Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
S02E41: Rashly Retreading Role Playing in Star Wars, Part Two
31 Plays18 days ago
You don't have to wait for the next Star Wars videogame release, or hope for a rebirth of the Starcruiser, to immerse yourself in Star Wars... the table-top role playing game is right here! Join us as we continue our conversation with TTRPG professor Tad Leckman.
Join the Short for a Stormtrooper community!
Discord: https://discord.gg/a89TD3XdFX
Email: SFASpod@gmail.com
Recommended
Transcript
Star Wars RPG vs Dungeons & Dragons
00:00:00
Speaker
We're back with Tad Lechman talking about the Star Wars RPG and we're talking real quick. Aren't you a little short? Aren't you a little short? Aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper?
00:00:14
Speaker
Welcome back to Short for a Stormtrooper. As you recall from last week, we were talking with our good friend, Tad Lechman, about the Star Wars role-playing game. And specifically, when we broke off last week, we were talking about the fact that in Star Wars, unlike Dungeons and Dragons, where you roll a 20-sided die and you compare it to a number and you either succeed or fail, in Star Wars, it's not quite so black and white.
00:00:40
Speaker
So let's dive back in and pick it up right there. What I like about this, because I was just GMing with another system that uses a very similar mechanic. We might come back to that in a few minutes, but you can have the yes, woohoo, other success. Yes. Or you can have a yes, but.
00:00:57
Speaker
Like, yes, you succeed, but this bad thing happens. Or you can have a no, but. No, you fail, but something good happens. Or you can have no, no, no, no no no no utter failure.
00:01:09
Speaker
It's kind of those four dimensions. Yeah. which I'm guessing this is where you're going leads to a much richer form of storytelling that totally lines up with how star Wars is.
00:01:21
Speaker
It, it does. um And it also, did I steal your thunder? I'm sorry. No, not at all. No. In fact, it's like you're cause it's intuitive. Like, You can kind of intuit that just by discussing it, but really when you see it played out in in at the table, it's remarkable how well it works.
Mechanics and Storytelling in Star Wars RPG
00:01:40
Speaker
yeah The other thing that I think is aligned with Star Wars weirdly is even if you're playing a game like Edge of Empire that isn't very focused on the Force, the very act that you're doing at the table, you're like...
00:01:53
Speaker
interpreting the dice. It's almost like divination of runes, like, especially cause they're not numbers, they're symbols. Like it is like throwing runes to find out what your future will be, but it's rolling runes to find out what your present will be.
00:02:07
Speaker
yeah And it definitely, it does provide situations like you're saying that if you go back and look at, especially, you know, the original trilogy,
00:02:20
Speaker
like our band of heroes are failing as much as they're succeeding. They're always moving forward, yeah but they fail a lot. They wind up in garbage compactors and their ships don't work and things break.
00:02:32
Speaker
And it's, you know, they're, they're kind of succeed. They're, they're failing forward as much as there's triumphant in anything. And it definitely, this, this system kind of forces that kind of, yeah to, to be the kind of normal state of play for your characters.
00:02:49
Speaker
Yeah, and like think to me, I think of Empire Strikes Back as such good examples of where, like here's some really good success with a negative consequence. like Luke survives the lightsaber fight with Darth Vader, but loses his hand.
00:03:04
Speaker
yeah Also gets some information that kind of brings him down. but So there's that aspect. They escape Cloud City in the Millennium Falcon, but the hyperdrive isn't fixed. yeah It's these type of things that happen all of the time.
00:03:18
Speaker
Yeah. Or you've you've escaped the Death Star um in the Millennium Falcon. Oh, but there's a tracking device on your ship. There's a tracking device. Yeah. And it's funny too, Bob. I think you we could go back to each of those situations. I love the i i love the ah the example of Luke and Vader fighting in Cloud City.
00:03:36
Speaker
We could probably put together a dice pool result together. a group of dice pool dice roll results from this game that would yield that result as one of the possible interpretations.
00:03:49
Speaker
Right. If we were writing a tutorial for the game, yeah we could engineer it that way. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. Well, tell us a little bit more about your experience, like playing this game and running this
Personal Experiences and Story Arcs in Star Wars RPG
00:04:00
Speaker
game. You know, what are some of the stories you've told?
00:04:03
Speaker
Yeah, we, so, um, So the first time I ran as a player, ah my GM was actually running a a story of his own design that he had actually like thought of as a kid, as we all did.
00:04:20
Speaker
We all made our own Star Wars stories, and he had one that really stuck with him. And so he was running. So it was really interesting. It involved... um It was unusual in that there was, the force was very important. There was a woman that we were working to ah protect who was pregnant with twins. And those twins, one was kind of dark side,
00:04:46
Speaker
ah sensitive and one was light side sensitive. Oh, interesting. And so that was, I was like, you really? You thought of this as a kid? um So, but that was, and that was probably, I think we must've played for, know, maybe like four or five sessions. So it was a good introduction. It was a nice kind of story arc.
00:05:06
Speaker
um And a great introduction to that, to how that system worked and interpreting the dice. um And then after that, when I played, the next game I played was for my family. And I um had a story that i I definitely borrowed heavily from Bean Piper's ah fuzzy novels of science fiction novels, which themselves were also like, there's a lot of parallels to Return the Jedi and the Ewoks.
00:05:34
Speaker
as far as little fuzzy creatures in the forest um fighting against, in that case, corporate corporate masters.
Improvisation and Collaboration in RPGs
00:05:43
Speaker
um But it was, you know, ship crashes on a forest planet and you have to make your way...
00:05:52
Speaker
ah to eventually to, an Imperial base and kind of liberate it to help the locals stopping along the way at like a local, um, uh, like there's a lot of, uh, influence from like California 49ers mining,
00:06:09
Speaker
As well. um So that was that was fun. it was only a couple sessions. And it was it was fun to run it for the first time and also introduce other folks to like, okay.
00:06:23
Speaker
So yeah let's start by talking about these weird dice. But it goes away like once. It really only takes a few minutes. rounds of kind of interpreting together before it becomes second nature and you're like okay these these get these cancel each other out and now we can talk about what's left it is definitely though as i found that first time running it as a game master like you have to be on your feet like it is it is definitely if you are an improvisational game master and uh are not completely reliant of like
00:06:58
Speaker
pre-prepared material. You've got box tests for every. Yeah, exactly. You will do better if, if improv, if you're cool with improv, and because it's all thinking on your feet. I do like that. You can lean on the players to say like, well, what, what do you think the complication? Like you, you can kind of collaborate with them on it, but you know, most of the time it's, you just have figured out like what is okay, shoot.
00:07:20
Speaker
Now what bad could happen? So making use of your environment a lot. Yeah, that's that's interesting. And I know for me, um because again, on the verge of this turning into an RPG podcast, which is not, is um we got the chance to play Daggerheart at Gen Con, which is a successor to Dungeons and and Dragons. Let's just put it that way.
00:07:43
Speaker
yeah And really enjoyed it. And now the the game that I run with a couple of friends and my boys, we're going to convert over from D&D to Daggerheart. Um, yeah we just decided that last night and planned our session zero. So we're going to get going on that. Oh, great.
00:07:58
Speaker
But, and, and I did with some other friends, i I ran it for the first time on Saturday, a dagger heart adventure and, it's It's got that vibe to it. It's got that improvisational vibe.
00:08:09
Speaker
But what I really like about that as a game master is it does feel like you are you're playing as well. You get to yeah enjoy some of that, you know, playing the characters a little bit more and than you do from especially running a pre-canned adventure.
Surprise and Immersion in RPGs
00:08:26
Speaker
Yeah. I like that. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. It's a thing that i've I feel like is a sign of my maturity as a game master in the past 10 years, which is realizing, like you just said, that part of the fun for everybody at the table is being surprised by things that happen.
00:08:44
Speaker
yeah But that includes you as the game master. yeah like It is fun to be surprised. And the more that that game that you're playing supports it, the better a time i have anyway.
00:08:57
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I see, um you know, videos pop up on my YouTube feed about like, should dungeon masters use the yes and concept from improv?
00:09:08
Speaker
And, you know, everybody's got their own think piece about this, but this is what we're saying. Like if you're going in with an attitude of um I'm going to take whatever happens on the table as fact and just roll with it and keep building, which you do when you're doing improv, it just is a lot more fun for for everybody, which actually it leads me to Does playing this Star Wars role-playing game feel like Star Wars? You're one of the few people whose opinion on that I trust. you know You see a lot of people on the internet like, this doesn't feel like Star Wars. I'm like, dude, you're wrong, or vice versa. you know so Does it feel like Star Wars?
00:09:43
Speaker
It does. And that's I think that's why I keep coming back to it, and it's why I've felt comfortable using this game to bring... you know friends that I know that also like, it's important for them to, if we're going to play a star Wars game, it should feel like a star Wars
Capturing the Essence of Star Wars in RPGs
00:10:00
Speaker
game.
00:10:00
Speaker
Yeah. Uh, the, the last game I played, I told you a little bit about, which is, um, for For the listeners, I live in Central California in the Redwoods. like I literally live surrounded by Redwoods. So I live on Endor, effectively.
00:10:17
Speaker
And so so we every summer, we have a summer game that we play, usually outside at um on our property. And I wanted to, last last time we played, last year when we played, I wanted to...
00:10:30
Speaker
um introduce everybody to the Star Wars role-playing game and wanted to take advantage of our location. And so I wrote a framework for a scenario where basically all of the players were Ewoks and some folks from their village had been ah kidnapped by an Imperial, basically the front line of Imperials who were coming to assess the the ah suitability of Endor's movement Moon Vendor to be the location for Death Star 2.
00:11:03
Speaker
right And part of that was assessing the locals. And so it was basically a prison break. They had to go invade the Imperial camp and release there their comrades.
00:11:14
Speaker
And it worked great. so it like even Even with, you know, they had spears and bows and arrows and one of them had a hang glider and we, but we were able to do something that really felt like that's not an uncommon thing in Star Wars to have to infiltrate.
00:11:33
Speaker
um But without the ability to, you know, put on storm trooper armor because you're three feet tall. Yeah. Right. you could, it just might not be that effective, but it definitely like we, we had plenty of moments that were like pure. There was
Engaging Scenarios and Immersion Techniques
00:11:48
Speaker
a, um, uh, I had one of the boar bear creatures from this one of the Ewok adventures that they had also captured and they let it loose and it attacked all the stormtroopers and they used it as a as a mechanism for escape. And i did I just put it there. I did not know what they were going to do with it. And they're like, we're going let it go. Like, great. beautiful
00:12:11
Speaker
We rolled all the dice. We saw what happened and it it did what what I hoped it would do. um And it definitely, I think that the the system... supported that in a way that just saying like, oh yeah, no, it didn't work is not as satisfying.
Getting Started with RPGs
00:12:28
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that's great. That's great. That sounds like so much fun. Well, hey, as we are are running to a close here, how would you suggest that people who want to explore this, how would they get into it?
00:12:42
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good, you know so- is It's a little hard. Like if if you want to jump into D&D, that's yeah actually not too hard. They just came out with a really nice starter set. You can grab a couple of ones and you can figure it out. little bit harder with Star Wars. What would you do?
00:12:53
Speaker
Well, we are in a golden age of starter sets for tabletop role-playing games. And there actually is- be there's a starter set for each of the flavors of flavors. Yeah. Yeah. So there's an edge of empire box set and age of rebel or edge of empire, age of rebellion, and a force and destiny box sets.
00:13:10
Speaker
And they're great. They've got one set of dice for you. They've got an adventure with lots more detail, including some advice for new GMs about like, okay, if, If things go south, here's a way that you can have like yeah the action continue. So it's actually like we're at, we're at a place that new, you mentioned the new Dungeons and Dragons starter set. Like yeah it's supposedly very, very good it based on just getting feedback from all the previous ones that have happened. And was, seems clear that somebody um ah fantasy flight slash edge studio understood how to make a good box. x Cause I got the first edge of empire box set and it's quite good.
00:13:49
Speaker
yeah So that's an easy way. And they assume, you know, nothing about role-playing games. Yep. So probably just pick up the starter set and a couple of friends and, yeah ah you know, minimum of a couple of friends, probably no more than five friends and ah decide who's going to be the game master. And then the starter set will get you started from there.
00:14:08
Speaker
And I think this may sound obvious, but I think it's worth saying find some friends who are already super into star Wars. Because you don't want to have to... likes What's a nice advantage to this is unlike some other games that you have to also simultaneously absorb like a new world and new physics and a magic system. Like, we know we know how this works.
00:14:31
Speaker
Like, you can jump right in and you don't have to explain everything. Like, if there's... Bounty hunters, you know what that means. If there's smuggling going on, you know what that means.
Conclusion and Future Exploration
00:14:40
Speaker
ah If you see Rodians, you know what those are.
00:14:43
Speaker
It's, it's well, all right. Most people might not know. Yeah. Maybe not everyone knows who those, but it's like the guy that Han shot in the cantina or he shot him. It's Greedo. Yes. Great. yes great As always, a big thank you to Tad Lechman for joining us. His insights are great.
00:15:01
Speaker
And if you're interested in Star Wars role-playing game or Daggerheart or Dungeons & Dragons or anything like that, let me know. We'd be happy to talk more about it. And I don't know, maybe we would even play a Star Wars RPG and record it and see if that's something you would listen to.
00:15:17
Speaker
So anyway, thanks again for joining us. I'm not going go through the whole shutdown thing. Just happy you're here. May the force be with you. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye. Who's that mindless choice to do? Podcast, hope you see them through.
00:15:29
Speaker
Star Wars is your favorite in it. Let's chat for 15 minutes. Aren't you a little short? Aren't you a little short? Aren't you a little short for a sporn trooper?
00:15:41
Speaker
Aren't you a little short for a slur?