Wars in the Stars
It is a high holy day for geeks, and we couldn’t resist adding our own homage to the occasion. Of course, this page was just a “wouldn’t it be funny if” sort of thing when I pitched the idea to Laurel. She immediately got a crazed look in her eye, exclaimed, “Cleric is an Ewok!” and began sketching furiously while giggling like a Kowakian monkey-lizard.
We’ve got tickets for a Thursday night The Force Awakens screening, so by the time this goes live we will have learned such invaluable pieces of trivia as 1) Who’s got a bad feeling this time? 2) Is Jar Jar actually a secret Sith Lord? 3) Where the hell is Luke? 4) And most importantly to your bladder and mine, is there a post-credits scene? For the sake of posterity my guesses are Finn, no, he’s the new Emperor, and who cares we’ll all piss ourselves together.
As far as Star Wars and gaming, I know my group is looking forward to our upcoming all Wookiees campaign. (“The senator steeples his fingers and looks at you expectantly. What do you say?” “GRRRRRRRRAaaaawhhh whhhr!”). What about you guys though? Anybody out there have any good Star Wars gaming stories?
GET YOUR SCHWAG ON! Want a piece of Handbook-World to hang on you wall? Then you’ll want to check out the “Hero” reward tier on the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Each monthly treasure hall will bring you prints, decals, buttons, bookmarks and more! There’s even talk of a few Handbook-themed mini-dungeons on the horizon. So hit the link, open up that treasure chest, and see what loot awaits!
Well this isn’t actually a story about a Star Wars game so much as how we wound up having one.
One day at the beginning of summer I was wandering around doing not much of anything with a pair of friends. We were talking about how none of us much cared for the existing Star Wars RPG systems at the time. One of my friends made an off-hand joke that he’d run a game if we made a better one. So over the rest of the summer that’s exactly what the two of us did.
We wound up having three connected campaigns for a proper trilogy.
Well that’s impressive. What were your mechanics like? (And please don’t say, “They were astromech droids.”)
Well it was d20 system based. The main thing was that we separated the game into tiers of play (this was before 4e and such when tiers of play as a game term became a thing we’d be aware of btw). In first tier there were three classes: soldier, scoundrel, and adept that went from 1st to 5th level. The second tier was from 6th to 15th level and there were three classes that thematically branched off from the three previous ones. The third tier was from 16th to 20th and once again there were three classes that branched off from each of the ones of the tier below. Yes we seriously made that many classes. You could take levels of classes only in the tier you were in. So once you were 6th level or higher, no taking levels of any of the first tier classes.
Every level you’d get something. Some kind of small combat bonus or non-combat bonus or a feat-like thing, all at the same levels other classes would. There wasn’t any prerequisites for classes outside one or two feats/feat-like things that were pretty easily available. Generally each class had a neat-but not all important capstone as a kind of reward for not multiclassing, but multiclassing was also an equally good choice, especially if you wanted more of something specific like combat or non-combat bonuses.
The third tier classes were pretty much intentionally ridiculous. The 20th level capstone for the sith force using focused class had the ability to have a passive force effect on the entire galaxy at all times. The capital ship commander basically got leadership (a feature that grants you lower level secondary characters to control) every level of the class, with the expectation that his cohorts were picking up leadership stuff too so that your single character would be in control of an entire fleet.
One of the interesting features we had going was based on how D&D 3.5’s class based to-hit bonuses worked such that sometimes it would be a rather poor idea to multiclass a certain way. What we did was “fighter” type classes gained a full +1 every level, “rogue” types gain +.75, and “wizard” types gained +.5. So that you wouldn’t just grab a level of a wizard type class and simply not improve your total to hit bonus at all. The fractions were even important for a few minor details I no longer remember.
Of course we added and fine tuned things between the campaigns. By the time of the third one we had it so that there were all sorts of different bonuses you could get just from wielding different types of weapons, which was part of our balance patch from the previous iteration which had too much weapon energy type bonuses that wound up with your blasters having three or four different energy types at high levels. The weapon bonuses patch wound up with my final character being a walking arsenal.
There WAS an astromech droid in the party, though it was played by someone who was only there maybe one out of every three sessions of the second campaign and it was mainly just a roleplaying only character. Also it was owned by my character, who was also a droid. ;D
That’s amazing stuff, Ramsus! I’ve never home brewed that hard myself, but it sounds like a blast. I especially love your capital ship commander. “Leadership is too powerful? Naw man. We’re making that mess exponential!” I hope you guys put an end to those rebel scum.
It was a long time ago, so I forget the specific details of a lot of these events, but we had a DM who was tired of our shenanigans. Soon after these events he Rocks Fall Everyone Dies’d two campaigns – Marvel Superheroes and Serenity RPG – and just abandoned this one.
So I was playing a fast-talking pilot with tons of charismatic friendliness and flair. He had an astromech droid sidekick and generally existed to talk his way out of every situation with all the weird charisma of an incredibly successful used car salesman. The rest of the party included a human Jedi who seemed to be taking the ‘Lawful Stupid Paladin’ trope into the greater universe, a human padawan who mostly just meditated and tried to be mysterious and usually just ended up being very quiet and never having an opinion, and the GMPC, a soldiery rebel-type character. I know there was another, but for the life of me I can’t remember what they were; it matters little since they didn’t actually do anything.
So we pull in at Tatooine because my character’s looking for some morally questionable movement of goods across sectors both legal and not. But it seemed that since he had last been there, some bad juju had moved into town; the docks were abandoned and under heavy monitor and when we tried to leave, we were instructed remotely to remain on our ship until we were met by local law enforcement.
Local law enforcement was two individuals walking into our bay with red lightsabers.
So my guy instructs the two Jedi to stay on the ship, and goes out to meet ‘local law enforcement’ with a big grin. Pleasantries are exchanged. Extortion is performed. Threats are made. But just when it looks like my guy has ACTUALLY talked his way into having the ‘local authorities’ leave without searching his ship…
The GMPC who, totally unknown to anyone else, had climbed to the top of my guy’s ship, throws a grenade. It lands in the square between my guy and the two Sith. It explodes, as grenades do, and leaves my guy at less than half his health. Then the GMPC opens fire on the Sith and kills them.
This is all on camera. This place is heavily monitored. They have footage from multiple angles. The GMPC’s brilliant plan is drag the bodies into a large waste receptacle for getting rid of on-board refuse and pretend nothing happened.
My (half dead,) pilot was just beginning to point out the sheer stupidity of all of this when the game ended, and that was basically the last session. It was only the second. Most of us were pretty disillusioned with our DM by that point due to his behavior in two other campaigns, and he was pretty upset with us as well, so it probably could have gone worse.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… the GMPC ruined the game for everyone. That seems to be the story in every galaxy. Sad times, man.
You mentioned a Serenity game too. I’ve only done a Savage Worlds version. How was the actual system?
Character creation was a lot of fun. You had tons and tons and tons of options of perks and penalties you could give yourself to flesh out your character, and they could be used to create a character that fit your concept perfectly or near perfectly no matter what the concept was (So long as it was something relevant to the ‘verse anyway.)
Gameplay was usually pretty quick as well, it was a long time ago but I remember thinking there was a lot less random stuff to keep track of in combat or social situations.
The main criticism I remember myself having with it was that it was very, very easy to get screwed by your dice because it used a system where your stats are dice rolls. So if you have a D8 Agility and a D12 Pilot skill, you roll 1d8+1d12 for Pilot checks. Which makes it way too easy to roll low on both dice and end up making a new crater in this little moon. With your ship.
The game offsets this by giving players ‘Plot Points’ which they can spend to do things like add bonuses to their rolls or add penalties to/negate enemy rolls, or spend them as currency to add their own elements to the story or to influence events. Which sounds fun in theory – until you find out they’re also tied to character advancement. You use unspent Plot Points after every session as currency to buy advancements with. This leads to a lot of stubborn hoarding on the part of less creative players, and more creative players spending Plot Points to advance the story or keep people alive and advancing much more slowly.
It’s a fun system, but has some inherent flaws that I think would become more pronounced the longer a game goes.
Well then. I can see why there was a Savage version. That stats system sounds pretty familiar. “Plot points” seem a bit more powerful than Bennies, but otherwise I think we played fairly similar games after all.
The game was with the same DM as the Star Wars D20 and Marvel Superheroes games. I think his DM style may have colored my perception of the Serenity system, though – he tended to make low rolls catastrophic failures. I was new back then and thought this was how it worked, it wasn’t until much later that I realized my Serenity pilot’s low roll on Engineering shouldn’t have made the console he was attempting to repair explode and knock him unconscious (with no check,) in a room that was now burning…
Yeah I think some of my perceptions there were colored by a DM who needed more practice at it.
The friend who wanted to run the Star Wars campaign was a big fan of the Old Republic prequels Clone Wars era and Expanded Universe. I ended up playing a Zabrakian mercenary who’d been born in the Outer Rim and slipped through the Jedi Order’s cracks and went untrained in-spite of being Force Sensitive. The whole campaign was a sort of ‘can you fight fate’ thing to see if we could – without meta-gaming – prevent the bad end of the prequels. The game died surprisingly quickly, but that was more because we’d yet to set my friend circle’s newest forever-DM (i.e. Me) after the previous one moved away and all of that buddies’ campaigns tended (and still tend) to die surprisingly quickly (you’d think after a while it wouldn’t be surprising anymore, but nope. He manages to be surprising about it each time).
Anyways, it was good fun while it lasted especially since each player was a nerd with a different focus of ‘this is my favorite setting piece for Star Wars that I want to focus on with my character’ and each of us was eager to drag the rest of the party into dealing with whatever thing we thought was cool.
It was also – and I will swear to every single god you can think of and on the Tomb of Gygax that I did NOT do this intentionally – the first campaign where my PC went around accidentally and unintentionally seducing every named NPC we encountered and established the rest if my friends teasing the GM that he should always remember the golden rule: ‘do not give (Sightless Raiton’s) PCs more love interests than they have dots of Permanent Essence/character levels’.
In hindsight it was pretty funny.
Greedo: draws out laser gun. Drawing is a move action that triggers an attack of opportunity.
Han Solo: quick draw and fires. Quick Draw is a free feat for character with BAB +1 or higher. It allows drawing as a free action. Han Solo shoot the only shot and it was an attack of opportunity.