some things together as they developed so it would be cohesive instead of random.

So I took all of that and had a list of stuff they wanted in the campaign. Made a bunch of situations that involved what came out of Session 0, their character Obligations and Motivations. I don't strictly plot out much. I just write stuff coincidentally like what the FFG marketing folks hyped as Modular Encounters in Suns of Fortune.

I also came up with ideas for how each PC's Obligation might trigger and made situations and set pieces for those. When I roll the Obligation Table and trigger one, I look at the set pieces I have for it and run with it. I have the Minor triggers and the Major triggers (rolling doubles on the table). So far I've been able to seamlessly weave those into whatever they happen to be running around doing.

Main story pieces come from whatever they decide to do. I keep Session 0 stuff relevant to it all as much as possible, but sometimes it's just background to what's going on. Season 2 has three main stories going on that I prepped. Of those, the one right now is to upscale the power level of the group a notch. So I set up an environment wherein they have opportunities to work their way up to nabbing a corvette class ship. Of the other two, one involves their characters dealing with their Hutt problem as they requested an arc about that at the post-Season 1 session.

Basically, I spend a lot of time finding out what they want, then coming up with novel and interesting complications that happen while they try to get it.

Sounds great! I assume you're running this in person, not via email or anything like that.

So when you add "Elements" and "Modifiers", that means you're having the players contribute to what's in the campaign, yes? E.g., a player says "let's add a Planetary Governor to the cast of characters?"

Anyway, your campaign looks like a blast!

Thanks for your reply. Do you ever run with no maps or visual aids at all? How about miniatures? Do you find those useful?

I have yet to use maps, though I do scribble something on graph paper sometimes to get a general layout of an area if necessary.

i use a white board and minis. i track ranges between characters using the white board and occasionally sketch out significant points of cover.

Sounds great! I assume you're running this in person, not via email or anything like that.

Yes, it's played live via Roll20 and Google Hangouts.

So when you add "Elements" and "Modifiers", that means you're having the players contribute to what's in the campaign, yes? E.g., a player says "let's add a Planetary Governor to the cast of characters?"

Base Elements for People start off in the format of "An X who Y."

So in your example, the starting proposition would be "A Planetary Governor who takes payoffs/bribes."

An example of Modifiers for that are:

"...and we've traded favors with him before."

"...and his greed is getting him into trouble with the wrong people."

"...and my character used to date his daughter."

etc.

So my players contribute to the world-building process at the beginning and that gives them buy-in and their characters a network of connections in the campaign before we've even played a session.

When they are deciding what to do next, they often all look at their notes from Session 0 and the changes since and agree on an objective then they're off again.

There's a lot of choices for adventures, too.

After the Beginner Box (Escape from Mos Shuuta) there's a downloable sequel (for free) called Long Arm of the Hutt. It continues exactly where Escape leaves off.

THere's the Black Sun downloadble like you mentioned. The Core Rulebook comes with one. The GM screen (which I highly recommend for it's high quality and handy references printed on it) comes with one 'Debts to Pay'.

There's also Beyond the Rim. Suns of Fortune comes with Modular Encounters that you can insert into other adventures.

Heck, do all of them. Some people here have created threads where they have tied all of them together using a common narrative.