Running great Star Wars campaigns

[Solaris]

One of my biggest problems is coming up with plotlines and adventure hooks. Not surprisingly, one of my best Star Wars campaigns was essentially a sandbox campaign where I set the players loose to do what they wanted in the Galaxy. Good times were had by all, except for the unfortunately-potable Rodians.

But my main point is that I see no real value in having one type of blaster do +1 to damage or another type of blaster having +10% to maximum range. A blaster is a blaster, it shots things dead when they are hit. If you have mechanical differences between pieces of equipment, make them big and significant differences. I think having "blaster pistol" and "blaster rifle" is sufficiently granular. No need to let players pick from a list of 20 different customizable blaster pistols. It won't really change how they will behave in fight scenes and plan their tactics, but its a break on the pacing.

There's no need for it, sure, but it offers a way for a player wanting to play a Hollywood scientist to contribute without being another soldier.
While looting rarely sees a lot of play in my Star Wars games (accomplished mainly by making it difficult to sell off loot and informing the players that I'd rather they didn't loot every stormtrooper they killed), the same is not true of equipment. Han Solo's blaster may not have a lot of screen time spent on it, but it's iconic of the character. Leia's blaster, same to a lesser extent. I see no reason to deny players the same thing - especially when we're dealing with a medium that makes it even easier to manage than the screen. We don't need to spend screen time on shopping and modifying characters' gear (outside of plotlines and quests - one of my favorites is Jedi characters questing for crystals), but the variety of options does add to the setting.

It's amazing. Everything you just said was wrong.

None of these limitations apply to star wars games that simulate the movies.

That's one of my new favorite Star Wars lines.

[Yora]

Story is indeed a bit of a challenge when you want to make it both about the players and about big events. In the common kinds of adventure design, these two are somewhat in opposition to each other. To get both these things, I think you need to at least partially make things up as you go, which is something I usually don't like to do when running a game.
When the players are driving the action, you can't be working with a fixed script. Which means you don't know what will happen in advance. But if you want to make it a campaign in which the players are important and central characters in big events, then a straight sandbox is probably not going to achieve that. What could work, and what I want to try out next time, is to prepare some main villains who have their own plans that they are working on during the campaign. And then during the campaign you make it so that their paths are crossing with the players' multiple times until the players take the initiative to go against them.
Which obviously is something that requires some really careful adjustments depending on how each session plays out. If the players really don't want to engage with a villain, trying to force it won't be going well. It will be frustrating for the players and soon smell like bad railroading, which quite quickly it can become to be. But this might be mitigated by having not just one potential main villain prepared at the start, but three or maybe four. Then you can alternate between clashes with each of them until eventually the players decide to take on of them. And then you just can have the others quietly fade into the background as the campaign becomes about the conflict the players have chosen to engage with.

[Pleh]

Story is indeed a bit of a challenge when you want to make it both about the players and about big events. In the common kinds of adventure design, these two are somewhat in opposition to each other. To get both these things, I think you need to at least partially make things up as you go, which is something I usually don't like to do when running a game.
When the players are driving the action, you can't be working with a fixed script. Which means you don't know what will happen in advance. But if you want to make it a campaign in which the players are important and central characters in big events, then a straight sandbox is probably not going to achieve that.

The key for me is less about "big events vs sandbox" and more about me (as DM) doing the groundwork to understand the world and its events well enough to actively adapt to changes the players make.

The difference between "big events" and "sandbox" (as you're using them) seems to be only whether the DM or the players are setting up the moving parts of the game. Either can work fine, but both have to be intimately understood to accurately interpret changes on the fly.

So your ideas about a villain driven campaign is a good one. I just advise that you do a lot of solo playtesting during prep time. That is to say, when creating and detailing the encounters and NPCs, pause frequently to place yourself in the players' shoes and imagine what kind of solutions you might come up with. Even after you know your preferred solution, consider the other ideas you had that you might have not chosen to pursue. Then take more time to brainstorm solutions that didn't quickly occur to you ("if I ignore the solutions I've come up with so far, what else can I think up?")

With some advanced prep on this level, it should start to help you understand the approximate number of different directions each branching path can take and how many of them will ultimately have substantial changes to the story.

[Corsair14]

We had a couple recurring villains in our 4 year continuous campaign. Other than that only really major events in the campaign were planned in advance by each DM. The four of us randomly DM'd and each had his long term plan for where we wanted our part of the story to go. So each time we played we would follow along that arc. Sounds confusing but it worked really well. We did everything from survival in a jungle Naked and afraid style to impersonating a Grand Admiral and temporarily taking command of an Imperial fleet. We never actually ended the campaign and when one of our guys married a prominent Disney SW writer, all the characters have made appearances in her books as bit roles...and they all died ingloriously, finally after 23 years :P

Familiarity with the SW universe and a big imagination is really all that's needed to run a player driven campaign. The D6 system makes it stupidly easy and fluid to run along with the massive amount of sourcebooks out there. Come up with some cool places, make some memorable characters and be sure not to let them get killed until you are ready. You can have cool ships too but we found they were kind of pointless in our campaign since we lost them so often and spent half our time getting out of trouble on other peoples ships.

[Yora]

That is to say, when creating and detailing the encounters and NPCs, pause frequently to place yourself in the players' shoes and imagine what kind of solutions you might come up with. Even after you know your preferred solution, consider the other ideas you had that you might have not chosen to pursue. Then take more time to brainstorm solutions that didn't quickly occur to you ("if I ignore the solutions I've come up with so far, what else can I think up?")

One thing that sets Star Wars apart from other fantasy settings is that everyone as radio. This allows you to have enemy reinforcements arrive at pretty much any time. A new group of stormtroopers comes around the corner or the Star Destroyer launches another flight of Tie Fighters. If an encounter doesn't feel sufficiently dramatic enough, you can always drop in more enemies as needed.
Though my personal hunch is to only use it to make the players appear more awesome. Making them face an unlimited number of enemies because you want them to get a hint and give up their attempt to storm a place wouldn't be fun for anyone and they might quickly catch on to the railroading.

Also: Relevant link is relevant.

[Pleh]

One thing that sets Star Wars apart from other fantasy settings is that everyone as radio. This allows you to have enemy reinforcements arrive at pretty much any time. A new group of stormtroopers comes around the corner or the Star Destroyer launches another flight of Tie Fighters. If an encounter doesn't feel sufficiently dramatic enough, you can always drop in more enemies as needed.
Though my personal hunch is to only use it to make the players appear more awesome. Making them face an unlimited number of enemies because you want them to get a hint and give up their attempt to storm a place wouldn't be fun for anyone and they might quickly catch on to the railroading.

Also: Relevant link is relevant.

Actually, that's another neat feature of star wars. There are radio jammers, so everyone has radio until someone starts scrambling it. There's no reason to scramble radio until you're about to strike. Reaching out to talk to someone and finding the lines scrambled is a great way to tip the players off that they are about to be attacked.

It's more or less the same with starship shields. They drain a lot of power, so no one runs around with their guard always up. Only maximum security space stations typically bother with permanent shields. So when you meet another ship in space and they have their shields up, you know they expect an attack.

[Yora]

What would you say are iconic things in Star Wars that every GM should try to somehow get into a campaign at the very least once, and if possible every other adventure?

Somehow the first thing that comes to my mind is Sneaking around in Industrial Facilities. Like rescuing Leia from the Death Star (though technically not industrial), Luke sneaking around Cloud City, Obi-Wan sneaking around on Geonosis, and half of all levels in the Jedi Knight series.

More obvious one is Fighting Large Numbers of Stormtroopers. Bonus points for doing it during a heroic escape.

And its little brother: Getting chased by Tie Fighters. If you have a ship with sufficient guns to give most players something useful to do.

[Pleh]

What would you say are iconic things in Star Wars that every GM should try to somehow get into a campaign at the very least once, and if possible every other adventure?

Somehow the first thing that comes to my mind is Sneaking around in Industrial Facilities. Like rescuing Leia from the Death Star (though technically not industrial), Luke sneaking around Cloud City, Obi-Wan sneaking around on Geonosis, and half of all levels in the Jedi Knight series.

More obvious one is Fighting Large Numbers of Stormtroopers. Bonus points for doing it during a heroic escape.

And its little brother: Getting chased by Tie Fighters. If you have a ship with sufficient guns to give most players something useful to do.

Having a bad feeling about this

Escape to Hyperspace

A Shady Cantina

Large Alien Predatory Garbage Disposals

Fluent Bilingual Conversations

Spontaneous Gunfights that surprise both sides

[ProphetSword]

What would you say are iconic things in Star Wars that every GM should try to somehow get into a campaign at the very least once, and if possible every other adventure?

Somehow the first thing that comes to my mind is Sneaking around in Industrial Facilities. Like rescuing Leia from the Death Star (though technically not industrial), Luke sneaking around Cloud City, Obi-Wan sneaking around on Geonosis, and half of all levels in the Jedi Knight series.

More obvious one is Fighting Large Numbers of Stormtroopers. Bonus points for doing it during a heroic escape.

And its little brother: Getting chased by Tie Fighters. If you have a ship with sufficient guns to give most players something useful to do.

Even though you already mentioned some of these, here is a list of rules I have for whenever I run STAR WARS campaigns (going from memory, since I'm at work while typing this):

Chase Scenes:
The heroes are being chased by something (Star Destroyer, AT-AT, Speeder Bikes, etc) or are chasing something (a fleeing TIE Fighter, a spy running through a marketplace, etc). It's especially good to find a way for every character to be involved in the chase and to make it take place in an exotic location (through deep desert canyons at high speed, an asteroid field or even the halls of a massive space station).

Blaster Fights:
Whether the heroes are battling it out with enemy droids, space pirates or Imperial agents, it's essential that some blasters become involved at some point in the game to properly capture the STAR WARS feel. Shooting things is fun.

Space Battles:
Like blaster fights, STAR WARS will need ship-to-ship combat. Whether it's small fighters (TIE Fighters vs a squad of A-Wings) or large capital ships (Imperial Star Destroyer vs Rebel Blockade Runner), there's a lot of excitement to be had when you include them.

Lightsabers and The Force:
While you can do stories without these two things, it's nice to have something in a campaign that touches on these if possible. They are a big part of STAR WARS and they help with the atmosphere. Whether you've got a story about Jedi vs Sith or just a section of a campaign where heroes encounter someone wise with the Force, it does a lot to make the game feel like it belongs in the universe.

Large Scope Danger:
Stormtroopers are fun. But, what's even more fun is dodging fire from an AT-AT, taking on a Star Destroyer, or blowing up a huge Imperial facility. Make the targets big and the danger even bigger and players will have a ton of fun. If your garrison should have 20 Stormtroopers, stock it with 60 instead and throw in a squadron of TIE Fighters just for kicks.

Fast Pace:
STAR WARS shouldn't crawl. Keep things moving. The faster you can make things move, the better. Get players to make faster decisions and not worry too much about being tactical. ("Uh, we had a slight weapons malfunction, but uh... everything's perfectly all right now. We're fine. We're all fine here now, thank you. How are you?")

Have fun:
Best rule of all.

[Yora]

Spontaneous Gunfights that surprise both sides

Somehow I did not think of this, but it's definitly true.

[Yora]

So I got this idea to start a new campaign.

First I read out the opening crawl. Then I describe the establishing shot in space. And then I tell the players to make characters that are on the ship that has come into view.

I think that's actually much more interesting than having the players create characters first and then making the proper introduction of the adventure. Though it most certainly will help if you're running a system where characters can be created in 10 to 20 minutes and it's not an hour or two before the first scene can begin.

With Star Wars d6, I think you can actually have the players start with only their attributes and not yet bothering with the individual skills. This makes them substantially weaker but the characters are ready to play and you can have them assign their skills at the end of the first session after their characters have already done some things and are no longer blank slates. Or a bit more experimental, allow them to assign their skill points at any time during the first session. If something needs fixing and a player decides that he want's to be the guy who fixes it, he can put some of his skill points into the right skill just there and then. Though I think this might make things perhaps more complicated than less for first time players.

[ProphetSword]

You could do what I did. Download a program that allows you to create a realistic looking Star Wars opening crawl, complete with actual Star Wars music, and then show it to the players each session as the game begins. I updated it every session.

Here’s an example someone else did...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=05mzZH1nm5c

[Yora]

That's always a fun option to do, but I think it probably works best when sending a link of it to the players as a kind of trailer than trying to somehow show it at the table.

I was thinking more about the idea of treating individual adventures as episodes, which means each should conclude with some kind of big final confrontation. Which is actually somewhat different from what is usually seen in ongoing campaigns. But I actually really like having big decisive showdowns every four to six sessions instead of building up to the big finale over months or years.
It does however raise the question of how to deal with villains. In the movies, the great villains actually do a great deal of their awesome villainous stuff out of sight of the heroes. I've heard that some people like to narrate cutscenes during campaigns, but that's something I always found to be very odd to imagine. I feel that players should experience the campaign from the eyes of their characters, not as outside spectators.

To build up great villains, I think players have to spend several scenes with them spanning over multiple sessions so their presence has time to really settle in. Narrow escapes are a big staple of Star Wars, so that certainly works in our favor. While it's not terribly menacing, this also goes for the villains. If they are getting in a fight with the heroes and get beaten, I think it wouldn't feel out of place to have them make an escape. But that raises the faint shadows of railroad tracks, which in all fairness, this totally is. But perhaps this could be mitigated by establishing some villains as people who avoid fighting in general and always make their escape very quickly when things aren't completely in their favor. I think in that case players might only hate that villain but not dislike dealing with him. But when you have a big bad juggernaut, having him run away doesn't feel right. I guess when you can't think of any good reasons why such a villain would survive a losing fight, then have him not survive that fight. If he's going down easier and earlier than you expected, then so be it. But I wonder if there's any good ways to get more use out of such villains than that.

One option that I occasionally see in movies and videogames is to have something suddenly separate the heroes from the villains so that they no longer can continue their fight. But I don't know if that's something that would go down well in a campaign. Maybe if it happens sufficiently early in a fight when the players still have doubt if they can win, but I think it would really suck once the players start believing that they got this one in the bag.

[ProphetSword]

It’s not hard to show at the table if you have a tablet or phone. Doesn’t require a full size movie screen.

[Yora]

Come up with some cool places, make some memorable characters and be sure not to let them get killed until you are ready. You can have cool ships too but we found they were kind of pointless in our campaign since we lost them so often and spent half our time getting out of trouble on other peoples ships.

Chase Scenes:
The heroes are being chased by something (Star Destroyer, AT-AT, Speeder Bikes, etc) or are chasing something (a fleeing TIE Fighter, a spy running through a marketplace, etc). It's especially good to find a way for every character to be involved in the chase and to make it take place in an exotic location (through deep desert canyons at high speed, an asteroid field or even the halls of a massive space station).

Space Battles:
Like blaster fights, STAR WARS will need ship-to-ship combat. Whether it's small fighters (TIE Fighters vs a squad of A-Wings) or large capital ships (Imperial Star Destroyer vs Rebel Blockade Runner), there's a lot of excitement to be had when you include them.

One neat thing about vehicle chases and space battles is that you have a great cost for defeat that doesn't automatically kill the PCs. If you can get the players to become attached to a ship, then the threat of the ship getting destroyed could be a great way to create tension in a fight.

Spoiler

Show

Alternatively, you can have the ship getting disabled and pulled in. Then after the players have escaped somehow, they will have to come up with plans to get the ship back or get a new one.
I think about starting my campaign with the party crashing their ship on a wilderness planet and their first task is to somehow get a new ship. Of course they don't have money to buy one, because buying one would be boring. And doesn't create any attachment to the new ship.

As someone mentioned earlier, letting the players make cool upgrades to the ship probably increases their attachment even more. What might also work is to have villains directly taunt the players by announcing to take or destroy their ship. Nothing makes you more clingy of something than knowing a jerk wants to take it away from you.

With chases on foot, failure doesn't have to mean death either. If the dramatic tension of a scene requires it, maybe one PC gets killed, but getting taken prisoner is something Star Wars heroes do. As Harrison Ford said in another role: "This happens to me all the time." And then you can have wacky escape hijinks. If they are under time pressure, you instantly get extra tension.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

It does however raise the question of how to deal with villains. In the movies, the great villains actually do a great deal of their awesome villainous stuff out of sight of the heroes. I've heard that some people like to narrate cutscenes during campaigns, but that's something I always found to be very odd to imagine. I feel that players should experience the campaign from the eyes of their characters, not as outside spectators.

One tactic I've used to good effect in previous games, which gives you a different perspective from the PCs but avoids the omniscient-third-person effect of cutscenes, is to cut away from the PCs and have the party play a group of what would normally be background characters, and have the outcome affect the party afterwards. For instance, the last Star Wars campaign I ran saw the party playing a Wraith Squadron-style group of New Republic pilot-commandos, and at a certain point they were getting a bit jaded; stormtroopers weren't a threat individually and they were good at avoiding large groups of them, they could outfly non-heroic TIE Fighters easily, and so on. So after one session when they were tasked with stopping Imperial forces from launching an assault on New Republic shipyards but let a handful of Star Destroyers escape, at the start of the next session I handed out stat blocks for engineers, security guards, and maintenance techs and said "You're workers on the bridge of a nearly-complete star cruiser at the Mon Calamari shipyards. Suddenly, a squadron of Star Destroyers drops out of hyperspace nearby, and you see boarding shuttles headed for your ship. All the other employees are looking to you for guidance. What do you do?"

The party had to run around to bring systems online, encourage panicking workers, set traps to delay boarding parties, and the like, and I really played up how the stormtroopers were incredibly scary and deadly and the Imperial forces seemed unstoppable. They managed to hold off the attack long enough for the main party's forces to jump in, and they got to roleplay being relieved that the New Republic Navy was coming to save them before getting back to their PCs and saving the day, and that gave the party some perspective and made them respect rank-and-file Imperial troops again.

So you could showcase the villain that way. Have the players play Rebel soldiers who get captured for interrogation by Moff Disra, a merchant crew that gets extorted by minions of Zorba The Hutt, inhabitants of a city that gets invaded and conquered by Warlord Zsinj, and so on. Or even have them play Imperials under Vader who let the heroes escape and get Force-choked for their failure, thugs working for Black Sun who get hung out to dry by their vigo as part of a larger plot, or the like if your players like to play morally-dubious characters every so often or just want to ham up the "bumbling stormtrooper" or "backstabbing mercenary" tropes. They do their thing, the main villain(s) make an appearance, and the party can see the villains be awesome firsthand and perhaps learn about their plans from the villain monologue, the questions asked during interrogations, which items are taken from the characters' ship, and the like.

[Yora]

Something I often wondered about but have not tried yet is to have villains seem threatening by showing other NPCs being afraid of them and having their minions do evil stuff on their orders, which the players then experience first hand. Could get a bit telly instead of showy if NPCs insist that the villain is super terrible but the players don't see anything that makes them feel concerned.

[PastorofMuppets]

Don’t forget betrayal is a big part of the Star Wars universe; Palpatines manipulations, Lando turning in Han and friends, the trade federation intro to episode one, the creation of Jar Jar and both the creation and redemption of Darth Vader.

I had a game running a while back where the players ended up discovering ( a little sooner than I anticipated) that their resident Jedi expert was actually trying to turn them in to the emperors purge forces. (A game set a little past the midway point between trilogies during the closing of the Imperial Iron Fist. They got to help set up the Rebellion by bringing together the various empire resistance groups.)

They pieced together that the guy was an actual Jedi that survived Order 66 while on an archeological expedition. He gave into despair and just hid in the outer rim until he met the force sensitive players when he became sure they were going to be caught anyway( they were not exactly a low key group), and figured he could at least know when it would happen so he could escape at the right time.

The funny thing is I was doing some bravery tests for him during those sessions. If they had ever realized he was a force user too they might have saved him from his fears, but with the messy trails they kept leaving behind his fear turned into the dark side.

[Rakaydos]

Clone Wars has a slightly different feel than the mainline movies.

Clone Wars: Traitor of Arda Base

Newsreel anouncer:
Militia Training base on Arda I… ATTACKED! Jedi Master RAHM KOTA, wounded! Survivors are rallying on Jagomir, as Padawon Quinn brings evidence to the temple that the militia may have a TRAITOR among them…

Opening: Jedi temple landing pad on Corusant. Master Plo Koon accompanies the Padawon Quinn toward the consular class cruiser, as Jedi Knight Kehel Gufrai, Padawon Airkann, and Captian Scholf disembark.

The Jedi Master opens the discussion. “Thank you for coming. I apologize for the terse summons, but this is a matter the Chancellor would prefer kept quiet. I’m sure you have questions. Please, come with me.” The Master turns back toward the temple, inviting you to talk as you follow.