Star Wars Wednesday - Nonheroics

Continuing with the stat block creation discussion of the past two weeks, this time I want delve into the use of the nonheroic class in Star Wars RPG Saga Edition.

In a minute. First, I want to cover one important point on last week's notes on stat blocks for canon characters.

When creating canon characters, you're usually dealing with known character histories. That means the characters must have certain abilities available at certain times in their career. While Saga normally just printed the stats for a character as it was best known, the stats were built with their histories in mind so they could be deconstructed to a logical lower level if needed. So, this means building the character like you would a player character is pretty important. You must pay attention to the order of levels, ability score advancement and potentially the pickup of extra skills and languages if their Intelligence score increases along the way. Sometimes, you have to get pretty creative to fit it all in, and tricks like that can help.

So, nonheroics - what the heck is that class?

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Star Wars Wednesday - Designing Stats

Last week, I discussed the pitfalls of stat block creation for public use/publication(mostly for Star Wars Saga Edition, but applicable to other systems as well).  Keith "Nar" Kappel of www.fandomcomics.com followed up with a good question I wanted to address here.

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Star Wars Wednesday - Dealing with Stat Blocks

A few hours ago, I finished recording/co-hosting an episode of the Order 66 podcast. I'm writing this on Sunday, because I'm traveling this week. If all goes well, this will auto-post at the right day and time. If you never listen to the Order 66 podcast, it is dedicated to the Saga Edition of the RPG, and you can find it at d20 Radio.

In the episode, we talk about creating modules for public use/publication and how that is different from creating an adventure for a home game. Hopefully, some of my more rambling comments still provide some help. It occurred to me, however, that one aspect we didn't address was stat blocks, so I wanted to touch on that a bit this week. I'll be addressing Saga Edition specifically, but most of the following applies to any system.

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Star Wars Wendesday - How long did that take?

Action scenes in roleplaying games are major highlights in the game. In Star Wars, more often than not, they should be THE highlight of the session, or the campaign. Creating good cinematic sequences is key.

Remember that action doesn't always mean combat. There doesn't even need to be a direct physical threat, if there is enough drama in the scene. The results of failure can manifest itself in other ways - the characters didn't get there in time to prevent x from happening, for instance.

Creating a good action sequence can be difficult.

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Star Wars Wednesday - Newsnets

So, it's still Wednesday, right? Sorry for the delay, things got considerably busier at the end of the day than I expected...

Today, or what's left of it, I want to talk a bit about distributing information within the game, for those RPG fans out there. I'm talking mainly about clues and backstory - information that the gamemaster wants the players and their characters to learn about, but may not want to spend a lot of session time playing it out. Sure, the GM can read it out, or play it out with GM characters, but this runs the risk of halting play for a lot of exposition. Handing over a sheaf of campaign notes aren't likely to be read either, no matter how interested the players may be.

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Star Wars Wednesday - Yoda's Species in Play

A long time ago, in a meeting far, far away, George Lucas declared that Yoda's species details would remain a secret. Generally, I'm fine with that - it's a big galaxy, and it's nice to have unknown bits. We don't even know the species name. For game designers, this presented certain challenges - how do you stat out Yoda or one of the other two known members of the species?

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Star Wars Wednesday - Mobilized

This week, I've been totally distracted by several things. I've recently become significantly busier, in a good way, but it has also left me going "Tomorrow is Wednesday? Already?" the past couple of weeks. I'll get things sorted and get some more gaming stuff up in the future, and follow up on the outpost from a few weeks back.

One distraction this week is my new android phone, my first foray in to the smartphone arena. No, it's not "droid" branded model, though that would have been appropriate and fun, especially the special edition R2 model.

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Star Wars Wednesday - Superweapon...of the week!

Superweapons. They're a staple of Star Wars. Sure, they were over used in the early books, novels and comics, but they also provided a highly defined and specific target and goal for the story. Eventually, the stories moved beyond the superweapon of the week into other topics, but....

Have you used a superweapon in your Star Wars RPG game?

Why not?

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Star Wars Wed - Trandoshan Hunting Pod

I hope everyone enjoyed last week's April Fools day posts. The "obviously omitted" rules from Wednesday were a lot of fun to do, and those who checked back on April 1st itself got some RPG and minis stats for Simon the Killer Ewok. A couple of notes: the rules were far more popular than Simon, and I actually did send a previous version of those midi-chlorian rules to Rodney Thompson (Wizards Saga line developer) back in 2008 for April 1st. Last week's version was much improved, and a few people noted what I thought of as a joke within the joke - you could eventually use them in play, after some more development and tweaking.

I don't report a lot of Star Wars non-gaming news, but for those who missed it, the official forums at starwars.com are shutting down at the end of the month. They'll be read only until June or so, but then they will be removed. No word on the blogs, and I'll keep posting there while I can. I've suspected for a long time the blogs would go away with the end of the Hyperspace online fan club, given the lack of upgrades. Didn't expect the forums to also go away. There was an announcement last year that another company was coming in to help run the Lucas sites, so I gather this is all part of that process.

On to this week. Since it's the end of the current Clone Wars season, I wanted to follow up on the final episodes, without major spoilers.

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Star Wars Surprise - Simon the Killer Ewok

Thanks for checking out my blog here on April 1. To celebrate, you get Simon the Killer Ewok!

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