Author: Zach Swain

I’m pretty sure our session last night bounced between the ridiculous and the obscene, so I won’t post a transcript. However, I did want to run one of our combats past the group.

The PCs discover a cargo container floating through a debris field. Visual assessment tells them a ship has been blown up; looks like the cargo container was ejected due to a lack of evidence of explosion on its exterior. They decide to grab it using a shuttle with a cargo hold but, having no tractor beam, I adjudicate the threat of destroying the container so Face Adversity+expertise of the shuttle pilot. Success with a hard choice; either the container is brought on board quickly, but the exterior ruptures and the goods seep out into space or it takes an extended period of time (like, all day) to maneuver into position. The choose the latter.

I advance a threat, the pirates that (maybe?) originally blew up the ship returning to grab their prize. One of our other players launches his shuttle; we now have two shuttles and the main (Class 2) ship vs. the single pirate (Class 2) ship. The pirates ask, for their container back, the PCs delay/sweet talk, and while they’re doing this they open the cargo container…illicit narcotics. The pirates offer a scant sum, well below what the PCs are told (by their Hutt passenger) the cargo is worth in the Hutt empire. The players ask full price, Face Adversity+Influence.

Success with (another) hard choice…sell it to them for below market value, or learn an unwelcome truth. They choose the latter, at which point the pirate ship launches 3 shuttles and powers up their ion cannon.

The PCs decide to load the shuttles into their main shp’s cargo bay and GTFO. My ruling is their ship must be a sitting duck while they dock the shuttles, taking hits from the now launched fighters and the ion cannon, or they can evade and risk not docking the shuttles in a timely manner. They choose the former.

Combat ends when they get the shuttles docked, then jump to light speed (AI, which has the voice of Harvey Fierstein, driving) with suppressing fire to ward off the fighters remaining shots, but the ship sustained critical hits to the helm, engineering and quarters, a major hit to engineering, the cockpit is completely destroyed (debility, fortunately they have an AI piloting for them), and the Life Support takes a debility (offline).

Questions:

1) As they were sitting ducks, I had them roll Shields Up for each of 5 hits (Ion Cannon, Fighter x 3, Missiles). They failed on shot 3, which should have disabled their shields, but I let them continue to roll Shields Up judging it was “all at the same time”. Is either the 5 hits/rolls or the continued Shields Up roll incorrect RAW? We weren’t sure.

2) Shots from fighters with weapons intended to breach hulls, when they hit, are Critical Injuries to one of the ships’ sections, correct?

3) Do critical hits always cause debilities?

4) What do most people do when you receive two critical hits to a single section of a ship? That should be a fatal hit, which I would rule as that section of the ship is incapable of performing any function, but have others just said “Hull breach, dead” or something along those lines?

5) Fixing this ship for next week; three criticals, a major, a system completely offline. That seems like too much for just an Acquisition role (or roles, if we roll for each bit of damage), but how would you folks do that? I don’t read anything that allows for reductions in rolls, but I feel like this is a time when I’d want to mechnically make them spend cargo/credits to get a ship repaired. Do you incorporate that into the fiction, or is there something RAW that would make it harder to get big stuff repaired that I’m missing?

Moved this to Discussion.

I’m bouncing back onto the wealth topic, and I’ve been mulling a few things around in my head that I wanted to toss out to the community for advice.

First, I think the abstract wealth system works in theory, but in practice my players are repeatedly asking “How much does X cost?” or “How much can we get for Y?” Example:

Last night they docked at a Hutt controlled spaceport. The Hutts keep trade taxes low, but charge tremendous docking fees. I described it as such, but the players immediately were trying to ascertain how much is “tremendous”…and I had no good answer for them. Mechanically, I treated it as an acquisition which I think RAW is correct. I explained abstract wealth, and we did work it into the fiction (they wound up finding a “friend” that worked in the port authority that allowed them to bypass the fees rather than spending cargo on an acquisition roll, but owed this friend some favors), but it felt incorrect to me.

Later, one of the players wanted to replace his blaster. Again, acquisition roll (though I think he could have just received one sans roll as it was just a Class 1).

Towards the end, the players wanted to pick up goods to trade with the mining facility they were heading towards (DataNet assessment, the facility needs Fusion Plant materials). They rolled two acquisitions, one success one partial so I ruled they got two cargo; one Class 2 parts, one Class 2 parts that was slightly unstable. They’re going to want to sell these at the next station and, potentially, not pick up new goods…how would we handle selling goods without getting anything for it (i.e. cashing in)? I’ve considered favors, credits, etc but I’m not convinced I’m going down the right track with any of them.

Possibly because I loved Trade Wars 2002, and I picked up ‘Suns of Gold’ for SWN the other day, I’m flirting with implementing the trade system from SoG. It’s decidedly not abstract, but has anyone employed something similar to that (fixed cost trading, basically)?

Advice/Criticism welcome. As a side note, we took the advice from my thread last week to heart and had a much better time with combat and conflict this week; explaining consequences went a long way in helping me adjudicate and helped both me and the players understand what they were trying to overcome.

Question for the masses about how I should have run a combat, along with a rule question.

The players were heading out from a stardock to intercept a set of three ships, one of which was docked airlock to airlock with a mercenary that had been transporting cargo the players were on a mission to retrieve (the Hutt cargo from last week).

My players went tactical; two have their own fighters that they flew off to try and divert the non-docked ships, two others manned the main ship and maneuvered in place alongside the docked ship, and the last jumped in his repair mech (sealed) and went out the airlock to attach to the docked ship and try to interface to shut down their systems externally.

Nothing really went right, their rolls for every Face Adversity were horrible. Both shuttles ended up disabled (missile hits that I ruled as Critical damages that damaged/shutdown systems), the repair mech wound up attached to the docked ship but rolled poorly and the ship powered up, dropped the airlock and took off with him attached to it. He kept trying to interface with it, so I’d have him Face Adversity to hang on (which he’d pass) then Face Adversity to interface (which he’d fail), so I had systems go haywire then eventually brought in reinforcements.

Overall, I’d say we spent 45 minutes to an hour resolving the combat, and I eventually brought it down to three rolls to figure out what would happen to the remaining forces (pilots escape podded, docked ship had all systems disabled, shuttles will need to be picked up but the cargo was retrieved).

Anyways, we spent way too long on the combat…as things went downhill, I could have just killed off characters but I wound up giving them the opportunity to roll Patch Ups which they succeeded on to get back into the fight. Any suggestions on running this fight where everyone wants to do something different, their outcomes have direct impacts on what others are doing, and things go downhill but not horribly so? How many rolls would you have made this entire combat given the setup, or what flow would you have given it? Much like Dungeon World, I felt like I was trapping myself with 7-9 Face Adversity rolls, and I eventually ran out of hard choices/threats.

Rule Question: Shields up doesn’t indicate adding armor to the roll…if the ship/vehicle has armor, is it supposed to be added or should vehicles like shuttles be treated like PCs with Brace for Impact rolls?

I’m trying to wrap my head around the wealth system.  I get that UW by default abstracts wealth to ‘lifestyle’, but is the intent that anytime a PC acquires something of significant value (ship, weapon, vehicle, etc) that you either use cargo as a boost in an Acquisition or you call in a favor/take on debt in order to acquire it?  I think one of my issues here is that we have 6 players in our game; trying to give each person a share of the wealth from a job means I either need to have 6 assets awarded, figure out a way to break down rewards into chunks or have those awards go back to the PCs faction/team/corp and then dole out stuff to them from said faction/team/corp.

I can foresee my players wanting to become personally wealthy…how would this system handle that?  Multiple favors being owed them by factions perhaps would be an indicator of wealth.  A favor that explicitly says “Pick out any Class 3 ship and it’s yours!” maybe?  

What if they’re just interested in stockpiling credits?  I had considered putting a base price on each class of asset (e.g. Class 0/1/2 weapons are 10/100/1000 credits, Class 0/1/2 vehicles are 1000/10000/100000 credits, etc) as an exchange rate…berfore I even suggest it, does that break this system in some way I’m not seeing?

Starting a game of UW next week. We’ve played some DW, a lot of Pathfinder, 5e, etc. It’s going to be a Star Wars themed universe, but one of our players wants to play a cleric/mystic type; think the Shepherd from Firefly. I started putting together a career path for it, but was wondering if someone else had something simliar, better or playtested? Not sure if I’m just missing potential options that already exist in game or good 3rd party resources. I’m open to any options anyone has, I’ll throw them all in front of the player and let him decide.

Here’s what I had started putting together. If it sounds a lot like a Jedi, I was trying to merge Jedi/Mystic/Cleric into one career.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xr_DBRPb27D7P60Rwv0pI9I7YDVG5dXDNGSPZ7DZXwU/edit?usp=sharing