Star Wars: The Twilight Path, Reborn!
After a long break to allow the new father in our group to get accustomed to parenthood, we’ve finally restarted our Star Wars campaign, The Twilight Path. The session went pretty well for the most part – the action, roleplaying, and investigation elements were pretty well balanced and paced well throughout the adventure. Things started to drag at one point, but after a break for food we all came back to the table refreshed and regained our earlier vigor.
Unfortunately the gamemaster and I felt that the system was working against us this game. After our experiences with the Spirit of the Century rules, the d20 implementation of Star Wars felt even more clunky and cumbersome than when the game started. On the other hand the two other players really weren’t interested in any possible conversions and were more comfortable with the d20 ruleset so we won’t be converting this campaign.
Rules aside the session was a good break back into the campaign and the plot, although some of the details of the first session are a bit hazy. We opened with a combat defending the Praxium from invaders, which each PC having a few lower level NPCs around to lead into combat. As the final blow was struck, it was revealed it was all a training exercise – a fact our characters were aware of but was withheld from the players to make it a little more exciting. It was a nifty little trick and worked well for the most part, with the exception of the one player who was taking a while to decide his action each round.
After that there was a pretty lengthy session of roleplaying and information gathering within the Praxium My character spent most of his time decoding a document he had uncovered which I think turned out for the best – I tend to play the mouthpiece and this kept me back from the spotlight and got the others to do more interaction with the NPCs.
The last parts of the session included dealing with a peer’s edging toward the dark side and trying to prevent/stop a burglary at a gas mining colony, which was a lot of fun. The only real problem came up again when one of the players was taking too long to decide his actions and was slowing down the action-movie pace we were trying to set through the encounters. I can’t really blame the player since it was our first session back with d20 and there are a lot of rules for force powers and what not, but if it continues we might need to subtlety point out how he’s affecting the game flow.
Yes, SotC will do that to your games…
If you don’t mind my suggestion, I would say that your player is not a big a problem as it seems. You’re trying to force a cinematic pace into D20 (maybe because of the influence of SotC), but the system is a slower engine; force it to much, it may start to burn. It seems the player enjoy the tactical decisions of the D20 game.
Maybe there’s a way for reaching compromise. Perhaps go through all the mechanics first, and then go to the ‘editing room’ to ensemble a meaningful description every two or three turns. It might work out for everyone involved.
Cheers.
We’ve succeeded in removing some of the tactical nature of the d20 system by eliminating the grid along with Attacks of Opportunity. My intention was to increase the domain of options open to the players and it may be this extended freedom that causes a stall when his PC acts.
After some reflection, I think I’d say that FATE is much more tactical than d20 simply because Aspects can appear out of nowhere to drastically change something in the environment. Additionally, maneuvers are as varied as the imaginations of the players (again with the great freedom of choice thing). It can be daunting to come up with an action that’s both interesting and useful in a given situation. I know I’m still trying to get the hang of it.
Wow, someone I don’t know found my blog. If you don’t mind my asking, René, I’m curious how you got here. Regardless, thanks for chiming in! 🙂
Anyway, As for your comments, they seem to be pretty fair based on what I wrote. On the other hand, they’re also showing me that my attempt to be ambiguous to “protect the guilty” has cost me some clarity on what I’m trying to talk about. I’ll have to correct that in the future.
To try to clarify, the issue with speed really wasn’t coming down to the tactical nature of d20 so much as the player looking over his character sheet for a long time before just repeating the basic action he did each of the previous few rounds.
I don’t think that d20 at its core is really any more tactical than SotC as saultydog – our gamemaster – says, it’s the extra record keeping and the relative complexity of rules (and multitude of modifiers to remember) that can bog the game down. I have a feeling saultydog handwaves a fair bit of grunt hit points and conditional modifiers when he’s running the game and I don’t blame him.
I’ve heard suggestions for the editing room idea before, but personally I’m not a fan. If combat’s dragging on enough as it is, I really don’t want to go back and revisit what everyone in the fight did. It could work, but if another other option is to run the game in such a way as to have each turn and action be narrative in nature, I’d much prefer that.