Awesome Defeat
Posted 13th December 2008 at 12:16 AM by Moridin
So, a couple of hours ago I ran my weekly lunchtime Star Wars: Legacy game. I won't go into details, but I can honestly say it might be the most fun I've ever had watching my party fail--and they felt the same way! Typically, I never set up no-win situations. I don't believe that's fun, and while I like to challenge my players I also like to kind of leave things up to chance. I like a challenge that leaves the heroes with about a 50/50 shot of success. Today, the heroes failed, and it was great.
Here's the setup: the heroes have been working for a Toydarian crime lord named Gnat, based out of Nar Shaddaa. Over the course of a recent mission, they butted heads with the ex-pirate crime lord, Rav, and were hired by him to go back to Nar Shaddaa and kill their current employer. When they arrived at Gnat's villa on Nar Shaddaa, they found their employer already dead at the hands of a human Sith Lord, who was there to claim the Professor (Andrew Finch's Pau'an noble/Force user) and bring him back to Coruscant, where he would presumably be tortured/converted to the dark side. He had some Imperial allies with him, as well, so when the fighting started he grabbed the Professor with the Force and began dragging him toward the balcony. Then things went way, way south for the heroes. Every die roll was coming up horrible for them (the bad guys were hitting about average), and on the third round of combat they had done exactly 0 points of damage to the enemies through sheer bad luck.
At this point, the heroes discovered a hovering skiff off of the balcony with an Imperial pilot, which was waiting to transport the prisoner away. The Professor leaped onto the skiff, hurled the pilot into the abyss below, and the other heroes began a fighting retreat out onto the balcony. At one point, the skiff had both the Sith Lord and a couple of heroes on it, battling one another for control of the skiff, but eventually the Professor got off a good hit with the Force and hurled the Sith Lord onto a nearby walkway. As Matt Sernett's Rodian scout, Akeem, fired up the skiff's engines, the Sith Lord made one last attempt to drag the skiff down with the Force, but failed. The session ended with the heroes blasting off into the Nar Shaddaa skyline as stormtroopers fired blaster shots at them from a distance, one coming close enough to nearly take out Trapp (Adam Colby's Mon Calamari gunslinger). Next session, we open with a skill challenge: racing through the decrepit ecumenopolis of Nar Shaddaa, evading Imperial pursuit.
Anyways, the encounter was designed for the heroes to be able to succeed (though I had built in a few escape routes for the Sith Lord if things looked dire), but thanks to terrible, terrible dice luck everyone decided to get out, and fast. They knew things were going badly when SRM's Wookiee soldier, Vassek, completely whiffed with his power hammer twice and got hurled back to the antechamber and a door slammed in his face. It was a nice example of how failure can turn into an awesome, cinematic scene (as SRM said, the movie in our heads was great).
I think one of the best parts of the session, though, was the first 15 minutes. The players spent some time debating amongst their characters of whether or not they should kill Gnat themselves, how they were going to do it, and so forth. It was a good bit of roleplaying and interaction that would have made a great scene for a movie if distilled down into dialogue, because you had the party members who were reluctant to become cold-blooded killers being talked into it by the ones who only had eyes for the credits. My players are definitely going for the whole "Scum and Villainy" schtick!
Here's the setup: the heroes have been working for a Toydarian crime lord named Gnat, based out of Nar Shaddaa. Over the course of a recent mission, they butted heads with the ex-pirate crime lord, Rav, and were hired by him to go back to Nar Shaddaa and kill their current employer. When they arrived at Gnat's villa on Nar Shaddaa, they found their employer already dead at the hands of a human Sith Lord, who was there to claim the Professor (Andrew Finch's Pau'an noble/Force user) and bring him back to Coruscant, where he would presumably be tortured/converted to the dark side. He had some Imperial allies with him, as well, so when the fighting started he grabbed the Professor with the Force and began dragging him toward the balcony. Then things went way, way south for the heroes. Every die roll was coming up horrible for them (the bad guys were hitting about average), and on the third round of combat they had done exactly 0 points of damage to the enemies through sheer bad luck.
At this point, the heroes discovered a hovering skiff off of the balcony with an Imperial pilot, which was waiting to transport the prisoner away. The Professor leaped onto the skiff, hurled the pilot into the abyss below, and the other heroes began a fighting retreat out onto the balcony. At one point, the skiff had both the Sith Lord and a couple of heroes on it, battling one another for control of the skiff, but eventually the Professor got off a good hit with the Force and hurled the Sith Lord onto a nearby walkway. As Matt Sernett's Rodian scout, Akeem, fired up the skiff's engines, the Sith Lord made one last attempt to drag the skiff down with the Force, but failed. The session ended with the heroes blasting off into the Nar Shaddaa skyline as stormtroopers fired blaster shots at them from a distance, one coming close enough to nearly take out Trapp (Adam Colby's Mon Calamari gunslinger). Next session, we open with a skill challenge: racing through the decrepit ecumenopolis of Nar Shaddaa, evading Imperial pursuit.
Anyways, the encounter was designed for the heroes to be able to succeed (though I had built in a few escape routes for the Sith Lord if things looked dire), but thanks to terrible, terrible dice luck everyone decided to get out, and fast. They knew things were going badly when SRM's Wookiee soldier, Vassek, completely whiffed with his power hammer twice and got hurled back to the antechamber and a door slammed in his face. It was a nice example of how failure can turn into an awesome, cinematic scene (as SRM said, the movie in our heads was great).
I think one of the best parts of the session, though, was the first 15 minutes. The players spent some time debating amongst their characters of whether or not they should kill Gnat themselves, how they were going to do it, and so forth. It was a good bit of roleplaying and interaction that would have made a great scene for a movie if distilled down into dialogue, because you had the party members who were reluctant to become cold-blooded killers being talked into it by the ones who only had eyes for the credits. My players are definitely going for the whole "Scum and Villainy" schtick!
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