Starsystems and Stormtroopers

Well that was something.

I've been dungeonmastering and storytelling tabletop games for over a decade, on and off. I knew the turnout would be substantial when we decided to play a Star Wars D20 game, and I was not disappointed. Nine players is a lot to handle, and will presumably involve a degree of cat-herding.

Cats don't rip your arms out of their sockets when they lose.

I spent the previous week worrying about how to wrangle everyone into the story and ultimately on to the same ship. I'll leave the telling of our tale to Ryan for now because I want to focus on the nuts and bolts of running a game this big. Everyone appeared to leave happy, but I'm going to assume for the purpose of this writing that they were mostly just being nice because there were some major flaws in the execution.

First, I needed a theme and tone. I've long been a fan of the old Battlestar Galactica slash Voyager slash Macross "community on the run" sort of story. Sure, it's a bit over-utilized, but it has a lot to offer a game like ours. We have ten characters with different backgrounds and motives. You can get a group of four or so to set aside their differences and work together on something but the process of negotiating that whole alliance between so many characters could take all night.

This story format forces the issue by presenting the characters with an existential crisis - in this case, a hostile takeover of the space station they all live on. They must work together because the options for escape are limited and the alternative is capture or death.

That element seemed to work pretty well. Once it was clear that the station would soon be crawling with stormtroopers, the players started working together to escape - though they disagreed on the best way to abscond.

As a funny little aside, Ryan spent a lot of time working on his character's story, and with it the story and layout of the remote station where the game began. In the weeks before we sat down to play, I could see him getting attached to the place, but I couldn't tell him I planned to drive them out of it.

Since these games can take a while, I chose a pretty simple (or so I thought) three act format that I hoped we could complete in a reasonable amount of time.

We got close enough.

After the obligatory character introductions, I leaned over our sweet graphed-out chalkboard table and said, "now roll initiative." Rather than spend an hour and a half leading everyone to the first battle, I decided to throw them right into the middle of it. The first act involved three combats run simultaneously in different locations. Pirates and saboteurs probing the doomed station for weakness.

That was a good call. The foes were relatively weak, but desperate. Not enough to really menace the characters, but sufficient to send a message. "This station is a mess," our wookie player commented. Exactly.

The second act was where my plan started to become bogged down. This is where I wanted the players to investigate the invaders and determine that they were not mere scoundrels, but pawns in an Imperial plot to take over.

It took much longer than it should have. I don't mean to suggest that the players weren't smart enough, but rather that I should have been able to lead them to the proper conclusion through more than just the couple of channels I prepared ahead of time. I've always felt that my ability to think on my feet as a DM was one of my skills - indeed I've run games entirely from the top of my head - but I just wasn't fast enough.

Victory in a situation like that - figuring out what's going on - would not have been cheapened by making it a little easier. In fact, as we found out directly afterward, the players themselves will provide the additional challenge and drama. They immediately disagreed on how exactly to escape the station, and whether or not to help the other denizens get away, or blow it up on the way out.

I have always liked these. Hence, I put the group on one.

That discussion, and the logistical challenges presented by the players' conclusions was where that second act's time should have been spent. I think that is the second lesson from this game - keep it simple and let the players provide the color and moral quandaries. In a group that big, they're going to do it anyway.

By the time the third act had begun, fatigue and drunkenness were setting in, and I had to end things quickly. I allowed them to escape the Star Destroyer without much of a fight with their stolen flotilla. I had planned a scene in which the fighter pilot characters would need to defend the ship from TIEs while the rest of them escorted the tech-savvy Sullustan to engineering - fighting through a stormtrooper boarding party - in order to restore the hyperdrive.

It would have been cool, but maybe next time.

Don't get me wrong, I think it was a good game. The fact that we reached the intended end point and set the characters off on their adventure is enough for me. I think it will help me improve my DMing as well. It was a very different beast from the kind of thing we usually do. It was more akin to the webcomic writing I've done than I expected (my forum-adventure comic, A Beginner's Guide to the End of the Universe). You have to switch off your targeting computer. Let go. Set some waypoints in the story but let the group dynamic carry it as much as possible. With so many people, there's enough material that will just manifest itself and the whole story will be richer for it, I think.

We plan to switch up the DM role, so I'm looking forward to seeing where we go from here. That, and playing my B2 Battle Droid Tech Specialist.

j!