Star Wars Scum and Villainy Session 2 report: It all went sideways
In our latest session, the players did their downtime actions, mostly recovering from the last mission and training. We actually didn’t know how to handle healing for a droid character, so I ruled that the Mechanic could use Rig, but the Stitch’s Physicker special ability would still apply. After that, they took a job from their contact with a bunch of anarchist criminals called the Laserbrains: simple delivery job of booze and drugs to a pirate outpost on an ocean planet controlled by the First Order. The Speaker also managed to acquire a small side job delivering a package to an unknown contact on the same planet.
They rolled a 6 on the Engagement roll and so their first obstacle was getting stopped by a First Order patrol and boarded for inspection. These FO guys are pretty sloppy and disheveled since they haven’t had a proper resupply or rotation in over a year, and the characters manage to slip the cargo past them no sweat. Afterwards, the characters met up with their unknown contact, who turns out to be a Resistance pilot and their cargo for her was a lot of explosives. The party Stitch gave her a check-up, but managed to roll low enough that she was offended and they parted on bad terms.
It turned out that the pirate base (the Reef) was mobile, built on the back of a mega-whale skimming the surface of this ocean planet. Once there, their ship got boarded by some dockworkers for inspection, and they tried to skim some of the booze and drugs off the top of the shipment. The Speaker was having none of it and immediately shot the lead pirate in the head, sparking a huge firefight and getting the first Trauma of the game. The Scoundrel held off the pirates and killed most of the boarding party. As more pirates rushed in, the crew’s droid Muscle ran in with their flamethrower and used Command to scare them off. Afterwards the party hit the engines and blasted their way out.
They considered giving up on the mission, but the Speaker hit up a contact back at the Reef who managed to negotiate a deal to still sell off the cargo. So they returned, this time watched much more closely, and sold the shipment to the intended client: a sullustan named Dua Ath. When they told him about the skimming, he figured out that the dockmaster was stealing from him and had his battle droid shoot the dockmaster. In the end, the players got paid less than agreed upon and hurt their reputation with the Laserbrains. And they started a clock with a starship manufacturing company, Kuat Drive Yards, from whom they stole their ship parts during ship creation. If it hits 4 ticks, KDY is gonna find them. The Speaker took Vicious for their Trauma, and the crew forged a new reputation on top of Daring: now they are known to have a Short Fuse.
Still loving the game so far! I do have one question, though. During the game, the Speaker used Acquire Asset and rolled well enough to get a standard item, but we didn’t decide on what it was. They later used it as part of a flashback to decide that it was false crates that they could hide their real crates inside of. Is this a proper use of Acquire Asset? From my reading, we need to decide on the item ahead of time, but the player made a good argument for combining it with a flashback later on in the game. It felt sorta like a Hannibal-esque “plan comes together” moment and it was cool. I just want to check and see if it is something allowed within the rules.
What adaptations did you make to S&V to make it Star Wars?
Honestly very little. I wrote up a bunch of setting info on the Corporate Sector and let the players use that as a basis. Our droid Muscle uses Rig for recovering instead of Doctor, and the players spent one of their starting upgrades for the Stardancer on particle cannons which we just call a blaster cannon since most ships in Star Wars are armed. Other than that its just about calling things by Star Wars names.
What did you use for Factions?
Matthijs Krijger I made up a whole bunch of my own and threw in a few from the new canon and old EU where appropriate.
Willing to share them?
Matthijs Krijger Sure! This covers the sector as well as the factions at the bottom: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hMUL67u2d24AP4b5-y6BFK3Iy3LLlW5iHxTD9w-uec0/edit?usp=sharing
Re: the acquire asset – that feels fine for your example. As a reference point, you’re not doing anything a flashback with cred couldn’t do already. Did you just end up with a ‘free’ downtime action?
John LeBoeuf-Little the PC in question was a Speaker and I think they wanted to spend their free downtime action getting something useful but didn’t know what to get. After having discussed how flashbacks can be used with some BitD people, I think in the future we’ll just use a flashback for that sort of thing.
Serf McSerfington We’ve done that before for sure, specially with the Speaker. Just be mindful of the plausibility of knowing to need that asset and apply a reasonable stress cost to the flashback and you should be fine. Crates sound like a zero stress flashback but a specialized CPU chip you probably didn’t know you needed might be 2. (Your group sounds pretty reasonable about such things though.)
John LeBoeuf-Little Flashbacks to downtime actions should cost 1 cred and 0 stress normally — I would assume that if you flashback to a free downtime action, that should cost 0 cred and 0 stress, no? The Spider’s Calculating special ability mentions that explicitly, while the Speaker’s ability does not … so is it intended that the Speaker cannot necessarily flashback to using their ability for 0 stress? That seems to encourage planning…
Jakob Oesinghaus Realistically, there’s a fine line to be gauged between using downtime actions in downtime and allowing for player creativity during a job. I’d say 9/10, it will be a zero cost flashback but like any flashback, it can have stress costs if you think it should. (It’s been a while since I’ve looked up the Spider’s ability though so if it says differently then that’s really about that one ability.)
Maybe talk with your table and get a sense of what they’re comfortable with and that will help guide whether you want to wait until the job or figure those actions out ahead of time. In general, I think most people would be fine allowing for holding that for a flashback – especially if the intention is that it be an asset that was acquired before the job.
That’s a very reasonable stance, thanks for the clarification on the intent here.