Revenge of the Jedi Play Report

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on January 12, 2005 at 12:08 AM

So I ran the first real session of our Revenge of the Jedi Star Wars game. (This is a game which begins immediately after The Empire Strikes Back, right after Luke Skywalker accepted Vader's offer and joined the Dark Side.) I ran the game using the Feng Shui rules, and it was generally good. Here's a description of what I did, and what worked, what didn't, and what I think I'll do next.

My initial motivation was to kick the game off with some of the split-screen action that characterizes Star Wars -- I wanted to run a sequence in which the PCs were separated from one another, but with the actions of each subgroup of PCs affecting the circumstances of the other PCs. There were three main threads to the action, each at some disparate moment in time:

• First, there was Leia, disguised as the bounty hunter Eela Oond. She was visiting Jabba the Hutt's palace, and trying to wangle an invitation to a party he was hosting on his pleasure barge. The theme of the party was "Don't stiff Jabba", and various people who had offended the crime lord would be tossed to the Sarlacc monster as part of the celebrations. Han's frozen corpse would be prominently displayed there, outside the super-high-security of Jabba's trophy room.
• The second scene was Lando Calrissian at a fancy casino in Tatooine, The Black Hole. His goal was to rendezvous with Jabba's chief accountant Bella Nyx and seduce her, so that he could steal the security codes for Jabba's criminal database.
• The final scene was R2D2 and C3PO (along with the Rebel infiltration expert Sy Snootles) bluffing their way into Jabba's base, so that they could hack his database and install files establishing "Eela Oond"'s bona fides as a genuine bounty hunter with a long track record as murderous scum working the Outer Rim.

All three of these scenes were run simultaneously. The idea was that the success or failure of the PCs in any one of these scenes would affect how the other scenes played out. If Lando had trouble getting the codes, then R2D2 would have face a much trickier challenge trying to hack Jabba's security, and if that failed then Leia's cover story would stand a chance of being revealed as bogus.

I ran these three scenes using the Feng Shui initiative mechanics. Initiative in Feng Shui works as follows: each of the characters generates an initiative number by adding 1d6 to their Speed attribute. The GM counts down the shot counter, and when a character's initiative comes up, they act, and reduce their initiative by 3. So a character who rolled an 11 initiative would get to act on shots 11, 8, 5, and 2. The characters' varying initiatives meant that they had a whole bunch of interleaved actions, and I ran a very short mini-scene for each PC when their shot came up. The players were trying to accomplish all of their goals before time ran out, and everyone was playing without sure knowledge of whether their compatriots had succeeded or not.

This was, all things considered, a pretty good idea. It let me focus attention on the different players very nicely, and had a nicely cinematic interleaved shots effect. There were a couple of genuinely cool moments when a question was raised on one player's shot, some information created in the next player's, providing a clear answer when we got back to the first player. I think this is a trick that anyone running any kind of complex action game in the style of heist movies or Mission Impossible should consider using.

However, I noticed a very clear jump in the quality and fluidity of the action when we finished the wangle-an-invitation sequence and moved on to the scene depicting Han Solo's rescue from Jabba's pleasure barge. This was an action sequence in which the players, all gathered together at the barge kicked off their big rescue plan. This part of the game was a fight, and made full use of the Feng Shui combat system. It played out a good deal better than the previous sequence -- the improvisations were more fluid, and it was clearer when the players were successful and when they failed.

I think that this was because the combat had a much more concrete indicator of success or failure than the first part did. In particular, the NPCs had a bunch of wound points, and we all knew that they were dead when they ran out. This sounds like a pretty trivial point, but it became clear to me when I made an off-the-cuff ruling -- Lando Calrissian was trying to convince Bella Nyx to heroically convert to the side of good, and after his player rolled, I mentioned that his kiss did 14 points of "indecision damage" to her, and that he would convert her if he did enough damage to "kill" her. The other players went "ah-ha" then, and I realized I had stumbled on a good thing.

Here's why I think it's good, and what the previous scene was missing. In Feng Shui, the basic way that the game works is that the GM comes up with a general description of the scene, including a number of cool features that the players can seize upon to use in their stunts. They describe doing something cool, and then they roll. This is fine, but it doesn't give us much guidance on how long a series of stunts should go before we're done with the scene.[1]

If the PCs are trying to escape through some caves, then of course in Feng Shui I don't want to draw a map of the cave complex -- instead, I want some dramatic complications and cool material for the players to stunt off of, and some signal to let us go "Cut!" for the scene. So in the first scene (the infiltration scene), we knew what the players were trying to do, but we didn't have a clear guide for how long it would take. In the second (the attack on the barge) we did.

So I think what I'm going to do is to borrow the template of Feng Shui's combat system for everything in the game from now on. So, the escape through a tunnel complex will be an antagonistic NPC with an action value, "wound" points, "speed", a strength, a toughness, and a bunch of details to use as raw material for stunts. The players will use the appropriate skills (such as Intrusion or Info/Caves) to "fight" it.[2] A quick or minor obstacle is an "unnamed" cave complex.

[1] I think this is something that Vincent has complained about before. Link?

[2] Note that if I actually had a map, I could use it instead of a "damage" track for the caves. But this isn't appropriate for Feng Shui, because the set should be firmly in the hands of the PCs.