Friday, January 21, 2022

22 JAN 2022 - Star Wars and Beef

 More adventures with the laser-sword gang. 

XP Total: 3,350

Duty (Mandalorian/Krevan): Rank 5 (dormant as of the fall of Iego), lasting rewards: Hangars-on, Armor, two superior mods, the first Destiny-class fighter. Rank also includes executive control of the Fate-class battleship Errant; also known as the Errant Fate. Recent work on both the Destiny and Errant Fate has fully upgraded the armor. While House Krevan is scattered at the moment, the portion with you at the hidden redoubt near the Maw continues to honor the obligation to maintain your small vessels and hangars-on, although you are mostly responsible for organizing the sustenance of the larger organization anyways.

Hangars-on: 13 mando recruits (three are Dathmorian males, one is an ex-clan-Rook female married to Aydian), 8 members of k-squad (two are nightsisters and self-appointed to k-squad), blue twi'lek child, 5 ex-MandalMotors technicians, 5 Blue-squad (self-upgraded ex-B1s who have been flying your YT-1300 around for years, now armed with heavy rifles). These hangars-on busy themselves with the maintenance of the Destiny and Kryt Fang, in addition to personal training. They normally do not grant extra actions in combat (except maybe with a destiny point), but can act as crew for your ships and minion groups for starship gunnery (Agility 3 as minion crew).

*Conflict: I'm going to be much harsher on conflict than the rules as written. When you have time to meditate, make a discipline check with a difficulty of the number of conflict points you have. Upgrade the difficulty once for each time you chose the easy (a.k.a. Dark) path before exploring the more difficult path, add a setback die for each time you called on the dark side. Downgrade the check for each time you took risks to take the light-side path and didn't regret it. Your total conflict is reduced by the net successes, but your morality only increases by the net advantages if your roll is successful. Conversely, your morality is decreased by net threat even if your roll is successful. Triumphs give you another check if you still have conflict. Despair assures that your next check fails without a chance to roll. This should make consecutive dark-side actions push you towards the dark side, so becoming a paragon of the light is hard to do, and hard to keep. It also will require a little more record keeping since conflict will typically remain after a roll if it starts stacking because you can't find time to meditate peacefully (traveling doesn't necessarily give you the peace required for reflection, even if it takes days).


Conflict from last session:

All force users: 1 conflict (chose to initiate violence in fear of being caught or having violence done to you, would be more if it wasn't so easily justified against clearly evil foes)(Also, an upgrade for initiating violence, but a downgrade for letting the inquisitor go with advice to turn him towards the light in spite of the potential consequences)

Or'lorn: 3 (called on the dark side for an additional 2 conflict and 1 setback)

*Assets and Allies on Corellia: 12 allies of mandalorian descent. Rai Quek is a force-sensitive sculptor whose parents left Mandalor with her when she was a child at the start of the Clone Wars. Her parents are dead now, but their desire to give her a good life here was successful. Her self-directed sculptures sell for a million or more credits regularly, and her commissioned pieces regularly earn her that much, but usually have a lower resale value. She is happy to provide a comfortable life for her newfound mandalorian family as she sees her success in life as something that was given to her, not earned, so she shares freely with friends and family. She doesn't really want much to do with violence of any type, and doesn't want to attract any scrutiny, although some people have noted the sudden appearance of mandalorians in her neighborhood.

With the pacification of the new criminal organization, team-mandalorian has successfully reduced the sale of slaves to imperials on Corellia, and redirected their criminal operations to smuggling of weapons and drugs, along with protection rackets in other crime-lords' territory. They also run a particularly violent underground fight club, but its mortality rate has been cut just a little bit by the opening of a new shadow clinic with an exclusive contract with the newly renamed Corellian Cutters gang. Fortunately for the gang, the new shadow clinic is also named Corellion Cutters, which leads to a little confusion and has made imperial policing against them a little more difficult. The shadow clinic doesn't make too much money, but with patronage of a gang and philanthropist, it can manage some rather effective recruiting. Part of the protection racket run by the CC gang is to take impoverished youths from other neighborhoods and educate them and determine how they can be trained based on their proclivities. With sponsorship from both trained medical and criminal professionals they have multiple options for being useful to multiple criminal enterprises.

For Rai's part, she's commissioned the construction of a hangar near her studio to facilitate deliveries and purchased a wayfarer to make those deliveries, complete with documented crew on standby, who don't really exist. She has also created an endowment for at-risk youths to be housed and educated at a previously abandoned apartment building not too far from her studio, and had a hangar and strip mall built there to provide some training and work experience. She hasn't hired any competent administrators for it, so the paperwork is constantly out of date or lost, but her reputation keeps most prying eyes elsewhere... the bribes help too. The 11 remaining mandalorians have set up shop there, bringing their martial and mechanics skills to bear teaching and caring for the new inhabitants, and also seeing which might be recruited into the mandalorian culture.

Mandalorian Message Board: Assuming someone knows Rai's mandalorian connection, noticing the messages shouldn't be difficult via references to family and the stars; “the stars” being a mandalorian phrase referring to fate or destiny. You trade a few messages with your hosts to create a sort of key that requires a common experience; in this case the exodus from Iego that might easily be mistaken for any number of mandalorian migrations, so even other mandalorians will have trouble interpreting it, including Rai, which makes her unable to share the code, even accidentally with anyone else.

*Question for next session: What armor and weapons (or other gear) did you bring with you? Its not unreasonable to have a spare suit of armor on the Desiny, but you can't have four suits for everyone, it has limited bunks, not staterooms. Because of this, Mr. boring suggests maybe taking the Nemesis in the future (a combat-refit Consular he was using before he was able to get the Arquitens up. While he has claimed it, it really is party treasure.)

*For example: Ronic is carrying two sets of robes, his westar-35 pistol, two phase knives, a lightsaber (singularity), a jedi utility belt and backpack, and keeps his armored drop suit and spare lightsaber (Gleam) on the Destiny. Technically breaks the two suits of armor limit, but since they're just robes, they don't really count.


Comments:
Hey all, just a quick post to let you know I will be available on Feb 5th for Pathfinder, weather and such permitting. Hope to see you then.
 
Well, my Art was with the fleet but I am willing to divy out equipment to PCs and NPC.
Forgot my second roll for the eyes last week and will try again this week.

I was thinking of opening a Dojo/Merc school kind of for what they are doing but wont if it will cause trouble for what they did.

I will investigate the Fight Club cause i was thinking of sponsoring non deadly matches were the challenger bet his cash and if he wins we do a double his his money back, but if he loses he loses his cash.(sometimes giving part back to encourage repeat challenges). Seemed like a good way to scout talent not thugs and train me and students.

And who are these cutters?
 
Plus meditation is always part of his training and schedule.
 
I will be there on the late side today.

Rules changes should come with substantial advanced warning, and decisions made under the old rules (my decision to use the dark side, something I very rarely do) should not be punished retroactively under the new rules.

These new rules look like an unavoidable path to the dark side regardless of character actions:
- If we are not given the chance to meditate (DM's choice, not ours), conflict will quickly stack to a level that cannot be overcome with a typical Discipline check. I would also argue that Force users can mediate on short notice in high-stress situations, such as Qui-Gon in his fatal duel with Maul.
- The dice roles are clearly biased towards the dark side / losing morality; morality decreased based on remaining threat even if you make the check while the inverse is not true, Despairs being worse than Triumphs, etc.
- Finally, it feels wrong that power-gaming to max out one's Discipline skill makes it easier to be light-sider while continuing to intentionally make horrible decisions. For example, using the Force (or drugs) to buff the characteristic associated with Discipline to avoid losing morality because you earlier used the Force to murder somebody who looked at you funny doesn't feel right at all.

Rules changes should only be done to address a clear issue with the existing rules; what is the end goal of these changes? Nobody in the group is becoming a light-side paragon mechanically because we are not performing the d10 based morality roll each session, and opportunities to increase morality via roleplaying have also been sparse to nonexistent. We can play these new rules out for a while and see what happens, but I'm concerned with where this is headed. I'm not interested in playing an evil murder-hobo, particularly when being evil is forced upon my character by endless hopeless choices or situations over which I have no real control.

 
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