Day Four: Star Wars, The Roleplaying Game

Dun dun dun daaah... daaah... dadada DAAAA da!  

It's Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game! I love this game. It's simple and action-packed and does a great job of simulating the high action of the originals. Characters have six statistics, each rated by how many D6s you roll when you use it, and you can use even more dice when you use a skill. If you really want to succeed, you can spend a Force Point to double your dice, and you can earn bonuses if you use it in a heroic and dramatically appropriate manner! Or you can do lots of extra actions on your turn by removing one die per extra action, letting you pull off very dramatic tricks. The rulebook is written in a breezy, tongue-in-cheek manner, and there's lots of in-universe posters, like sales posters for buying R2 droids. 

All this is ignoring the absolutely massive impact which this game had on Star Wars by creating names and backstories for all the aliens, planets, characters, technology and more, most of which is still canon.

Is it a perfect game? Not at all. When I run it I tend to throw out a bunch of the fiddlier rules (which is also why I've never bothered with the more rules-heavy Second Edition.) But then, this is a game that explicitly tells you to ignore the rules if you want, to make silly sound effects and play music and just have fun. And that's what it's all about.

Character Creation

So simple! There are twenty-four templates, like Brash Pilots or Old Senators or Smugglers or Wookies, included with the book. Just pick one, allocate seven dice to skills, give it a name and off you go. If you're feeling like going in-depth you can create your own template, which is only slightly more complicated: you say who you are, distribute eighteen dice amongst your characteristics, and then the seven for your skills, pick some appropriate equipment and write a short blurb about yourself, and off you go. Quick and easy!

I randomly rolled for which template I'd use, and got the Laconic Scout. I liked the idea of a grizzled outdoorsman, and maybe someone who can interact with all the monsters and creatures that Star Wars loves. Then I saw the very high Knowledge score (4D is the human maximum) and my idea changed slightly - I'd be a University Professor of Xenobiology who goes off on adventures when not teaching classes, a zoologist Indiana Jones. So I tweaked the template slightly to create Dr. Janeve 'Wookiee' Irall. (In addition to Indy, I was thinking of Bear Grylls, Jane Goodall and Steve Irwin, and you'll see I just smashed their names together to come up with mine.) One dice in Blaster and Dodge so I can survive a firefight, one dice in Hide/Sneak and Search so I can track and sneak up on wildlife, one dice in Survival so I could, well, survive in the wild, and one dice in Beast Riding. For my final dice, I invented a new skill, Creatures, so I can know about Rancors and Tauntauns and Banthas and what-have-you.

Final Thoughts: I love the Star Wars RPG, I loved making this character, and I'd happily run another game of this at the drop of a hat. So quick, so easy, so much fun.