Player characters – Divide and sometimes Conquer

I’m not talking about making PC’s squabble, which in itself can be fun and rewarding for a DM. I’m talking about giving characters their own little encounters outside of the usual group encounters. I did this in the last KOTOR game. Andy’s Mandalorian bodyguards for the major NPC Solomon, who visits the Coruscant University from time to time as an alumni. So I had him attacked in a student lounge area near the massive library, by the Sith brother Phade (see last post) whom Mandalorian had ticked off in a previous encounter. Also in the same game, I had NPC Solomon have the female Jedi, Lucia, watch his back as they entered a gang bar on a rescue mission of a young lady; it ended up in a nice big fight.


This is an example of something I have long since done in all my games periodically, including D&D. Give characters a life and encounters of their own from time to time. This is especially useful when you only have a couple or three players for the night, like I did. And they are a snap to design for. If you have decent characters to work with, they will have backgrounds and previous encounters that can give you good ideas for solo fights and you can pretty much just wing it. Old enemies return for an ambush, new enemies attack when character friends are doing their own thing elsewhere, or just rescue and escort missions depending on the character. This really helps flesh them out for me, rather than just constant group experiences.


Once again I firmly blame my comic book collecting background growing up. The example is right there in members of groups like the Justice League or The Avengers; big group-related donnybrooks, but the individual heroes also have their own comics with their own headaches.

You don’t want to make other players wait too long (sometimes I miscalculate, which is the main drawback of this kind of thing – but if it happens you can promise the offended player their own beefed up solo encounter in the near future to make up for it), but if you put some thought into it the players can really dig getting their own licks in without other characters getting in the way. It really helps bring them to life.

Star Wars – the Brutality of Force Powers

We had a very rollicking session of Knights of The Old Republic this week, one that stood out mostly due to the very high amount of force powers being tossed around the battlefield.



Most of the display of force powers so far In the campaign has been the Jedi characters, most specifically the male Jedi whose powers have been chosen for maximum combat usefulness (the player of the female Jedi has chosen powers and abilities that she liked over any sort of power gaming), making him a terror to lesser villains. He crushes and slams his way across a battle area, aided and abetted by things like negate energy (stops energy attacks), deflect, and block to keep the personal damage total to a minimum.



I got the chance to do some force power use of my own in a game earlier this year when the party took on a lichy undead Sith Lord aboard a haunted space station, but in the game this week it got way more hairy.



The party is travelling with a young, red-haired NPC named Solomon, who has for some reason or another (some prophesies have been attributed to him) has garnered interest from the Sith who want to find out what he is about, and another arcane group with great resources that seem to want him dead.



So in the campaign so far the party has been tailed by a pair of young brother and sister Sith Students, and in this last game it was revealed that they are actually working for their mother who is a Sith Witch. The witch, her kids, and almost a dozen other Sith students (actually young Fallen Jedi being tested) travelling with them confronted and ended up attacking the party in a rundown factory area of Coruscant. The male Jedi of the group was in a speeder hidden nearby, so most of the party was deprived of his strong force powers in their fight with the larger group. This Jedi was attacked at his speeder by a small number of Sith students, but did not end up in combat as one of the Sith was a former Jedi who grew up with the PC Jedi at the Coruscant Temple, and she recognized him from going up around him and stayed her hand, telling her companions to back off as well.



As a matter of fact, the Witch leader and the rest didn’t really intend to kill them. Obviously they were trying to get Solomon to come with them so they can investigate him further, but also with Coruscant being basically the Jedi capitol, it would be unwise for them to slaughter people planetside, especially involving killing of Jedi. But what they did want to do was show Solomon their strength, impressing him by beating the shit out of the other characters. Which in this case ended up being the two strong fighers.



These two characters are a Wookiee outlaw, and a Mandalorion veteran from the recent wars (that lead up to the current Jedi Civil War). Normally they dominate a battlefield, but they were facing strong, mid-level Sith warriors (almost all former Jedi) and all with force powers in addition to lightsabers.



And now, with me finally being able to cut loose with multiple force users of my own, it was my turn to dominate these two often bullyish fighters. And let me tell you, these powers are bruuut-tal! With the Mandalorian in full armor flying around in a jet pack, he got hit by Force Grip (one of the more strong and somewhat broken force powers), and a couple of other powers including a thrown lightsaber that did damn good damage (that surprised him, though he is a Mandalorian War veteran who would have faced Jedi in combat in the past). Pretty close to taking him right out. As for the Wookiee, he got hit by force lightning that was not only damaging, but severely knocking down his condition track (you get minuses to everything when your condition goes down). With several lightsabers coming at him, powered by decent skill and Dark Rage power, things looked bad for the Wookiee as well.



But the Sith had made their point, and backed off. I was actually a bit torn at that point, and put it to a secret dice roll as to whether they might try to kill the party. The Sith Witch and her two children were not involving themselves in the fight, but the characters chose to throw some attacks their way. I felt it was kind of foolish, going for honor shots on the leaders instead of focusing on those attacking you. But that’s overconfident players for you. Lucky for the characters that they backed off anyway, as it probably would have been the end of them. It actually would have been kind of cool to end things in a TPK.



See, even though it’s fun and I love the KOTOR setting (initially sparked by the KOTOR XBOX game), I kind of need a break from it. We actually don’t play it as much; our first game was around a year and a half ago, and we’ve probably only done fifteen or so sessions of it since. As it’s getting higher level, the foes need more detail over the cannon fodder the PC’s have been wading through so far. I was using over a dozen force users on the battlefield, all with differing powers and abilities. I even went so far as to have to put numbered bits of paper under them to keep track of the individuals better. This is a lot of work for me. Not like D&D which I can basically phone-in and still have a fun session.



So I think some D&D is in order to run some more relaxing sessions. A new campaign. It’s been a couple of years or so now since I finished my Night Below campaign, and I think I have recovered enough from that to get on the Dungeon train again. So I think KOTOR goes on the backburner for awhile, and I’ll get on some good ol’ D&D as we get into a new year.

The Star Wars Universe is like a Toaster

In this recent post about the Star Wars city planet Coruscant, Chaz makes this comment:

“…On a further aside - what's with the technological stagnation in the star wars universe? My grandmother was born in 1916 and today she uses a kindle with ease! It always seemed weird to me that KOTOR tech was in line with Episode IV etc…”


It’s true that we still think more about the cool tech, and enduring “lived in” look of Star Wars than why this 25,000 year old galaxy-spanning civilization does not advance much in terms of the functionality of the equipment available. Over the thousands of year of the Republic, little changes outside of, perhaps, the architecture and style-design of weapons and gear. Pod Racers might be popular towards the end of the Galactic Republic, while Swoop Bikes are the choice for racing 4,000 years prior, but very little goes forward in the technology that drives and powers things. The biggest technological difference that comes to mind to me time and time again is that the protocol droids are far less mincing than their Empire era counterparts (but still a little light in the loafers) although that is sketchy research matter at best. Bottom line; if C3PO was proficient in over 6 million languages, odds are that was the same amount a Knights of The Old Republic droid would be proficient in.

Comlinks are the cell phones of the Star Wars Universe, and Datapads seem to be the Laptops/Netbooks of folks. You would think that just like the real world these things would change fastest and the most, but between the KOTOR period and the Trilogy period, the tech has not changed. In fact, in the classic Star Wars periods you do not see many Datapads at all, usually only in the hands of tech dudes on the Hoth base or whatever. But as little as 30 years prior in the Clone War era Anakin is seen goofing around with one on the couch. So did they just get too expensive in the Empire era? Was everybody just too busy shitting their pants to even think about such frivolous items?

In Dune, the universe had a pretty good excuse for keeping tech from advancing. They had bad prior experiences with robots, so they banned all computers any more advanced than an abacus. There’s yer technological retardation right there. Not even the Golden Path could overcome that fear.

But Star Wars has no such excuses. What’s the deal?

One could say that the galaxy and Republic is constantly being faced by devastating wars again and again, usually involving the Sith and the Jedi. This not only costs huge numbers in lives and sucks up resources, but puts many thriving planets, again and again over the millennia, into periods of urban decay and semi-post apocalypses. When this happens to major industrial areas, technological growth gets retarded. OK, but you soon have to hand-wave theories like this, because wars tend to bring forth greater and great technologies that eventually trickle down to the masses. That does not seem to be happening (outside of the occasional Death Star or Star Forge).

So could the very presence of Jedi as constant allies in the Republic over the millennia have something to do with technological retardation? Probably not, because after most Jedi are gone regular folk seem to fuck things up pretty good on the high tech front. Everybody heads for the hills when The Empire takes over, and most of their ships and vehicles don’t seem to be able to even get a paint job, much less an upgrade. Hey, when the highest tech items on Tatooine are either used to vaporate moisture or bullseye Womp Rats, you know you are in a universe in decline.

But I think my “Toaster Theory” is the most logical fit. You see, toasters have barely changed in almost 100 years. They must be the least changed technology in our real world. Sure, they have come in countless designs and styles on the shelves of Sears stores over the decades, but when the day is done they all still heat your toast and your Pop tarts by heating up metal coils. That’s it. Why? I think it must have something to do with functionality meets cost-benefit analysis meets the point of diminishing returns. Could we come up with better ways to toast our multi-grain grub-outs if we threw a lot of money at it? Sure. We could probably also set little laser beam blast traps to disintegrate the mice infesting the garage, only 2.1 million dollars per trap down at Rite-Aid! But will it kill mice better than a spring-loaded roll bar that breaks it’s neck for 3 bucks? Nope. Don’t need a better mouse trap. Come to think of it, in Star Wars they would probably have it be a low tech Rube Goldberg-like device with gears and poles and descending cages like the old board game.

So maybe in the Star Wars universe, blasters work as good as you need them too and still be able to afford them. How much faster does a starship need to go once it’s in hyperspace? Would it make that huge a difference to spend three times the money to get somewhere a day sooner? And when your police force numbers in the millions and your armed forces number in the billions, can you afford to give them all blasters that do double damage, and give them all hand held super-computers? Could you divert needed funds towards teleportation technology? Who would set-up all these resources? And could such advances actually ignite wars over them, fracturing the Republic even more than the endless beatings it takes over the thousands of years of it’s existence?

In all Star Wars eras computers not changing is the real head scratcher. They seem to be in the early to mid-80’s Earth level of tech millennia-in, millennia-out. So…there are no Steve Jobs types in the SW universe? Perhaps there are some planets in the universe with super-tech that has actually advanced beyond those you see in general population use in Darth Vader’s time or Darth Revan’s time. But what works and is cost-effective on a planetary scale probably is not on a galactic scale.

OK, obviously I have no answers, and the Toaster Theory™ only goes so far. But apparently The Republic after the Empire era sufferes for it’s lack of tech advancement and too much reliance on The Force when the Yuuzhan Vong invade the galaxy. With their own bizarre organic hi-tech weaponry and immunity to The Force, they are enough to make the sentients of the galaxy wish they had put more nose to the grindstone in the technology department, and less in ancient weapons and hokey religions.

Sith Lord Lich and the Three-Headed Apprentice

This weeks KOTOR session was an action-packed blast. The group has been trapped in a derelict, haunted space station along the Hyperspace routes. Some decades ago during the Sith War the Dark Lord known as Darth Sinaes and his apprentices took over a Republic ship repair station and committed mass murder and horrible atrocities there, to the point of the Dark Lords apprentices themselves being appalled and turning on the master. Although they managed to kill him, his evil lingered in his body and allowed him to be a Dark Side Lich. Sinaes used his unholy power to meld the apprentices into one single body (three faces and three sets of arms, but just one pair of legs and a torso) that could use three regular lightsabers and one double lightsaber simultaneously. Oh, the horror! Along with his three-in-one apprentice, zombified bodies of old victims, and some other monstrosities, Darth Sinaes has lurked in the station an occasionally used it to lure unwary spacefarers to their doom, to become part of his growing undead army. Also trapped on the station was the ghost of a Jedi victim, Amelia, who had come along years ago. Amelia had her spirit locked here because of all the corruption, but she came in handy as a warning to players. She was able to tell the party the history Sinaes and his corruption of the place.

I originally meant this to be more or less a space dungeon for the characters to crawl around in, and it was, but in the end I mostly focused on combat encounters. The party had fun in the previous game fighting zombie hordes and a couple mutated monsters, but in this session it was time to face Sinaes and his hideious apprentices. Good thing we had a full group that session.

The apprentice managed to put a lot of fear and damage into the party, before he was ultimately defeated by a combination of good rolls and the infamous Force Grip of Pauls Khil (tentacle faced humanoid) force user. During this battle Terry’s Cathar (cat lady) Jedi Lucia was taken down with a killing blast (not so deadly due to the use of her last force point) of force lighting, but the spirit of Amelia used the force to bond with Lucia and not just bring her back to full health, but increase her stats and abilities for the encounter, allowing her to jump right back into the fray.

The party was now able to put the screws to Darth Sinaes, who I had planned to have run away but I hesitated so he could gloat and get an attack in. Bad move, because they were all over him. After some fierce melee and force use, Darth Sinaes set off explosions in the hull of the station that immediately started explosive decompression and loss of life support. Even though Andy’s Mandalorian soldier had Mando armor with life support, the party on a whole only got a couple more licks in on the beat-up Sith Lord before they had to make it for the ship (in cinematic fashion barely escaping).

This was the most exciting session yet, and I really got a kick out of it (and the players seemed to as well). Although faced with the possibility of a powerful enemy escaping from them, they mixed it up with a real challenge for a change and came out with flying colors. And Terry’s Jedi Lucia gets a colorful addition to her bio – namely, the soul of another Jedi whom now sort of haunts her (in a non-evil way), but also gives her a little bonus to a couple of stats and hit points when she is in contact with her. This will make for some interesting role-play down the line, methinks. I think Terry may have been struggling with what exactly the personality of Lucia was, but now she for sure has an interesting angle to work from. I originally though Amelia might do this bonding thing with the male Jedi (I thought he would get the focus of damage and be the first knocked out of the fight), and also thought it would be funny if her spirit bonded with the Wookiee, but in the end I am glad Terry will be the one dealing with it. Her character seemed the least fleshed out.

Next week we play in Dan’s palace up in Bel Air above Mulholland Blvd, and the party will finally arrive at the Galactic Core and the planet Coruscant for more mayhem. Man, I think I have finally decided that I like this game! (the prequel movies, not so much).