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  1. - Top - End - #1
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    Question Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    I've been taking a bit of a break from my Sword & Sorcery RPG work and currently play around with ideas for a Star Wars campaign. And one of the big challenges I see as a long time D&D GM is to really capture the style of Star Wars without making the campaign to be more or less generic with a coat of Star Wars paint over it.

    As reference here I am referring to the first three moves. Most people feel that Ep 1 to 3 went rather wrong with this in several ways an in my own view the new movies appear to go off into a completely different direction that doesn't really do it for me.

    So I've been thinking about what I would consider to be essential elements that need to be there to properly emulate the style of the old movies. And the really big things I found is visiting these amazing locations and environments and encountering badass larger than life characters. That Used Future look of rust, oil, and dust is also pretty important.
    But what certainly isn't a big drawing point of the movies is intricate plots. No, it really isn't the plots. The first movie has a plot that is famously paint by numbers, the second one doesn't really have a discernable plot structure, and the third movie is two completely different stories taped back to back. The story that there is in Star Wars is entirely character driven. Luke has his personal story and Han and Leia have their story that progress through all three movies, but the bigger picture around them is really simplistic. The villains don't have multi-step plans and there are no mysteries for the heroes to explore and solve. With the exception of Lando and Yoda, no new characters are met and estabished a relationship with.

    Because of this, I think a Star Wars campaign that tries to go straight to the original source probably wouldn't work by coming up with a villain who has a grand plan that the heroes need to prevent from being completed. That only kind of happens in Revenge of the Sith and in that case the heroes completely fail. Instead I think the true heart of Star Wars adventures lies in amazing action scenes against memorable foes in stunning fantastic environments. But just having a bunch of fights is not going to be enough to sustain a long campaign if there are no stakes. Stakes that I think need to be presonal and can't simply be about pursuing the greater good for the benefit of the galaxy.

    How would you even begin to run a character driven campaign and to sustain it over time?
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    GnomePirate

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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    Think big. We ran a campaign for almost a decade. Now ours wasn't exactly cohesive and we swapped GMs fairly often if someone had an idea to run with, so our adventures were often one off adventures led by the characters. Usually they were fairly loosely run. The GM had an idea and presented it at the start of the adventurer as part of the story and we went with it. We had Eric Nightdrifter who was a failed jedi(template) trying for redemption and to figure out how to properly use force powers to correctly handle a lightsaber, I forget the smuggler's name but he started as a "I want to be Han Solo but cooler," character when we were HS freshmen. I played a Twilek gunslinger and pilot working towards freedom of Ryloth from the Hutt slave cartels(at the time there wasn't a lot of info on the subject as there is now). Every adventure kind of moved someone forward in their personal stories but like I said rarely was there a sequence of adventures tied together. We only dealt with a movie character once in the game where we were learning to play and were not expecting to keep the characters. We went through numerous ships, pet droids, used storm trooper bodies as shields, started adventures being woke up tied to poles in the jungle naked surrounded by raw meat, impersonated Imperial admirals and stole a super star destroyer and found weird cults with ancient jedi and sith artifacts.

    Because of how expansive star wars is I urge you to consider perhaps an over-reaching story but make the adventures rough outlines. There's no telling what PCs will do and head off to so you want to play loosely with the adventure. Think big. Everything in Star Wars is big. Big giant war machines and stupidly huge ships, awesome planetary vistas and space worms, larger than life characters.

    I don't know what your plan for the campaign would be but starting perhaps as privateers vs or for the Empire. Intelligence agents for or against the empire. A young jedi padawon who was overlooked in the Purge and is trying to teach himself jedi abilities while hiding from the ever searching eyes of the Inquisition or like my friends character, a jedi who couldn't take it, earned a couple dark side points and spends most of his time in a bar with a bottle reminiscing about the good old days but is trying to make a comeback.

    What system are you using? We played the older WEG d6 system(which is now completely free and downloadable) which allowed for absolute freedom when making characters since it was a classless system. Also very easy to GM since everything is based off a D6 and a simple difficulty system. I looked into the FFG system and found it far too restrictive and complicated for whats supposed to be a fast smooth game.

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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    As you say, a challenge even for the owners of the franchise.

    Takes me back to the 1980s and watching Episodes IV - VI for the first time...
    To begin with, it's a story of growth. Luke starts out a dirt farmer and has to grow into a hotshot pilot. But that's not enough, he has to be a Jedi. But that's not enough; he's nowhere near as badass as Darth Vader. So he becomes a Jedi Knight, but he doesn't conquer Vader in a duel of Force powers. He's got to morally overwhelm him with a sense of principle.

    Han Solo starts out as a freewheeling pirate; ends up putting his own neck in the noose on a suicide mission that involves giving away his ship; becomes the steady boyfriend.

    Leia goes from being a somewhat helpless pawn of events to being an active combatant with a promise of Force powers.

    Your main characters need to change in some way to overcome their challenges.

    It's misleading. Luke wins by refusing to use the Force. Vader wins by being a good dad. Han Solo doesn't triumph with his fancy boat. Lando wins by being loyal when the deal goes sour. Figure out what your main characters are best at and deny them their strengths at the climax.


    Big-Time Heroes.
    Only Luke can take out the Death Star. Only Han can stop Darth Vader from shooting him down. Only Luke can turn Vader. Only Vader can stand behind the Emperor's elbow. Only Leia can befriend the Ewoks. Only C3PO can talk to them. Only Han can come up with the plan. Only Lando can keep Akbar from running.

    Don't be afraid to make the characters pivotal actors in what is going on. Have others rely on them for major decisions.

    In for the duration. Most of the conflicts in the first 3 films are very short term. Blow up THIS battlestation. Escape. Rescue. Blow up THIS battlestation. It's only the presence of the Emperor that makes it a decisive victory at the end.

    Have your players carry out mundane task in escalating intensity and importance. Give them a showdown at the end.

    Loyalty to the party. Luke disobeys Yoda to show this. It's a sign of Lando's and Han's growth that they embrace this. Don't avoid "sidetracking" the campaign to keep the party together.

    Putting it all together: The party will tackle a series of challenges, none of them overtly fatal-- a lot of captures if they're defeated, setting up rescues. The party must develop a sense of loyalty to each other that is seemingly greater than their overall quest. However, they should be looking for dramatic contests with clearly defined adversaries when they have developed to the point this seems possible. However, when the showdown emerges, they should be at a dramatic disadvantage. They should feel pressed to continue anyhow by other forces and by the urgency of the situation. By using their new development in surprising ways they will completely triumph.

    Now as to how you do that... if I knew that I'd sell it to Disney for a fat wad of cash.
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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    In addition to "what system are you using?" (there are several pretty solid ones now with quite different feels) I'll also ask "what timeline are you using?"

    Because if it's during episodes 4-6, I think you'll be a bit limited. While the galaxy is a big place, those plotlines suck up a LOT of the air. Especially if a PC or two want to play Jedi, it limits their backstories. Setting it in The Old Republic might be easier. (I'm assuming that you played KOTR.)

    I really wouldn't recommend making them the heroes of the galaxy. The galaxy is a big place and there are plenty of smaller stories to tell with the PCs still being badasses.

    Quote Originally Posted by TheYell
    Luke starts out a dirt farmer
    Doesn't he technically start as a sand farmer?
    Last edited by CharonsHelper; 2017-07-25 at 08:21 AM.

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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    It really doesn't limit the jedi greatly. Just means they cant go openly waving around a lightsaber for people to see. The Empire knows there are jedi they missed in the purge thus why they created the Inquisitors to go hunt down rumors of them and turn or kill them. Most surviving jedi are not very powerful and many would have been padawans whose masters took one in order for them to escape. Do they play a big role in the galaxy, nope. Most are struggling to learn the force by themselves while keeping a low profile. I doubt Vader publicized that Luke was a force user. Even if rumors of the Rebels having a jedi knight got out, it would likely take a long time before a low profile padawan would even hear about it. The Rebels too would have wanted to keep the fact they had a jedi in their ranks to a low murmur. It took two years for word of the Endor incident to reach Coruscant(a great deal due to a media blackout on it) so information travels very slow from the rim to the core and even longer from one end of the rim to the other.

    It could be the source of a few adventures. There were many types of jedi and not all of them specialized in being combat leaders or knights. In the books there are several mentions of jedi who specialized in agriculture and simply assisted worlds that needed their help and many of them were on far flung worlds doing that job when the Purge occurred. There was a novel I read where a master sacrificed himself along with some commandoes to let his padawan and some useless farmer jedi escape from Vader.

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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    Quote Originally Posted by CharonsHelper View Post
    Doesn't he technically start as a sand farmer?
    I believe that Owen and Beru were moisture farmers, actually.
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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    Because Star Wars takes place in space, and has blasters and FTL ships and space battles and a myriad alien species, it's very easy to mistake it for science fiction, rather than the space fantasy that it is.

    And as such, the game can easily take a left turn into obsessing over the technology and minutia, little details and differences, and become an arms race. Not sure how to avoid that, it happened to me multiple times, but then it's also how I think... worldbuilding is my drug.


    Of all the systems I've tried for Star Wars, the old WEG d6 is still the best.

    The various d20s aren't really suited with classes and levels, it makes the progression strange and shoehorns the characters into tighter boxes than we see in the source material. FFG's Star Wars system... it has narrative intent and narrative wallpaper, but somewhere in between it got lost up its own crunch; and again, very class-heavy character building. Both are too unwieldy to capture the freewheeling quick-fire feel of the original trilogy.
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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    Quote Originally Posted by Yora View Post
    As reference here I am referring to the first three moves. Most people feel that Ep 1 to 3 went rather wrong with this in several ways an in my own view the new movies appear to go off into a completely different direction that doesn't really do it for me.
    Episodes 1-3 went wrong in some ways but were unmistakably Star Wars. What you really want to avoid is Rogue One.
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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    Why would you want to avoid Rogue One? It was the best Star Wars movie since Empires. The Guns of Navarone meets Star Wars. The upcoming movie has a high bar to reach to get past R1. The space battle was right up there with RoTJ if not better even.

    By itself it would make a great series of adventures. Just don't have the PCs blown up by the super weapon at the end.

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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    Quote Originally Posted by Corsair14 View Post
    Think big. Everything in Star Wars is big. Big giant war machines and stupidly huge ships, awesome planetary vistas and space worms, larger than life characters.
    While seemingly a trivial statement, I think this is actually really important.

    Quote Originally Posted by TheYell View Post
    Big-Time Heroes.[/B] Only Luke can take out the Death Star. Only Han can stop Darth Vader from shooting him down. Only Luke can turn Vader. Only Vader can stand behind the Emperor's elbow. Only Leia can befriend the Ewoks. Only C3PO can talk to them. Only Han can come up with the plan. Only Lando can keep Akbar from running.

    Don't be afraid to make the characters pivotal actors in what is going on. Have others rely on them for major decisions.

    In for the duration. Most of the conflicts in the first 3 films are very short term. Blow up THIS battlestation. Escape. Rescue. Blow up THIS battlestation. It's only the presence of the Emperor that makes it a decisive victory at the end.

    Have your players carry out mundane task in escalating intensity and importance. Give them a showdown at the end.
    Quote Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy View Post
    Because Star Wars takes place in space, and has blasters and FTL ships and space battles and a myriad alien species, it's very easy to mistake it for science fiction, rather than the space fantasy that it is.
    One of the distinguishing aspects of Star Wars that really makes it stand apart is that it doesn'r work on rational logic but completely embraces a dramatic logic. Star Wars has managed to successfully establish a style of storytelling where it no longer matters whether things are reasonable or plausible as long as they are narratively dramatic. It's always full of stuff that are obviously impossible and can not be, even if you account for the existance of the Force. But it doesn't matter because the stories never go into such questions of how these things can be. (Or at least it shouldn't, once you start going down this path everything would start coming apart very quickly.) That's really the main thing that makes it firmly grounded in fantasy to me.
    Star Wars is also pretty famous for its huge amount of amazing coincidences. People happen to meet at the right time at the right place all the time against all odds, and very wisely nobody ever mentions what amazing luck it is and just roll with it.

    I think the lesson here is to make use of very improbable things and events a lot but never point out how unlikely or improbable they are, either as a plot point or as a joke. This is just how this setting works.

    Quote Originally Posted by Corsair14 View Post
    What system are you using? We played the older WEG d6 system(which is now completely free and downloadable) which allowed for absolute freedom when making characters since it was a classless system. Also very easy to GM since everything is based off a D6 and a simple difficulty system. I looked into the FFG system and found it far too restrictive and complicated for whats supposed to be a fast smooth game.
    Quote Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy View Post
    Of all the systems I've tried for Star Wars, the old WEG d6 is still the best.

    The various d20s aren't really suited with classes and levels, it makes the progression strange and shoehorns the characters into tighter boxes than we see in the source material. FFG's Star Wars system... it has narrative intent and narrative wallpaper, but somewhere in between it got lost up its own crunch; and again, very class-heavy character building. Both are too unwieldy to capture the freewheeling quick-fire feel of the original trilogy.
    WEG is a really nice system, though currently I am favoring Apocalypse World with Omega Edition Star Wars hack myself. Since things in Star Wars happen not by what would reasonably happen but by what would be most dramatic, I think a system to run a game really needs to be very light about the impact of equipment. It's not math that determines the outcome of a confrontation. Numbers and firepower really matter very little. All the armies lined up in front of the hearoes have as little meaning as the armies lined up behind them. It's their own character stories that matter alone.

    Quote Originally Posted by Bohandas View Post
    Episodes 1-3 went wrong in some ways but were unmistakably Star Wars. What you really want to avoid is Rogue One.
    Good to see I am not completely alone on this. Rogue One felt to me like a generic early 2000s war movie that had raided the Star Wars props trunk. Rogue One and also Force Awakens made me greatly appreciate the creative artistic work of George Lucas. While his scripts and directing are still terrible, I can now see what he brought to the production of the first three movies. The creativity and atmosphere that the prequels still had but the new movies lack.
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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    One thing that I think is a bit understated but still important in Star Wars is the feeling that the Galaxy is a large place. There are countless alien species, places to go, and as mentioned, they're all so very large in scale. Places rarely get reused without reason (Jabba being the unifying factor in Tatooine in the original trilogy - let's not speak of the prequels and how the planet was somehow so important to everything), and there's always somewhere else to go, something else to see.

    The Galaxy in Star Wars should be painted in vivid colors and large scale. But, at the same time, each location works their own narrative purpose that is rarely ventured beyond. In a sense, planets in Star Wars have the same purpose as cities or nations in other settings. The distances and scale simply differ.

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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    Quote Originally Posted by Yora View Post
    One of the distinguishing aspects of Star Wars that really makes it stand apart is that it doesn'r work on rational logic but completely embraces a dramatic logic.
    Would Fate be a good base for Star Wars? Or a PbtA system?

    Quote Originally Posted by Yora View Post
    All the armies lined up in front of the hearoes have as little meaning as the armies lined up behind them.
    Is there a system that models Conservation of Ninjutsu?

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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    Quote Originally Posted by goto124 View Post
    Is there a system that models Conservation of Ninjutsu?
    Lol - doesn't League of Legends do that a bit? For every other of the ninjas on your team you lose 1hp. (pretty insignificant - but still funny)

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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    Star Wars is one of the best examples I can think of when it comes to setting the precise tone of the piece (My personal favorite is always the short story A Small Room in Koboldtown, which I will gush about if given half a chance).

    The Title Crawl is what i'm referring to. You know, This Thing:
    "It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire.
    During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire's ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet.
    Pursued by the Empire's sinister agents, Princess Leia races home aboard her starship, custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore freedom to the galaxy...."
    This is the narrative equivalent of the teacher giving you a pop quiz on the first day of class, or of a Rock band rising out of the stage in columns of smoke and pyrotechnics.

    It throws a TON of concepts at you, each one understandable enough that you don't get lost, but alien enough that you never feel like you understand the universe, and nor should you,.

    Rebel Spaceship, Evil Empires, a Death Star, a Princess, Sinister Agents. You know what those mean in general, but not what they mean HERE. In addition to setting a tone of high adventure, the opening crawl knocks the audience out of the world they know, and into a strange universe full of possibilities.

    So that when a guy in black armor with a laser sword stomps onto the ship, you not only accept it, you trust that this is a living universe, not constrained by what it's shown you. The story then becomes one of discovery. Once you accept that you don't know this world, every aspect of it that is revealed becomes fantastical.

    The opening moments of the film are then a series of oneupmanship. First you see Leia's ship, and just when you accept that this thing is a starship, the Star Destroyer comes into view, and you are wowed again.
    You see the Rebel soldiers readying their blasters, "Woah, Cool, Space Lasers", then they get overwhelmed by the Stormtroopers, who in turn pale before the presence of Darth Vader.


    Ironically enough, Star Wars itself is a terrible setting for re-capturing this feel. It's well understood by modern audiences, especially those who would play a Star Wars RPG. They know the universe, when the whole reason it worked so well was that the universe itself was unknown, but implied. When Harrison Ford showed up with a sasquatch co-pilot and was threatened by a green dude who claimed to be working for somebody named "Jabba" it worked. Rather than feeling like the story was failing to give us relevant information about the world (Who is Jabba? What is this green Dude? What's with the sasquatch?), it instead felt like we were peeking into a fully realized universe, like it was on us to understand



    Now, you can't QUITE get this same "Sucker-Punched out of reality" feel in a tabletop game. Since the Players need to know enough about the setting to make informed decisions on behalf of their characters, but I think you could get the same effect. I have a purely episodic (It's not always even established which order the sessions are taking place in) Space Opera D&D 5e Hack that I start each session (Since it's a bunch of one-shots) in-media-res in order to provide that gut-punch into the world.


    The other way to do it is to leave much of the setting intentionally blank, and encourage the players to Yes-And various aspects of the setting as gameplay emerges.
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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    Quote Originally Posted by Bohandas View Post
    Episodes 1-3 went wrong in some ways but were unmistakably Star Wars. What you really want to avoid is Rogue One.
    That's strange. Rouge One (despite it's weaknesses in characters) was the Star Wars movie I was hoping for.

    But I guess Star Wars means different things for different people. For me, I've always projected the more mature and gritty version of Star Wars as seen in the Thrawn trilogy on the setting. Rogue One presented the setting in a similar light, so naturally I liked it.

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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    I concur. I wasn't a fan of the too clean vision the pre-quals presented. I actually wished the characters from R1 were the characters for the new trilogy and Finn, Poe and Rey were the ones taken out by the deathstar. They were much better characters and better developed than junk girl Mary Sue, random stormtrooper traitor(who was raised from birth to be a storm trooper but somehow decided to go rogue) and poor man's Wedge.
    Last edited by Corsair14; 2017-07-25 at 01:17 PM.

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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    The opening crawl is one of the greatest narrative devices ever used in a movie. Imagine how much time other movies would have taken to explain all those basic concepts through character dialog? It could easily have taken up half the movie and would still have been essentially busywork before the actual story can start. Here the movie simply drops the pretense of other movies that everything is actually naturally evolving and simply has a narrator put all the important facts, which really aren't that many, on the table so we can go straight to the good stuff.
    However, this really works so well only because Star Wars, in best Campbellian and Freudian fashion, makes extensive use of archetypes for everything. There are almost no really new idea. It's all a remix of old and very well known ideas of concepts that the audience can instantly recognize. Guy in black armor with a skull mask and a red sword needs no explanation. Everyone understands it instantly. The imperial soldiers wear skeleton armor and the officers a simplified version of Nazi uniforms. This immediately tells you everything you need to know. And what is the military situation between the Empire and the Rebel Alliance? No character ever needs to explain this. You immediately understand it in the very first shot: A tiny ship running away from an unbelievably massive behemoth. Or the bounty hunters in The Empire strikes Back. They need no introduction, their appearance tells everything there is to know. Or giant robot war elephants.
    People using the Hero's Journey as a template get regularly criticized, but I think Lucas actually got the idea and didn't mindlessly fill in the blanks.

    When trying to bring the Star Wars setting to life, I think making use of archetypes in a similar way can do a lot of work for you, just as it did for the making of the movies. When you create a situation, environment, or character, start with a popular and easily recognizable archetype and give it your own spin. Being truly original is not necessary and in this particular case perhaps not even helpful.
    While freeform character creation does have many benefits, I think Star Wars is actually a setting in which classes are already backed into the world. Not explicitly, but implicitly you always have the scoundrels, the jedi, the pilots, the nobles, the officers, and the bounty hunters,
    And this is also why I think that the preparation of Star Wars campaigns and adventures has to be about something pretty simple and basic. Simple ideas, as other mentioned. Safe the princess, destroy the death star, escape from Hoth, rescue han, destroy the death star. It also has the side effect of greatly reducing the chance of the players hitting a dead end and not being able to get back on track without intervention by the GM, As in the movies, making the immediate scene great is much more important than making the greater narrative clever.

    I regard the amount of detail that is now available about the Star Wars galaxy as somewhat problematic as well. The more information you have the greater the temptation for GMs to weave their own adventures into the greater tapestry and the more likely the assumption of the players that everything is somehow tied together. Which I think is why apparently most GM prefer to keep their campaigns well away from any events from the movies. It just gets too complicated and the presence of movie heroes interferes with the agency of the player characters.
    My own preference is to set games in remote regions of the galaxy as a matter of principle, and I also really like the Knights of the Old Republic era for exactly that reason. The KotOR galaxy is a much simpler place than the galaxy of the Clone Wars or the New Republic. Somewhat surprisingly, the time of and up to Episode 4 also works really well for that reason. (There's a new big RPG in development right now that is set in that time, which I think is specifically to avoid getting tangled up in the overlapping and conflicting versions of the Expanded Universe.) For my campaign, I want to not even go with the time of Tales of the Jedi or Knights of the Old Republic but 100 or 200 years later when the slate is pretty clean once more. And it's the reason why I won't even try to learn about all the storylines and development from The Old Republic game.
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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    Quote Originally Posted by Yora View Post
    And it's the reason why I won't even try to learn about all the storylines and development from The Old Republic game.
    Really - the storylines in The Old Republic are generally smaller than KOTR's. Admittedly I haven't played it since its first year or so, but each base class had its own story which was mostly independent of the overarching world.

    The big thing which I felt was a missed opportunity for The Old Republic was the lack of asymmetry between the Sith and Republic sides other than cosmetic differences.

    The only other issue I had with it was following MMORPG tropes too much. Overall though a game with 8ish decent KOTR lite campaigns.

  19. - Top - End - #19
    Barbarian in the Playground
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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    One perhaps interesting thing is the idea of logic versus intuition as factors that decide what people do. Star Wars does a lot of things on the latter. Even beyond the obvious Force explanation where Jedi and those attuned to it can "read" the world better, even characters who explicitly deny the Force like Han Solo "have a bad feeling about this" very often.

    On the flipside, cold raw logic is a thing of droids. C3PO calculates the odds of surviving asteroid belts and those odds come up very slim. But it is attempted anyway despite logic saying that things won't go well. And they succeed. The stories very often emphasize feeling instead of thinking.

    This can be said for many stories, of course, but I feel it's rather prominent in Star Wars.

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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    Grist for the mill -- Jedi Philosophy – The Pop Culture Philosopher

    There's a tension between the "Jedi are always right about the Force and moral issues" attitude that many hardcore fans and present-day Lucas himself will push, versus the deep fallibility of the Jedi ideology actually shown in the original trilogy.
    It is one thing to suspend your disbelief. It is another thing entirely to hang it by the neck until dead.

    Verisimilitude -- n, the appearance or semblance of truth, likelihood, or probability.

    The concern is not realism in speculative fiction, but rather the sense that a setting or story could be real, fostered by internal consistency and coherence.

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    Barbarian in the Playground
     
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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    Star Wars is an interesting mix of ideas as I'm sure the rest of these posts made clear. It's futuristic but also retro. It embraces the idea of the big heroes but since a lot of the expanded universe went into the small details. People who were following Star Wars in the 90s probably have a different concept of it as people in the 80s or the 00s. Someone earlier was mentioning that they thought that the prequel trilogy embraced the feel where as Ep. 7 and R1 moved away from it, I feel the opposite. When watching Ep. 7 as I was sitting in the theatre and the fellow at the start pulls out the binoculars and they gave a K-CHUNK sound as they focused on what he was looking at I thought "At least the Foley guy gets Star Wars."

    My best advice to you is to just talk to your party and ask them something like "When I mention Star Wars what springs to mind?" I've talked to hundreds of people over the years about it and each one of them gave me a slightly different response, best to ensure that you and your specific players are on the same page.

    One really neat thing to check out for the feel of the storytelling of Star Wars is on YouTube. Star Wars Minus Star Wars by Kyle Kallgren. It's Star Wars Ep. 4 retold using entirely clips from other media showing the influence that it had on others and the influence others had on it. Highly recommend it.

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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    The feel of Star Wars - a rag tag group with some snarky banter and humor. A behemoth enemy that can't be faced head-on by conventional means (without consequences). Cool locales with aliens and unique environments to deal with. Desperate missions to infiltrate, escape, rescue, sabotage, smuggle things under the nose of the empire/crime boss, etc. There must be occasional vehicle chases, spaceship dogfights. Vehicles and Starships with character - breaking down, getting fixed, held together with space duct tape and hydrospanners. Occasional environmental hazards like asteroids, space worms, sea monsters, and Saarlac pits that guys can fall into/get eaten by. Huge things getting blown up sometimes.

    That stuff should be liberally sprinkled throughout most game sessions and adventures, making sure that it is all flavored according to the characters' motivations and goals and situation in a naturally flowing/emerging nature. When in doubt, throw some stormtroopers or pirates in there and have a good old blaster fight to keep things exciting.

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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    Good point -- whatever system you use has to be able to handle vehicle and space combat in a way that makes the ships "cool" but still keeps the characters "in the lead roles".
    It is one thing to suspend your disbelief. It is another thing entirely to hang it by the neck until dead.

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    The concern is not realism in speculative fiction, but rather the sense that a setting or story could be real, fostered by internal consistency and coherence.

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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    Quote Originally Posted by Corsair14 View Post
    Why would you want to avoid Rogue One? It was the best Star Wars movie since Empires. The Guns of Navarone meets Star Wars. The upcoming movie has a high bar to reach to get past R1. The space battle was right up there with RoTJ if not better even.

    By itself it would make a great series of adventures. Just don't have the PCs blown up by the super weapon at the end.
    It's a decent movie but it doesn't feel like Star Wars. The tone is completely wrong and there are numerous retcons and plot holes.

    Furthermore lot of the characters are implicitly changed around. Tarkin is no longer the coldly efficient guy who blows up Alderaan to make a statement, it's now clear that he's just a guy who likes to blow crap up for any excuse he can think of. and Leia is no longer on a fake diplomatic mission as a cover, now she's just a terrible liar.

    Plus it seems like they made a conscious decision to kill off all the major characters. Like they didn't just tone down the plot armor or something like that, a lot of the characters got killed off in ways that made neither logical nor narrative sense; like a complete diabolus ex machina.

    And what was up with that slow moving explosion when they did the low power superlaser test? I think most of the people in Jedha city could have saved themselves by walking away from the epicenter at a brisk pace. This in turn means that the film also has its own internal tonal inconsistencies, because in the middle of what's otherwise the grittiest Star Wars film to date we have a rehash of the central gag from an old episode of Invader Zim
    Last edited by Bohandas; 2017-07-25 at 08:55 PM.
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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    Quote Originally Posted by Bohandas View Post
    It's a decent movie but it doesn't feel like Star Wars. The tone is completely wrong and there are numerous retcons and plot holes.

    Furthermore lot of the characters are implicitly changed around. Tarkin is no longer the coldly efficient guy who blows up Alderaan to make a statement, it's now clear that he's just a guy who likes to blow crap up for any excuse he can think of. and Leia is no longer on a fake diplomatic mission as a cover, now she's just a terrible liar.

    Plus it seems like they made a conscious decision to kill off all the major characters. Like they didn't just tone down the plot armor or something like that, a lot of the characters got killed off in ways that made neither logical nor narrative sense; like a complete diabolus ex machina.

    And what was up with that slow moving explosion when they did the low power superlaser test? I think most of the people in Jedha city could have saved themselves by walking away from the epicenter at a brisk pace.
    "Walk for your lives!"

    Rogue 1 gets a lot of love for being "gritty" and "different", but it's really a mediocre movie that needlessly undermined much of what we were shown and told in previous cannon material (ANH, TCW series, etc) in the pursuit of being edgy for the sake of edgy.
    It is one thing to suspend your disbelief. It is another thing entirely to hang it by the neck until dead.

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    The concern is not realism in speculative fiction, but rather the sense that a setting or story could be real, fostered by internal consistency and coherence.

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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    Quote Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy View Post
    There's a tension between the "Jedi are always right about the Force and moral issues" attitude that many hardcore fans and present-day Lucas himself will push, versus the deep fallibility of the Jedi ideology actually shown in the original trilogy.
    Since the Jedi will mostly likely be PCs, we'll probably end up with the deeply fallible version

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    Ettin in the Playground
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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    I tend to agree that the strength of the original "Star Wars Feeling" was the heavy use of easy to recognize archetypes (without having the need to either point that out or subvert it) and the pure focus on the heroes journey/dramatic character development.
    Itīs obvious that the answer to anything is never "technologies" or "the Force", but always growths in the face of adversary.

    A lot of that got lost with the expanded universe. I can totally understand why some people prefer the more "gritty" approach of Thrawn or R1, but thatīs cold "Droid Logic" and a different appeal then the "Force Logic" of the first trilogy, Force Awakens or KotOR1.

    Having played the old WEG Star Wars for quite some time, it became noticeable when talk changed from character to equipment and tactics.

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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    So you want to make your game character driven. This means your characters are going to have to have back stories that actually get used in some way/shape/form at some point during the campaign. Luke's father was actually a Jedi (which explains his natural affinity with The Force) who was killed by Vader. But WAIT...Luke's father IS Vader! Dun dun DUN! Luke helps rescue Leia...who he learns is his sister (but only after they snog)! You're going to end up writing a mini soap opera.

    A good example of a character driven story, is the old BBC Sci-Fi show "Blake's 7". The BBC didn't have the huge budget that US studios had, so they had to make up for the lack of special effects, and basic practical effects, with awesome characters. If you have never watched the show, do so. Now. I'll wait.

    Back? Good. Awesome show (despite it's age) isn't it? I agree.

    The thing with Star Wars is, the main characters of every movie, have been THE main characters in the Galaxy for one reason or another. You can play your PC's as the B team, the one's who still kick arse but don't get top billing, but they are still going to have to be doing some pretty major stuff...they may not be the greatest heroes of the Galaxy, but they are going to have to be the greatest heroes of their personal, collective, universe.

    Or, you can pick a time line that doesn't mesh up with any existing movie/game and make your characters the super heroes of THAT time line. Personally, this is the method I choose. My last campaign took place in the OLD old Republic, and told the events that let up to, and included, the start of the first Sith War. I planned out the subtle yet manipulative things the Sith were up to while trying to secretly weaken the Republic before they launced an invasion, and set the players on a trail that gave them the opportunity to figure out that these seemingly disconnected incidents were all pieces of a giant, sinister puzzle.... I got down right machiavellian with it, and good times were had by all.

    Plus, if you set the game in a time before ANH, you can let everybody be a Jedi. Otherwise you either have to let ONE person be the Jedi, or nobody gets to be.

    To get that Star Wars feel, you are going to have to try to keep things as fast paced as you can. The WEG D6 version did this remarkably well. Later versions bogged down (in combat especially) and made the game drag a bit too often. Using The Force was straight forward. Use the Force, just double all of your dice codes for that round. Boom...quick and easy.

    But what ever system you choose, choose one that you can learn quickly, one that is easy to run "off the cuff", or one that you know VERY VERY well and QUICKLY.

    I'm still going to plug the WEG D6 version...not only can a GM learn it quick...but so can the players. When it first came out, our group had characters made, and were knee deep in bantha poodoo in less than 10 minutes from first sitting down at the table.
    Last edited by Mutazoia; 2017-07-26 at 05:42 AM.
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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    Quote Originally Posted by Actana View Post
    One thing that I think is a bit understated but still important in Star Wars is the feeling that the Galaxy is a large place.
    This is one thing Star Wars does not do well. The Galaxy is super small. It's a lot like the Middle Earth problem. How long does it take to get anywhere in the galaxy? A couple of minutes.

    Now, if you use Star Wars, you will need to decide quick do you A) Want to shadow the Famous or B) Want to have a more generic space fantasy. And this is a very tricky thing with something as famous as Star Wars. A lot of players won't ''feel'' like it is Star Wars unless you use the famous and iconic characters and places. If you say ''oh it's planet Zembuplly'', some people will say that is not Star Wars.

  30. - Top - End - #30
    Ogre in the Playground
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    Default Re: Capturing the Feel of Star Wars

    Use the Music, Yora!

    Get the sound tracks (from all the movies, not just E4-6), plus some other classical music that was a source of inspiration to Williams (Holtz, Stravinsky, Korngold, Dvorac).

    Write an opening crawl for each adventure, and time your delivery to match the opening crawl music - also try to time your description of the following scene to roughly match the sound track that follows on from the crawl music.

    Use this technique to create opening scenes for each session - or as many sessions as you're comfortable with. So use Stravinsky's Rite of Spring for an eerie build up to a scary battle. Use Prokoviev's Dance of the Knights for your own scary Sith Lord, and so on.

    Search your feelings, Yora - you know it to be true.

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