Black Ice help

[Gregorius]

Has anyone ever run the black ice adventure with PCs with no ability to use starfighters. Every PC in my group has neglected to take any starfighter piloting skills. Has anyone run the game like this, and if so, how did you?

[vong]

Well, I have never heard of this campagin before, but can offer suggestions.

The starfighter parts of the campaign are probably just the "escape" portion of the adventure. Change it to a vehicular escape. Give the players a freighter instead of fighters, and an NPC pilot to get them around. Just skip over those parts of the adventure - perhaps some in space encounters just to tense things up a bit, but they are most likely not needed.

If the players are supposed to do a strafing run, just switch it up to a sabotage mission. they should all be good at on the ground things since they dont have space faring skills.

Adventure modules throw in something for everyone, if your party doesnt have that skill set, just skip those scenes, or modify them to fit the personalities. (eg instead of talking to port athoraties in the air, perhaps have them have to deal with it after they land.... fees, blackmail, ship confiscation... fun)

Anywho, if you give more details those who have not read it we might be able to give more help!

just my 2 creds.
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[ZzaphodD]

If Im not mistaken in 'Black Ice' the characters are supposed to hijack a huge bacta/gas/whatever-transport. Isnt it about 5 times the length of an ISD?

A, found it..



Well, even if they have piloting skills, do they have Captial Piloting? Not that common really. Perhaps let the Rebels supply them with a pilot. We all know pilots are just fly-boys with no real guts when it becomes close and personal. This pilot might be just like that (even though he is a really good pilot). The PCs then have to 'baby-sit' him and make sure he doesnt come to harm (STR 2D) to be able to fly out of there... Lots of funny situations can come from that...

Engine pod for scale

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[vong]

if that is the case then I would suggest the following:

Give them a stealth ship. Or some sort of advantage "we know they will be at X,Y,Z exactly" so the PCs wait with lights out till it comes up and just attach. then the board via space suits. Have them encounter more resistance in the hallways, as that is the main action now.

Once the arrive at the bridge you have 3 options:

have the crew surrender (fat chance) or have them use a previously given item (by NPCs) that will enter a set of coords in a navicomputer. this will give one jump to where more NPCs are to help with piloting.

and of course as he said, give them a pilot to babysit.

this way the PCs get all the fun of taking the ship, and none of the book keeping.
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[garhkal]

Personally i am all for hitting them where they neglect. So if a mission calls for a techie and they don't have one, i am not going to drop the mission, or give them an npc to fill teh roll, as that teaches them nothing other than "the gm will help out and fill in where we lack"
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[Raven Redstar]

Why not give them a crash course training before the mission? They're given 10 hours or so of training before being shipped off, if anyone has the points to spend to raise piloting skills, they get to run with +1 above the attribute.

So they're not going to be hot shot pilots, but that makes it all the more interesting.

[Gregorius]

Actually, the problem is the week-long series of dogfights at the climax. On the last two days of the week there are groundside segments, but there is a dogfight every day before that. That is the problem I am having. They already have the skills necessary to pilot the cargo ship (just for kicks maybe I should put The Alien on it, rather than Skolos).

[Raven Redstar]

What about giving them a space transport with turrets?

[garhkal]

Won't matter unless they have gunnery skills.
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[Gregorius]

which they don't

[vong]

[Esoomian]

If the players have droid or perhaps even computer programming they could attempt to automate any turrets they find. Perhaps they could even program suicide droids with explosive charges/proton torpedos and thrusters.

Might be a tense moment if they have fewer droids than there are star fighters so they have to order/command the droids to attempt to hit more than one starfighter at once using the blast radius.
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[garhkal]

[vong]

the game is about having fun. Yes they have a gaping hole in their skill set, and im all for exploiting it. But not at the expense of killing them all and or making the game less fun. if there is a series of week long dogfights, that wont work with this group for a climax.
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[Bren]

I liked some of the other suggestions.

However if you are set on running the scenario more or less as is, another option would be to let the players create new characters who have starfighter piloting skills. You could do this either by having all the players run two characters (regular character and new pilot character) or you could have some of the characters play the regular characters and some play new pilots.

We sometimes have players running more than one character. It works if the GM can handle the workload of the extra PCs and if the players are mature enough and familiar enough with SW D6 to run two characters.