What is your favorite type of character to play?

[Volar the Healer]

I would say hate is way too strong a term. But players should understand that in a space combat it is possible to lose a whole lot of characters all at once if even one thing turns against them.

While my players fly around on tramp freighters, I have observed only the least experienced wear vacc suits or survival bubbles. A hull breach can (and has) wiped out a crew and all the passengers.

And the hazards faced by fighter pilots...
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[Loc Taal]

I agree that space battles definitely add more of a "Star Wars" feel to an adventure. My characters, however, usually prefer to keep their feet fimly planted on terra firma.
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[Volar the Healer]

We played several different campaigns: Rebel Y-wing fighter squadron, Rebel irregular strike team, Civilian tramp freighter crew, and Earth invasion. The Y-wing campaign placed all the combat in space and all the goofing off aboard ship. The strike team had all it's combat dirtside with the ships only providing transport to the next site (and a few space interdictions / running escapes). The Tramp freighter had combat and "adventures" spread evenly between dirtside and space. The Earth invasion was all dirtside for obvious reasons.

The Y-wing campaign lasted three months. The strike team campaign lasted eight years. The tramp freighter campaign lasted eight months. The Earth invasion lasted one and a half years. So I guess the strike team campaign was the most popular, but it was also the most lethal. We only had one character survive the whole campaign. Probably because the player didn't hesitate to run away when the mission had failed or the opposition became overwhelming. We thought it funny that the player with the most real world military experience was the first to see when the battle was lost.

My favorite was the Earth invasion. For me, there's just something about watching F-15's chasing TIEs across the sky. Although orbital bombardment got to be wearisome - even though it was never directed at our small militia group. I guess the US Army gave the Imperials much better targets to shoot at. It was a difficult campaign since the stormtroopers are almost (but not quite) bulletproof. If your players really want a challenge this is the campaign for them.
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[Crell Damar]

Armor piercing high explosive bullets my friend, will chew through a storm trooper.

especially if you chuck those into a .48 cal pistol 6D+1 damage
hehe -1D from their armor and 7D+1 damage... tell me a stormtrooper that could easily overcome that.

Playing an earth based game seems kinda interesting, but firearms are pretty much useless outside of wanting a totally silent ranged weapon for hitting unarmored or lightly armored targets.

[Volar the Healer]

7D+1 damage!? Why isn't the Empire using these? They're supposed to have the best technology available.

This .48 pistol is a good example of game inflation. The RPG rulebook says firearms inflict about 3D damage, a fully auto firearm can do 4D damage. So, we figured a high powered bursting M-16 should do 3D+2 damage. Pistols in our campaign did 3D damage. 3D+1 if it was high powered.

In real life, our weapons do not kill people unless a vital organ is hit. The game mechanics allow for this using the wild die rule. Mostly our weapons wound people. In a recent survey of police shootings in San Diego county over 200 people were shot with only one fatality. (A shotgun placed against the heart.)

In keeping with realism (There's a bizarre use of that word again), we kept the damage dice within the RPG rules. And it worked really well. Blasters did more damage, but were shorter ranged than firearms. The stormtroopers also gained the bonus that their armour was +2D vs. firearms or fragmentation weapons. That's in the RPG somewhere, but I can't recall where right now. Armour piercing ammo negated this bonus.

The Earth's forces gained the benefits of camophlage: +1 level of difficulty to hit because they're hard to see. A great anguish faced by this RPG group, half of whom were prior military with really good firearm skills, was: Do I use this M-16 which I know I can hit with but won't do much damage -or- Do I use this captured blaster which I don't know how to use but will hurt them if I hit?

Knowing we were outclassed, we had to come up with a style of combat the Empire had not seen before. We introduced them to the drive by shooting.

In our first encounter with a two man stormtrooper patrol, our group shot them over a dozen times scoring one wound and two stuns. We pigpiled one of them with the whole group, everybody took a limb, we got his helmet off, and killed him with a knife. One of us killed the other stormtrooper by himself. He ran over him with a pick up truck!
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[Loc Taal]

LOL! That adventure sounds very cool. I think the .48 caliber pistol that Auron was talking about was the Morellian .48 Enforcer. This slugthrower appeared on page 18 of the Alliance Intelligence Reports book from WEG. The stats were taken directly from the book, however the picture obviously was not. Can you picture Han Solo with one of these babies pointed at a Stormtrooper, "Go ahead, make my day".
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"Mind what you have learned. Save you it can." --Yoda

The original RANCOR PIT archive

[Crell Damar]

that's the exact pistol i was referring to, and besides, i've found a slug pistol that does 4D base damage, which isn't bad for a firearm, you should really take in Galladinium's fantastic technology lots of cool guns

[Crell Damar]

And when you hook a firearm up with a merr-sonn silencer, a firearm becomes a deadly deadly weapon from a concealed position, because unlike a blaster, a firearm's noise and flash can be concealed

Merr-Sonn Silencer makes it so that perception checks aren't allowed to locate where a shot is coming from when the weapon is fired, though there's always the classic "I was shot from behind..., he must be there!" lots of nice things you can do with firearms anyway, but the one real downfall with firearms is the fact that ammo isn't exactly the most common thing, and most armor protects against physical damage more anyway.

[Loc Taal]

One of my favorite non-blaster weapons is the Magna Caster. It's silent and does some very decent damage. Works very well for black-ops...
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The original RANCOR PIT archive

[Crell Damar]

Low level jedi are easy targets

Lucky for me, i've got the poor man's bonus

[Volar the Healer]

What is the poor man's bonus?
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[Crell Damar]

Concentration - pretty much a +3D on to any roll *including multiple actions* , we call it the poor man's bonus because it's a basic force power, and if you've got no skill in something, you can still attempt it with some hope of succeeding

[Loc Taal]

Auron, the Movie Trilogy Sourcebook has a somewhat different description for the Concentration force power. Is it different in the Revised and Expanded book? Still gotta get that book one of these days...
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The original RANCOR PIT archive

[Volar the Healer]

THAT is the version I'm familiar with. Only good for one task for one round (unless the director says otherwise, of course).
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[Crell Damar]

yeah, i was only using it for one task, but even still, you do have to take into account multiple action penalties after you add on the 4D, it just means that i can attempt stuff when it's not a really high risk situation for an easy 3D