The second session went well. It was the first one where we had actual play. The players seemed to have a good time when they were involved in whatever was happening at the time, but were disengaged when people were doing things that did not directly involve them. I mapped things as we went, and that worked better than I expected it to.
The issues, as I saw it were that we are all new to the system and getting used to a new system takes some time.
One that I am not super clear on… is the balance between me describing things and them reading a situation.
The way I thought I was supposed to do it is that I would give them a general description of some of what they seem but if they want to know more they have to tell me they are reading the situation. That I wouldn’t tell them to do that, they would have to tell me they were doing that. However I just read over some examples in the AW book and in one of them it has the MC asking for that roll. So now I am not clear on which way you are supposed to do it.
Also if I ask them to make that roll and its for a stat they have highlighted, they still get the exp right?
>but were disengaged when people were doing things that did not directly involve them
I like to flit back and forth between scenes and characters. “Q-Tip, what are you doing while this is happening? … Hooker, do you see this from across the street? … Charlie, the shots from down the street wake you up from your nap – what do you do?”
>but if they want to know more they have to tell me they are reading the situation.
They can ask questions. The game is a conversation. No need to roll to find out if the building is blue or red. It may be up to you to decide if what they are doing is simply conversing, or performing a move. Especially at first when people don’t know the moves as well as you.
Always get XP for a highlighted stat roll, doesn’t matter who calls for it.
So, as the MC its your job to present the world. You present it honestly and with integrity to the characters. Sometimes, though, this means that the characters don’t get to know everything — there’s more to be learned, your prep suggests extra details, and so on. In these situations, you know that the situation is Charged (remember that! Its specifically Read a Charged Situation)… I feel like its the MC’s responsibility to offer the roll in cases where players have no reason to realize a situation is charged. I regularly offer this move to players if they do something that suggests its what they’re angling for.
Yes, they still get xp.
Try and get away from naming the moves, especially as an MC. Suggest to your players that first they should imagine what their player does and express that, rather than coming at it from the rules/moves first.
You’ve got the first part right. Describe the general situation. Then ask, “what do you do?”
PC: Well, I want to poke around in that pile of debris you described.
MC: Sounds like you are scavenging.
PC: Actually, I’m looking to see if anyone is hiding there.
MC: Ah, ok, please roll Read a Bad Situation.
Of course, just saying, I want to read a situation is ok. It’s just not as narrative as some prefer.
Also, note that any time you are playing AW, it is automatically a bad day. Any time you Read a Bad Situation, it just became a bad situation.
Cool, cool. That helps guys. I will adjust for session #3. I need re-frame how I present things and when it seems like they are making a move based on their description I should ask them to roll.
Aaron Griffin I did skip around the table and kept things moving… its just that as soon as they could they all went in separate directions, so they couldn’t really interact with each others situations. So while one guy was chatting up his flirtatious rival, the other guy was meditating on the force and looking for dark siders on his own. Those two situations actually merged, so that entertained two people at once.
The other guys didn’t do things that were all that interesting, and I could have tossed something at them to spice things up, but I held back because I didn’t want to toss too much at them at once.
Might be worth working their Hx into the mix. What sort of relationships to the PCs have and how do they relate with the Front cast?
Aaron Griffin
“Might be worth working their Hx into the mix. What sort of relationships to the PCs have and how do they relate with the Front cast?”
I don’t have the playbooks handy so I can’t give specifics on the PCs… but it seems to break down like this…
Orien, a Gearhead is well liked by everyone except for Tugo the Ace, who doesn’t like him much, but is only neutral with everyone else. We have R33-PR a Droid Bounty hunter that is on ok terms with everyone generally but works and likes Forlon the Scoundrel Chiss that he works bounties with. Most of the PCs are on good terms with the Scoundrel. We also have Ta Keen a Guardian who just wants to help, and doesn’t want to fall to the darkside like his master, but he is still figuring himself out. The Guardian is on ok terms with everyone as well, but especially Orien and Forlon.
After typing that… I realize that I need to study their connections better.
As for the fronts/threats, I didn’t work those up completely because I wanted to see what happened in the first play session. Here is what I do have however.
Jorma, runs the local space port, and is a city official. This is on a mostly tropical water world, so besides the sea platform they have as a space port there are not many places to land. It gives him a lot of local power. So this connects him to all of the PC’s except the Jedi because three of them have ships, and one has a repair shop that involves many of the local ships. He is also suspected to be the local kingpin.
One of the Gearhead’s shop workers “Bracewin” prides himself on being able to get any part needed, and acts like its nothing. He often sets safety and sense aside in order to get the right parts. He owes 5 creds to Jorma’s people, and has been unable to pay it off.
We have Drogan Lox, a slaver that the group captured on a bounty gig, however due to some setting issues, the holonet is down, and they are not sure where to deliver him. So he is sitting in R33-PR’s ships brig. I really wanted this to cause more issue, but R33-PR has kept him sedated while he has been locked up. He was supposed to bargain for release, try to escape by violence, and if/when that fails try to signal for release. Hmm… I just had an idea. The ship he was in was searched at the port, so they saw the bounty. May Drogan did his bargaining with those people then.
The last major one I have is Drugulla the Hutt. He hates Forlon because he used to be his slave but escaped. Forlon and Drugulla have been sniping at each other for some time now. Forlon’s obligation gig is to get revenge on him. I didn’t want this to be as in the face of the PC’s until we ticked away at the countdown clock some. So next I think I am going to have Drugulla’s agents to find out more about where Forlon (and his crew of former slaves) are hiding out at, and then put out a capture bounty on the lot of them. The PC bounty hunter will see this and we will have some drama.
There are a number of other threats that I can work up that connect to the PC’s (since they came up with all of them) but the only one that I have introduced was a rival for the Ace. Tugo the Ace in this game bills himself as “The Best Pilot” in the galaxy, his rival is Ja’veik Thraw, a foxy, adventurous, force sensitive ship captain of the smuggler craft Basilisk Bex. She is fun but manipulative, and possible love interest. I was hoping to use her as a foil for Tugo, and depending on how he reacted she could either go all bitter and dangerous, or not.
She also carries a dark broken sword that is attuned to darkside, and this has the Jedi fairly concerned. So… maybe she could be a love interest for him as well. This could setup a fun but dangerous dynamic in the group.
I didn’t do the whole, lets follow the PCs thing at first because I wanted to get our feet wet with making some rolls in a manner closer to what they are used to. So in our first play session, we started with shop workers getting assaulted in the alley behind the shop because of the owed debt. The PC’s quickly rolled out and laid the smack down on the attackers. Actually scaring most of them away… except for the one that died with a huge hole burned through his chest.
They figured out that the attackers came from the Space Port, and that the reason for the attack was because of a failure to pay. They paid the port a visit and there was some tension with guards, and a completely failed mind trick, but they managed to get in to talk to Jorma, who was more than happy to use the conflict as an excuse to manipulate them in to delivering a crate for him. [This is a big crate of Spice precursor. The delivery is to a paranoid grey force cult that uses it to enhance their powers. This delivery will not go well at all… I am thinking that maybe some Drugulla agents will mess things up in attacking the group, but not because of the spice.]
After that the group scattered because they had a few days before they had to pick up the shipment. Everyone did their own thing, but Tugo and Ta Keen the Jedi ended up in the same place with Ja’veik Thraw, detailed above.
As someone who doesn’t follow the SW universe very well, this is a hair hard to follow. BUT it seems like you have some strings to pull to bring people together and get them all involved if you run out of plot to work with.
You might need two or more active threats at once, though. Maybe, for example, Jorma uses what he has over Bracewin to convince him to board R33’s ship and either replace the sedation drugs with saline or simply free Drogon. Now you have Orien and R33-PR sort of at odds with each other.
Oooh thats a good idea on the Orien R33-PR front.
Yeah I have 2 or 3 more NPC’s that I can bring in to focus as threats. I just didn’t want to have too much tossed in their face while we all adjusted to a new gaming system and figured out where we are going with things.