I’m potentially thinking about… NOTE: this is not a final choice! This is just “hey this is neat”.
- Mechanic
- Muscle
- Mystic (e.g. Jedi)
- Pilot
- Scoundrel
- Speaker (i.e. Face)
- Stitch (i.e. Medic)
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Both the “smart” characters appeal to me, mostly because I’m not going to at all play them as straight “book smart”.
Switched up my early choices from last night. I don’t think there’s a playbook I wouldn’t have fun with, but right now these are my “I have immediate ideas how I could play this character” choices.
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Yeah, the question is tentative not to get a final answer out of anyone, but to jumpstart the creative process.
I’m making my way through the rule book, and have just gotten into the playbooks, and, of course, all of them look fun so far. I’m trying to narrow down to three moderately concrete concepts to bounce off of people, as straw men if nothing else. (If we all sit around the phone going, “Well, I could play any of these,” that doesn’t actually solve anything. 
So … as I think we left it that we’re not meeting next Monday, nor the following two Eve Mondays … are we going to be doing a character proposal and how folk relate discussion?
(I have one concept I’m pretty excited about, another alternative of the same playbook, and some vague ideas for a few others, but, still, honestly, could jump onto anywhere we have a gap.)
And, of course, with five players, we can’t even hit all the character types, let alone the themes and variations within each one. So there’s that. We might want to have a discussion about what classes we sort of must have.
What we must have seems like it depends on what we do, which sort of depends on group decisions that Doyce said he doesn’t want to lock in yet. For example, we might not need a face type if we’re just rebels-against-an-empire, but definitely do if we’re negotiating deals as free traders or space gunslingers.
But all that said, what do you think we must have?
Fair enough.
It seems to me that a Pilot, a Muscle, and a Mechanic (engineering and hacking) seem like minimums for the sorts of stuff that involve much of what the different missions entail. Stitch and Mystic are both useful add-ons with broad flexibility. Speaker and Scoundrel both hit some interesting notes, too.
But, again, that also ignores the subspecialties (can a Mechanic provide enough hacking and yet still keep us flying?). And this is complicated (for me) in that it’s not clear (to me, yet) the extent to which attributes and specific class skills, etc., can be dealt across classes. Do we actually need a Pilot, or can other folk (some more than others, maybe) double that role? If people have a good enough spread of talent, can we forgo a Muscle?
The game is clearly not designed for play groups of a dozen, so everything obviously must be a bit of a compromise. I just don’t have a feel yet for how best to blend that, or to what extent we just need to expect that, no matter what our mix of five covers, we’ll still be saying, “Damn, I wish we had an X on the team.”
Well I know one Stardancer crew that was a Speaker, a Pilot, and a Muscle and they seemed to do just fine. Considering there are twelve skills total and you’re likely going to have one pip (out of three) in at at least four of those, I don’t think we’re going to be hurting in the “reasonable level of competency is most of things” category.
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Are you at a point where you feel like sharing what you have?
Worth remembering that one “meager” pip gives you a 50% chance of pulling off even desperate actions (sucking chest wound surgery while under fire. Leaf on the wind flying, etc.).
And that 50% is assuming you only get one shot at trying (non-desperate situations might let you retry under deteriorating circumstances), and assumes you’re just phoning it in with the single die: devil’s bargains, extra effort, assistance, gambits, and probably some other option I’m forgetting (tools? Are bonuses from tools a thing? IDHMBWM…) all improve your chances.
SO: yeah anyone can pilot, with pips. Or even without, if they’re learning the hard way. Pilots get extra gas in that tank with their moves, of course, and that’s nice, but any skill is open to whoever.
Thread! Thread! Thread! Thread!
(also: we could meet on Monday, though I know James can’t make it, if only to sort stuff out… ask questions, we can probably establish the ship, figure out the background a bit more, things like that.)
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I’d kind of like to, just to have time to flesh things out and be as ready as we can be to start with a bang in the NY. @fragolakat is mid-Finals, but I can try to get him up to speed for character stuff and ship choices, etc.
I was hoping that was the case. Okay, I withdraw my concern about gottahaves. 
I would definitely draw everyone’s attention to the second paragraph of chapter two that begins with “because of the way that I system works…” definitely relevant to the whole skill rating thing
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So as I was writing up some notes for James (to target some input to the character/ship discussion), I started coming up with examples from fiction of various playbook. And, to my delight, I found, like with Masks, that the rules are protean enough that a given character could be written up under a number of playbooks, not unlike my League of Jasons before the last game (Jason as Doomed, Jason as Star, Jason as Legacy …)
Who is Han Solo? Why, certainly, he’s a Pilot. Or maybe a Scoundrel. Though we know he also does Mechanic stuff on his own ship. Chewie is clearly a Xeno Mechanic, except when he’s Muscle – or maybe Speaker (notice who Obi-wan approaches first) or a fellow Scoundrel.
(Actually, one could argue that Han is a Pilot, because that’s where he clearly wants his reputation to be built. But his player keeps doing scoundrelly things so as to set up the need for excellent piloting, so he’s ended up taking some of the Scoundrel moves, too.)
Etc. The point being that one could write up those characters in each of those playbooks, and they could still be (with slightly different flavors or go-to activities) the same character
So, yeah, that’s pretty cool. Of course, it opens up the opposite problem: winnowing down from so many possibilities …