Hyperspace Beacon: The importance of pacing in a SWTOR roleplay event

Last time I talked about roleplaying in spite of game mechanics, I didn’t really get a whole lot of comments. I don’t know whether this was because people weren’t interested or you guys were so excited by what I had to say that you ran off to your game and did it yourself. I’m going to delude myself and believe that it was the latter!

Star Wars: The Old Republic will still be my focus this round, but it’s not the only themepark game where you can pull off some of these ideas. And although my ideas work best for me, they don’t necessarily work best for you in your game or even with you and your roleplay group.

Today, I will continue to illustrate how to tell an interesting story with your characters despite game mechanics. But this time instead of giving you an abstract idea and concept of the situation, I will dive into the nitty gritty of how I handled situations that arose in the roleplay scene I talked about a couple of weeks ago. And to make things better, I have pretty pictures to paint an image of what I did.

What I planned

In my last entry I posted on the roleplay event involving Count Vastane and Moff Rook, Skytroopers had invaded the stronghold and were attempting to kill the members of my guild who were present for the meeting. Remember that the goal was to move the primary venue from the stronghold to the guild ship, so there was no way that the guild would be able to win; there just had to be a way for everyone to escape. And being the sadistic GM that I am, I was not going to make it easy.

There were two ways to actually escape the building from an in-character perspective. We could escape via the turbolift of the building, or we could call a shuttle to the outdoor platform and have it lift us off. With the stronghold security compromised, as Count Vastane explained in my setup, the only logical solution was to escape via the platform, but we had to make sure that it was clear for landing. At the same time, we needed to bottleneck the Skytroopers in the stairwells so that others could make their escape.

For those keeping score at home, that makes three battlefronts to track at one time. At this point, I should mention that it’s a good idea to plan your events based on the size of your guild. I knew that I would have approximately 15 people in attendance. With three fronts, I would have about five people per front. Because we were not using traditional game mechanics, there was no way I would be able to track all of the fighting alone. That meant that would need assistant GMs, ideally one per group. But then that would also mean that I would need three people who could be in charge in-character, too.

When possible, I do not like the GM and the IC (in-character) leader to be the same player. So I took my character out of the mix by sending him to the security room to lock down the guild archives; OOC, I ran the group on the platform since that group would control the pacing of the event. Thankfully, I had two other people who would GM holding back the Skytroopers in the stairwells as well as two IC leaders to make the command decisions that might need to take place in those stairwells.

Storytelling mechanics

Anyone that knows me or has watched my livestreams will recognize that I enjoy the the combat mechanics of SWTOR. But I also understand that those mechanics are not well designed to communicate the personality of the characters committing the act or even adding personality to the scene in general.

Now, I know I’m going to get comments about my advocating emote combat over combat with game mechanics. And for this particular situation, I am, but I don’t always. It’s situational. The pacing and location of the event plays a large role in how a GM should handle combat.

That said, I placed a mechanic in this scenario to help prevent everyone from hitting the I-win button: dice rolls. As a guild, we created an augmented d20 system that allows players to easily jump into a combat scenario without much prep. If you’d like to read about that system, I would love to talk about it in another article. However, it’s more important to know that the roll system is built on being able to convey what your character is doing, feeling, or saying versus how fast he’s slashing his lightsaber.

When you’re roleplaying a scenario where much of the action is emoted, it’s not always necessary to have actual NPCs in combat situations, but it’s helpful. And since this scene took place in our guild stronghold, we could place down personnel decorations to represent the Skytroopers and the other Zakuulan invaders.

What actually happened

I wish I could say that everything ran as smoothly as I expected, that there were no hiccups and everyone had an amazing time. It wasn’t flawless; there were some frustrations – the chief issue being pacing.

Bare in mind, we had five players in each group who needed to emote for every attacking round. As GMs, we had to emote for as many as 12 NPCs at a time. Some of that was circumvented by having multiple NPCs do the same thing, but for the most part it served the story better to emote for as many as I could because of the different functions of those NPCs.

Because the pacing was very important, I knew that people would want to RP after the event as a kind of debriefing and detox, and I couldn’t have the fighting part last forever. So I did things like reduce the number of hitpoints on the NPCs on the fly, allowing AoEs for the fight itself, or giving extra points for creativity. But I think most important thing I did was plan for Hail Mary scenarios. In this particular case, it took the platform group so long to clear it, so I played the card of letting the incoming shuttle destroy airborne ships once we hit the two-hour mark. This moved the scenario along without turning the situation into something completely implausible.

I could literally write forever about how I like to handle roleplay scenes like this, but ultimately, I want you to get something out of it. Let me know what you thought in the comments, or if you have any questions you’d like to pose, please let me know here or on Twitter. I will see you next week!