This is the latest in a series of posts looking at roleplaying games I really think you owe it to yourself to play.
Last time out, looking at Ghostbusters, I talked about the wonderful simplicity of the game’s system, and how it could only be betterered by one thing: taking that system and combining it with the greatest science fiction movie trilogy of all time. Well, at least, it was in 1987….
9) Star Wars
Remember how Traveller, well, just didn’t do it for me? Remember how I was essentially seduced by that image of a Luke Skywalker-lookalike on the box? (Damn you, GDW….) Well, it took five years or so, but finally my sci-fi roleplaying prayers were answered in 1987 with the release, on the (gulp) tenth anniversary of the movie, of Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game from West End Games.
If Marvel Super Heroes had opened my eyes to how a game system could work with you in creating a setting, Star Wars blew out of the back of my skull. Designed by Greg Costikyan, Curtis Smith and Bill Slavicsek, the simple D6 system in Star Wars expanded on the initial principles of Ghostbusters, and was an absolute joy to read. The original rulebook filled my head with the potential excitement of adventures across the galaxy, where the players would fight for the Rebellion against the evil forces of the Empire. Blasters would be fired! Quips would be uttered! Lightsabers would be drawn! Heroes would be made!
So naturally, in the first session of my campaign, the players stole a starship and then – I remember this quite specifically – spot-welded the ship merchant to the inside of his own safe.
Yeah, they weren’t really looking to be heroes.
Despite what you may think, that incident kicked off one of the best campaigns I’ve ever run, although it was a classic example of the lunatics taking over the asylum. The ring leader of this band of lunatics – the McMurphy character, if you will – had asked to play a rogue Imperial agent, a man who was only interested in looking out for himself, and wasn’t anxious to work for the Rebellion or the Empire. Thinking this would make for a kind of Han Solo-like rogue, I said yes; not knowing that what he was actually going to play was the classic Traveller or D&D anti-hero. Chaotic Neutral, in other words; everyone else can go hang, as long as I come out of it with cash.
Now, there’s a place for that kind of character, but not necessarily in a classic Star Wars campaign. The original rulebook suggested you set your game between the end of Star Wars and the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back, when the Rebellion has won a major victory by destroying the Death Star, but the stakes are high and there’s plenty of danger. I liked the sound of that, and I particularly liked the high drama inherent in the setting. But, we didn’t really get to that; instead we created some high drama of our own.
That was mostly because a latecomer to the game asked to create a Jedi – a very rare thing at this point in the Star Wars timeline, as you might realise – and I said yes, thinking that perhaps that with him in the group, we’d get some of that good-vs-evil stuff that I was craving. Well if you thought of him as good and the rest of the party as evil….
What happened was what always happens when you drop a Lawful Good Paladin into the middle of a Chaotic Neutral party: lots of arguing, scheming, backstabbing and ultimately, bloodshed.
The thing is, it was immensely entertaining to watch every week, simply because both of the players were very good at sticking within their roles. The rogue agent lied, schemed, double-crossed (the rest of the party) and generally acted in accordance with his personal code. The lone Jedi proselytised, argued, defended innocents (from the rest of the party) and generally acted in accordance with the Jedi code. I just sat back and occasionally prodded them towards something, and somehow that eventually led to them turning up to the battle of Hoth to help Darth Vader.
Mmm. Well, it was certainly a memorable campaign.
Long rambling personal reminiscences aside, Star Wars was (and really, is) a classic in roleplaying design, and to date is one of the few RPGs which I liked enough to actually buy supplements for. Unfortunately not long after my campaign started, it ended, as I moved away from the area and my roleplaying group. As a result my dreams of a classic Rebels vs Imperials campaign never came to light.
By 1992 I had an entirely new roleplaying group at my disposal – and West End Games released Star Wars in a Second Edition. However, on reading reviews at the time, I found out the Second Edition expanded the rules quite a bit, which frankly I never thought they needed. I understand now that Second Editions are a natural part of any large RPG line’s progression, but at the time, I didn’t see the point in buying into it. Besides, I hated the cover art.
Since then the Star Wars licence has proved perennial in RPGs, although I stopped paying attention long ago. Today Wizards of the Coast publish the official RPG, although the original D6 System Star Wars came from is still knocking around in various forms. For a good overview of Star Wars’ RPG history, I recommend this article on – where else – Star Wars.com.
Today, even after the wildly uneven Prequel Trilogy and the relentless exploitation of Star Wars by the Lucas Empire (Hey, it’s either that or Howard the Duck spin-offs), I still have a hankering to run a Star Wars campaign that evokes the classic era, the original trilogy.
Being realistic and boringly adult about it, I know there’s an element of wanting to recapture those glory days, when I felt like I was running a campaign by the skin of my teeth, barely keeping up with an older, smarter and wilier group of players. That’s unlikely to happen, but I still have my rulebooks – you never know.
It took Lucas 16 years to get back to the movies, after all….
#1 by kelvingreen at June 3rd, 2009
I played an exiled Sand Person called Roogar. His cabin in the group’s ship was filled with sand to make him feel at home. Great stuff.
I bought the revised second edition, with an eye towards running the game, but I got tripped up by the setting. The existing eras seemed too constraining, and the alternative, a Traveller-like “pocket empire” seemed to be missing part of the point of playing Star Wars in the first place. So it never happened, which was a shame, but I suspect I would have enjoyed running it less than I did playing it.
Two particular parts of the system stand out for me. The first is how the basic rules scaled up to encompass vehicle, then starships, with little modification or increase in complexity. The second thing was the “alignment” system; I recall a short essay in the core rules about the Dark Side, and how even if a Force user was using Dark powers purely for good, it was still Dark, and thus still evil. While it’s simplistic, it does cut through any arguments, and it occurred to me that it’s a perfectly acceptable approach when dealing with a fictional setting. If I were to ever run a D&D game, I think I might do something similar, setting out guidelines for what counts as Evil in this world, what counts as Chaotic in this world, and so on. When you’ve got a constructed fictional world, in which gods (or vague moral entities like the Force) are real and palpable, I see no contradiction is setting the associated morality in stone too.
#2 by Shadowe at June 18th, 2009
Here it goes…
I haqven’t played most of the games that Rockjaw has mentioned here. Sure, I’ve played some of them. But not all. And none have come close to comparing with the excitement and fun I’ve had with D&D (in its various guises) over the years… with one exception.
Star Wars
Even now, just thinking about it, reading the novels, glancing at my bookshelf… I get that John Williams soundtrack playing in my head, and I just WANT to be adventuring, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…
I picked up the original WEG Star Wars RPG when I was about 12 years old. I fell totally in love with it, and my gaming group at the time (friends from school, obviously) who were all Star Wars fans like me, dove into a series of adventures the likes of which the galaxy has never seen – culminating, I remember clearly, in a fantastic piece of misdirection as they flew a purloined Imperial Star Destroyer into a battle that they simply could not hope to win… just to help the assault against the second Death Star succeed.
When I was 16 my parents took us on holiday to Florida, and I was lucky enough to actually pick up a few rules expansions for the game while I was there, which improved the game system quite a bit (I’m a rules monkey – I may have mentioned that before), and clarrified some stuff.
When SW:RPG 2nd Edition came out, I got my hands on it pretty darn sharpish, and my (slightly more mature) RP group began a (slightly) more mature and gritty campaign set post-Endor (my favourite era, actually, because there’s still massive chunks of the Imperial military around, and the Rebellion/New Republic are fighting a billion battles at once, but without the ever-present oppression and fear of the Empire and the civil war hanging over everything).
Star Wars has always had a very simple, cut-and-dried morality: The good guys are good, the bad guys are bad, and the ones in the middle are either entirely in it for themselves (selfish buggers) – and fall into the bad-guy category – or have hearts of gold, and will secretly help the good guys as long as they can save face with it. As a GM you can build on the particular characters however you want – and it’s really good fun to have a rogue ex-Imperial Admiral in charge of a fleet of warships, who is ACTUALLY a golden-hearted rogue (not that anyone knows that), chasing the PCs from one end of the galaxy to the other.
When WotC got the Star Wars license and produced d20 Star Wars, I was pleasantly surprised. They didn’t break the setting by squeezing it into the existing d20 ruleset created for 3e D&D – they adapted d20 and made it work for Star Wars. The revised version was even better than that, and the recent release of the Saga Rules Edition has actually stepped it up to the next level, creating a much more fluid feel to the game system.
But I prefer the old d6 one.