Star Wars: Dawn of Defiance ends with a bang

Apart from finishing my Serenity campaign last weekend, the weekend also saw the last session of our Dawn of Defiance/Star Wars Saga RPG campaign. After twenty levels (and a couple of years) of adventures, we finally finished the campaign and were hailed as heroes by the few surviving Rebels who knew who we were.

Some of us as dead heroes. My character finally died, heroically running away from an explosion he'd caused and he couldn't quite outrun. Greg's Cat Jedi, who was on the same ship, died as well.

January 25, 2008 - July 16, 2010. That's how long the campaign spanned. We played fortnightly, except for the sessions we missed, and the 6 month gap at the beginning of this year because our GM was dreadfully ill.

Looking back on the campaign, it was a good one to play, although at times it had dreadful structural problems. The final session was a good case in point: it was a number of starship battles for a campaign that has been dreadfully short on starship battles. It was good because Nathaniel got something he was good at to do (although, to be fair, he's a good sniper in any case), but it sucked for Greg, the definitely non-pilot Jedi.

It does display the problem with having a system which has two major areas which have little cross-over between them. In Shadowrun you have Hacking and Shooting. For Star Wars, they are Piloting and (Ground) Shooting. To my mind, it works best when you can have both actions going on at once. See the climax to Return of the Jedi: Luke fighting a lightsaber battle, Han & Leia in a fight against Stormtroopers, and Lando and Wedge in the big starship battle. It is possible to do that in a RPG, but it takes careful management.

In comparison, see the end of A New Hope. Yes, works well for a film. Mind you, if you were playing Leia, how boring would it be? (She's probably a NPC for that film, anyway).

Looking back at how the Saga system ran, it wasn't bad. It has got its good points, but looks just a little undeveloped. The chief problem it has is how some skill checks (Use the Force, I'm looking at how) target defenses, when both function on totally different scales. The other problem is a lack of the healing surge mechanic. Star Wars characters in the films are rarely injured, but that's not the case in the RPG... and healing takes way too long and is too difficult, especially in combat-heavy sessions like a lot of Dawn of Defiance. Surges would keep individual combats dangerous whilst allowing the session to continue after one!

The more we played 4E, the more we wanted healing surges in Saga. Oh well.

Cheers!

I love the healing surges in 4e, and also wish SAGA had them. So hard to get a saga game going here tho :/

Wow. Ending two campaigns. I guess you must be looking forward to having the time to start up some cool new beginnings.

I'm glad to know that there's at least one group out there in the world that made it to the end of Dawn of Defiance. Thanks Merric!

Do you think you could just graft on healing surges (allowing them to be triggered with Second Wind or spent at a short/extended rest) and call it a day? Or do you think you'd need other ways to trigger the surges?

Joshua Randall said:

Do you think you could just graft on healing surges (allowing them to be triggered with Second Wind or spent at a short/extended rest) and call it a day? Or do you think you'd need other ways to trigger the surges?

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I think grafting them on would work. The combat system rarely damaged us so much that we'd be unconscious, but going from one combat to another at 25% hit points wasn't good. (Mind you, during the last adventure, we were spending Destiny Points like crazy because we couldn't otherwise take the punishment).

Cheers!

MerricB said:

It does display the problem with having a system which has two major areas which have little cross-over between them. In Shadowrun you have Hacking and Shooting. For Star Wars, they are Piloting and (Ground) Shooting. To my mind, it works best when you can have both actions going on at once. See the climax to Return of the Jedi: Luke fighting a lightsaber battle, Han & Leia in a fight against Stormtroopers, and Lando and Wedge in the big starship battle. It is possible to do that in a RPG, but it takes careful management.

Click to expand...

I hear you on this one.

My long-running SW game (finished it a few years back) had exactly the same issue, especially since one of the PCs was a dedicated fighter pilot. It made things impossible - I could dream up reasons for there to be both ground and space combat happening at the same time for most action scenes for a while, but there's a LOT of combat scenes in a long SW campaign and after a while it just seems contrived. Not to mention when the PC (entirely logically) wants to stay in his fighter and provide 'air support' whenever possible, cos the fighter's weaponry is by far the hardest hitter in the group (all this was in SWd20 Revised, so rules for this in Saga may be different...)

Eventually the player got sick of this business and made a Jedi character instead, so sadly the space combat side of things frittered away after that. It's not an easy problem to overcome.

Moridin said:

I'm glad to know that there's at least one group out there in the world that made it to the end of Dawn of Defiance. Thanks Merric!

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I'm glad it was there to play through. Thanks, Rodney!

There are some great memories I'm taking away from the campaign...

* Adam and Nathaniel stealing hovertanks to help break a world free from the Imperial grip...

* ...and me wandering through the streets in an AT-RT, for a brief time the most dangerous character!

* Negotiating with a Hutt crimelord, and persuading him that we're bigger and badder than everyone else in his employ

* Participating in a Sabaac tournament, where the adventure probably expected no more than one of us to have the money to play. I had Wealth. Everyone could play!

* Having my very own "liberated" luxury space transport (stolen from the aforementioned Hutt crimelord) and doing it up in even more luxurious attire

* Watching Adam and Greg go on a lightsaber collecting spree. How many Dark Side users of the Force are there again?

* Watching in horror as two of my companions (including my cousin) were trapped by Inquisitors and killed... and knowing there was nothing I could do to save them. (In fact, it was their own fault: when I say "Run!" there's usually a very good reason for it.)

Goodbye, Miles "Starkiller" Tradora. You'll be missed.

Cheers!

humble minion said:

I hear you on this one.

My long-running SW game (finished it a few years back) had exactly the same issue, especially since one of the PCs was a dedicated fighter pilot. It made things impossible - I could dream up reasons for there to be both ground and space combat happening at the same time for most action scenes for a while, but there's a LOT of combat scenes in a long SW campaign and after a while it just seems contrived. Not to mention when the PC (entirely logically) wants to stay in his fighter and provide 'air support' whenever possible, cos the fighter's weaponry is by far the hardest hitter in the group (all this was in SWd20 Revised, so rules for this in Saga may be different...)

Eventually the player got sick of this business and made a Jedi character instead, so sadly the space combat side of things frittered away after that. It's not an easy problem to overcome.

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The original Star Wars campaign I played in - back in the West End Games days, and this was with the first edition although the second edition got released as we were playing it - had me as the Brash Pilot character. However, I wasn't a pilot specialist. There were other things I could do, and eventually I ended up a Jedi. Didn't intend to, just developed that way.

That was a good campaign: it lasted three years!

Nathaniel's pilot didn't specialise either, thankfully. He was scary with guns - more effective than my character. However, once we got into spaceships, he was the undisputed master... and Greg, untrained in Piloting, was hopeless.

It's relatively easy to have a good pilot who does well on the ground. The reverse isn't so easy. The impression we got from DoD was there wasn't that much space combat, although (admittedly) Nathaniel did miss a session where it occurred and it was left to me to be the main pilot. Still, it's a hard problem to pull off. I need to go back through some of the old WEG Star Wars adventures and see how they handled it.

Cheers!

The group I'm playing in is about 3/4 of the way through the entire adventure, so I've been very careful about spoilers in this thread. I'm having a very fun time in playing it, but my favorite moment of the entire campaign was the fourth adventure. My character was already on the dark side and the illusion beast or whatever it was only cemented it further. I ended up killing one of my fellow PCs and turned on the rest of the group even after the illusion had ended.

They surprisingly trusted me after my character had calmed down, if I remember correctly, and were "rewarded" by me trying to kill the other Jedi in the group a session later when we encountered the secondary boss of the dungeon. I was incapacitated once again and finally tied up. Both me and the dark Jedi were spared death, the latter actually becoming a character in the campaign played by a newcomer (but that's another story).

I managed to convince them to untie me and give me a blaster pistol (not my lightsaber) when we faced off against the Inquisitor thorn in our side. I stayed back for the majority of the combat, but eventually got into the fray late in the battle. It was then that I finally got to use my force lightning power (as I began to realize that the way I'd been playing the character would eventually result in falling, I started to train him in dark powers) which killed Draco right there.

Sorry this got kind of long, but that (and really the whole character) was my favorite moment of the Dawn of Defiance campaign.