GZG ECC: Jedi vs Droids

   Stuart Murray ran a homebrew game Friday night at ECC; his five year old son created the rules and Stuart polished them a little. The game was Jedi vs Droids. The droids are defending a facility with three shield generators; the Jedi have to reach and disable all three generators, after which clone trooper gunships can sweep in and wipe out the rest of the droids.
   Figures are Troopers (droids, clones), Leaders (padawan, Sith assassins), or Heroes (Jedi, General Grievous), which get 1, 2 and 3 dice respectively. When firing at close range, add a die; if you have a Big Weapon or Great Big Weapon, add one or two more dice. Troopers hit on a 6, Leaders on a 5-6, Heroes on a 4-6. Getting hit means you lose a die. Clearly a droid trooper going up against a Jedi is going to lose (1/6 chance of a hit, vs 7/8 chance of at least one hit); of course, there are a lot more droids. In melees, whoever rolls the highest single die wind, so if your droid rolls a 6 and a Jedi rolls a 5,5,5, then the droid wins (until the Jedi uses his Force points to change things). And--because the game was created by a five year old--you have to make the appropriate weapon noises if you're going to have any effect, so a blaster shot that doesn't get an accompanying "pew pew!" doesn't hit.
   Jedi don't have ranged weapons but can use their light sabers to reflect incoming fire. When a squad fires on a Jedi, the Jedi rolls an attack; if he gets any hits, all the "successful" droid shots go back and hit droids instead. Example: nine droids at close range roll 18 dice and get three hits; the Jedi rolls three dice and gets 1, 1, 4, so one success; that reflects back the three droid shots and the droids lose three troopers. Jedi also get 1d3 Force points per turn, usable at any time, with which they can Force Jump, or Force Push, or Force Escape From A Melee They're Losing, or Force Reroll A Die (which means if you thought you hit one, they can make you reroll your hit, or reroll theirs), or Force Whatever They Can Persuade The GM To Go Along With.
  Droids get reinforcements; every turn, when the droid player (or leader, if it's a multiplayer game as ours was) activates, he rolls 2d6 and gets that many reinforcements. The new droids must come on the table closer to their baseline than the farthest Jedi forces, so you can't use that to pop out behind the Jedi lines. The Sith assassins and Grievous don't have Force points but they do have 1d3 Hero points (per game, not per turn like the Jedi); Grievous also has four light sabers, so in melee he rolls 4 attacks at 3 dice each.

In our case, the Jedi came on and pretty quickly killed the first two shield generators while mowing down hordes of droids. And then our special units started getting involved....Jon Davis had a bounty hunter, who had an assignment to capture a Mon Calamari Jedi. The Jedi advanced beyond his supporting clone troopers (or droid fire took out the clones, who Stuart described as "ablative armor for the Jedi"), and then Boba Jon attacked. They dueled for a couple of turns, then Jon got the upper hand, summoned his Slave 1 ship and took off with his captive. And General Grievous got into a duel with a padawan; the padawan was about to die when she converted to the Dark Side, and became a Sith! In my case, I had a Sith assassin, who dueled a Jedi, getting a couple of hits in before he got bisected; that was good enough for my next droid squad to fire on the Jedi and finish him off before he could destroy the last shield generator. A Jedi then Force carried a Jedi droid to the shield generator, and the R2 unit tried to shut down the generator, but our droids figured out what was going on and opened fire. Finally, Obi wan Force Jumped over an intervening droid squad, doing a face-plant on the side of the building when he didn't roll well enough at first; but then he scrambled up the side and did the final hit on the final shield generator. Triumphant music ensues and the surviving Jedi look very heroic...but off to the side, the new Sith infiltrator glowers....