Star Destroyer image by Pixabay.com/Janson_G, Starfield background by Pixabay.com/FrancescoValla, editing and compositing by Mike

At the end of the last Pulp session, one of our players informed my co-GM and I that they might not be able to attend the next session. Because sessions of this campaign are a month apart, this constituted ample notice, and we’re going to be able to carry on without him. We’re sure that his absence from the player-Gestalt will be noticed; some ideas and historical reference are more likely to be forthcoming from his contributions than those of any other participant, though they each have their strengths.

Quite a while back, I analyzed a comprehensive list of possible strategies a GM can use to cope with a player absence (Missing In Action: Maintaining a campaign in the face of player absence). Nevertheless, I knew that even this list was sometimes inadequate to the needs of the real world, which is why I was so delighted to add a new solution to my stockpile a few months ago (Tales of Yore: An Absent Player Solution).

Even so, I’m always on the lookout for more techniques in this area, because no two campaigns are quite alike and the demands they impose on GM responses to this all-too-common real-world problem are likewise not prone to cookie-cutter one-size-fits-all solutions.

Which brings me to (the original) Star Wars.

Millennium Falcon image by pixabay.com/JAKO5D

Star Wars…. again

I recently had occasion to watch this movie for the umpteenth time, and – as is often the case – began to review what I was seeing from the perspective of an RPG campaign. But, because of the aforementioned notification, my point-of-view within that broader context was a little different to that of each other occasion: If Star Wars were an RPG campaign, and the protagonists all (or mostly all) PCs, what would the plot structure teach about gaming dynamics?

Analysis

To answer this question, I listed every “scene” (using a more PG-relevant definition of the term than the one used by movie and TV types), breaking the movie down into individual adventures of roughly equal playing time, then looking for patterns and attempting to relate them to the familiar problems faced by GMs.

Naturally, I had to impose a rule or two, a ‘campaign style’ if you will, in order to define boundary points for those adventures. So, the primary rule is this: Adventures end on a cliffhanger. The secondary rule is this: Characters whose players are absent are to have minimal relevance to events, though they may be handed pages of exposition if the content is relevant to their character; this is a mechanism by which the GM can inform the players of the game mechanics and background of the campaign.

These rules seem reasonable given that a primary stylistic inspiration for the movie were the Saturday Movie Serials of Lucas’ youth.

So, here goes:

Adventure #1

• The battle in space
• Secret Mission / Droids into Escape Pod
• Leia Captured, Intro Vader
• Droids in the Desert
• Droids split up
• Captured by Jawa

Adventure #2

• Droid reunion
• Prisoners of the Jawa
• Arrival, intro Luke
• Purchase / Threat of separation / ‘Bad motivator’
• Cleaning / Partial Message
• Ominous Tales Of Old Ben

Adventure #3

• Runaway droid
• Mystery of Luke’s father (not a farmer) [presume this was overheard by Luke]
• Pursuit by Luke & C3PO
• Hints of Sandpeople / Reunion with R2D2
• Fight with the Sandpeople
• Luke & C3PO defeated

Adventure #4

• Rescue by Old Ben
• Obi-wan & background exposition
• The Message
• The Quest – refused (“I’m just playing my character” I)
• Leia – Intro Moff Tarkin & Death Star
• Threat to destroy the rebellion

Adventure #5

• Jawa slaughter aftermath
• Fresh motivation for Luke
• Leia interrogation begins
• Luke signs up to the Quest
• Arrival at Mos Eisley
• Checkpoint / Jedi mind tricks
• Cantina
• Luke gets into trouble

Adventure #6

• A quick bar-fight
• Intro Chewbacca & Han Solo / Negotiations
• Greedo
• Death Star To Alderaan
  • INSERTED SCENE: Jabba & Han
• Millennium Falcon
• Stormtrooper informant (not witnessed by a PC, Presumed to have been inferred by Obi-wan)

Adventure #7

• Stormtroopers vs. Millennium Falcon
• Imperial Cruiser vs Millennium Falcon (raising the stakes)
• Leia vs Tarkin, the threat to Alderaan
• Leia surrenders the location of the rebel base
• Alderaan destroyed

Adventure #8

• Jedi training / Downtime / Exposition
• Leia’s deceit revealed/discovered
• Alderaan arrival – Millennium Falcon
• Short-range Tie fighter
• “That’s no moon – it’s a space station”
• Tractor beam / Bravado / Captured Falcon

Adventure #9

• Smuggler’s holds
• Stormtrooper disguises
• Obi-wan to sabotage tractor beam
• Discovery of the Princess
• Han & Chewie accept Luke’s side-quest
• “Prisoner transfer” bluff – will it work?

Adventure #10

• The gunfight
• Han’s failed bluff roll / “Luke, we’re gonna have company!”
• Rescue Leia
• Cornered / gunfight
• Trapped in the garbage chute
• ….with the creature!

Adventure #11

• The walls begin to close
• C3PO / R2D2 bluff
• Droids to the rescue
• Obi-wan sabotages tractor beam
• Running firefights
• The chasm (a literal cliffhanger!)

Adventure #12

• Chasm Swing
• Firefight continues
• Vader confronts Obi-wan, the duel begins
• Re-boarding the Falcon
• Ben’s “Surrender” / Luke fails his stealth roll

Adventure #13

• Exit the Death Star / Did Obi-wan have enough time to finish?
• The sentry ship firefight
• Escape
• “That was too easy…”
• Arrival Yavin IV, but the Empire will be coming

Adventure #14

• Briefing / Death Star weakness
• 30 minutes to Imperial Victory
• Han Leaves (“I’m just playing my character” II)
• Personal moments – old friends & goodbyes / calm before the storm
• Fighter launch / 15 minutes to Imperial Victory

Adventure #15

• Attack on the Death Star part 1: defensive emplacements
• Attack on the Death Star part 2: fighters vs fighters
• Gold Squad attack run vs Vader
• One minute to Imperial Victory

Adventure #16 (Extra length)

• Luke’s squad attacks the death star – the final throw of the dice
• “Use the Force, Luke” / shut off the Targeting computer
• R2D2 hit
• Rebel base in range of the Death Star / Luke stripped of escort
• Vader lines up on Luke’s fighter
• Millennium Falcon intervention / Vader escapes
• A shot in a million / reunion with Han
• Victory celebrations / R2D2 repaired / campaign wrap

Whew!

A couple of notes:

1. The garbage-masher monster is clearly used as a filler, something to occupy the characters in the garbage unit until the Droid characters are available to not be there to save the day! Either that, or he changed plans after thinking of a way to involve the Droids in the escape! Either is plausible.

2. “I’m just playing my character” I and II – we’ve all had adventures and even campaigns go off the rails because one player insisted in his character taking a left turn, even knowing – at a meta-game level – that it was going to cause the GM a plot problem. Examine these two incidents carefully, and note how our fictitious GM has been able to get the campaign (and adventure) back on track without telling the players “I can’t let you do that”.

Appearance Tally

You begin to see some interesting patterns when you look at the presence or lack thereof of each of the main characters in individual adventures.

• Leia – has brief but significant roles in 1, 4, 5, 7, and 8. For adventures 10-14, she is an equal participant – and note that this is when the character joins the main party. Finally, she is a minor character, present only to look worried or proud, in adventures 15 and 16.
• R2D2 is a major character in 1-5, has a minor presence in 6-8, has significant roles in 9 and 11, minor roles in 12-13, significant roles in 14 and 15, and is seemingly killed off early in 16 leaving only a minor presence at the end.
• C3PO – is a major character in 1-5, a minor presence in 6-7, significant roles in 8, 9, 11, then a minor presence in 12-13, a substantial presence in 14, and is even more marginalized than Leia in 15 and most of 16.
• Luke – is a featured character from his first appearance in Adventure 2 all the way through to the end of the campaign in Adventure 16. Note that there is absolutely no reason why he couldn’t have had solo scenes in Adventure #1, and some versions of the script included such scenes, introducing Biggs (who would then turn up again in the rebel base).
• Ben/Obi-wan – has a substantial role in 4-6, 8-9, 11, and 12. Note that in the latter two, his action is separate to that of the main party.
• Han – has significant roles in 6-14 and 16. It would have been easy to give him a minor role in 15, simply by removing his final line from 14 and setting it on-board the Millennium Falcon in 15 – “Don’t look at me that way, I know what I’m doing.”
• Chewie – always has slightly less-significant roles than Han, but makes significant contributions in 6-13, and has a minor presence in 14 and 16.

Vader and friends pic by Pixabay.com/Voltordu

Campaign Pacing – quests within quests within quests

Looking over the detailed breakdown, it’s hard not to be struck by the fact that for much of the movie, the goal is simply to get into a position to undertake the next quest. You can divide the movie into three acts: Tattooine, Death Star, and Yavin IV. The whole purpose of the Tattooine sequence is to get the PCs to the Death Star; the whole purpose of the Death Star sequences are to escape to Yavin IV, having united the party; and the over-arching quest of the whole movie is encompassed by the final battle.

Within each of these, there are smaller quests – the Droids escaping the Empire, R2 getting to old Ben, rescuing the Princess, and so on. And within each of those is the quest simply to get out of whatever trouble the PCs were in at the end of each adventure.

Stately inevitability

It’s also worth noting that there appears to be an inevitability to the appearance of certain characters. Consider how the outcome of subsequent events might have been changed had Luke and Obi-wan hired some other freighter captain and ship back in the Bar on Tattooine!

These are exactly the kind of look-the-other-way meta-gaming that players and GM are routinely forced to confront in an RPG.

Han can demand an outrageous price for his services during his introductory negotiations, but he knows that if the player handling Ben makes a half-reasonable counter-offer (with assistance from the GM, who is pulling the strings) he will have to accept it to get the party together and the adventure on the road.

The PC Roster

So, which of the characters are PCs, which are NPCs, and which are sometime PCs?

It’s hard not to look over the adventure content breakdowns and synopsis in terms of minor/significant roles in given adventures and not get the impression of players being there some of the time and absent at others.

R2D2 model image by Pixabay.com/aldobarquin

The initial roster: two droids

It’s obvious, in this contextual interpretation, that the two Droids are amongst the players initially signed up to play in the campaign. The first five adventures feature them quite heavily.

It also seems clear that thereafter, they begin to be sidelined except when the GM makes a special effort to include them, and that the player handling R2D2 feels this more acutely and loses interest more quickly, or perhaps, is more overcome by external circumstances.

My personal impression is that, if Star Wars were an RPG, R2D2 at least (and possibly both droids) are NPCs in adventures 6 & 7.

In adventure 8, R2 is an NPC but C3PO is present. In 9, both are present, but in 10 they are both absent. In 11, they both play significant roles – but are non-participating observers for the main action. And, at this point, the player behind R2 leaves the campaign, only to be lured back by the promise of a significant role in the space combat Big Finale (14 and 15). His role is not quite what was advertised and by 16, he’s had enough. (However, he and the GM remain friends, and with the promise of more hacking opportunities in future, he comes back for the sequels!)

The initial roster: is Leia a PC?

I have two – no, three – thoughts, when it comes to this question.

First, take a quick look back at the character’s first 5 appearances – these are exactly the sort of sideways involvement you might write in for a character whose player informs you that their appearance will be sporadic until half-way through the campaign. Aside from the first adventure, is there any one of those appearances that could not have been written as solo-play vignettes and dropped into place whenever the player was next present? This is not the only such example – so I’ve given this thought it’s own subsection in the discussion below.

Second, Leia might have been PLANNED to be a PC, and the driving force behind Luke’s plot. It would be easy to rewrite Star Wars as R2D2 hiding aboard the Death Star while the Princess and her Protocol Droid escape to Tattooine in an escape pod. Of course, various character interactions would change, but it’s easy to imagine Leia recruiting Luke and Obi-wan, conducting the negotiations with Han for a much more dangerous mission than simple providing transport to Alderaan, and so on. Heck, she’s a General in the resistance, so she could even play Chess with Chewie with only minor changes to the dialogue! But, having integrated the planned PC with the plotlines for the first adventures, the player is forced to downgrade his attendance – this sort of thing happens in real life – and the GM scrambles to a solution at the last minute before the first adventure.

Leia is clearly a PC in 10-14. Anything more is questionable speculation.

As for my third thought:

The Obi-wan/Leia coincidence

Let’s say you’re a player and create Princess Leia as a character in the new space opera campaign, “Star Wars”, only to be told that the campaign will sideline the character until half-way through aside from brief but significant appearances. But the GM then offers you a bargain: in the meantime, you can play a character who is significantly more powerful than the other PCs, but who is to be written out at that midpoint. The “downside”: you will get to be the GM’s conduit for backstory and campaign concepts to the other players/PCs. So, from time to time, you will have to interpret information provided by the GM into character dialogue / exposition.

Aside from one sequence when she’s a Hologram, Leia and Obi-wan never have a shared scene in the movie. Even when they appear in the same adventure – 4 through 6 and 11-12 – they are plot-isolated from each other.

You can add depth to this speculation by asking this: Would it have significantly changed this movie if Ben had survived his battle with Vader, however badly injured, and been amongst the Leia/C3PO group in the rebel base, then used his powers (despite his desperately weakened state) to reach out to aid/guide Luke (“Use the Force, Luke”)? Given the obvious answer, why did Obi-wan have to die? Was it so that the player would never be confronted with playing two characters simultaneously? (Of course, in the real world, the answer is completely different – but in the fictional context of “If Star Wars were an RPG campaign”, this makes perfect sense!)

Variations on the theme are possible. Leia may have been another player’s planned PC, as described earlier, but that player had to withdraw. After Adventure 9, the player tells the GM that he’s unhappy with the character and wants to leave the campaign. The GM responds with a counter-offer: take over Leia, and let’s give Obi-wan a heroic send-off. If you were playing a campaign in those circumstances, it’s something you’d at least have to think about. Instead of playing Adventure 10, you spend game time rewriting Leia and growing more enthusiastic about the idea… it sounds at least plausible, doesn’t it?

One explanation: The Obi-wan Dichotomy

Assuming that some form of the above speculation would be correct in this context, it remains to offer some plausible reason why the player in back of Obi-wan might tire of the character.

For me, there is one notable potential answer, something that bugs me every time I watch the movie – and, if you hear it, you may find yourself similarly afflicted. It doesn’t ruin it completely, but it nags at me.

So if you don’t want to risk it, scroll down to the next section heading NOW.

–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–

Still with me?

It’s my contention that the downfall of “Obi-wan” was, and is, “Old Ben”. This folksy characterization submerges the powerful and wise Jedi Master beneath a cloak of eccentric old-timer. From the time of the discovery of the Jawa Massacre, the character is in full “Obi-wan” mode, having thrown off that cloak, but the other characters – especially Han – continue to treat him as “Old Ben” even if they have never met that persona. Every time the character tries to get mystic and spiritual, his pomposity is punctured by Han’s sarcastic pessimism. “Where did you dig up that old fossil?”

Some characters naturally lock into place in the genre and style of the “campaign” – Luke, Han, Leia, even 3PO in a strongly character-driven way. Others don’t quite develop the boisterous exuberance of the adventure setting. Obi-wan, the Jedi Knight, fits right in – but he only really appears in the combat sequence with Vader and the “These are not the droids you are looking for” scene. The rest of the time, he is trying to be mysterious and spiritual, but the other characters won’t let him.

The inevitable result is frustration. It’s worth noting that Leia is just as spiritual and mystic,especially in the sequels, as is Luke on occasion, but they use it as a surface patina to that “boisterous exuberance” that I mentioned, and Leia in particular punctures it with wit, sarcasm and a touch of boots-and-all fatalism, deflecting Han’s jibes in the process.

I think that, in the real world, at least one generation of the shooting script might have used “old Ben” for the character name when dialogue is given, and that this colored the perceptions of the inexperienced actors even if it was later changed. And “Old Ben” stuck.

This illustrates five lines of the conversation between three people (A, B, and C) as described.

Player Groupings: Pairs and Triangles

Another point that I noticed was this: it’s natural for the GM to try and pair characters together. It makes conversations easy to anticipate, it’s easy to find points of commonality or conflict that can drive role-play, and so on.

Star Wars does this, too – the two droids; Luke and C3PO when R2D2 goes off on his own; Han and Chewie, Luke and Ben, Han and Leia, Luke and Leia. All of these are bonding moments of one kind or another, either reflecting a pre-existing bond or forging a new one – even the incendiary fractiousness of the initial Han / Leia relationship cements into place a relationship between the two characters.

Triangles are far harder to predict, but far more capable of driving character development and dynamic roleplay. Triangles contain three relationship pairs, tripling the capacity for a conversational reaction to an in-game event or statement.

What’s more, it’s typical for the outsider to then react to the interplay between the members of the relationship pair having the conversation, which will usually engage a different relationship pairing with one of the two members of the previously-invoked pair, and momentarily making the other member the new outsider, compelling them to engage with one of the two – either their original conversational partner or the new entrant.

Each piece of dialogue between them stimulates a new one – provided that all three participants are equally extroverted in self-expression. And, to some extent, the GM can manipulate the flow of this conversation simply by looking at one of the players as though expecting a reply. If one is not immediately forthcoming, simply shifting gaze to the person who was just spoken to transfers the psychological onus.

Note that if you look down at any point, however, this “stage direction” is broken, and the driving factor becomes the personalities of the players, not the characters.

It follows that groups of three – even if one is an NPC – are far more effective roleplaying structures than groups of two.

It’s also worth contemplating a group of four – after all, if three is better than two… Unfortunately, this theory doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. If you have four, you can have two simultaneous conversations (making it harder for anyone to be heard), which can lead to two or more people replying to the same player at the same time (garbling both responses, in all probability), and corner-to-corner conversations, which are even worse as people try to talk over the top of another conversation. And, just in case you thought that was the sum total of the potential for trouble, the square can fragment into two pairs, leading to two of the players “involved” in the square ignoring the other two, and vice-versa.

The same problems beset combinations of 6, or 8. As a general rule of thumb, even-numbered groups larger than two are bad news for roleplaying; add an NPC into the conversation ASAP!

That being said, smaller groups are ultimately more responsive – so groups of two and three are always to be preferred – when it comes to roleplaying.

Drop-in plot sequences

Throughout the movie, characters are given scenes that can be dropped in whenever the ‘player’ is in attendance (and held back or downplayed if they are not). Does it really matter whether or not the Droid’s bluff when discovered in the Death Star) takes place in adventure 10 or 11? So long as they are out of contact when the main group get stuck in the garbage masher, the sequence can be dropped in anytime after they leave to rescue Leia from the Detention level.

The same is true of Ben sabotaging the tractor beam, prior to the confrontation with Vader – the movie has that in what I have designated adventure 11, but it could just as easily be in adventure 10.

Leia’s early appearances are obvious examples, as mentioned earlier.

This is exactly the sort of restructuring that can be performed if a player give sufficient notice that they won’t be able to attend – provided that you have planned your adventures that way.

Which brings me back to the Pulp campaign, and the impending absence of a central character. Due to the plot circumstances, we can’t really have the character go off on his own, but there are only a couple of significant contributions / character moments planned that can’t be handed off to one of the PCs who are in attendance. There are a couple of occasions when the character’s skills might be useful – we can roll for those, as necessary, and we normally have a “plan B” in case the character fails the skill check, anyway; the latter may change the path of the adventure, but not it’s overall trajectory. And the character has one vital clue to impart to the other PCs that no-one else can supply – but it’s entirely possible, even likely, that this won’t come up until the player is back with the group. Given enough notice to isolate the scenes and sequences that have to belong to that character from those that simply give him a fair share of the spotlight, and to redistribute the latter amongst the other PCs, we can simply have the character retreat from the spotlight most of the time.