Misfortune Mordren

Boring Post Material

Misfortune Mordren

This morning I am struggling a bit to remain conscious.  Neither myself nor my wife managed to get much sleep last night, because in our partially finished state…  the rain kept dripping off a metal plate just outside our window.  Which meant either try and sleep through this loud irregular dripping pattern, or sleep with the television loud enough to hopefully drown out the noise.  We did the later which means we never really slept that deeply, kinda like we do when there is a tornado warning and we end up with the weather blaring all night hoping we would wake up if we needed to take shelter.  As a result I am struggling a bit when it comes to stringing together thoughts into a sentence.  This is absolutely the sort of day that I would just say screw it and not blog…  but after several years of this madness I don’t really want to break the chain.  That’s the funny thing about doing the daily blogging thing… is after a point you really don’t want to do something to break the pattern of posts.  It is like the pattern itself becomes the important thing and not so much what I am writing about.

This weekend also was one where I did a surprisingly small amount of gaming.  We recorded the latest episode of AggroChat on Friday night this week, and during that I piddled around in Fallout 4.  Then as usual I stayed up way the hell too late wrapping up some minor details on the podcast.  Then Saturday we had the very first of our family “Christmas” activities, I say it in quotes because it is technically a dual purpose Thanksgiving and Christmas that we have with my wife’s dad and step mom.  They are snow birds and spend the winter in warmer climates… so for the last decade or so we have had this dual holiday day around Thanksgiving.  Thing is they keep pushing it up so they can get down South “before it gets cold”, and admittedly they have a really nice place down there so I don’t blame them.  It just ends up making for a strange holiday get together… when I am absolutely not even in Thanksgiving mode yet.  When I got home from that… I had every intent of taking a nap, but instead the contractors were banging on the wall of the bedroom which would have made sleep impossible.

As a result I pretty much sleep walked through the day until we went to bed that evening relatively early.  This is the point at which we realized that the drip was a thing… which woke us up about 4 am Sunday morning.  My wife just stayed up, and I attempted to sleep through it…  which I am guessing I eventually succeeded because it didn’t wake me up again until around 7:30.  Over the last several years we have pretty much ignored we had a back yard.  The siding had gotten bad and honestly everything back there was just overwhelming in that it all needed attention.  With the bedroom door thing leading out there, my wife has become determined to fix the problems back there and reclaim it as usable space.  Since we had a dumpster thanks to the construction folks…  she was damned determined to use that to take care of some stuff.  We had a few hour break in the rain, so my wife and I were trudging through the muddy back yard picking up things and carrying them to the dumpster.  I am surprisingly sore from this, even though all I really did was act as the person moving stuff from the backyard to the dumpster, and she did a lot of the brute force gathering stuff into piles for me to move.

Star Wars Pen and Paper

Misfortune Mordren

The highlight of yesterday has to be our Star Wars pen and paper game.  The AggroChat crew and a few friends have been doing a fantasy flights Star Wars system game through Roll 20.  The way that game integrates with Roll 20 is amazing, and quite literally if you fill out your character sheet correctly all you have to do is push a single button when you want to do an attack.  I am assuming there is a lot more going on behind the scenes that Tam is doing to run the game, but for the most part… this is the best possible remote pen and paper experience.  Essentially we are a group of force users during the A New Hope era, with one significant monkey wrench thrown in.  My character is the one that does not fit…  I am not a nice person…  I never claimed to be.  My character has pretty much spent his entire life working as a Bodyguard/Hired Gun/Enforcer for one Hutt cartel after another.  The problem is… I get these “bad feelings” and often times my employers don’t heed my warnings and end up dead.  As a result I’ve developed this persona in the underworld of “Misfortune Mordren”, and it has been interesting to see how that is working out.

I built this persona because I thought it would be interesting to play… but apparently I am some sort of underworld bogeyman.  We had an instance yesterday where our craft was about to get boarded by some pirates, and the mere mention of my name…. and some really high deception rolls on the part of Kodra…  caused them to back off because they wanted absolutely nothing to do with me.  Apparently I am considered to be so “Bad Luck” that even after interdicting our ship…  it was not worth their time to try and take us on.  Then again there is a whole other side to this tale, because I am racking up quite the body count.  While I am playing a character from Edge of the Empire, we decided to make things easier and put me on the Force and Destiny conflict system.  I feel like I am not understanding this system… because every time I take conflict I cheer out loud.  Much to the horror of my otherwise party of “goody two shoes” that are trying desperately to avoid the Dark Side.  We walked into a gang base yesterday, and I opened fire before they had time to even speak.  To my defense though… I figure if you are in a gang on Nar Shadda you have made some poor life choices anyways.  Also to my defense Kodra did ask me to create a diversion…  so yeah I was just doing that.

Essentially I am becoming somewhat of the conflict sponge for my party, and I am perfectly fine in that role.  The thing is… I never said I wanted to be a light side character… and additionally I never said I was a “good guy”.  My character has spent his entire life living in Hutt territory, and in truth I am turning over a new leaf.  As a Hutt enforcer I would have been expected to torture every single one of these people I took down… just for good measure, because that is what Hutts do.  I have yet to feed a single one of them to some bizarre creature we are keeping in a pit to entertain the boss.  So simply taking them out cleaning… is a bit of a mercy from what I have been used to.  It is going to be interesting to see how my character and the rest of the party play out… as they so carefully use their stun settings…  and mine has dust on it because it has never been used once.  The game usually runs for several hours… and by the time it wraps up I just have enough time to grabs some food and head downstairs for my Sunday evening television time… including Walking Dead, Talking Dead… and now maybe Into the Badlands.  I watched the first episode last night and I have to say so far I am digging it heavily.

 

 

On Creation, Part 2

…and we’re back!

Obligation

Each of the three core books has a unique mechanic for player characters, intended to guide their actions in subtle and sometimes not-subtle ways. Age of Rebellion uses Duty, to represent your affiliation with the rebellion. Force and Destiny uses Morality, which tracks where you stand with respect to the Light or Dark side of the force. Edge of the Empire Uses Obligation, which is a representation of the debt (real or figurative) that your character owes. This could be actual debt, or a price on your head, or even something like a strong sense of accountability to something. In addition to a description, it also has magnitude that may have mechanical effects. Higher values mean you’re more worried about whatever it is, and it’s more likely to come up in play.

The suggested order of character creation has you determine your obligation as the first step, which can be chosen or rolled randomly. We’re going to go with the Dutybound obligation for Aragos, representing the bounties he is supposed to be out pursuing while the party’s interests may or may not align with this goal. The starting obligation value for a group of 4-5 players is 10, but that number isn’t necessarily fixed. For additional XP or credits at character creation, you can take additional obligation, up to your starting value. The starting value of 500 credits is rather low, so for Aragos we’ll take 5 more obligation for 1000 more credits.

As for your character’s specific motivation, there is a mechanic to roll this randomly if you wish. I personally would rather just build it into the background of the character. This is really the only part that varies depending on the core book you’re using.

Starting Gear

Unless you take additional obligation (or make similar decisions re: Duty or Morality), you’ll start with 500 credits, which really isn’t a lot. It’s somewhat unlikely that your character will be able to avoid conflict altogether, so you may want to put some of this into a weapon. Armor is more optional, as it tends to be heavy, expensive, and of questionable effectiveness, but you’ll probably want at least basic clothing. (Some specializations can use armor more effectively, however.) A comlink is also suggested, as it’s cheap and very useful. From there you can take other things that suit your character.

For Aragos, we’ll keep it relatively simple. A Blaster Rifle is 900, Heavy Clothing is 50, a Comlink is 25, and a Combat Knife is another 25 (I started with one of these and never used it). For other gear we’ll take 2 sets of Binders (50), A utility belt (25), Extra Reloads (25), a Datapad (75), a few Glowrods (30), Scanner Goggles (150), and a Backpack in case I have to carry all of that at once (50). That still leaves 95 credits for anything that might come up. You will also start with 1d100 additional credits that can’t be spent on starting gear, and whatever miscellaneous small items that you might think of that aren’t large enough to be tracked on your character sheet.

Finishing Touches

To finish up, a character needs a name, a description, and a personality. The Obligation and Motivation steps are actually somewhat helpful at filling in the gaps here, but this is really up to you. As mentioned, I tend to do that in reverse.

There’s also a group component, in that you can start with a particular resource that also varies by books. I’m not sure how this would be handled in a case where a group had mixed characters, but this is usually either a ship of questionable quality (except for maybe the YT-1300 in Edge of the Empire, and even then you’re gonna want a mechanic) or a justification for a party bonus (which may have other benefits). Decide among your group and GM what you’re going to take here.

On Creation, Part 2

…and we’re back!

Obligation

Each of the three core books has a unique mechanic for player characters, intended to guide their actions in subtle and sometimes not-subtle ways. Age of Rebellion uses Duty, to represent your affiliation with the rebellion. Force and Destiny uses Morality, which tracks where you stand with respect to the Light or Dark side of the force. Edge of the Empire Uses Obligation, which is a representation of the debt (real or figurative) that your character owes. This could be actual debt, or a price on your head, or even something like a strong sense of accountability to something. In addition to a description, it also has magnitude that may have mechanical effects. Higher values mean you’re more worried about whatever it is, and it’s more likely to come up in play.

The suggested order of character creation has you determine your obligation as the first step, which can be chosen or rolled randomly. We’re going to go with the Dutybound obligation for Aragos, representing the bounties he is supposed to be out pursuing while the party’s interests may or may not align with this goal. The starting obligation value for a group of 4-5 players is 10, but that number isn’t necessarily fixed. For additional XP or credits at character creation, you can take additional obligation, up to your starting value. The starting value of 500 credits is rather low, so for Aragos we’ll take 5 more obligation for 1000 more credits.

As for your character’s specific motivation, there is a mechanic to roll this randomly if you wish. I personally would rather just build it into the background of the character. This is really the only part that varies depending on the core book you’re using.

Starting Gear

Unless you take additional obligation (or make similar decisions re: Duty or Morality), you’ll start with 500 credits, which really isn’t a lot. It’s somewhat unlikely that your character will be able to avoid conflict altogether, so you may want to put some of this into a weapon. Armor is more optional, as it tends to be heavy, expensive, and of questionable effectiveness, but you’ll probably want at least basic clothing. (Some specializations can use armor more effectively, however.) A comlink is also suggested, as it’s cheap and very useful. From there you can take other things that suit your character.

For Aragos, we’ll keep it relatively simple. A Blaster Rifle is 900, Heavy Clothing is 50, a Comlink is 25, and a Combat Knife is another 25 (I started with one of these and never used it). For other gear we’ll take 2 sets of Binders (50), A utility belt (25), Extra Reloads (25), a Datapad (75), a few Glowrods (30), Scanner Goggles (150), and a Backpack in case I have to carry all of that at once (50). That still leaves 95 credits for anything that might come up. You will also start with 1d100 additional credits that can’t be spent on starting gear, and whatever miscellaneous small items that you might think of that aren’t large enough to be tracked on your character sheet.

Finishing Touches

To finish up, a character needs a name, a description, and a personality. The Obligation and Motivation steps are actually somewhat helpful at filling in the gaps here, but this is really up to you. As mentioned, I tend to do that in reverse.

There’s also a group component, in that you can start with a particular resource that also varies by books. I’m not sure how this would be handled in a case where a group had mixed characters, but this is usually either a ship of questionable quality (except for maybe the YT-1300 in Edge of the Empire, and even then you’re gonna want a mechanic) or a justification for a party bonus (which may have other benefits). Decide among your group and GM what you’re going to take here.

On Creation, Part 1

Star Wars Fever seems to be going around the Aggrochat crew, and we’re all dealing with it in different ways.SWTOR has been a thing for several of us, as has Disney Infinity 3.0 (AKA the one that added Star Wars characters). Another thing is that because we’re about to hit a point of relative calm in Shadowrun, we’re looking at spinning up a Star Wars game. Character Creation is interesting here, so let’s take a look:

Concept

I’m going to cheat a bit here and just use the character I played in the Saga Edition. For some background, Aragos was a bounty hunter who was first and foremost, a sniper. Thanks to background, he was also a bit of a survivalist and big game hunter. As the game went on, he acquired more technical ability and eventually silly movement tricks. (In a game where standard movement was 6 squares, Aragos could move about 30 in a turn and still act.) But for now, we’ll start with the base. Our Saga Edition game used rolled stats, and Aragos ended up with all of his stats in the 11-15 range, so I was able to get fairly well-rounded despite the racial -2 INT.

Mechanics

There’s a suggested order for character creation that I’ll be largely ignoring, it’s more helpful when you don’t have a concrete concept in mind. As such I’ll be starting with species. I didn’t stat out a Cathar for nothing, so we’ll be going with that. Edge of the Empire also provides the useful Bounty Hunter career. Aragos had a bit of both the Survivalist and Assassin specializations, but Assassin fits better as the starting one. Skills come along with this: 4 from career, 2 from specialization, and one from species. These are going to be Perception (career), Streetwise (career), Vigilance(career), Ranged (Heavy) x2 (career, specialization), Stealth (specialization), and Athletics (species). It’s worth noting that the second rank in a skill is normally more expensive if taken later, so any ability to double up like this can save you XP in the long run, at the cost of reducing the breadth of your starting abilities.

That still leaves 90 XP to spend on attributes, skills, and talents. It’s worth noting that the only time you can spend XP on attributes is character creation, so you may want to dedicate a decent portion of your XP to this. Attributes aren’t cheap, at 10 times the new value. They’re also limited to 5 at creation. Career skills are 5 times new value, but cannot go above 2 at creation. Non-career skills cost 5 extra points per rank, so you should think long and hard if you want to take any of these (especially if you intend to take a specialization that includes them as career skills later, or you’re in one of the specializations that contains the “Well Rounded” talent). An exception might be for a combat skill if you are in one of the careers that doesn’t have one. For Aragos, we’ll buy off that intellect penalty and then some, spending 50 XP to get Intellect up to 3. 40 XP goes into putting more eggs in the “solve problems by shooting things” basket and raising Agility to 4. (Aragos did not start as a nuanced character.)

More to come…

I’ll go into Obligation and starting gear next time. From here, character creation diverges a bit depending on which book you’re starting with. The “mechanic” for Edge of the Empire is Obligation, so we’ll see what impacts that has on creation.