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I’m not really looking forward to writing this one. In general, I like to be positive about the games I talk about or at least constructively critical. SWTOR is almost four years old now, and I can’t imagine my critique at this point is able to be constructive. Still, it’s something that weighs on my mind, especially as someone who does their own writing, and perhaps I can put the thoughts to rest by writing them down. As per usual, spoilers ahead, probably more significant than the others of these I’ve written.

I’ve been doing these in pairs for a particular reason. SWTOR class stories tie together in thematic pairs surprisingly nicely. Whether this is an intentional sort of duality or not I don’t know, but as I’ve played them, the classes seem to arrange themselves into tidy pairs. Trooper and Agent are stories about being a dutiful member of an organization. The Sith Inquisitor and Warrior stories are about paths to power and respect. The Smuggler and Bounty Hunter stories are about being on the outside looking in (and I’m interested in seeing more of both). Finally, the Jedi Consular and Knight stories are about being superheroes, the key piece that sets Star Wars apart from other settings.

I talked before about “Star Wars stories” vs “stories that happen to be set in Star Wars”. Both of the Jedi stories are the former. In general, I’m a lot less of a fan of these stories, and in the case of the two Jedi classes, one works and one doesn’t. I’ll start with the one that does, so I can talk about the other one.

Jedi Knight

The Jedi Knight storyline is, in a variety of ways, the “main story” of SWTOR, as much as it has one. It draws from the great moments of KOTOR, the prequels, and the original trilogy to deliver a focused beam of cool Star Wars-y content. It has companions that pull from the “standard” characters throughout Star Wars and the events that occur during the Jedi Knight story are not only referenced in other class stories more than pretty much any other class, but in fact are the catalyst for (at least) an entire expansion’s worth of content, as well as frequent callouts elsewhere.

The story is comprised of pretty much every Jedi-y concept in Star Wars, and it’s very clearly thoroughly thought out. The first Act of the story is about finding and disarming superweapons. You’re plunged pretty much instantly into Serious Business, and the game slowly weans you off your older, snarky master. Of note here: your master is basically Qui-Gon Jinn, and throughout the first act you are Obi-Wan Kenobi circa the Clone Wars, complete with your very own not-entirely-light-side Padawan, who hides a secret from you. You get to be better than Kenobi, though, and while your master is killed, he comes back as a spirit and advises you from beyond the grave, and you can keep your Padawan on the straight-and-narrow, with a bit of leeway and understanding.

Throughout Act 1, there’s this continual choice to kill your foes or to try to redeem them. Almost all of these characters are set up very well to make these choices not so cut and dry. There’s a lot of doubt surrounding the ability for fallen Jedi or Sith to be redeemed, and you also deal with the political fallout of “traitor Jedi” which tarnish the Jedi reputation. The choices were compelling enough (and my lack of care about being “full light side” or “full dark side” being pretty significant) that I actually spared some and killed others, based on the situation.

Acts 2 and 3 are where things really pick up. While other classes are embroiled in internal rivalries or military actions or what have you, as a Jedi Knight you are gunning for the Emperor himself. It’s a bold move, and Act 2 is about setting your strike up, bringing together some other dedicated Jedi, and attacking the Emperor’s secret base. It’s a very KOTOR-like segment, with you working towards a clear, obvious project. I like the delivery here because what you’re doing is notable every step of the way, and you’re reminded what you’re doing and why, so there’s none of the usual “why am I on this planet again?” sense of disorientation. The characters you meet along the way are generally interesting as well (I especially like the Jedi Master who has several “meedee” droid pets).

Act 3 begins after your (failed) attack on the Emperor, during which you gain a lot of insight into the Emperor’s (horrific, galaxy-destroying) plans as well as gaining an unexpected Sith ally. Lord Scourge is an interesting character, and contextualizes for the Republic what the Sith opinion of the Emperor is. He wants to see the Emperor go down just as much as you do, but has no faith in the Dark Council’s ability to fight him. He’s had a vision and made a deal with the devil to be able to see it through. In Act 3, you get an interesting inversion of the redeem/kill choices in Act 1, as you find yourself face to face with the rest of your Jedi strike team, all controlled by the Emperor.

Throughout Act 3, you are Luke Skywalker, hero of the Rebellion Republic, and helping out with military actions while setting up to take down the ultimate evil in the galaxy. The final confrontation with the Emperor is distinctly reminescent of the end of Return of the Jedi, with you going (mostly) alone deep into enemy territory, and the story’s finale looks more like the awards ceremony at the end of A New Hope than anything else in the game. The music is exciting, the applause raucous, the lights gleaming, and the camera hitting the right notes.

The Jedi Knight story is an example of a “star wars story” done well. It’s comprised of lots of hints and callouts to the rest of Star Wars lore, but it’s woven together into a coherent, compelling story that hits all the right notes without directly stealing from anywhere (except possibly that awards ceremony). You do incredible, heroic things, you do all of the cool Jedi stuff you’re used to seeing, and you get recognized for your awesomeness. It’s not a story you can remove from Star Wars, but it’s the kind of story that you can only tell in the Star Wars universe, and it’s a pretty good one, with some neat twists and interesting moments. And then…

Jedi Consular

For all that the Jedi Knight story does well, the Jedi Consular stumbles and falls. I’ve played through this story twice now, and the Consular is mechanically my favorite class in the game, but I am extremely glad I played it first, before playing any other class story. I don’t want to go on and on about how it’s just a bad story, but I do want to talk about why.

For the Sith Warrior, Sith Inquisitor, and Jedi Knight, there are clear, obvious characters in the Star Wars mythos that are being evoked. For the Consular, not so much. There aren’t a lot of Consular-type Jedi who take front-and-center; you’ve got… Yoda, and… Yoda. Talking backwards at people is not exactly compelling gameplay and a core conceit of Yoda’s character is that he’s crazy powerful. Being crazy powerful right at the start of the Consular story doesn’t work, and it’s pretty clear from the word go that the story is kind of adrift.

Notably, playing Consular and Knight side by side, it feels like the Jedi Knight was a story built on the big, notable “Jedi” moments and the Consular was kinda left with the scraps. Throughout the Consular story, there are these hints at cool “Jedi” moments, but they’re never delivered as well as they are in the Jedi Knight story, or as coherently. There’s a ton of mysticism, which is appropriate, but it ultimately doesn’t affect much– the mysticism quickly becomes a hand-wavey way of telling me that I’m doing “something cool” without showing me why it’s cool.

As an example: Act 1 is about… a virus, kind of, that sort of affects Jedi Masters. Your Master falls ill and one of your first acts is trying to cure her. You’re looking for some Jedi artifacts that are unique and special and put you face-to-face with some old wise Jedi Masters, some of which are callbacks to KOTOR and all of which are lore faucets, telling you a bunch of things that boil down to “we have no idea what’s wrong with your Master”, up until you find the very last one. There’s no sense of progression other than a few throwaway lines along the lines of “oh, yeah, we can think about this more clearly because you found the other ones for some reason”. Bear in mind: during this same stretch of time, the Trooper is hunting the squad that betrayed them up close and personally, the Smuggler is seeking revenge for their stolen ship, and the Jedi Knight is racing to stop a superweapon. The Consular is… looking for some forgotten lore to help fight some mysterious ailment that’s affecting their Master? Eventually you find this cure, some kind of ritual that blocks the virus and the mind control (?) that comes with it. You’re warned that doing so weakens you in some unspecified way, but that’s about it.

This is the big story hook that’s supposed to draw you into the rest of the story, and it’s vague and uncertain. It’s also littered with holes that make it feel even more uncertain and not super well-thought-out. One of the first things you find out in this whole hunting-the-cure segment is that your Master is mostly delirious or comatose and attacked one of the medical staff. A little later, this happens again, and you have to fight her yourself. She’s equipped with her lightsaber. There isn’t even an option to ask the medical staff why they let a delirious, violent, martially-trained patient keep their deadly weapon. The story is full of these “wait, what” moments that further weaken the already uncertain story. These kinds of things exist elsewhere, and it’s possible to accuse me of nitpicking here, but the point I want to make is that a minor plot hole like this in a strong story like the Agent’s is a lot less noticeable and more easily forgiven than a similar issue in a weaker, less compelling story like the Consular’s.

Act 1 continues with you finding out that some Masters might also be afflicted, so you travel around the galaxy checking on them and finding out that, yep, they’re all afflicted. You track them down, find out they’re preparing to do something awful while mind controlled, stop them from doing said awful thing, and then decide whether to save them or not. There’s a parallel here to the Jedi Knight story, except that in the Jedi Knight story the people you’re “saving” aren’t necessarily innocents, whereas every single one in the Consular story is an innocent who is literally being mind controlled. Your choice is to save them, like you came to these planets to do, or murder them with no real rationale. There’s the occasional person on the planet who clearly doesn’t understand the big picture who tends to urge you to kill whoever you’re there to save, but you don’t really get the opportunity to explain things.

Act 1 wraps up with you working some mysticism with your Master to find the location of the person behind all of this. You get pretty much no clues about where to find the guy or who he is up until this point, and then you perform some unspecified ritual and then hunt him down. When you get there, surprise, it’s some guy you’ve never met but has been hinted at throughout Act 1, except everyone thought he was dead, because that provably stops the Force elsewhere in lore. During the showdown, he mocks you, saying that you can’t kill him because he’s infected TONS of Jedi Masters somehow, despite the disease spreading by touch, and if you kill him all of those Jedi Masters will die.

The frustrating thing for me is that I’m trying to be charitable. I’ve played through this story twice and it’s still vague and uncertain for me, and almost every major plot point in Act 1 boils down to “because magic”. The first Act is not without its bright spots, too. There’s a really cool moment where you can save some people from a burning wreck using Force Lift, because you’re just that awesome, and it’s a moment of greatness unlike anything the Jedi Knight gets to do. Later, you get to take part in a diplomatic summit, which is another neat moment and wraps up that planet very nicely as well as foreshadowing the next Act. The Jedi Consular is at its best when it’s getting to do things the Jedi Knight doesn’t get to do, and at its worst when it’s doing the same things as the Knight but less interestingly.

Act 2 shifts gears considerably, and is, I think, the most interesting part of the Consular storyline while being the most frustrating. Your role shifts to diplomat, and Act 2 becomes about getting a particular group of people to join the Republic by, essentially, solving their problems on their home planets. This would actually have been really compelling if any of the representatives you dealt with were likable; they’re pretty much all either sniveling or entitled, and doing work for them leaves you feeling unappreciated– you get a lot of grudging thanks and bickering that mars an otherwise compelling story arc.

Act 3 returns you to mysticism land, where once again you’re dealing with mind controlled people, mostly Force-users, who are the Children of the Emperor, secretly doing his bidding as sleeper agents all over the galaxy. This is a really compelling concept that unfortunately just becomes mystical nonsense because it doesn’t have enough build time. You sort of get a few infodumps about who these people are and why they’re bad and then you do some magic to find them and stop them before they complete their inevitable betrayal. This culminates in you facing off against a notable Jedi Master who’s one of the few recurring characters in this story, which is an honestly really great moment. It’s overshadowed by the Jedi Knight getting a nearly identical fight at the exact same time with a better-developed character, right BEFORE a much more impressive, much more epic sequence that the Consular lacks entirely.

The storyline can, in theory, be held together by its characters, though. The Smuggler story, from what I’ve seen thus far and what I’ve heard, is more about the cool characters than the actual plot, and the Consular storyline could easily have been saved by a selection of interesting characters. Unfortunately, this doesn’t really happen. You start with a Trandoshan melee tank, whose philosophy is about hunting and killing, and who is hanging around with you for some kind of unclear lore reason, whether you want him to or not. You also get a character whose defining characteristic is he’s a military guy, and another whose defining characteristic is that he’s a freedom fighter. Neither are terribly memorable. The Consular’s padawan (and potential love interest if you’re a male) is a naive teenaged girl who’s excited to see the galaxy (making the whole love interest thing really creepy), and who you don’t get until extremely late in the story, making her companion arc feel rushed. That having been said, the Consular does get one great companion in Tharan Cedrax, who is annoying and narcissistic at first but winds up being both extraordinarily useful and genuinely funny, and is a lot more complex of a character than most.

What’s frustrating to me is that I’m trying to be as charitable as I can. For a story with so much potential, it’s riddled with problems and is punctuated by a few bright spots, but otherwise spends a ton of time telling you about Star Wars mysticism minutiae. It’s very similar to the Sith Inquisitor storyline in that respect, except that the mysticism you’re hearing about doesn’t have much bearing on what you’re actually doing, it’s just a loose justification. You get all kinds of lore about the mind-control virus that was invented by [ancient sith lord] and employed in [historical moment] and rediscovered on [planet you never visit], but in the end it’s just a reason for you to go save some people, and it leaves things feeling hollow.

I don’t want to leave this without talking a bit about what I would have done to improve it, and why, but I’ve gone on for quite a while at this point. More tomorrow.

I’ve wrapped up the first arc of my Shadowrun campaign and, thanks largely to the timing and the Star Wars hype going around, I’m getting started with a new game before picking up Shadowrun again. I’m running the Fantasy Flight Star Wars system, which I’m excited to run. It’s a somewhat unwieldy system with three “core” books, so I’ve slimmed things down a little bit to make it a bit more accessible. For the most part, my players will only be using the new Force and Destiny book.

The premise should be fun. Set right around the time of Episode IV, the party is a collection of Force-sensitives who were slated to train at the Jedi Temple but avoided the Purge and have been hiding out ever since. They’ve been raised on Coruscant by a loyal and savvy local businessman (Dexter Jettster, of Dex’s Diner) and kept out of harm’s way. It’s a reasonable arrangement, with the kids helping out at the diner and picking up some tricks in secret. It keeps everyone together and with roughly aligned goals even if they have wildly different personalities; they’re more like a family than a party of convenience.

I’m looking forward to running in parallel with the original trilogy, writing for and showing off a different view of events as the movie plots play out (elsewhere in the galaxy). I like the “party of nascent Jedi” concept, too, especially since with this setup I can lean on the interesting mythology and have it be relevant to all of the characters, but not force everyone to be the usual berobed lightsaber-wielding knights.

Systemically, I’m also interested in seeing how the game plays out. It’s a much, much less deadly game than Shadowrun is in general, which makes for some interesting choices. It should feel like it’s a lot less necessary to make extremely detailed plans and avoid risk at all costs, and I think that’ll be a good break from the sometimes-oppressive Shadowrun setting, where one wrong move and horrible things happen to everyone.

I really like that the system has clearly-defined degrees of success, along with a non-binary resolution system. There’s more to a roll than whether you simply succeeded or failed, and it’s entirely possible to fail but still have something good happen or succeed and still have something go wrong. It makes even failed rolls interesting as a player, and gives me as the DM a lot more hooks to attach interesting things to.

The big concern I have is writing time. I usually write campaigns for about three to six months prior to the first session, and I’m compressing that time into about three weeks. I’m taking next week off of running game because there’s an Infinity tournament that day, but it also gives me more time to get a lead on writing this campaign. Because I don’t have time to extensively map out every possible set of actions that the group can take (notably, I’ve done this in the past and as I’ve mentioned previously, throw out about 80% of everything I write), I’m adopting a style of writing that I used for the previous Star Wars game I ran. Instead of a highly detailed tree, I’m essentially writing little “blobs” of content and connecting them on the fly, adapting to what the group is doing and sometimes stringing them together. My biggest worry about this approach is that it can lead to a “monster of the week” sort of feel, though I think even that can be fun for a little while.

I’ve got a big group for this one– seven or eight players– and I suspect there will be some amount of cycling that goes on as some people can make it some days but not others. It’s a good, balanced group, though, and one of the nice things about FFG’s Star Wars system is that it splits the usual party roles up enough to prevent certain common problems from arising. There won’t be a disaster because the one Face character isn’t around, and they’re not going to suddenly have a combat disaster because the healer can’t make it that night. I should be able to run just fine even if any one or two characters are missing, which is perfect.

I’m really looking forward to running this one. It’s got some cool moments already, and I look forward to dropping the party on Taris once again.

More on SWTOR class stories today, as I finished another one last night which gives me a nice grouping to work with. I wanted to talk about these thematically, starting with the “member of a military organization” pair, because I think they work well as story pairs. Part of this is the duality of Republic vs Sith, but really I think it has to do with source material and inspirations.

For this part, I want to go into the Sith Inquisitor and Sith Warrior stories. These two have the clearest source material– Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader, respectively, and I feel like they live up to their inspirations in interesting ways. They’re also two stories written VERY differently, which I want to talk about a bit, because it’ll come up later when I’m less kind about a particular class story. As before, expect spoilers here.

Without further ado:

SITH WARRIOR

Sith Warrior is, among other things, a story about privilege. You start as an acolyte who is sped through the Sith training process, handed everything on a silver platter, and disliked intensely by your rival, who by all accounts worked hard to get to where he is. From here you move to being the favored apprentice of a powerful Darth, given both free reign and high-profile assignments.

Your first three companions exacerbate this– Vette is a former slave, Quinn is bound by military discipline, and Jaesa is wrapped up in Jedi teachings. You have none of their limitations, which is the source of both their interest in you and conflicts between you and these party members. I bring up companions here because the Sith Warrior’s story is bound into its companions more than any of the others I’ve played. The entirety of Act 1 is a lead-in to Jaesa– you first hear about her at level 13 or 14, and finally acquire her as a party member around level 30, as the crowning finale of Act 1. You are Darth Vader, tempting Luke Skywalker over to the Dark Side, and it takes quite a bit of doing.

This Darth Vader throughline lasts throughout the entire story, and it’s great. You get a lot of moments that feel like you’re a powerful Sith Lord without taking directly from any of the movies. What I get a lot of from the Sith Warrior storyline as well is a sense that my choices matter. Of all of the classes, this is the one I’m most likely to play a second time, because the variance between the Light Side and Dark Side feels pretty significant. Depending on how far to one side or the other you are, the outcome of Act 1 can change drastically, giving you a literally different Jaesa depending on what your choice is.

Act 2 moves in a different direction, with you working to turn the cold war between Republic and Sith into all-out war, at Darth Baras’ direction. You’ve gotten hints all through Act 1 that Baras has plans within plans, and in Act 2 it starts to become apparent that not only is he manipulating the two sides into war, he’s also using the conflict to push his own agenda. Your role in this is eliminating key Republic officials to get the ball rolling and ensure the Sith have a strong position, and by the end of Act 2 you’ve openly gotten a war started, and fought alongside another of Baras’ apprentices to eliminate Baras’ superior and propel him onto the Dark Council. Throughout all of this, Baras is more and more open about how much of a pawn you are, up to and including taking credit for your work when you’re not around. For all that he’s given you, it’s the point where you start to resent him.

Act 3 ramps this up: in your very first mission you’re set up and left to die in a bombed-out cave. It’s blatant that Baras is behind it and expect you to have died, and this Act centers mostly around revenge. You’ve dealt with/heard about a lot of people who have a bone to pick with Baras, and in this chapter you’re working with them to bring down your former master. The timing here is great. Right at the point where you’re tired of taking orders from Baras, you start working against him directly. In this chapter, a bunch of Sith mysticism stuff starts to come into play, but it’s an extremely light touch. Mostly you’re disrupting Baras’ power base, so the details of the mysticism he’s employing aren’t terribly important insofar as you can ruin it.

One of the things I like a lot about Act 3 here is that it inverts a lot of what you’ve gotten used to in the rest of the story. Throughout the storyline’s first and second acts, you land on a planet and get immediate respect and obedience from everyone you talk to, because they’re afraid of Baras, if not you. Starting in Act 3, you no longer have that buffer and people will openly defy you, forcing you to take other routes. It’s a bit of friction that works really well in the story and drives home that underlying theme. No longer propped up by the system, you start working outside of it to get your goals accomplished.

There’s a note about the Sith Warrior that I want to make before moving onto the Inquisitor. This storyline, despite being about a lightsaber-wielding Sith Lord in a Star Wars game, is a fully fleshed out story on its own. You don’t need to know anything about Star Wars to appreciate the story, it stands on its own without the trappings of the setting (much like the Agent and Trooper stories do). Put another way, it’s a good story that happens to be in the Star Wars universe, not good Star Wars that happens to be formed into a story. Moving on:

SITH INQUISITOR

This is a fascinating story when compared to the Sith Warrior, because it’s the opposite in many ways. You start as a slave, who happens to have a talent for the Force and thus gets shuttled off to be a Sith acolyte. Whereas the Sith Warrior is handed success on a silver platter, the Sith Inquisitor is set up for failure from the word go, with an overseer who is openly prejudiced against you and is trying to keep you down. It’s a stark contrast, and when you get matched up with a Darth, there’s the distinct impression that it’s because of your perseverance in the face of adversity, not your raw awesomeness that overcomes your flaws.

Whereas the Sith Warrior presents you with a position that you can be proud of, with others fearing and respecting you, even once you’ve made it as the apprentice of Darth Zash, you’re still criticized and disrespected by other Sith. Zash isn’t as feared or respected as Baras, and as her apprentice you’re even less respected. As a point of comparison– when you first land on Dromund Kaas as a Sith Warrior, you’re met by a groveling servant whose biggest fear is that you won’t tell Baras he did well. As an Inquisitor, your welcome is a face-to-face with another Darth, who threatens you and then laughs in your face if you speak up against him.

Act 1 of the Inquisitor storyline is all about setting the groundwork for a ritual for Zash. Unlike Baras, who is pretty clear in his authority, Zash is almost cloyingly sweet to you unless you back-talk her directly, and you’re warned multiple times, sometimes explicitly, that Zash is going to betray you. This starts early, before level 20, when you wind up in a tomb facing an ancestor of yours. As it turns out, you’re the ancestor of an old Sith Lord whose ghost is interested in maintaining its legacy through you, and helps you out through the story. He warns you first of Zash’s impending betrayal and while you’re working through setting up for Zash’s ritual (which she promises will make you incredibly powerful), he’s providing you defenses against her. Ultimately, when the ritual occurs, it turns out it was a possession ritual– Zash knows you’ll be more powerful than she is so seeks to possess your body, combining her knowledge and your talent. Instead, she winds up possessing one of your companions. More on this a bit later.

The “communing with ghosts” theme runs through the story, and it’s one of the most-criticized aspects of the Sith Inquisitor storyline. Frankly, I think it works– the idea that you’re digging for more power through ancient mysticism is a pretty reasonable one, and since you can’t take power the usual way because the system is keeping you down, you take a more obscure path.

Act 2 of the Inquisitor storyline is about gaining power. Zash’s power play attracted the attention of another Darth, a hyper-traditionalist who seeks to discredit and dishonor Zash and eliminate her entire power base as a posthumous punishment for her arrogance. This includes you, and the start of Act 2 is this new Darth, called Thanaton, trying to get you killed. When this fails, you return and fight him directly and he beats you down pretty thoroughly, using powers you have no real defense against. Act 2 then becomes about finding defenses against Thanaton’s powers, which in this case involves enlisting the aid of other spirits beyond your ancestor. Essentially, you’re taking an extreme shortcut to power by robbing the dead.

It’s at this point that I want to go off on a tangent and talk a bit about the Sith Inquisitor’s companions and supporting NPCs. The companions are (unfortunately) mostly forgettable, and you’re stuck with your first one for quite a while. This companion is a big monster in a loincloth who is disagreeable, talks down to you, and ultimately winds up getting possessed by Zash, which both he and she resent. This companion represents my biggest criticism of the Sith Inquisitor storyline, which comes up a lot. Your first companion, Khem Val, is something called a Dashade, which is some kind of Force-resistant something something Sith assassin something something ancient Sith Lord something. It’s a one-shot of obscure Star Wars lore that’s largely irrelevant to the story but feels like a reference to some obscure piece of Star Wars mythos. This kind of thing litters the Sith Inquisitor storyline, and I think leads to the “ghostbusters” critique you see a lot. On the other hand, a lot of the incidental people you meet on various planets are rather important to the story and quite interesting, and you return to them quite a bit in Act 3. I particularly like the cult you start as a quick route to acquiring an artifact, which keeps returning and being relevant later on.

While the overall arc for the Sith Inquisitor is very good, it suffers from a lot of these one-shot lore bombs, where you’re told about some obscure bit of Star Wars backstory whose only relevance to the story is that it’s the next thing you’re going to go collect. As a result of this, Acts 1 and 2 can feel like a long fetch-quest with some interesting bits laced throughout, because really you’re just going and acquiring ancient power for the first forty levels or so. It boils down to “go to planet, collect artifact/ghost” six or seven times in a row, making the first two arcs feel very repetitive if you aren’t bought into the lore. If you are bought into the lore, it’s a cool lens into some obscure Star Wars mythos, which is where I draw the distinction between the Sith Warrior and Sith Inquisitor storylines. Sith Inquisitor is a bunch of good Star Wars lore mashed together into a story, rather than a good story set in the Star Wars universe.

This changes in Act 3. Having proven that you can stand up to Darth Thanaton and survive at the end of Act 2, Act 3 is about consolidating your powerbase and facing Thanaton for good. There’s a bit of a snag, though, in that your extremely quick route to power is destroying you. While fending off Thanaton and building a solid powerbase, you’re trying to find a cure for the degeneration your stolen power is causing. This takes things in a new direction, where rather than acquiring tchotchkes, you’re following vague hints and scraps of lore for notes. The thread of “obscure Star Wars mythos” continues in this chapter, but it’s directly tied to the story and completely relevant, so they feel a lot more meaningful. Effectively, you’re seeing a technological and spiritual cure for your condition, and as you do so you’re putting together a front against Thanaton.

The Inquisitor Act 3 is an interesting inversion of the Sith Warrior. Up to that point, you’re kind of disrespected as a Sith and often have to use force to get any kind of consideration. In Act 3, between your powerbase and your increasing allies, you’re taken more and more seriously as a legitimate rival to Thanaton, and get the according respect and assistance you might require. You go from being outside the system and the machinations of the Sith to playing a direct part in them, and your allies and powerbase are helping you the entire way through. You finish the story having earned a place on the Dark Council, which is notably a step further than even the Sith Warrior gets. While the Warrior is a lone badass operating outside the lines, the Sith Inquisitor is a legitimate member of the Dark Council with a network of allies and agents spanning quite a few planets.

The big difference in the two that I want to call attention to is that the Inquisitor’s main storyline is possibly the least interesting thing about the class. The writing of the individual planets is far stronger than the overall thread, and the incidental characters you meet are interesting and fun, even when they’re temporary or short-lived. Whereas Sith Warrior has a compelling thread all throughout, Sith Inquisitor has a lot of good moments, even without the thread. Inquisitor’s Act 3 pulls everything together quite nicely, which is also somewhat rare; I tend to dislike Belsavis and Voss on most characters, whereas they’re interesting on the Inquisitor and feel more tied into the class story, as opposed to incidental (they feel INCREDIBLY incidental to the Sith Warrior and Trooper stories).

Of the two, I like the Sith Warrior more, but Inquisitor is also rather good if you buy into the Star Wars mythos it’s built on. I think the use of mysticism is generally fine, but I think Act 3’s direct link between action and lore is stronger than the Acts 1 and 2 lore tie-ins that mostly serve to make it feel like going to a planet and finding some macguffin or another is more interesting. That being said, both deliver on the feeling of being a powerful Vader-type character or a shadowy, schemeing Palpatine figure extremely well, particularly with the payoffs at the end.

I’ve been running tabletop games more or less continuously for the last five or six years, and on and off before that. I take my role as DM fairly seriously, and most of my larger campaigns are a few hundred pages’ worth of notes and reference material. A big part of that involves layers of failure– what happens if my players don’t succeed at whatever their goals are at a given time?

For all the pages of content, I wind up using about 15-20% of it. To use a recent example, I just wrapped up the first chapter of a Shadowrun game, and I think about a third of the NPCs I created for the game wound up getting used, and of those, a goodly fraction wound up appearing once and never again, not playing an important role in the game. I’m not bothered by this “wasted” work; I leave my games and the approaches my players take very open, and I rarely see a reason to force an NPC on my party if he or she doesn’t make the game more fun and align with the party’s goals. I do my best not to be a ‘railroading’ DM, and I provide story hooks but rarely explicit tunnels. At pretty much any point, my players can say “nope, not going to do that” and they’ll wind up going down some different, alternate path.

I can get away with this because I’m gifted with a group of players who aren’t actively trying to break the game world or intentionally derail the story. I can throw interesting and varied challenges at them and they’ll be taken seriously, but still approached creatively. I haven’t killed a player-character in years. I haven’t needed to, although it’s been close a few times in particularly scary combat encounters. Outside of combat, though, I don’t gun for my PCs– I generally feel like killing a player character is so trivial a job for a DM that there’s no real reason to do it except to curb game-destructive behavior.

As an example: I’m not going to kill a PC because the party forgot to disable one of ten security systems, or because a hacking attempt went badly and they got noticed, or what have you. It’s way too easy to create “gotcha” moments where something the party could never have anticipated comes out and kills them. I will cause problems if a danger they should have discovered and neutralized goes ignored, but again, I’m not killing anyone because they overlooked some detail. On the other hand, if I have a party member start openly trying to break the game or turn it into their personal playground to the detriment of people taking the game more seriously, I will and have punished that kind of destructive behavior by killing that character. At one point, I had a player (not in my usual group) make a point of cutting in and mocking every NPC the party talked to. At first, NPCs ignored this, then they started getting insulted and treating the party less well, but this didn’t curb the behavior. Eventually, they ran into a particularly powerful NPC who intended to make a deal with them. She got instantly insulted by the player, gestured once, and the player was cut down by sniper fire, at which point she turned back to the party to continue the conversation.

This brings me back to the concept of failure. I’m unlikely to kill players for failure; that’s not terribly interesting. They may be inconvenienced, but if I’m going to make a legitimately challenging encounter, I think it’s unfair of me to start killing players because dice randomness didn’t go their way in a particular session. Instead, I go down a different story path; failure is interesting, and winning all the time gets dull.

What’s interesting to me is that my current party has become highly risk-averse. In the last several games, there’s been a pretty strong reticence to take anything other than the most calculated risks, and any situation in which they might delve into the unknown leads to quick paralysis and inaction. At least in Shadowrun, I feel like the game system is oppressive enough and lethal enough that taking anything but a very carefully measured approach is very dangerous, but I’ve also seen relatively little risk-taking elsewhere. Powerful artifacts are left alone or returned to their owners, dangerous encounters are avoided rather than turned to an advantage, and moving forward without as complete knowledge as possible is rare.

I consider this a failure on my part in two ways. First, I haven’t made it clear enough that failure and death are not synonymous, and that the game will go on (and potentially be interesting with interesting hooks!) even if a particular quest or mission or fight goes badly. Second, I’ve been a little too balanced in my encounter design. I keep very careful tabs on what I know the party is capable of, and I never put them in situations that I don’t think they have a statistically significant chance of winning (75% or more). Combined with my players’ penchant for coming up with clever combos and creative solutions, I haven’t actually seen a failed encounter in quite a while now– there’s pretty much been a string of resounding successes, often well beyond what I expect.

As a result of all of this, I’ve started looking into systems that have failure as a built-in mechanic. I always look at Burning Wheel as a compelling system; it creates fantastic stories and has some really interesting character creation and advancement, but there’s a ton of crunch involved and it’s a really impenetrable and lethal system. I think a couple of my players would love it and the rest would get bogged down in the mire of rules.

I’d thought that my group disliked the new Fantasy Flight Star Wars system, which I’d always thought was a pity because it builds degrees of success and failure into the basic dice rolls in (I think) interesting ways. I found out recently that pretty much everyone is interested in getting into it, so I’m excited to give it a whirl. I think the system does a great job of making you feel like your die rolls are more than binary success/failure, and gives me a lot of interesting buttons to push and levers to pull on the DM side. On top of that, it’s not a very lethal game– even losing the entire party in combat isn’t necessarily a death sentence, unlike… pretty much every other game I’ve played.

My biggest concern is that the power level of starting characters in the system is very low. It can be hard to succeed at much of anything on your first try, and you want to work together and try to get bonuses from a variety of sources to try really difficult things. Failure is still interesting and moves things forward, but you are going to fail quite a lot, and the game will keep moving. I’m worried this is going to result in people hyperspecializing, to maximize success in a single given category, and then avoid using that skill at all if the key person who’s “good at it” isn’t around. I may have to do a bit more splitting of the party than I usually do.

That being said, the premise is interesting (force-sensitives before and during Episode IV), and I’m excited to see what kinds of characters I’ll be writing for. I have a very loose sketch of the early parts of the game, but I don’t like writing until I know what my players are playing, so I can weave their ideas into the story. I’ll have about a week to start fleshing things out, which should be enough to get a few sessions going.