Sunday, February 21, 2016

How To Use This Blog



GETTING STARTED

Here’s what you need to start playing Star Wars:



Take some time to familiarize yourself with the rules. You don’t need to know everything right away (or ever), but you’ll need to understand the basics, how hero points/victory points work, how to make characters, and what your abilities do. If you intend to be the gamemaster, you will need a more thorough understanding of the rules and the setting. If you need any in-universe answers to Star Wars questions, Wookieepedia has your back.

THE DEFAULT SETTING

Most of the material on this blog will assume that adventures will be taking place after Return of the Jedi formerly known as the New Republic Era. That being said, most of the material should be useable for nearly any Star Wars campaign and perhaps for other settings as well.



CHARACTERS

Character creation will be largely unchanged from Mutants & Masterminds. Unlike the superhero genre, Star Wars has a more limited origin for powers. In fact most powers would not be thought of as such by the characters. To be sure, Force using characters clearly have unusual powers and both droids and non-human species are capable of amazing feats (at least by human standards), but then so are Star Wars heroes like Padme Amidala, Lando Calrissian, and Boba Fett. In game terms, these ‘normal’ characters will have powers too.

The following origins will be the most common sources of these abilities:

Droid
 
Experiment

The Force

Mutant

Species

Technology

Training

In addition to ready to play archetypes, Star Wars campaigns will benefit from templates designed to speed character creation and encourage creativity. Species templates can be found here http://starwarsmandm3e.blogspot.com/2016/02/blog-post_16.html and class templates will be added at a later date. The ‘classes’ are not intended as part of the traditional class and level system, but rather to provide a familiar and simple starting point for players. None of these templates need to be taken whole. Even species templates could be separated into components either to create a new species, a hybrid or simply an atypical individual. In fact, experienced players can feel free to dispense with them entirely! Mutants & Masterminds is simple at its core, however it can also be like opening up a huge box of lego bricks. Even with instructions, it can be hard to put all the pieces together. Templates serves as character ‘blocks’ that you can stick together if you want.

POWER LEVEL

The power level for the Star Wars campaign should range between 3 and 8. PL 3 is appropriate for inexperienced heroes who are expected to grow tremendously during the course of the campaign, as with characters like Luke Skywalker, Finn, and Rey. More experienced characters should be closer to PL 5 or 6. These characters will see slower advancement over the course of the campaign, if they advance at all and represent characters already in their prime such as Han Solo and Chewbacca, Poe Dameron, or Mara Jade. PLs 7 and 8 should be reserved either for mentor characters, like Obi-Wan Kenobi, or the peak of achievement for characters advancing from a lower PL like Luke Skywalker as a Jedi Knight.

Higher power levels should generally be reserved for gamemaster characters or perhaps for other eras such as Jedi Knights and Masters in the time of the Clone Wars.




ABILITIES

Ability ranks range from -5 to 20, with 0 being average, applying no modifier (equivalent to a score of 10 or 11 in other d20 games). See the ability benchmarks below. Generally, only non-humans or enhanced humans will have ranks of 8 or more. Characters starting at power level 3 should generally spend 10 to 14 character points on abilities. This will approximate the ‘standard array’ of ability scores found in other d20 games.

All abilities should be equally important in a Star Wars campaign.

Ability Benchmarks:
-3
Younger child
-2
Child, elderly, impaired
-1
Below average; teenager
0
Average adult
+1
Above average
+2
Well above average
+3
Gifted
+4
Highly gifted
+5
Best in a nation
+6
One of the best in the world
+7
Best in the galaxy; peak of human achievement
+8 or higher
Superhuman

SKILLS

Your total skill modifier can be no more than 10 + your power level. Even so, this means that a lowly PL 1 character could be an ‘expert’ in a couple of skills. Keep the benchmarks below in mind when designing your character and consider that the best ever at something in the real world probably topped out around +15 (like Einstein might have had Expertise: Physics at that level) and even fictional characters rarely reach higher than that. So called ‘epic’ levels of skills are possible at higher PLs, but are rarely necessary and should represent near godliness.

Skills Benchmarks:
+1-4
Familiarity; trained
+5-8
Professional
+9-12
Expert
+13-15
Master
+16 or higher
Best in the galaxy

ADVANTAGES

Unlike many older d20 games, Mutants & Masterminds has a fairly shallow pool of ‘feats’, which suits most games just fine. If you like sorting through pages and pages of ways to add a bonus to something, feel free to add more by converting feats from other games. The advantages in the core rules should suit most games just fine. Any power or effect that has a final cost of 1 character point per rank, could be used as an advantage if desired, however I prefer to keep such things designated as ‘powers’ to allow more interplay between them (advantages can’t be nullified, but powers can and can likewise be countered).

EQUIPMENT

Armor, tools, vehicles and weapons will likely see more play in Star Wars campaigns than in a typical Mutants & Masterminds game. The standard rules for equipment should be used however additional rules dealing with wealth and equipment will be explored. The main concern with using the rules as written is with regard to vehicles (with spaceships being integral to galaxy spanning adventure). One option is to use the standard rules for personal gear (acquired via the Equipment advantage), but to employ a different management strategy regarding vehicles.

It may make more sense (and could be necessary for low PL characters) to have a separate PL for pilots and their vehicles. For example, it seems quite unlikely that a proton torpedo can be made to fit PL 8 or less, even if you trade off most of its accuracy for damage. Vehicles might require that players track in game wealth (usually hand-waived in Mutants & Masterminds) more rigorously and require that players budget for repairs, docking fees, licenses and so forth. In fact, for a freelance trader campaign this could represent a big part of the fun!

Another possibility is to hand out vehicles with complications. Want your own freighter? Be prepared to spend a huge amount of time on adventures that serve to pay off your debt and if you default, you’ll probably have an enemy much more powerful than you. X-wing pilots are probably soldiers of the New Republic and have many responsibilities beyond gallivanting around the space lanes or seeking tutelage in the ways of the Force.

Each group (and perhaps each individual campaign played by each group) may need to find different ways to incorporate equipment and get the right feel for their game.

POWERS

Most Mutants & Masterminds games assume a number of origins, countless power descriptors and, well SUPER-powers! Star Wars is a little different, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with powers too! As mentioned previous,  the source of ‘powers’ (this blog will tend to use the term abilities) is somewhat narrow, however many descriptors will be associated with power effects. A number of descriptors from Power Profiles will be used with Star Wars, however additional descriptors will be added or given greater prominence such as: audacity, courage, the Dark Side, fear, the Force, hyperspace, injury and skullduggery. In general, abilities will be sorted into classes (Agent, Fighter, Fringer, Jedi Guardian, Pilot, Scoundrel, etc.) and each class will have between one and three unique descriptors. For example, only scoundrels will use skullduggery. Other descriptors may be common to several classes (like luck or social) and the talent descriptor will appear in most class abilities.



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