Playing the Role

Hello again people it's a  Dark Heresy / Star Wars role-play post attempting to make two half-ish posts into one quality item. With this one I'm kind of looking to compare and contrast the two.

Last Thursday week was the latest session of DH and involved plenty of Role as we spent most of the evening questioning the Abbot and his staff.....some would say interrogating....Mr C definitely would ;) We have our suspicions and we're not going to be parted from them easily.

Running through our list suspicious happenings we crossed off most of them as not possible to investigate until we got to the LIGHTS IN THE HILLS so off we trotted. We insisted on taking Aritsticus / Fisticus with us, despite his protestations and a local A'Sheen as a guide.

Wandering along we were soon attacked by a quadruped zombie beastie who immediately tore off the head of our local guide, much to my chagrin, and set about the rest of us. Spasming beastie to the floor I went all Vulcan on his mouldy ass and established some form of psychic link controlling it. Persuading the rest of the guys to wrestle beastie down while I tried a fuller mind meld and just as I was ranging in the connection went dead just as Fisticus was finally useful and spotted an female form along my track-line who suddenly winked out of existence.

Heading back to the Cathedral with beastie we confronted our Abbot to no real result other than the arrival of an A'Sheen "Death-Singer" the next morning. Hmmmm...............one of our better sessions to be honest!

This Tuesday we hooked up at Enfield Gamers for our second run through with FFs new and updated Star Wars system, which personally I'm beginning to like more and more.

Searching around our recently liberated ride, from Capt Trex, we found a bunch of cash, an impressive Wampa rug, a couple of smuggling compartments (one full of illegal Wookie skins) and old Twilek chap in the brig.

Setting Mr T free, eventually, he told us his tale of woe and suppression ath the hands of our former employer and who doesn't want to get back at their boss, especially when there's a profit in it too!

In short there's a mine on Ryloth that's being squeezed by out Hutt chap via Trex's goons and Mr T is part of the resistance. Signing up for a percentage of the profits we did a quick bit of shopping and got down to planning our strike before we were interrupted by news of the return of the recently spaced Capt Trex at the space-port.

Using our Wookie as bait we set up an ambush and let Blaster-Boy loose on them, who turned out to be female, and let the dice loose.


As previously blogged the multi outcome dice system is one that's really interested me and it developed a bit more as Rich (GM) encouraged us to become more inventive with our use of Advantage, rather than just allocating boost dice i.e. disarm, knockdown, force out of cover etc.

So dragging you eventually to my point with Star Wars everything is very open, you can TRY to pull anything off, you just might not be very good at it or have much of a chance but you'll always A chance no matter how slim. LUCK! Freeform can be much harder work to get a full return, especially for the GM, and probably isn't the best place for a roleplay newb to start. Both sides can come up with curve balls and to me is at least half of the game, thinking outside of the box to create that illusion of choice.

DH is much more structured in every way, characters have much more specific strengths and weaknesses, there's plenty you can't do so easily. This does encourage the group to work together more, you need to cover the bases, skill gaps can't be plugged easily. Character development is far more defined and crucial and once you know how the system works you can make the most of it. At the end of the day everyone knows what page you're on.

I probably don't need to put up a poll for you to work out which end of the spectrum I prefer to play at but I think it's important to know where you are when you're playing together so as to play well with others........most of the time anyway ;)