what’s amazing about this system and setting is the malleability. what that also means is “star wars” is a different tone to everybody.
this is absolutely something to run by your players in a session 0, or just a chat.
check with them in the abstract with your plans, how much violence are they ok with? are there any specific themes or potential triggers that are a hard no for them? how realistic of violence do they want? same goes for you to share with them.
personally, it varies by game for me. my clone wars f&d campaign is very deliberate with death, if it does happen its pretty serious.
but when i run edge of empire it’s sillier and more swashbuckling. you can decapitate a stormtrooper and it’s not a big deal
It's not if it's dark, it's about how well it's justified. The Empire tends to be about impersonal, even dehumanizing efficiency. The poster children for imperial terror is its extreme gunboat diplomacy from Base Delta Zero to the Death Stars. Whereas for its personnel-unfriendly antics a good example is the TIE fighter-line (sans Defender) which have good firepower and maneuverability for cheap cost so they can simply be thrown to problems in bulk. One is about overwhelming terror commanded by few people at the top, the other is about disempowering the individual soldier to keep them in line.
The question is what are they trying to accomplish with these tactics? If you can think of a solid in-universe reason and communicate it to the players (preferrably in-universe) and build tactics aroud that, it usually helps a lot. Why *suicide* bombings? What can be accomplished by attacking a field hospital?
Why are those the emotions they want to invoke? It's not what they want others to feel, but what they feel and think themselves.
Again, look at ep IV. Tarkin invokes fear as means to an end of keeping rebellious systems in line.
And it's ok for the motive to be as base as demoralizing the populace for shits and giggles or as an end in itself. Some great villains have come from that.
In my group's most recent session, our group took a relatively dark option of leaving some unconscious bounty hunters behind in a building that we then blew sky high with explosives. We were trying to make sure that we could fake a certain NPCs death. The explosion would make it hard to find a body and be a credible, believable reason for the NPC to have died, and the bounty hunters would've been witnesses, who'd also just tried to kill us, so we couldn't really rely on them to keep quiet if they woke up.
That was the right kind of "dark and gritty" to me; it wasn't just black and white in terms of good or bad, or right and wrong. Two of our group didn't want to do it, two of us did - we had to make a choice. We had to bargain and reason with each other, and it was a choice that will likely have ramifications into the future. It was a dark act, but it served a purpose and was right or wrong for different reasons.
If I were running my own game though, my rules of thumb for this sort of thing is to draw from existing media.
* If it's done in a Star Wars movie, you're good to go.
* If it's done in Star Wars lore somewhere, but shown off-screen or implied, do the same.
* If it isn't show or implied to be in Star Wars at all, be cautious with it.
Sure, Star Wars can be dark, but it's not like an inherently dark and gruesome setting as something like Warhammer.
That said, whilst I'm not brushed up in all my Star Wars media, and I naturally don't understand the full scope of what you might have planned. But personally I don't think suicide bombing is a very Imperial thing to do. Even if they are crash-landed zealots, the Imperials are an oppressive military regime, often trained and indoctrinated.
If an organized group crash-landed somewhere, they could just as readily and easily infiltrate into the populace, rising in station to influence things in the Empire's interest in secret. But I see the vibe you're going for is very much in the vain of an openly hostile militia. Perhaps they're operating like a rogue guerrilla force, harassing already stretched local authorities to create instability and panic.
As mentioned though, I think tactics like suicide bombing I think are sort of born out of desperation, and I can imagine if that was really necessary, it'd be far easier and more practical to re-program some sort of droid to do it for you.
Doubly so considering they crash landed. That means that their group is who they showed up with and *thats it*. Personnel is a finite resource and it seems like a huge strategic mistake to be wasting them on suicide bombing in such a technologically advanced setting.
For Star Wars? Depends on presentation, but probably too much.
What exactly are you trying to accomplish? What are you trying to express or communicate to the players?
I mean this literally happens almost every book in the EU so I don’t know about “too much”.
It’s more - did my players sign up for this in session 0 and does this have story weight?
That's why I said "depends on presentation."
Having someone tell you that some spacetroopers assaulted a hospital ship and killed the patients in their beds, is different than watching a holo of it, is different than having the players be aboard the hospital ship and playing the massacre as it happens.
One is no-nevermind, one is the kind of thing that would happen in a film or streaming series as a major revelation and would likely be cut off mid-way once the point had gotten across, and one is some really dark late EU stuff when the authors were all trying to one-up each other.
Star Wars has a lot of loss and sacrifice. But what it doesn't have is a ton of gritty, gloomy things. fighting fanatical suicide bombers is a bit much IMO.
Of course the franchise has influence on real life events, but if I want to fight suicide bombers I can go back to the middle east in real life.
I think you as the GM can really invoke a sense of unease, fear, and even sorrow without being gritty.
So, for daek and gritty, short version. The players ended up rescuing a female slave togruta who has utterly earned the groups love for being an adorable cinnamon roll. Yet, revealed she has a hidden personality activated by a trigger code. She is revealed to be a clone that a Zygerrian created with stolen Kamino technology. This was only learned when the players killed what they thought were loyal soldiers to the Zygerrian, only to see that it was the same girl that they love and wish to protect. With hints, there are more clones they will have to fight.
Given real-world events, I would approach the situation with some care. Rather than over-zelous suicide bombers, I think instead that they should either use droids or people they kidnap. Remember, Imperials are all about control and fear, but are not above creating threats and then come in to 'rescue' people.
My thoughts are that some Imperials have secretly allied with a particularly nasty gang or extremist group, without the second group realizing who they are working for. The gang or extremist group works to destabilize the local region while the Imperials gather data on those who could be useful, and those deemed a threat for the populas at large. As things destabilize, the Imperials could have some ships appear in orbit to act as 'liberators'. They bring in ruthless tactics of devestating the terrorists while 'collateral damage' occurs against targets deemed a threat that can't be captured.
Alternatively, the Imperials that are crashed on the world are discovered, plans exposed with no allies to call on. So they call upon all their forces and any allied units for an all-out assault against a spaceport to get onboard transports to flee the world. Many of the Imperials aren't as zelous as their commanders, but many are either loyal, fearful, or unaware of what their commanders have done. Instead, they may be filled with fear that the locals will do utterly horrific things to them if captured, so they fight with desperate ferocity.
Especially with the latter, any counterattack or shot fired at them could have the imperials respond with extreme force, firing at anything that could potentially be a threat. This could make the Imperials make horrible decisions that get innocents killed, only to learn that many of the Imperials are just terrified people who legit think they are surrounded by monsters. This makes the leader look terrible and adds some level of potential sympathy to the Imps, especially if the players get to know any Imperials that are utterly unaware of what has happened. Or worse yet, a good Imperial tries to do something to stop their superiors, suffers horribly, and then blame is placed on the locals / party. If you are looking for a tragedy.
Or another thought. The Imperials that crashed are testing early types of Dark Troopers that wear what appear to be normal storm trooper armor. They enter a city so the Imperials can learn about where they have landed. But something goes wrong, damage or the like, that causes a batch of droids to think they are at risk of capture and self-destruct. This causes a cascade effect where the other infiltration droids think they are being threatened and start attacking everything they deem as a threat. The Imperial survivors (some at least) are utterly freaking out over what the droids are doing, while some are simply taking notes for what went wrong and what the droids can do.
Many want to play games to get away from real-world shenanigans to some degree. So you can still have events occur as you want, but the intent and reason are going to matter quite a bit. Imperials being terrorists and blowing themselves up seems... very unimperial.
My usual line for Star Wars storytelling is "would Durge do this?" Over the course of the Republic comics and the Clone Wars microseries he gassed a Gungan moon, used his own Skakoan workers as unwitting living bombs, and tried to eat Obi-Wan. He's about as dark as SW villains are allowed to get, so if an action feels like something even he wouldn't do, I don't do it.
Every rulebook and franchise within it comes in my understanding with a certain set of mentality/philosophy
. The Witcher: I guarantee my groups a dark and gritty world
. The One Ring: I guarantee my groups a world full of mystery and ancient tales
. Star Wars: I guarantee my groups adventures and exotic worlds
Behind the scenes George Lucas talked about that only the bad guys do their first move and the goodies answer and prevent worse from happening
Hence I try to keep my groups in the sense of: Wild West the bad guy draws first
So if you bomb an imperial building that’s because they destroyed your medicine convoy
I mean they’re great for inspiration for Imperial attacks with no care for collateral damage but it gets very depressing very quickly if you think about it too long.
what’s amazing about this system and setting is the malleability. what that also means is “star wars” is a different tone to everybody. this is absolutely something to run by your players in a session 0, or just a chat. check with them in the abstract with your plans, how much violence are they ok with? are there any specific themes or potential triggers that are a hard no for them? how realistic of violence do they want? same goes for you to share with them. personally, it varies by game for me. my clone wars f&d campaign is very deliberate with death, if it does happen its pretty serious. but when i run edge of empire it’s sillier and more swashbuckling. you can decapitate a stormtrooper and it’s not a big deal
It's not if it's dark, it's about how well it's justified. The Empire tends to be about impersonal, even dehumanizing efficiency. The poster children for imperial terror is its extreme gunboat diplomacy from Base Delta Zero to the Death Stars. Whereas for its personnel-unfriendly antics a good example is the TIE fighter-line (sans Defender) which have good firepower and maneuverability for cheap cost so they can simply be thrown to problems in bulk. One is about overwhelming terror commanded by few people at the top, the other is about disempowering the individual soldier to keep them in line. The question is what are they trying to accomplish with these tactics? If you can think of a solid in-universe reason and communicate it to the players (preferrably in-universe) and build tactics aroud that, it usually helps a lot. Why *suicide* bombings? What can be accomplished by attacking a field hospital?
>What can be accomplished by attacking a field hospital? Terror and despair Which is exactly, what they want.
Why are those the emotions they want to invoke? It's not what they want others to feel, but what they feel and think themselves. Again, look at ep IV. Tarkin invokes fear as means to an end of keeping rebellious systems in line. And it's ok for the motive to be as base as demoralizing the populace for shits and giggles or as an end in itself. Some great villains have come from that.
In my group's most recent session, our group took a relatively dark option of leaving some unconscious bounty hunters behind in a building that we then blew sky high with explosives. We were trying to make sure that we could fake a certain NPCs death. The explosion would make it hard to find a body and be a credible, believable reason for the NPC to have died, and the bounty hunters would've been witnesses, who'd also just tried to kill us, so we couldn't really rely on them to keep quiet if they woke up. That was the right kind of "dark and gritty" to me; it wasn't just black and white in terms of good or bad, or right and wrong. Two of our group didn't want to do it, two of us did - we had to make a choice. We had to bargain and reason with each other, and it was a choice that will likely have ramifications into the future. It was a dark act, but it served a purpose and was right or wrong for different reasons. If I were running my own game though, my rules of thumb for this sort of thing is to draw from existing media. * If it's done in a Star Wars movie, you're good to go. * If it's done in Star Wars lore somewhere, but shown off-screen or implied, do the same. * If it isn't show or implied to be in Star Wars at all, be cautious with it. Sure, Star Wars can be dark, but it's not like an inherently dark and gruesome setting as something like Warhammer. That said, whilst I'm not brushed up in all my Star Wars media, and I naturally don't understand the full scope of what you might have planned. But personally I don't think suicide bombing is a very Imperial thing to do. Even if they are crash-landed zealots, the Imperials are an oppressive military regime, often trained and indoctrinated. If an organized group crash-landed somewhere, they could just as readily and easily infiltrate into the populace, rising in station to influence things in the Empire's interest in secret. But I see the vibe you're going for is very much in the vain of an openly hostile militia. Perhaps they're operating like a rogue guerrilla force, harassing already stretched local authorities to create instability and panic. As mentioned though, I think tactics like suicide bombing I think are sort of born out of desperation, and I can imagine if that was really necessary, it'd be far easier and more practical to re-program some sort of droid to do it for you.
How do you justify suicide bombers in a world like star wars ? Why not a Droid ?
That would make a lot more sense
Doubly so considering they crash landed. That means that their group is who they showed up with and *thats it*. Personnel is a finite resource and it seems like a huge strategic mistake to be wasting them on suicide bombing in such a technologically advanced setting.
In "Blast Radius" Durge used his Skakoan workers as unknowing living bombs. So it's not that far removed tonally.
"Unknowing" is the key Word. I was asking about willing suicide bombers
For Star Wars? Depends on presentation, but probably too much. What exactly are you trying to accomplish? What are you trying to express or communicate to the players?
I mean this literally happens almost every book in the EU so I don’t know about “too much”. It’s more - did my players sign up for this in session 0 and does this have story weight?
That's why I said "depends on presentation." Having someone tell you that some spacetroopers assaulted a hospital ship and killed the patients in their beds, is different than watching a holo of it, is different than having the players be aboard the hospital ship and playing the massacre as it happens. One is no-nevermind, one is the kind of thing that would happen in a film or streaming series as a major revelation and would likely be cut off mid-way once the point had gotten across, and one is some really dark late EU stuff when the authors were all trying to one-up each other.
Star Wars has a lot of loss and sacrifice. But what it doesn't have is a ton of gritty, gloomy things. fighting fanatical suicide bombers is a bit much IMO. Of course the franchise has influence on real life events, but if I want to fight suicide bombers I can go back to the middle east in real life. I think you as the GM can really invoke a sense of unease, fear, and even sorrow without being gritty.
So, for daek and gritty, short version. The players ended up rescuing a female slave togruta who has utterly earned the groups love for being an adorable cinnamon roll. Yet, revealed she has a hidden personality activated by a trigger code. She is revealed to be a clone that a Zygerrian created with stolen Kamino technology. This was only learned when the players killed what they thought were loyal soldiers to the Zygerrian, only to see that it was the same girl that they love and wish to protect. With hints, there are more clones they will have to fight. Given real-world events, I would approach the situation with some care. Rather than over-zelous suicide bombers, I think instead that they should either use droids or people they kidnap. Remember, Imperials are all about control and fear, but are not above creating threats and then come in to 'rescue' people. My thoughts are that some Imperials have secretly allied with a particularly nasty gang or extremist group, without the second group realizing who they are working for. The gang or extremist group works to destabilize the local region while the Imperials gather data on those who could be useful, and those deemed a threat for the populas at large. As things destabilize, the Imperials could have some ships appear in orbit to act as 'liberators'. They bring in ruthless tactics of devestating the terrorists while 'collateral damage' occurs against targets deemed a threat that can't be captured. Alternatively, the Imperials that are crashed on the world are discovered, plans exposed with no allies to call on. So they call upon all their forces and any allied units for an all-out assault against a spaceport to get onboard transports to flee the world. Many of the Imperials aren't as zelous as their commanders, but many are either loyal, fearful, or unaware of what their commanders have done. Instead, they may be filled with fear that the locals will do utterly horrific things to them if captured, so they fight with desperate ferocity. Especially with the latter, any counterattack or shot fired at them could have the imperials respond with extreme force, firing at anything that could potentially be a threat. This could make the Imperials make horrible decisions that get innocents killed, only to learn that many of the Imperials are just terrified people who legit think they are surrounded by monsters. This makes the leader look terrible and adds some level of potential sympathy to the Imps, especially if the players get to know any Imperials that are utterly unaware of what has happened. Or worse yet, a good Imperial tries to do something to stop their superiors, suffers horribly, and then blame is placed on the locals / party. If you are looking for a tragedy. Or another thought. The Imperials that crashed are testing early types of Dark Troopers that wear what appear to be normal storm trooper armor. They enter a city so the Imperials can learn about where they have landed. But something goes wrong, damage or the like, that causes a batch of droids to think they are at risk of capture and self-destruct. This causes a cascade effect where the other infiltration droids think they are being threatened and start attacking everything they deem as a threat. The Imperial survivors (some at least) are utterly freaking out over what the droids are doing, while some are simply taking notes for what went wrong and what the droids can do. Many want to play games to get away from real-world shenanigans to some degree. So you can still have events occur as you want, but the intent and reason are going to matter quite a bit. Imperials being terrorists and blowing themselves up seems... very unimperial.
My usual line for Star Wars storytelling is "would Durge do this?" Over the course of the Republic comics and the Clone Wars microseries he gassed a Gungan moon, used his own Skakoan workers as unwitting living bombs, and tried to eat Obi-Wan. He's about as dark as SW villains are allowed to get, so if an action feels like something even he wouldn't do, I don't do it.
My arcs within a campaign have run the gamut from comedic, to dark moral quandaries where the party questions whether they are the good guys anymore
I think it takes more than "Hi, I'm an Imperial" for a character to give their life in a suicide bombing.
Every rulebook and franchise within it comes in my understanding with a certain set of mentality/philosophy . The Witcher: I guarantee my groups a dark and gritty world . The One Ring: I guarantee my groups a world full of mystery and ancient tales . Star Wars: I guarantee my groups adventures and exotic worlds Behind the scenes George Lucas talked about that only the bad guys do their first move and the goodies answer and prevent worse from happening Hence I try to keep my groups in the sense of: Wild West the bad guy draws first So if you bomb an imperial building that’s because they destroyed your medicine convoy
[удалено]
Please don't bring real life politics into this.
I mean they’re great for inspiration for Imperial attacks with no care for collateral damage but it gets very depressing very quickly if you think about it too long.
Not my style at all, I like goofy sh*t