Mark Kanemura is amazing for choreographing and performing this. Still cannot believe that Jenna was cut for this performance - democracy stinks sometimes.

Dead Authors Podcast Chapter 13 - Paul F. Tompkins as H.G. Wells, Matt Gourley and Jeremy Carter as the Brothers Grimm who are discussing their fairy tale, The All Fur.

via tumblr

Grimm Brother 1: He is lying on the death bed of his wife and she says, ‘Never marry again.’ And he promises, ‘I will not, unless I find someone as beautiful as you and that’s the one loophole okay?’ And she says, ‘Oh yeah that seems fair.’ And so he goes, ‘Well, no one is as beautiful as her except for my daughter, so that seems okay. I will marry her.’ And she says ‘Hold on a minute, girlfriend.’ She was smart and said, ‘Not unless you give me three gowns. One must be gold as the sun and silver as the moon and the other as the bright as the stars. Oh, and also I need fur from every animal that ever existed.’

H.G. Wells: That ever existed?

Grimm Brother 2: Ya. It’s like a Noah’s ark dress.

Grimm Brother 1: Yes it is. That’s exactly it.

H.G Wells: So this is one giant fur, it’s not that she just wants one of each?

Grimm Brother 2: Yeah, it’s not like this is my dinner stole and this is my breakfast fox. It’s all one thing.

Grimm Brother 1: Yeah, get it done. The whole thing. So long story short, he says okay, I’ll do it and he does. All right? And she’s like-

H.G Wells: Wait, I’m sorry how does he do that?

Grimm Brother 1: Well, we don’t include that part.

Grimm Brother 2: It seemed like too many set pieces. So we just went simpler.

Grimm Brother 1: Nobody likes exposition, you know.

An interesting question came up on the SWRPG subreddit - what music do you use for a cantina beyond just the Star Wars classics? I actually keep such a playlist of fun and wierd music that I can see playing in the restaurants and clubs of Star Wars.

• Chain Reaction - Steroid Maximus
• Tarmac A Gris-Gris - Steroid Maximus
• Blues Up and Down - Hot Club of Detroit (looks like spotify only?)
• Melnorme Theme - Star Control 2
• Arilou Theme - Star Control 2
• Syreen Theme - Star Control 2
• Sylandro Home (Floating Gas Bags) - The Ur-Quan Masters
• Pkunk’s Not Dead - The Ur-Quan Masters
• Shake Yer Rootz - The Ur-Quan Masters
• Daisuke - El Heurvo

Additionally, I have a “clubs” playlist for places that are a bit rougher than your average cantina. My “Clubs” playlist:

• Hydrogen - MOON
• Hotline - Jasper Byrne
• Menu - Behavior (From Splinter Cell: Double Agent)
• HQ Act 2 - Michael McCann (from XCOM)
• Ode to a Room - Jim Guthrie
• 23 Minore Mane - CWK Joynes & Son Ensemble feat. William Sathya - download link on page
• Vegas - Jesper Kyd (from Hitman Blood Money)
• Power Plant - Simon Viklund (from Bionic Commando Rearmed)
• Intruder Alert - Simon Viklund (from Bionic Commando Rearmed)
• Javyar’s Cantina - Jeremy Soule (From KotoR)
• Shunjun - Yoshihisa Hirano and Hideki Taniuchi (from Death Note)
• Yotsuba Group - Yoshihisa Hirano and Hideki Taniuchi (from Death Note)
• Culture 19 - The Ur-Quan Masters
• My Chrysalis Highwayman - Mark Morgan (from Fallout 2)
• Druuge Theme - Star Control 2
• Ultra-gross! - The Ur-Quan Masters

It’s worth noting that I don’t actually play these all that often at the table (I usually have some music playing, but worrying about switching playlists is just a distration). These are tremendous when it comes to game preparation though. I can put on the right playlist and jump straight into the mood.

As I said when introducing my compact NPC character sheet, I hate clutter at the table. The FFG vehicle sheet is fantastic for my players’ ship as they want to track everything at a fair level of detail. Not only is that overkill for most NPC vehicles, but I also don’t want to have to remember “Okay, now which NPC sheet is the driver of this vehicle again?”

I made an combined sheet that condenses the most critical information on NPC vehicles and their crew. You can see it in action with the stats for a “CSA TAST-A”, a somewhat crap airspeeder used by CorpSec planetside police in my campaign:

Download Link

A few notes about this sheet:

• This sheet makes pretty extensive use of scripts to calculate die rolls. You’ll probably want to open it in Adobe Reader to make use of them.
• If your printer doesn’t support half-sheets, these also print nicely two to a page. What I usually do on my Mac OSX is:
  • Select all the NPCs I want to print for a session in Finder
  • Open them in Preview (this opens all the separate PDFs as one document)
  • Print, and under “Layout” select “Pages per Sheet: 2”

Changes or suggestions are welcome! All the tools I used to make this are free to use, and all the original materials are available for download or modification in the Github repository. Pull requests are welcome!

Happy GMing!

The Edge of the Empire roleplaying game by Fantasy Flight Games, much like its oft-discussed dice, is a mix of success and failure. Its ideas are simultaneously brilliant and half-baked. It’s a system that will help players and GMs collaborate on exciting and unexpected adventures. It’s also a system that requires extensive house ruling and often contradicts itself. After two years of playing I can’t exactly recommend it, but I also won’t stop playing it anytime soon.

The rules are simple enough at a high level. Characters have “characteristics” which represent your natural abilities and derived skills that they can train. When you’re doing something exciting and challenging, you combine characteristics, skills, talents, and gear to build dice pools via FFG’s signature design flourish, custom dice.

Each type of dice that goes into a dice pool represents a different aspect of the current situation which helps or hinders your efforts. Two kinds of positive dice represent natural ability or additional training, and two kinds of negative dice represent inherent and exceptional difficulty. The GM calls for additional, smaller dice to represent situational modifiers like poor light, helpful gear, or adverse conditions.

Each die has different symbols representing Success, Failure, Advantage, and Threat. Success and Failure cancel each other out and determine whether or not the character succeeds in their task. Advantage and Threat also cancel each other out and dictate whether the character creates complications or advantageous side effects in the process.

Baking concepts into the dice results like “success with complications” and “failure with advantages” makes it easy to keep the narrative moving and exciting. The system allows players to pick the effects of positive advantages which helps players contribute to the story without being overwhelmed. Adding dice to represent situational difficulties is an extremely clever workaround for the endless tables of modifiers that have plagued GMs for ages. For each different complicating factor, just add a “setback die.” For each helpful factor, add a “boost die.” An entire category of bargaining and discussion that dominates checks in so many other games is entirely removed.

With Edge of the Empire though, the devil’s in the details. Each skill has specific rules for interpreting success, failure, advantage, and threat. These rules are obtuse and often contradictory. Sometimes Successes grant time reduction, other times Advantage grants that. Some skills treat Threat as a secondary failure condition while others create side effects with them. The skills themselves are also often confusing with overlapping or vague descriptions. Exciting moments frequently lose momentum in order to debate Cool vs. Vigilance vs. Discipline or Athletics vs. Coordination.

This becomes ludicrous with the addition of gear. A fair amount of gear comes with varying options between “low end” and “high end” models that are rarely spelled out in terms of mechanical impact to gameplay. When gear actually gets mechanical rules, they also contradict one another. After two years I still forget whether to upgrade or downgrade Medicine or Computers checks based on the presence or lack thereof of the associated tools (for the record, Medicine checks without a kit are downgraded — Computers checks with a kit are upgraded). And don’t get me started on the bonkers rules around first aid kits, stimpaks and emergency repair patches…

Edge often feels like an unfinished project despite three different versions of the core rules and countless sourcebooks for expansions. The high level ideas are great and help create an atmosphere of swashbuckling adventure as long as you do the legwork of deciding what subset of its’ confusing rules you’ll be playing with. Each of the three core rulebooks went through an extension “beta testing” process, so I am baffled at the inconsistencies that run throughout this game.

If you are gung-ho for Star Wars, by all means pick up one of the generous beginner boxes and try it out. Despite all my complaints, it’s a system I will keep running and keep hacking. Once you find your group’s version of Edge of the Empire, you’ll still have a grand adventure.

I’m happy to announce that SWSheets.com has officially left Beta. No terribly serious issues were found by the first round users. The most severe were that I totally forgot about the Medicine skill and that I had an ordering issue with large sets of talents or attacks on a character.

I was really happy to see the enthusiastic reception from users on both the FFG forums and the SWRPG subreddit. They’ve been super helpful in ironing out the issues on the site as well as determining the next steps.

Over the weekend I’ll be putting together the list of features for the next release (codenamed “Mynock”). This is your last chance to weigh in on the SWSheets issues page for what matters to you.

Changelog from this last milestone:

• Eight bugfixes including password reset issues, display issues when rendering errors, and some HTML bugs.
• Reworked the Character URLs (sorry for breaking all the existing ones, figured it was better to do that sooner than later)
• Split the “Gear” field into three breakouts in keeping with the original EotE charsheet.
• Added author profile pages and a thanks page for the volunteers who have helped thus far.

The full list of changes from the Beta period is here.

Beta Statistics:

• 84 users
• 29 users who have created at least one character (this was surprising, figured it would be lower)
• 34 total characters
• 1 character deleted for inappropriate content (also surprising, figured it would be higher!)

I’m proud to share something I’ve been working on for the past few months, swsheets.com.

Right now this is in Beta mode. I’m making every effort not to do anything dumb that would cause me to wipe all the data or something equally catastrophic, but I don’t make any promises. I expect to be out of beta in 1-2 weeks.

swsheets.com is a website for creating and sharing characters for Fantasy Flight Games’ Star Wars: Edge of the Empire RPG. Right now it’s rather basic and only allows you to create, edit, and delete characters. I hope to add in printing to PDF next, but that’s a rather complicated task.

Please take a look and let me know if you have any feedback or thoughts. You can add bug reports to the Github Issue page and you are welcome to give me any other feedback you have by commenting below.

SWSheets is completely open source and I happily accept pull requests. Check it out on Github.

Thanks!

40K: Safe, Sane and Consensual, or The Arrogance of Unacknowledged Playstyles

For gamers of any variety, this article is a great read. Nominally about the Warhammer 40,000 wargaming community, it’s much more about the consequences of mixmatched expectations of play.

These mismatched expectations led to the effective end of the board game club I used to organize, and they were a major component in the end of my torrid Netrunner love affair as well.

Thankfully this has been avoided in our Star Wars RPG group without much conscious thought given to it. We all seem to be there for a mix of Narrative and Casual reasons - beating the bad guys is great, but having a laugh about the attempt is even better.

Anyway, enough rambling from me. This is a great article - go read it.

I run a Star Wars role playing group that meets every three weeks. Ten sessions in, I have a good grasp on how I react to this emotionally. Here’s a timeline of how that 21-day cycle invariably plays out:

Day 0

IT’S STAR WARS NIGHT! I AM SO EXCITED!

Days 1-3

Intense period of reflection on what I did as GM during the game. Inevitably this leads to self-loathing for mistakes and intense doubt whether I should continue to GM. My spiritual desolation.

Days 4-6

Intense emotions have subsided into a gentle bit of burnout. I think about other things.

Days 7-8

I realize I need to write a recap while I can still recall the events clearly. It’s a bit of a slog. I am reminded that not everything went horribly and there were some highlights and fun times for most people at the table, most of the time.

Days 9-16

Random thoughts collide about what I’d like to do for the next session. Vague ideas for following sessions float around too, but I don’t worry about it much. Usually I find a few pieces of music that embody the mood I want to capture in the next session. I will listen to this music over and over until I can hardly stand it.

Days 17-19

Write down a sparse outline of what will happen if the players do nothing and a few one-sentence descriptions of new characters. At this point I’m very eager for the next session. I briefly entertain crazy thoughts like “If only we met every two weeks” or “If only I could run a second group.”

Day 20

Almost inevitably I’m scrambling to make NPC and vehicle specs, track down reference art, flesh out any remaining major gaps in the plot, etc. Gradually I’m cutting down on this scramble as I learn what kinds of prep pay the most dividends, though.

Day 21/0

IT’S STAR WARS NIGHT! I AM SO EXCITED!

I hate to clutter up my tabletop with more than I absolutely must. Making full, two-page character sheets for each NPC drove me mad as a new Edge of the Empire GM. Much of the information on a character sheet is irrelevant to an NPC (no one cares about your obligations, CSA Viceprex). All of this just makes for wasted tabletop space.

To fix this problem, I made a compact NPC sheet: just the critical information I needed on NPCs that I could print on half of an 8.5x11 sheet of paper. In addition to displaying information more compactly, it also calculates skill and attack rolls as well as displaying a small reference on opposed social skill checks (I always forget that Charm is opposed by Cool, unlike most other social skills which are opposed by Discipline).

Here it is in action with the stats for a lowly droid my players encountered awhile back:

Download Link.

A few notes about this sheet:

• This sheet makes pretty extensive use of scripts to calculate die rolls. You’ll probably want to open it in Adobe Reader to make use of them.
• If your printer doesn’t support half-sheets, these also print nicely two to a page. What I usually do on my Mac OSX is:
  • Select all the NPCs I want to print for a session in Finder
  • Open them in Preview (this opens all the separate PDFs as one document)
  • Print, and under “Layout” select “Pages per Sheet: 2”

Changes or suggestions are welcome! All the tools I used to make this are free to use, and all the original materials are available for download or modification in the Github repository. Pull requests are welcome!

I’m working on something similar for NPC Vehicles. I’ll post it on this blog when it’s ready.

Happy GMing!