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anthonyfontana-blog · 4 years ago

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The Best Star Wars Stories Ever Told

The best Star Wars stories that have ever been told aren’t showing on the big screen or any streaming platform, they’re happening in roleplaying games (RPG). Whether it’s by zoom, Discord, or in-person - in places where the pandemic has been handled properly - at a Game Master’s table, the Star Wars RPG seems to have never been more popular.

What are RPGs? If you haven’t noticed by now, there’s been a huge resurgence over the last few years in the popularity of Dungeons and Dragons (DnD). In a nutshell, I like to describe RPGs as collaborative storytelling with a few rules. Often, but not always, these rules function with the use of dice, and therefore offer various odds of probability for achieving the goals you or your character want to see in the story.

I’ve been part of this DnD resurgence, playing or leading a game with a group of close friends at my local Buddhist Temple. (Yes... Real Zen practitioners who play make believe. It’s not as ironic as you’d think.) I started playing a bit after the group started, and then took over as the Dungeon Master (or DM), running the games for several years. We played almost entirely out of one campaign - Hoard of the Dragon Queen which leads into The Rise of Tiamat. This campaign was straight out of a book module you could buy at any game store or online. I highly recommend it!

The flavor that I brought to those games, and the reason it took three years to complete, was that we played once a month with a group of 15 people! (DnD was built for 3-5) My creative juices were spent developing techniques for reading the room, setting the pacing, and managing interactions and combat with triple the amount of players the game was built for. Not only that, as much as I loved Lord of the Rings and other fantasy fiction, I really knew very little about DnD lore. And other than the books we were working on, I didn’t feel compelled to learn more.

So back in December, when we wrapped up our three year campaign, we broke up the group. Half of them continued to play DnD with a new DM and the other half came over to a new game we were all interested in: the Star Wars RPG by Fantasy Flight Games. The game has been around since 2013 and has three major editions: One that focuses on the scum and villainy of scoundrels on the outer Edge of the Empire (think Mandalorian!). Another more specific to the military operations and conflict in the Age of Rebellion (think Rogue One). And the final one, all about Force users, Jedi lore, and their battle with the evil Sith.

There are many more companion sourcebooks, adventure modules, and beginner’s sets that have been published (too many for me to count). And my crew began by trying out some of that beginner material. I’d actually had the Edge Beginner set and played it with my kids several years prior. It was easy for our group to decide which to play... they all wanted to use the Force and carry lightsabers!

For the first few sessions I used the adventure modules found in the books. But after a while, my creativity kicked in and I started to homebrew (the term used to make your own stories) or develop hybrid adventures, mixing modules with my own ideas. These early gaming sessions were great! But I can't say it was perfect from the start. There's a bit of a learning curve with the system's “narrative dice”. A system I have now grown to love so much, I doubt I'll ever going back to the numbered dice system used by DnD.

To help myself learn the rules and discover the system, I turned to some really great podcasts. There are two types I’d recommend: “Actual Play” podcasts where a group of players sit around a microphone and play the game together and more radio talk show-style “how to play” or “how to GM” podcasts. Usually the first are edited enough that there isn’t much downtime included; when parts of the story and game run slower. My two favorites are Highly Suspect (foul language, not kid friendly) and Heroes of the Hydian Way (very kid friendly). Order 66 and Tales of the Hydian Way focus on making your games and stories better. They also review the various books that have been published. As does Steve Is Board on YouTube, who has an extensive backlog of reviews.

I was also delighted to find some very active Reddit and Facebook groups where the constant Q&A, idea generation, and story and rules sharing give plenty of information to help you learn and expand on the game. For more real-time interaction and questions, there’s also a Discord channel (Discord is group chat for gamers).

And through that Discord I discovered play-by-post (PBP) games. These are online, persistent games that play through one or many posts per day. So they tend to be much much slower than a real-life game that might complete an adventure in a few hours. In fact it might take a week, or multiple weeks to complete a similar sized PBP game. However, depending on the server, you might have multiple adventures going at one time.

Which finally leads me to the point of this article... If you are hungry for Star Wars content, and you can don’t want to wait until the next season of Mandalorian, the new series of High Republic books and stories, or even the next movie (who knows when that will be?!), then get online or to your local game shop and find a group.

The stories that are being told, collaboratively, one adventure at a time by GM’s all over the world, are some of the most thrilling and provocative stories you could ever imagine in the Star Wars Universe. Our weekly Jedi adventures have taken us to new planets and introduced an amazing set of characters that have deep backgrounds and complex histories. In my PBP server, my character’s story is unfolding week by week, exploring a planet on the Outer Rim of the galaxy plagued by pirate invasions and corrupt politicians.

If you’ve never tried RPGs, or are new to DnD but would rather be playing in a galaxy far far away, I highly recommend diving into the Star Wars RPG. Even after years, its community is fresh, new, and vibrant. Come and be part of the best Star Wars stories ever told!

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anthonyfontana-blog · 9 years ago

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