SWD Game: Thoughts and Player Reactions

My May the Fourth d6 Star Wars game was a success from a player standpoint, and from a referee standpoint. From a "get new people into the game" standpoint it was a little disappointing, but part of that is my own fault.

First of all, I prepped an adventure that was designed to bring various characters together. I borrowed the opening of the official module Starfall. The PCs are prisoners of the Empire, but a Rebel agent droid helps them escape. Only instead of setting it on an ISD, I put them on a moon base prison mining colony (borrowing thematically from Andor) with the map of the detention block taken from Starfall, but the upper levels of the base taken from the Hideouts & Strongholds supplement. The modules I've looked at are a bit too railroady, but I found it pretty easy to take a few ideas from them and turn them into challenging scenarios rather than storylines to play through.

The basic idea of my adventure is that the PCs are all new prisoners, held for only a week or so, and the Rebel droid infiltrator has identified them and a few other prisoners as not yet broken by Imperial slavery, and wanting to escape. This allowed the PCs some NPC assistance with overpowering the guards, but also a means of recruiting a replacement character mid-adventure if someone's PC died (none did though). 

The general goal was escape, bringing the captured and out of commission Rebel spy Walex with them for a reward beyond freedom. I gave each player a personal additional goal, which they were free to share or keep secret, as they liked, just to add a bit of potential complication. 

The part that was disappointing was that only three players showed up, and they're all in my D&D game. Everyone else was busy or uninterested. And as I said above, several friends who are not in the D&D game told me it was a cool idea, but that they didn't have free time. It's my own fault for coming up with this idea on the spur of the moment. Next year, I'll give people more notice. 

The players who did show up, and their characters, were: 

Steven (my son), playing his new Tech-warrior (modified from the Loyal Retainer template) Jim Bumass.

Denis (long time player), playing his Smuggler Nito.

Charles (first time playing d6, he's only been playing TS&R for a month or so) selected from my pregens the Twilek Gearhead (modified from the Tongue-tied Engineer template), and named him Conan (after O'Brien, not the Barbarian). Conan had an R5 astromech. 

I won't go into full detail of the play-by-play, but the PCs and the rowdy prisoner NPCs used Brawling until they secured weapons from defeated guards, borrowed uniforms, made good Con rolls to convince staff that they were the guards transporting other prisoners, recovered their gear, got intel on the mining operation, and rigged a the station's power generator to blow with a thermal detonator before hijacking the supply ship and evading the station's tractor beam to escape by an appropriate use of a Force Point by Nito. 

They managed, through clever ideas and lucky die rolls, to complete each player's secret objective and didn't trip any alarms along the way. They also avoided fights with a squad of 4 fully armed stormtroopers and the station commandant's security droids. Everyone had a blast playing through it. 

Afterwards, Charles was really enthused by how much tension the Wild Die added to every roll. Even when his Gearhead was using his 6D Computer skill, he was nervous about rolling that 1 on the die. He also liked how I had set up a variety of challenges, and he said he was trying to anticipate problems and think around the corners to come up with solutions. 

Denis felt similarly about the challenges faced, and that there were multiple ways the session could have gone. 

Steven told me, before bed last night, that he liked Star Wars more than D&D...but liked D&D more than Star Wars. He meant he really liked both, but they're different so hard to compare. He did really enjoy the fact that I broke out the minis for this game. The tactile play with the figures themselves, and the tactical use of them minis on a board, kept him a bit more interested in the session.

Our heroes (L to R): Nito the Smuggler*, Jim Bumass the Tech-Warrior, Conan the Gearhead with R5 droid. 

*Nito is human, but Denis told Steven to pick a mini for him and he picked Plo Koon. 

I collected these figures back when the Prequels were coming out, when I was living in Japan. Pepsi gave them away as freebies with every 500ml bottle of soda, and despite preferring Coke, I drank a LOT of Pepsi back then. I also visited the local resale shop often and picked up a lot more figures there. 

The figures are 54mm (green army man scale), so you can see I've mixed in a few Kamen Rider and Gundam figures I also got at the resale shop, and a few of the classic SW knock-off Galaxy Laser Team as well. I've been thinking of trying to add to my SW mini collection, but the table top games use 28mm or 35mm scale figures, so they'll look dinky next to these guys. If I ever want to expand the collection, I'll probably need to find some scalable STL files and have a friend with a 3D printer custom build them for me. I've realistically got enough minis...but there's a part of me that can never have enough minis.

So to wrap up, the game went well, but it would have been nice for me if I could have gotten a few more people out to try it. I'm re-energized about the SW campaign, though, so I'll be running it again soon, and maybe running both online and offline if I can find a few more offline players. It may cut into my D&D/TS&R time, but like Steven said, they're both good games that scratch different itches.