Making Star Wars suck

[Balbinus]

Or, why simulationism is sometimes an error.

Ok, Star Wars is a highly popular universe for gaming.  The Star Wars game is a big seller for WotC.  I'm willing to bet though that a lot of SW games don't feel much like SW in actual play.

Why do I say that?  Simple, simulating the movies ain't SW.  What makes the SW films fun, gripping?  Is it the sets, the aliens, the blasters?  Sure, that stuff's all cool but the stories are the real kicker here.  Epic tales of local boys made good, great villains brought low, mercenary heroes redeemeed and traitors brought to justice.

Story.

SW plots are about the people who matter.  The films don't show you what it's like to be a guy living in the Empire.  They show you the most important people in the galaxy getting it on and deciding the fate of worlds, while experiencing great passions.  The technology is backdrop, people are what matters.

So, SW games typically start out with a bunch of low powered adventurers wandering around the SW universe having adventures.  Good simulationist, sometimes gamist stuff.  But, not SW at all IMO.

Are the characters the most important people in the galaxy?  Willl their decisions ultimately affect the fate of worlds?  Can they die only if it matters, not to a wandering stormtrooper?  Are their passions the stuff of great opera?

If not, it's not SW.  It won't feel like SW I suspect.  Because SW is fundamentally narrativist.  Story first and story now.  It just isn't a simulationist universe.  If you tie it down with sim concerns, how far away is this system, how much damage does a blaster actually do, you lose the point.

In other words, I'm suggesting that some settings and genres only make sense with certain play styles.  SW I think is one of them.  It needs Paladin or the Pool, not d20 or d6.


It's sometimes asked where the limits of simulation are, if you simulate an inherently narrativistic genre.  Is Feng Shui a narrativist game, gamist or simulationist?

It simulates a genre, but it's a narrativist game because the concerns of that genre are fundamentally narrativist concerns.

Thoughts?

[xiombarg]

Thoughts?

Well, on the "Star Wars should be Narrativist" tip, you have checked out Paladin, right?

[Balbinus]

I cite it in my post as an example of the kind of game which is right for SW.  Do you see Paladin as sim?

[xiombarg]

I cite it in my post as an example of the kind of game which is right for SW.  Do you see Paladin as sim?

Whoops, I missed that.

Okay, well, to salvage my post, you ask a good question. I mean, one of the things that geeked me about Paladin was the Dark Animus mechanics worked more like I imagine the Dark Side SHOULD work in the Star Wars universe. Isn't that Sim? Sure, focused Sim, but arguably Sim.

[Mike Holmes]

I think that Paladin is decidedly Narrativist. Central to the game is the question of good and evil. Very simple narrativist stuff that.

That said, I see no reason why you couldn't Sim "Story" Star Wars. It would take a system more like Feng Shui, and even more rules to encourage the sort of large scale action that makes these sorts of stories tick. Lots of help for the GM.

Again, eveyone assumes that Sim has to be about Simulating the "reality" of the setting. Not so. We can Simulate the "pathos" of the fictional universe just as well, and get better results.

OTOH, there is no reason why you can't just go Narrativist as well. That certainly works, too. What I agree with, and I think Max is really pointing out, is that you can't do Sim - Exploration of Setting (much less System) in SW. Oh, you can actually play this if you want, but it will not feel much like the movies.

You have to focus on Exploration of Character and Color. Do this, and you'll have a Sim SW that will give you some sense of the movies, I think.

Mike

[contracycle]

Even focus on colour is risky IMO, on much the same principle that a few simple lies are better than a huge mass of complicated lies - its much easier to keep your story straight.  I have tried to GM star wars in a conventional sim style manner and Balbinus is right, it sucks.  I totally agree that you need something radically different than the sim approach to mechanics which seeks to objectify the world.

[Marco]

I think it's worse than that--far worse.

If you play at the time of the movies then you either ignore the movies or you're bound to a tightly defined meta-plot (who kills Vader? Luke kill's vader. Who blows up the second Death Star? Han blows up the second death star).

Even if you play before or after the movies, but that's getting harder and harder to do too (what with all the books and second trilogy and stuff).  You can be a bit-character (the Kyle ... Katarn(?) character from the PC games--the guy who helped steal the death star plans). You *can't* be an important person.

Thirdly, as Fang pointed out, the movies *themselves* aren't consistent--clearly cinematic license is taken often. While a game system can model that, as Ron has pointed out, some kind of consistency is needed for any mode of gaming and if a kid watching a movie can point out inconsistencies in the action how's that going to sit with a game-plot?

However, fourth, and maybe worst, the movies are action-adventure fare. Sure, there's a plot about good and evil ... about reconciliation with the father and redemption and all that--but that isn't what made the Star Wars movies huge--it was artistic (visual) vision and good story-telling that revolved around tense action scenes.

If you understand that Luke (or the PC's) have plot-immunity then the chasam scene just isn't going to work for you.

-Marco
[Aside: If it's leveling and wandering around you don't like, consider that Luke starts low and levels up--but there's nothing starting the characters at high level and going from there ... and while the stories are definitely stories, the kind of plot-immunity you describe is, IMO, hard to model satisfyingly in an RPG that relies on daring action as one of its tropes.]

[Mike Holmes]

I agree with Marco on what the worst problems are with trying to model SW. Not surpising, as I've long said that I feel that the problems of trying to deal with a liscenced world are not worth the hassle. You can llok at it from this perspective? What is it that playing in the SW universe gets you that you can't get from playing Traveller (which was heavily inspired by SW)?

Some will claim that it's a familarity with the world. I'd ay that this really only counts from a visual POV, however. That is, a single RPG book will have more setting information in it in terms of facts than all five of the movies have. Sure some few have read the novels, but as Marco points out, that only exacerbates other problems then. IOW, the biggest strength of the liscenced property is also its biggest failing.

I acceed that the visualization thing itself, the compelling nature of beinga able to see in your mind what the action looks like, is very much a strength of the licensed products. But it's a lure that does not pay off in the end. What I find happens is that play constantly refers back to what is common in the material. Thus, every troop of the Empire will be a stock StormTrooper, etfc. Which gives the whole a feeling of artificiality. As soon as you go off the beaten path to correct this feeling, then you risk violating the aesthetic of the game ("What? There are no ringworlds in Starwars!"), and lose the benefits of the visualization anyhow.

Why not get creative, and play in a universe where you can feel free to add or subtract what you like, and are not hampered by the mondo meta-plot? I suggest that if a universe like Traveller does not feel as inspiring to you as SW, that you really aren't trying. At worst one can always just make up a world of their own. Thus getting exactly the feel they want. In the end any solution is better than the liscenced product solution, IMO.

Mike

[Clinton R. Nixon]

We had a thread about licensed games once that I wish I could find. Basically, it talked about approaching a licensed game with an "understory" - that is, a smaller, more personal story that was not related to the main action of the license (be it story or movie or whatever), but that might perhaps intersect with it.

I think this works pretty well. My experience actually is with Star Wars - one of the best games I've ever been in was a Star Wars (WEG version) game, long before I was ever even on Gaming Outpost. One other player and I played Jedi in a game set right before "A New Hope." The Empire had hunted down almost all the Jedi and we were on the run from the Emperor's Dark Jedi.

The GM was one of these Star Wars freak-people. (This isn't derogatory.) He knew everything and anything there was to know about Star Wars, which kept the setting feeling very much like the movies, even intersecting with some of the same locations. However, our story didn't ever intersect with the Star Wars canon, besides some run-ins with Dark Jedi from some of the Lucas tie-in stuff, like books and computer games.

It worked great - we had that sense of familiarity with the setting, and got to do "cool Star Wars stuff," but it never felt like we were screwing with the Star Wars story.

As an aside, that game totally inspired Paladin. I played an ex-Imperial assassin turned Jedi. (I know - what a fucking twink. Anyway.) The Empire had taken my family hostage to make me be an assassin, and after a few years of it, I'd rescued them and fought against the Empire as a Jedi. The root of the character, though, was that he part of the Rebellion, and anti-Empire, not rooted in the Light, and anti-Dark Side, like most Jedi. The other character was the opposite - all about the Light Side in all things. As the game progressed, we took different routes, and the other character counseled mine often about the dangers of the Dark Side.

In the end, my character used all his Dark power to overthrow the head Dark Jedi besides Palpatine. Of course, then I wanted to take his place, and the other character had to put down my character like a rabid dog. It was a great exploration of morality between the two characters, and was what I really wanted to do with Paladin.