But on a + side, Ewoks have garnered much-needed street cred.

1. I assume that the players have only seen the movies.
2. The campaign I run puts a reasonable amount of space between the “canonical” events and characters of the movies, and any way to derail them.
3. I take some reasonable effort with Wookiepedia research to ensure that my additions or flair are either rooted in Wookiepedia, or don’t contradict it. For example, when I needed a droid crime lord, I looked up droids and found a good type for it. I didn’t have a deep background for it – meticulously researched – but I did have a bit of information there in case players pressed farther into its history. This didn’t take any more effort than thinking up new stuff, and helped me out a bit.
4. I don’t hinge game-changing plots on minutia
5. I describe the flavor of a locale and any pertinant plot points related to character knowledge from the character’s perspective. I don’t rely much on player background.

That is the core problem I have with Star Wars RPG (in fact the current direction of Wizards’ RPGs). I like the idea of an ordinary “Joe spacetrucker” stumbling into a mess much bigger than he knows and working his way out of the problem.
I like the idea of playing the common man and not the star quarterback.

Also SWRPG is nice but I think I would much rather play in a generic universe. I find having to play in the SW realm restricts my creativity. Also as a GM, it makes me feel like I have to defer to a player who knows his SW trivia.

Finally, I hate the Skywalkers. I really do. I hate ‘em.

If I run SW again. The first thing I would do it have the players take out Anakin, then have fun seeing where the game takes us.

But I have to agree, the purists and canon nazis tend to wreck any setting/game. “Hyperspace doesn’t have monsters in it.”, “That can’t be Elminster, he’s still trapped for another 2 years and besides, that’s the wrong pipeweed.”, “There’s no city here, you can’t put a city here.”, “Oh, I tell the guardian the secret password from the second novel, chapter 14.”, etc… Yeah, those types suck and trash any game.

Matt, this brings up an interesting discussion. Not only about SW RPG, but about general GM/Player dickery in general. I think it’d be the subject for a GOOD 20 minute interview/debate/discussion/laugh fest.

Would you be at all interesting in discussing this on a podcast?

Namely, the Order 66 Podcast, devoted to SW RPG.

This could be a fun discussion, sir! Email me if you’re interested in wasting 30 min of your life on a Sunday evening in the coming month.

GMChris@d20radio.com

The funny thing is, when I saw this article, I expected it to be about a completely different reason SW and similar games are “bad.” In my experience, games based on film or TV come with archetypal baggage in the form of main characters. If you play SW, more often than not someone will play a Luke clone, a Han Solo clone, a Leia clone, etc. It’s almost unavoidable. To me this is an imagination killer.

None taken.

Like several others here, you’ve put forward some great examples of how GMs, can use their expertese to enhance, rather than detract from their games. Thanks!

I think your point that not only is this not contained to StarWars, but it’s not even contained to obsession with setting is a good point too, though I think branching into other realms of how to deal with jerks who obsess over rules, or other game aspects is probably best split into another article.

I honestly can’t speak to the proportion of StarWars normal guys vs Star Wars Ubergeeks. I know that there are enough PITAs out there that we’ve seemingly all encountered one, and that that experience has soured a lot of people to the setting (wrongly so) but I also know that it only takes ONE to ruin the experience for an entire gaming circle, so they could still be relatively rare. You’d be a much better judge of that than I, being immersed into the StarWars scene, so I’m happy to take your word for it on the actual proportion.

I hope that what others have taken away from this article and all the great comments is what I have: That StarWars is a great setting, that it’s the expection, not the rule who ruins the game, and that there are ways of dealing with them, not just dumping the setting.
Discussing this has made me want to play StarWars for the first time in a long time, and mentioning that in my gaming circle actually netted me an invite to a forming Starwars game, though my schedule didn’t mesh so I had to pass.

Too bad. I wanted to play a grizzled Ewok Pugilist/Rogue named Tai N’Tunchar

Not that it justifies it, but this came at the end of a particularly wretched weekend, with a car breaking down on Friday night and not being able to pick up my don’t-be-a-dick prescriptions until Monday. So, when I opened my reader to Gnome Stew, I was looking forward to a nice pick-me-up … but noooooooooo.

“…and just because you spend an absurd amount of time and effort on something does not mean that it should be welcomed by everyone. Or anyone, for that matter. ”

Also to be clear, I agree wholeheartedly — working hard on the thing isn’t a reason why other people should like it. The point I was trying to make was this: “OK, here’s why I’m about to act like a total dick about this.”

A couple of final points I wanted to add to the discussion:

1) I — obviously — know a ridiculous amount about Star Wars, and that comes through in my own campaigns. However, I work on the assumption that none of the players have seen anything but the movies. Even then, I don’t assume that they know very much about about the place in question, so I make a point to refresh everyone’s memory: “Bespin is the planet that has Cloud City, from The Empire Strikes Back.” If I want them to know anything else, I will show them myself.

For example, in a recent game set during the Clone Wars, I had the players leading a clone trooper battalion to capture a secondary objective during the Battle of Muunilinst. Since most of this battle is shown during the first several episodes of the Clone Wars “micro series” from Cartoon Network, I popped in the DVD and showed it to them. (Each episode in that series was something like 4 minutes long, so this didn’t take much time.)

Which brings me to one of my new favorite game tools: a widescreen TV. I connect it to my laptop as a second monitor so that I can have all my fun stuff open on my desktop while I display videos, picture viewers, or browser windows in the other monitor for the players. Among other things, this allows me to display a lot of information really quickly: Here’s a map of Elrood Sector, this is what a Verpine looks like, etc.

During the prep for my game, I try to identify items that I’ll need ahead of time so the pictures are ready. Lately, I’ve even made more extensive briefings in PowerPoint, which I usually deliver in-game via a superior officer, ally, or what have you (e.g. Admiral Ackbar’s briefing in Return of the Jedi, or General Dodonna’s in A New Hope).

Even when the unexpected comes up, though, I can find a picture or a brief summary in a matter of 15 seconds by going to Wookieepedia, which I always keep open on my desktop during the game.

So, having an ubergeek running the show in a rich and detailed setting can also make the game really GOOD. I’m sorry that you’ve had bad luck with encountering ubergeeks with superiority complexes, but I’ve been dealing with this crowd since the first edition of the West End Games version, and I am absolutely certain that they are not the majority.

2) Here’s one of the reasons that I think the “Garflagle” example is misinformed: The GM doesn’t have to do all the extra stuff I mentioned above to bring the players up to speed. Instead, the game itself has built-in rules to share background information with the players. Each planet stat block has all the basic physical characteristics up at the top — region, climate, sapient species, etc. — and then it gives the Knowledge DCs to know a particular piece of information. For example, almost anyone might know that Coruscant has a planetwide cityscape and is the capital of the Republic/Empire (DC 10), but even people who live there might not know about the inhabitants and dangers of the lowest levels of the undercity (DC 25).

Since it’s all read-aloud text that can be fed to the players with very little prep work by the GM, the game tries to make it as quick as possible to get over that “background information” hurdle. Furthermore, it gives the GM a template for how to handle other, more obscure worlds: Even if you don’t have a stat block for “Garflagle,” the GM knows that the players are supposed to make a Knowledge check and that he gives them information based on how well they roll. (More importantly, the players know it, too, and they’re likely to prompt the GM for it if he forgets: “I’d like to make a Knowledge check to see what I know about this place.”)

Finally, since this mechanic is in place, if you have an ubergeek player who starts to be nuisance, the GM can use this mechanic to put take him down a peg: “I’m sorry, but based on your Knowledge check result, it seems that your character doesn’t know anything about that. Now sit down and shut up.”

3) It occurred to me that we’re talking about the subject too narrowly — it’s not just Star Wars, nor is it any well-developed licensed setting. It’s ANYTHING that someone can know a lot about, and the one thing that someone can hyperspecialize in for any game is the rules themselves.

Think about it: Rules lawyers are fanboys for game mechanics, and they can make life miserable the same way as what you describe for the setting-specific ubergeeks.

I might not be using “rules lawyer” 100% correctly here, but to be clear, I don’t mean to include “power gamers” or “min-maxers” or other people who merely KNOW all the rules really well. I’m talking about the guys who have an absolute obsession with “official” rules and mock or ridicule house rules and/or who will get into years-long arguments about stupid minutia on WotC’s D&D Character Optimization boards.

We all know the type, and I think it’s probably a more common problem than the aforementioned “canon purist.”

And as with any other geek obsession, it can be constructive (helping less experienced players learn the game) or destructive (lording your superiority over them). The obsession itself isn’t the problem: It’s the attitude.

I was a moderator on the WotC message boards (WizO_the_Hutt) for seven years. In my experience, you find a LOT more arguments caused by rules lawyers than by canon purists, and this applies to both D&D and Star Wars RPG boards. Admittedly, it’s probably a biased sample, but it’s also the one place you’re likely to encounter both types of problem players.