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!

Citizen: How do you know so much about crimes?!

Parker: I… read… blogs?

A great moment from Leverage where Parker is forced to pretend she’s not a master thief.

I have to find a way to steal this for my RPG campaign. So many of my favorite roleplaying moments come from when a character is forced to go far outside their comfort zones. It’s hard because that oftentimes means taking actions that the characters are bad at.

The times I’ve done this around inexperienced or goal-focused rleplayers, I’ve nearly caused riots. (the time at GenCon where my character was offered any weapon in the modern world I could ask for and he picked a taser was a great example).