I ran my first session on Tuesday, so thought I would post feedback from that here for developers (and anyone else interested).

WARNING - spoilers for Crate of Krayts (the adventure in the book) follow:

The session started with character creation. We only had the one book, but with my Reference sheets that didn't really matter as everyone had a copy of the bits they needed. Still, it took us a good 1 1/2 hours to create 5 characters, mostly in debating choices around species, career, specialisation, spending XP and buying gear. We ended up with a male Human Hired Gun (Marauder I think, with Gadgeteer specialisation from Bounty Hunter), male Human Hired Gun (not sure what career specialisation he took, but he also had Force Sensitive Exile), female Human Bounty Hunter (Assassin, also with Doctor specialisation), male Rodian Scoundrel (Pilot specialisation) and male Twi'lek Technician (Mechanic specialisation).

Generally speaking character creation went really well, and everyone was able to make up very different characters (even from the same career). There were a lot of tough choices made, both in terms of spending XP and also in terms of whether or not to increase obligation (One player increased obligation by 15 for both increased XP and gear, three players increased by 5 for either XP or gear and the last was determined to not increase it unless he really needed to, and managed not to - but it was a tough call for him, so I think the balance there is about right). The Force sensitive exile had the tough choice between buying Force powers or spending XP elsewhere, and eventually opted to skip the Force powers for now. The obligation and motivation mechanics worked well to give the characters a good backstory and tie them to the adventure. After a bit of discussion the group decided to go for the middle of the road YT-1300 as their starting ship. All-in-all, it went well and I think the players really got into the customisation options around specialisations, skills, talents and gear (and upgrading gear).

We then played through the start (first encounter) of the adventure from the book (Crates of Krayts). Again things went fairly well, with the less combat capable characters (pilot and mechanic) tending to the crates and moving them up to the ship, with the more combat capable ones fighting the raiders. Although a couple of issues did come up:

1) Auto-fire was crazy good against minions. I guess this is kind of the intended effect, but we had the situation where the player scored enough advantage to either activate a Critical Hit or buy extra hits with his heavy blaster rifle. With the way crits work against minions, the crit (costing 3 advantage) would have inflicted another 5 wounds (the amount of the minion's wounds), or the three advantage spent on autofire would have scored an extra 30 odd damage, which isn't really even comparable! Not entirely sure what the best fix for this is. Autofire as a two advantage activation might be too expensive, but it seems too cheap as a one advantage activation…

2) Advantage/disadvantage seemed to work pretty well, with lots of using it to pin down foes (giving them black dice), creating openings for allies (giving them blue dice) and diving for cover (getting a free maneuver, usually used to take cover and generate add a black die to the attack - not sure if that is the intent of the rule, after the roll, but that is the way we played it). One player did comment that it seemed like they were doing a lot of stuff, without really being successful, but that could just be the change of system - really they cleaned up the raiders pretty handily, with no-one taking any wounds and only minor amounts of strain. Another player commented that it was weird to not have separate attack and damage rolls, and he missed the suspense of not having the second roll, but the rest mostly liked the system. It also worked pretty well out of combat, with the players stopping to buy some "bantha poo" in bulk to hide the special crates in - they succeeded so I gave them a good price (I handwaved 100cr), with a lot of advantage, so I said the seller chucked in some empty crates to put the two special crates inside to help with the illusion.

3) Aiming seemed very popular. To the point where it was pretty much the default maneuver, with strain being taken to also move or do something else if needed. 

4) More a concern with the adventure than the system, but there seemed to be too long in between the waves of attackers. The ranged attackers on the top of the canyon were wiped out in the first turn, leaving a couple of turns of shooting at the slowly advancing melee attackers. In the end, only one group of melee attackers made an attack, which missed due to their ranks being pretty thinned by the time they got there. In hindsight, I probably should have given ranged attacks against the guys at the top of the canyon an additional black die for them being prone (I did add one for cover though), or added a third group of ranged attackers, but I figured the first fight was intended to be a bit of a cake walk.

5) The was a question about armour encumbrance, but that has been answered with this week's update already!

6) One player looked at buying synth-skin, but there aren't really any rules around what it does… I hand-waved that it'd add an extra blue die on medical checks to repair minor injuries (the description says cuts and bruises).

7) The pilot failed the easy Astrogation check to get to Nar Shadda, but there are no rules/guidelines to cover what this means. By a strict reading of the rules, it means they aren't able to get to Nar Shadda, but that seems to cut the adventure dead in it's tracks. The player also rolled a few advantages, so I instead ruled that he plotted an ultra-cautious route that was safe but took longer to get there. This probably needs a sentence or two to explain what the intent is…

8) Almost forgot - the players loved the destiny point mechanic - there were a lot of cheers around the table at the start of the session as two PCs rolled two light side points! There was a tendency at the end of the session to just burn it on every roll though, as everyone knew the session was coming to an end (so I usually just spent one as well, to even it out and potentially generate threat - which actually came up on the doctor's check to remember how often they would need to apply the sedative - once every 24 hours looks about right….).

I think that is it. Next session will be in 2 weeks time!

Thanks for the AAR.  I'll keep it in mind for when I run my game.

I had a similar experience this weekend, playing though the Episode I of Crates of Kryats.

I had, however, 3 players rather than 5, and only one of them using an heavy rifle with autofire capabilities.

The character with the heavy rifle was also the only one with an Agility of 4 and was the only one that did nothing but shooting the entire encounter (which lasted about 6 rounds).

The other characters 1) run to the ship, made daring flying maneuvres, saved the day with style and 2) walked with the crates, transporting them, tried to lift the small one and failed, made a stand to protect the crates against frenzy sand raiders in melee.

No surprise that the guy with the auto-rifle managed to down 10 Tuskan Raiders, while the other players killed 2 each.

But all felt very cinematic and not "unrealistic" at all. Everybody had loads of fun.

It is true that, at least against a group of minions, to chose the auto-fire effect seem better than to choose a critical. But this is not always necessarly so. Remember that to use auto-autofire, you are adding a [dificulty] die to your pool in advance. That is the trade-off.

Besides, it is only proper and good that minions fell like flies when hit by the setting equivalent of a machine gun.

One more thing: two of my players had their characters badly wounded (no crits though), which was enough to instill them a sense of danger and urgency in the scene.

But from on now two of them are at almost half wounds down, with only a third of the adventure completed.

So, I have no complaints regarding the auto-fire rules, and I think the main reason our experiences differ is that we played with the same number of adversaries against a different number of players (3 and 5).

Judging from our reports only I would say that the adventure may work best for 3-4 player characters. 

Maybe you will feel the need to adjust the opposition up accordingly next session.

Maybe we will feel quite the contrary at my table.

Yeah, I'm thinking adding more opponents is the way to go, especially for a larger group. I actually toyed with the idea of having another group, and I think that's probably a good idea for more than 4 players that should be added as a sidebar to the adventure. 

With the pacing, it was a case of the tuskans having a low initiative (single ability die), so the deadliest three characters acted before the group of tuskans that were shooting and in range (I ruled the group on the far rim of the crater was a long range, which meant they just shot up the settlement rather than the PCs), and annihilated them before they even got to fire a shot. Next round the other two groups arrived at long range, and spent two rounds closing with the PCs (during which time they were also shot to pieces - one group got one melee attack off that missed due to thinned numbers by that point). Again, I don't really have an issue with the power level of the PCs - despite what I wrote above, they seemed appropriate, more that the adventure probably needs some scaling or escalation guidelines in case of a situation like the above happening…

I'm not necessarily complaining about autofire - as I said it's probably appropriate to be gunning down minions - just that other options seemed to pale in comparison, which probably isn't an intended effect. Maybe to compare favorably a crit should drop an entire group, or even twice the wounds of a single minion (i.e.: two of the group)?

gribble said:

The way I see it, its just fine how it is. You will want to spend your advantages in auto-fire rather than crit.

The real choice, open to the player is made before the roll: to add a difficulty die to the pool and go for the auto-fire effect or play it safe against only the appropriate distance difficulty dice and go for the one-shot crit? The later option is safer to score a hit, whereas in the former you increase your chance to miss.

The optimal choice this time may depend of multiple factors: your ability rating, skill rank, distance to target, type of target (minion, henchmen, nemesis), external factors (boost - aiming, enemy in the open, or setback dice - armor, raining, at night, etc)

We shall see how it goes against other type of opponents, henchmen and nemesis in more diverse combat situations.

Yeah I guess it's a fair point that by adding the difficulty die up front, you're already declaring that you'll be using those advantages to score additional hits, it did just seem a bit weird in play. I guess, as you say, that we should wait and see how it does against henchmen or nemesis - although I doubt even they will appreciate being hit for 30 damage!

Also, it just occurred to me that a strict reading of the rules requires a second additional difficulty die to walk fire onto additional minions in the group beyond the first, otherwise your extra damage is going to all go into the same minion - or do the minion rules of sharing damage trump that?

gribble said:

Extra damage to a minion spills over to other minions in the group as they are all in engaged range with each other…..

but logically you should have to walk the fire.. but with the existing rules you dont p196…

nobble said:

Remember that 1 action ≠ 1 pull of the trigger. Each action, per pg128, is "…roughly a minute or so in time…", or plenty of time for a blaster pistol-wielding hero to take out a minion or two. Or enough time for a bounty hunter to mow down an entire squad with his auto-fire weapon!

-EF

EldritchFire said:

Not disputing that at all, just the differences between minions and henchmen.

The standard autofire rules state you have to 'Walk the Fire' between extra targets p105/137

The Standard Minion rules state extra damage spills over to other minions in the group p196

So if Autofire gives extra hits and extra hits = extra damage … does the damage spill over in Minion groups?  i.e. you dont need to walk the fire

we know it doesn't between Henchmen you need to walk the fire between them

e.g. when you hit with 2 successes 2 Advantages with your LRB thats 14 damage .. you could Autofire against one Henchman for the first advantage, walk the fire for the second and the autofire against another henchman for the third.

Now in the case of Minions how does this work. We have 2 options

1. Like Henchman above i.e. basically 2 hits doing 14, and 14 damage

2. or you dont need to Walk the fire as you are attacking the same group, that the system treats as a single target, getting you 3 hits at 14 damage

nobble said:

For walking fire, it talks about different targets. Per the minion rules, one group of minions are considered one target since you "attack the group as a whole, not an individual." (196), no matter how many in the group.

I think the intent was for each group of minions to be one target, but I agree it could use some clarification.

-EF

 What were you using for dice and how did not having purpose built dice affect the flow of your session?

Corradus said:

I printed the sticker sheet onto printable stickers, cut them out and assembled a bunch of the custom dice. So it wasn't an issue at all - the dice rolling went really smoothly. Was going to upload a pic of the dice, but I just realised that I need to do it via photobucket, so maybe later.

:)

So, we had our second session the other night…

Warning: further spoilers for Crates of Krayts adventure

This session basically covered the second part of the adventure - i.e.: the investigation on Nar Shadda leading to TechTank.

There was no combat in this session, but it rolled fairly smoothly. I found that the players were really getting into the theme of the game and suggesting possible ways to spend advantages and threats.

However, there were three observations:

1) Firstly, there was a lot of use of Surveillance, which is interesting seeing as it got axed in this weeks update (the day after the session). I guess these would just be perception or computers checks now, but I thought it was an odd coincidence. I actually kind of liked the idea that perception wasn't the uber stat it usually was, although there was initially some confusion among the players (why can't I use Vigilance/Perception?) until I explained the uses for each skill.

2) Secondly, more an observation than a complaint, but the PCs didn't really have any investigation/face specialised characters, so a *lot* of rolls resulted in zero successes and advantage or threat. I tried to use the adv/threat to sow alternative leads/false trails, but after this happened the third or fourth time I started to struggle a bit. The adventure is generally good about calling out uses for adv/threat, although some of these seem to assume success on the initial roll, which as I said usually occurred. Not sure if the dice mechanic is intended to work this way, but I guess it's likely given most pools were 2-3 ability and 2-3 difficulty.

3) Third, and I guess it's more an elaboration of the above point, but there were lots of occurrances of threat/adv on rolls, and after the third/fourth occurrence with the same skill I struggled to come up with things to happen. In combat, this is relatively easy to adjudicate with the "spending adv/threat in combat" table, crits and weapon qualities, but not so much in "unstructured play". I think there needs to be either a comprehensive list of "generic" uses for out of combat adv/threat, more examples in the skills, and/or more player abilities (in gear or talents) that trigger off spending advantage, in a similar vein to weapon qualities and crits.

Finally, and I guess it's more a consequence of coming to grips with the rules/game and adventure, but one player commented there seemed to be a lot of rolling. He made the comment after a piloting check (to navigate to tech tank), followed by perception checks (to spot any tail) followed by two computers checks in a row (to gain access to and open the hatch). I'm not sure there was more than in any other game for those number of actions, but that was certainly the perception he had.

gribble said:

IMO GMs tend to overuse perception, looking for something hidden? roll subterfuge w/advantage dice from skill in perception! Noticing a tail? roll vigilance! Look for a tail? Roll perception! Follow someone and notice they drop something? again Perception! but keep watch on his house for 10hrs and notice him slipping out the back door? Roll vigilance!  --> essentially vigilance and perception should be used about 50/50 I think

just my thoughts - and yes I hate perception as the uberskill too …  IMO perception is the investigator skill, whereas vigilance is the security/body guard skill (but then again I think cool should be chopped and just replaced with vigilance using presense)

 The distinction between the two perception skills should be things you are actively looking for and things you may just happend to notice, because this fits with the initiative system for sudden encounters and planned ambushes.

It's a small matter however, and I'd rather have three perception/initiative skills than only one.

I'll be running this adventure on Saturday of this week. I'm going to run it without Obligation, and so the PCs will be limited to 500 starting credits and the base 100 xp to spend on starting advances. I'm curious to see how that affect the balance of the scenario as compared to what the rest of you have described. There will be no auto-ire weapons in my version of Crates of Krayts, for example, because none of the PCs will be able to afford one. That should cure the "mowing down minions" issue, if nothing else.