I feel a disturbance in the Force...

Next Sunday is May the 4th (be with you), and yes, I'll be running my Star Wars d6 campaign instead of my TS&R (D&D) campaign. Last year, I tried to run a session to introduce SW gaming to a new audience, but out of five players, only two were new. At least they both stuck around (Randy's wife has been keeping him busy most weekends, but he still wants to play). This year, I'm just running with the regular crowd. 

I recently got involved with the TTRPG in Korea Discord group, during their last WinterCon. I offered to run a SW game for those guys on the 4th, but no one signed up. So I cancelled that game and will run for my Busan group. 

If I'd done the Discord group game, I would have used one of my old adventures (the first one I ran, actually, based loosely on the plot of the move Shaft). Since it's the regular group, minus the people who can only play online, I'll be furthering the game as we shift into the post RotJ era. 

The Hutts want to retake their planet Dandoran, which an Imperial invasion made them flee (with help from our Anti-Heroes). Now, the Hutts Strike Back. I've got four mini missions in mind, and the PCs are free to take or leave them (although the first one is smuggling heavy weapons to Dandoran, so they'll probably take up that mission). 

I've still got a bit of prep to do for the other three missions. But the good thing is, if we don't have time for all four (I figure we'll get two done), I've got content prepared for the next time we run SW. 

Happy Little Accidents

Back in early January, I posted about painting minis from my 1/72 collection. Over the course of January and February, I did end up painting quite a bit. I hadn't posted about them because I hadn't taken many pictures. But today, I did take some pictures for the TTRPG in Korea Discord group I'm in, and I figured I'd share these little rascals here as well.

I painted one set of Cyclopes and a set of Minotaurs, both from Red Box Dark Alliance. I didn't take a picture of them today, so that will have to wait. 

Then I finally painted the Caesar Goblins that I bought I'm not sure how many years ago. Maybe 10? These goblins look cool, but they're only wearing loin clouts, so I think I do need more goblins with armor on them. The easy way to distinguish these guys are the color coding on their loin clouts.

Then, I got some more of the Red Box historical Russian War Monk Artillery, and some figures from Strelets' Vikings and Scotish Army of Wallace sets that I bought way back around the time I got the Caesar goblins. The war monks make good magic-users/clerics, and the others became a mix of possible clerics (mace/club/war hammer in hand) and fighter-types. A few of the war monks were painted and shown in that post linked above from back in January. 

The Fighters

The Clerics

The Magic-Users

 

No, I don't have enough Thief types. I have an order pending with Michigan Toy Soldier Company, which includes the Red Box Dark Alliance "Southern Kingdom Rangers" (based on Faramir's Rangers of Ithillien) and some more goblins with armor.

Just at the end of the winter break, I but a base coat on my Red Box DA Half-Orcs (based on Saruman's uruk-hai from the movies), but I haven't had time to paint any more than that the past two months. 

For the Discord, I also posted a couple of reference pictures to show the scale of these guys. If you're using Reaper, WotC/Wizkids, or other similar scale minis, these guys can be halfings or gnomes. Here's the WotC Warduke mini next to a goblin and the Macho Man wizard (The resemblance was not intentional, it was the happy little accident of all this painting!).

 

 

Advancement System Before Action Resoultion Mechanics

The other day, Jeremy sent me a file for a Supers RPG that he's working on. He wants to play test it, and I'm looking forward to that. He's going for a rules-lite system, so he's trying not to bog it down with too many subsystems or overly define what any particular superpower can and can't do. That's fine. 

He's got an interesting action resolution/combat system. It's 2d10 based, but you add attribute scores (your superpowers or skills) as appropriate. If you roll snake eyes, you auto fail. If you roll any other doubles, the dice explode and you keep rolling (but snake eyes on a further roll is still auto failure). That's interesting and I want to see how it plays out.

Character creation has lots of d% tables for determining things randomly, but he also says that picking and choosing to fit your idea is fine as well. The only problem I found with this is that the big list of Attributes (again, the super powers or advanced skill-sets that heroes have) is a 3d100 chart. If you're picking the abilities that you want, no problem. If you're rolling randomly, this will skew heavily into the middle of the alphabetical list of 297 options. I checked the dice probabilities, and you're 7500 times more likely to get item 151 (or 152) than to get item 3 (or 300). Of course, with nearly 300 entries, it's still only a 0.75% chance (each) to get 151 or 152.

And what do you know, when I rolled a random PC, I got Leap (entry 151) as one of my rolls.  

So there are a few things to work out there, but nothing major. 

The big problem is, there's no advancement system. No way to earn XP or additional Build Points (once you determine your powers, you can set their strength with build points, then add features or limits plus or minus more build points) after play starts. There's no goal of play other than "play out stories like in comic books" which seems like it will only be conducive to one-shots/convention play. 

I think that anyone designing an RPG should figure out what the advancement system is before trying to figure out the resolution mechanics or char-gen features. You've got to know what the players should be doing with their PCs before anything else. Otherwise, what's the point of play?