Just as a general point of notice:

There are heroic bounty hunters (kind of...)

Bounty hunting in general is considered a "neutral" job. It's not necessarily evil because generally you're hunting criminals, similar to how bounty hunting works in the real world. A guy commits a crime and skips town, local government doesn't have the manpower to send their police halfway across the galaxy so they throw up a bounty and let other people do it.

IN GENERAL it's usually hunting a criminal but you have to get your hands dirty (pressing associates for information, illegally putting tracers and surviellance on targets, hacking bank accounts etc.)

HOWEVER during the rise of the empire, Bounty Hunting takes a darker twist because not only are political targets being hunted (i.e. people who's only crime is speaking out against the government) but also the restrictions on "dead" are lifted so more and more bounties are "dead or alive" whereas in the Old Republic era there were sanctions on what would consitute a death bounty in civilized space. Obviously in lawless hutt space it operates as it operates wherever but in the rest of the galaxy during KOTOR era bounty hunters might not be glamerously heroic they weren't inherently evil either, usually hunting pirates/con artists/fraudsters etc.

As for bounty hunting "heroes" there are two principal sources you can look at: Cade Skywalker in Legacy and Jango Fett in the game Bounty Hunter. Note that in both these instances the protagonist was "neutral at best" but they weren't inherently 'evil' like Boba Fett...


On that note EU aside, I always thought of Boba Fett as a sociopath due to witnessing the death of his father at a young age. Disintigrating the target was just easier so that's the route he would take, damn the consequences. Boba Fett is tough too look at becuase so many different authors in the EU put so many different perspectives on him. In fact, the prequels axes most of Boba's background anyway so /meh...



As far as ships go...in a setting like this it is probably expected to have a crappy ship for a LOOONG time. Imagine a group having to ride around on public transportation, it's kinda like that. You're renting a taxi, essentially just to get from point A to point B. It doesn't have to be glamerous or super fast or powerful because you're not using it other then to transport stuff from A to B. Even modern military doesn't use top notch cutting edge military tech in their transport planes, they just have to be durable and haul a bunch of stuff.

If you want a good ship then start saving your money...

Top choice in a low budget situation is the Vaya.  Only 15,000 credits and comes with SR35 shields and high-speed engines, and the best straight-up attribute scores of any freighter in the game.  Not a lot of room for customization and it's weaponry won't scare anybody without upgrades.  However the Vaya didn't have enough crew quarters for the game (and too small a cargo bay to add them), so I've suggested the Kazellis instead.  23,000, same price as the Ghtroc, but it's twice as fast, has twice the shields, and has almost twice the firepower.  Much better for a budding mercenary group even if I did have to give up my mobile anti-aircraft turret for it.

For some reason, usually older ships are mechanically better in the sourcebooks.  I have no idea why they did that, but the C-100 Stinger is an Old Republic fighter that eats Rebellion-era ships for breakfast and the Vaya is an Old Republic freighter that's actually got better dexterity than most Rebellion Era fighters.  Meanwhile the Legacy era has the Gladius, which costs 7 times more than the Vaya and is inferior to it in every single stat except hyperdrive and one gun, and the Pheobos which costs slightly more than the Stinger and is marginally inferior in most of it's stats, aside from it's .5 hyperdrive.  For what it's worth, the Twintail is significantly better than the X-wing in most of the ways that matter to a fighter, and not a lot pricier.  The only thing that tends to improve over time is hyperdrive, while all the other attributes go down over time in the books.

Something I've noticed between KOTOR and later eras of the game is that the tech of the earlier era is better than the later eras.  I guess it's supposed to be indicative of the decline of The Republic.  KOTOR has all this fancy tech like personal shields, stealth fields, and advanced cybernetics that in later eras are extremely rare.  There's no reason to stop making them.  It's illegal maybe but like that ever stopped The Empire from doing it?  A lot got destroyed during the Jedi Civil War, and more in the years after when The Republic was near collapse.  I can only think the technology was lost, and no one ever re-invented it.

I got the opposite impression from KOTOR technology, in some ways it seems advanced yet ends up being primitive.

Look at our own history: Warriors used to walk around with 80 lbs of armor from head to toe that would be very effective at warding away attacks...at that time.

Then came modern firearms that can rip through them no problem (remember the archaic template ;))

At some point the cost to protect against modern weapons outweighs the benefits. Your troops are no longer mobile if they have to lug around 100lb power generators that can only stop certain kinds of attacks...

Same thing with their ships, remember the archiac template that lets modern weaponry cut through their shields and armor.

Hmm, I usually try to avoid Archaic because it's such a powergamer option, way too strong for players who want to game the system to become invincible.  It actually makes later stuff even more pitiful, since now KOTOR era ships are not only more powerful but also cost a quarter as much as later vessels.  For instance an Archaic Vaya costs only 7,500 credits, and you can bring it up to speed for only 1,500 credits more, allowing you to pick up one of the most powerful colossal ships in the game for a mere 9,000 credits.  An Archaic Stinger puts you back 45,000 plus 9,000 for upgrades, leaving you one of the best fighters in the game for 54,000.  God forbid any GM is dumb enough to let players get a Thalassian Slave Transport with the Archaic template, or they'll soon be tooling around in a pocket Star Destroyer for well under 100,000 credits.

Also, as a bit of a nitpick since it always bugs me to see this: Your armor weights are really way beyond reality.  I'm not sure where you got your figures for how much a medieval suit of armor weighs, maybe a game of DnD or something, but not from research.  Even a full gothic plate suit for mounted heavy cavalry would only weigh around 40-45 pounds.  Armor for infantry tended to be between 10-20 pounds, for instance a suit of Lorica Segmentata should weigh about 15 pounds for a typical adult male.  There are, no joke, many pictures of people wearing full plate doing cartwheels and other acrobatics.  That business about knights having to practically be lowered onto their horses with cranes is pretty much pure invention, used for physical comedy by the likes of Mark Twain.

Seriously, check this guy's routine out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm11yAXeegg
This message was last edited by the GM at 23:39, Mon 04 Mar 2013.

I heard some good news about the new Star Wars movies the other day.  Carrie Fisher has agreed to play Princess Leia, although joking a Leia who's in the intergalactic retirement home.  She'll have to go on a diet if she wants to be remotely recognizable as Leia.  So they're going to try to get all the original characters back, although older and less active.  They would likely only be supporting characters though.  Still no word of if they're going to base the story on any of the EU book series.

On another good note though, they also mentioned that they will be doing some stand-alone movies featuring the bounty hunters from the comic books.  So there will be a Boba Fett movie!  Awesomeness!

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Wars_Episode_VII


According to several sources (and wookieepedia apparantly) they are planning an original story not based on EU.

Yeah, we discussed EU vs. original some time ago in the Topic of the Week Thread, it's going to be original according to the links we dug up.  I'd expect nothing else because using EU material means paying the author of the EU material royalties.

It doesn't surprise me that they would do an original story instead of basing it on an EU book.  As I mentioned before, it seems Lucas and his fellow writers barely know that the EU exists.  Any resemblance to the EU will be completely coincidental.  So expect to see contradictions and prepare to feel betrayed.  And here I was hoping they would do the new trilogy based on the Vong Invasion.  But now who knows what crap they'll come up with.  Probably something so epic that you wonder why it's never mentioned in the history talked about in the EU books.



I doubt that's really the reason.  Lots of movies are made based on a novel, and lots of them make plenty of money.  Anything with the Star Wars name on it is gold.  Paying royalties to the author would be a small expense compared to how much money Lucas would pour into special effects.  If anything, a movie based on an EU novel would earn MORE money because fans won't feel betrayed by it.  No, it's just that Lucas is a storyteller.  He wanted to write his own original story, and since he is the original creator of the franchise, why shouldn't he?  It's not like he's in the same category as the other authors.  He doesn't have to compete for acceptance.  Whatever he writes is de facto canon.  He has the power to nullify anything written by another author, and he doesn't have the professional courtesy not to exercise that power.  There wouldn't be any malice if he did though.  He's simply ignorant of what others have written.  The man doesn't have the time to pick up and read some books?  What's his excuse?  He could at least pay someone to read them for him, and give him a synopses of each book.

I would prefer that Lucas be a malicious ass toward the EU authors.  Then I could hate him and feel good about it.  But he isn't malicious, just ignorant.  And while there is no greater evil than ignorance, I can't hate him without feeling bad about it.  I wish there was some pure emotion I could have for Lucas.

. . . We already went over that too.  And you've countered your own argument.  Lots of movies are made off of novels. . . because the novels have a famous name attached, and "Heinlein's Starship Troopers" has name recognition that "Bug Hunt" doesn't.

But Star Wars already has all the name recognition in the world.  Many people who know Star Wars don't know "Grand Admiral Thrawn" but everybody who knows Thrawn already knows Star Wars, pulling in Thrawn means paying Timothy Zahn money for no apparent increase in people watching the movie, whereas making up a new admiral named "Nimdor" means not paying Zahn anything and no apparent decrease in watchers because Nimdor is still Star Wars.  As for "Only a Fraction of the cost," it's still money they have to pay, money they can save by skipping the EU.  Across the entire movie a lot of little fractions add up to a big chunk.

Also: Lucas isn't writing the story.  Michael Arndt has been hired to do the writing.

There are a lot of Star Wars fans who know the movies but they've never picked up a book.  To them the name Grand Admiral Thrawn means nothing.  To them it makes no difference.  But for the fans who know the books, it makes the difference between paying to see the movie once or paying to see it twice.  Maybe even later on paying to buy the movie on Blue Ray.  If the hardcore EU fans don't like what they see, they won't pay more than just to see it the first time.

And just because Lucas isn't personally writing every line of the screenplay doesn't mean he won't have any creative influence.  He may be hiring someone else to do the writing, but I'm sure he has handed that Arndt fellow a plot synopsis that Lucas wants written.  Lucas is just being too lazy to write every line for the characters.  And this makes me sad because he did the same thing on the Prequel Trilogy.  And that didn't have the snappy lines that made the characters in the Original Trilogy so good.

Lucas has gotten lazy.  Have you see the making of clips of the Prequel Trilogy?  It looked like all he did was sit around on his ass directing things and saying how great this is going to be.  The Making Of for the Original Trilogy shows him being more active and involved in the whole process to even sighting up the camera for the cameraman.  And we can blame age for that.  Fortunately, he has done the right thing by retiring.  Now someone else can direct.  But J.J.Abrams?  Sorry, but my opinion of J.J.Abrams' work is hit-or-miss.  It's either good or bad, never okay.  So I'm only certain it won't be a mediocre film.

The problem with the fans is that they'll see the movie whether it's original or not and complain whether it's original or not.

In all honesty while I'm sure it's going to go off in a new direction (see JJ Abrams Star Trek...) I don't think it's necessarily going to be terrible, just different. Yes every fanboy in the world would want to see Thrawn up on the big screen but that doesn't mean that the universe can't go in another direction and be terrible.

Yeah, I suppose there's no way to please all the fanboys.  Fanboys being so critical, they're always going to find something to complain about.  Copy someone's book or not, either way they're not going to make everyone happy.  Once a filmmaker accepts that they're not going to make everyone happy, they can feel free to do what they want so that they at least make themselves happy.  It is important to love your own work, otherwise you're not going to care the least about it and then it will really turn out to be crap.

Then again, you can still do precisely what you love and it will still be crap.  Case in point, Battlefield Earth.  Although in that case, they were working with a crap series of novels to begin with.  Anyone ever try to read Battlefield Earth?  It's totally boring.  A lot of it doesn't make any sense.  I mean, who lives on a planet with an explosive atmosphere?  Isn't one of the first inventions of an intelligent species something called fire?  Those books are so full of plot holes that it's like someone fired a vulcan minigun at it for a minute.  The Prequel Trilogy had its plot holes but it wasn't that obvious.

According to an article I saw on reddit, the only reason that book did so well was that the church of scientology just bought massive amounts of copies of the book. O_O

Yup.  L. Ron Hubbard was a rich prick who wanted to be a success at everything he did, so he routinely bought loads of his worst books to put himself on the New York Times Best Seller's List.  The Battlefield Earth Series were his truly best best sellers and even those numbers weren't high enough once he started up his Church of Scientology.  Something that basically started out as a pay-to-join book club with some pseudo-mysticism thrown in for the LOLs.  He started it on a dare.  And it has taken off like a cult.

Star Wars to has found a religious following of its own... but at least these real world Jedi don't ask for a bunch of money to join their church.  And the only books they ask you to buy and read are ones you probably already have.  But probably what's best about them is that when Lucas came up with the whole Jedi philosophy, he was borrowing from our world's greatest philosophies.  L. Ron Hubbard just pulled everything out of his imagination.  His mythology makes the Vedic Texts sound downright plausible and sane.  And like all his writings, there are plot holes you can drive a star cruiser through.  Just don't point them out because that's heresy.

  Really? A Star Wars religious cult. Amazing that some 'so called' adults can't seem to separate fantasy from reality.

  The Jedi were based in large part on the Shaolin Monks, which I believe are Buddhist and wear simple clothing but can do some physically amazing things. They are also trained since early childhood. Now if they can only find some Buddha crystals and put it in their swords..

Anyone tried the new Star Wars Edge of the Empire game?

"Not I." Said the cat.

Actually Wicked Lasers built a working lightsaber some time ago, as part of their Arctic Spyder 3 laser line.  It's just that, curiously, swords turn out to be no more useful in real life combat when made of lasers than when made of steel.  Still, anybody with 400 US dollars to blow can get a working lightsaber today.  Due to safety regulations it's not quite as destructive as the ones in the movies but from what I've read, a Wicked Laser will inflict some fairly nasty burns to human skin and can set most flammable things on fire readily enough.

http://www.wickedlasers.com.hk/arctic

You would need a laser sword powerful enough to stop bullets AND the skill/speed to intercept them in-flight before they'd be useful again...

Yeah, that's kind of where being a Jedi comes in.  Without being a Jedi, a Lightsaber is just an Exotic Energy Melee Weapon that anyone can learn to use just like any sword.  It's all those Jedi Talents that really make a Lightsaber useful.

Now if anyone wants to run a game, I've been dying to use that as a character concept.  Just an ordinary guy who used to be an actor who used to play Jedi in holovids.  He has a Lightsaber and he knows how to use it as a basic weapon.  But he's not a real Jedi, although people mistake him for one.  He's not even Force Sensitive.

I actually did that once.

Except this guy was willfully faking people out and used Batman style tricks to make it look like he could use the Force. And he happily told people he was a jedi, and dressed like a jedi...

And fought the good fight like a jedi! He was very careful never to disgrace the order he was trying to impersonate.

Wouldn't a Force sensitive figure out the fake eventually?

Indeed they would, and indeed one did. She took away his jedi lightsaber. He was stuck using a Sith Saber after that. While still trying to impersonate jedi.

Funny story... The SWSEC isnt in my game list anymore and ive tries multiple things. Any ideas what to do?

*edit* okay, posting put it back
This message was last edited by the player at 13:28, Sat 23 Mar 2013.