Someone in a Facebook discussion brought up an idea that I immediately thought could apply to the new Star Wars RPG (the one with the funny dice).

In the old Top Secret S/I game, there was a supplemental rule called "Friction". Basically, certain things would accumulate points, and if that running total reached a certain number, something would turn up to complicate a mission. An agent's favorite gun might have a small value, an important contact might add a bit more just for being there, a dirty politician might add a bunch.

When the point total reached the critical value, whatever brought it there would be involved in the complication. "Old Painless" might have a hangfire (where a gun is triggered, but the bullet doesn't immediately come out); the contact might be under surveillance; the politician's info might have a factual error.

This got me thinking about using something similar in the Star Wars RPG. Basically, allow players to 'set aside' Threat dice results. This lets them treat their rolls as if they got better results than they actually rolled... but once they've built up enough Threats, a major complication gets added to the scenario.

The players will have the choice of tweaking fate a little bit in their favor, but at the risk of it turning around and biting back. Ideally, the GM would establish a number ahead of time without telling the players. Maybe write it down on something, then leave it on the table until it's time to reveal it. Perhaps treat it like how you get the Destiny Pool: roll a Force die for each player, and note the total number of pips rolled.

This would be different than the Destiny Pool, which GMs can choose to use as long as they have Dark Side points available. Instead, this would be misfortune the PCs brought on themselves.
This message was last updated by a moderator, as it was the wrong forum, at 14:00, Fri 10 July 2015.

Thats a perfect idea! I love it! The rules were published in the Commando supplement for military type campaigns which works perfectly for Age of Rebellion.

That is certainly an interesting mechanic. I like the strategic aspect. It reminds me of a few things, but I haven't seen anything exactly like this. It would be interesting to see a playtest of the concept.

Here are some similar concepts which have been tried in other places.

#1 Paradox -- in the old Mage: the Ascension game from White Wolf, magic was performed by basically forcing ones will onto reality. Reality of a place could be shaped like a stretched piece of rubber, but when reality snaps back, it can be really bad for the mage. As characters performed magic, the area would acquire paradox points. Vulgar magic (meaning tricks which were clearly impossible) racked up the paradox points quickly. When the area became overloaded with paradox, magic would misfire traumatically. [note: I am grossly over-simplying a complex here to the point of inaccuracy.]

#2 Timed Complications -- During a playtest of the Chupa Open Roleplay Engine, the gamemaster ran the players through a disaster movie scenario. The PCs were trapped inside a burning castle and trying to escape. The GM set a kitchen timer on the table. After each ten minutes on the timer passed, some bad complication would occur in the game.

#3 Clue Counting -- A few years back, I created a rule which works sort of the opposite of what you describe. For mystery stories, I didn't want PCs to be penalized just because their players were not super-astute detectives who could pull off Sherlockian feats of deduction. I created a mechanic wherein the investigating PCs would gather clues which related to a mystery. It didn't matter which clues were found nor in what order, just the number of clues collected. When the investigators reached a certain benchmark number of clues, this triggered a scene transition to the next part of the story. Whereas I had something good happen in the story as a result of the points being acquired by a group of PCs, you are suggesting something bad happen. I should mention here that product for which I created this rule became stuck in publisher-limbo, and I never got a chance to playtest it.