DM Comfort Level

 I ran a session of my Star Wars d6 campaign a few hours ago. And while I'm still not 100% up on all the rules (especially the effects of all the Force powers), and should probably make a better cheat sheet for myself...I mean GM reference!...I feel like I'm a lot more comfortable with the system. I went through more than half the game before I needed to look something up in the rulebook, only to realize I'd left the actual books on the bookshelf in the other room. Since my PDF reader was acting strangely, I took a break to go get it, and carried on with the game. But for the most part, I had enough information in my adventure notes to run the game. 

That's a good feeling. In fact, after the game was over, I briefly considered if I wanted to make this game my main game, and wind up West Marches. I'm still enjoying WM, but some of the players seem a little less engaged these days. But then, several WM players don't care to play Star Wars, while one player has decided he would rather play Star Wars and has opted out of future WM games. My boys still enjoy both, so I'll probably keep things the way they are now. But it is something worth considering as I get more and more comfortable with the d6 system. 

Tonight's game almost didn't happen. Jeff had planned to run his weird GURPS/Palladium mashup game this evening, but since I don't play in it, I had no idea. This was my normally scheduled weekend to run West Marches, but I was in a Star Wars mood, and so were my boys. It wasn't until I'd scheduled the game that Jeremy told me about Jeff's game. But since my game started at 8, and Jeff's was scheduled to start at 9:30, he offered to start at 10pm instead. And he showed up to play in my game, too. 

We only had 2 hours, so I tried to start things off as soon as possible. Table talk was at a minimum tonight, which helped things go smoothly.

The heroes were contacted by Bumpomo the Hutt, whose daughter they had rescued in my first d6 Star Wars game (roughly based on the plot of Shaft [1971]). Bumpomo owed a favor to the local rebels, and one of their captains had been captured by the Imperials and was being transferred to the Citadel (Clone Wars fans might remember that place). The mission was to intercept the transport ship, extract the captain, and then rendezvous with a rebel ship in the Concord Dawn system. 

The party used some funds from Bumpomo to improve their stock YT-1300 freighter, adding better shields and a heavy ion cannon. When they got to the Lola Sayu system, they jammed the imperial communications and surprised the transport. Shots from the party's Mandalorian (son #1) on the laser cannon and Bulldogman Jedi (son #2) on the ion cannon took out the transport's two TIE fighter escort. Another blast from the ion cannon incapacitated the transport. 

The party docked, and as they were trying to find a computer terminal port to have one of their droids access the computer, a pair of KX enforcer droids attacked. The KX have strong armor, but lucky shots managed to stun the first one, then it was taken out with an ion grenade from the party's smuggler. Laser shots from several characters managed to stun and then destroy the other one. 

And that was all the time we had. The shopping for ship upgrades actually took the longest part of the session. The starship combat (our first time using the rules) worked really well. I used the simple Close/Medium/Long range zones of ship proximity from the 1st edition rules, rather than playing things out on a grid, and it worked really well. Of course, the party is lucky that they got the drop on the imperials, because the TIE fighters might have done some serious damage to their ship if they'd had a chance to react.