In 201, I want to take it more into actually playing your character, bringing your character to life at your table, so it has a different voice than just your voice.

I think it’s something that is pretty easy to do, have a character that sounds like you, acts like you, and thinks like you. And I don’t think that is a bad way to role play, sometimes, but there is much more that you can do beyond that to really play your character in Dungeons and Dragons and not just play yourself.

So, why do I think you shouldn’t just play yourself or your idealized version of yourself?

For me, I see role playing as an opportunity to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and see the world from a different perspective. Now, I don’t mean that you should play a racist jerk because that’s different from who you are, you’re probably going to be annoying everyone at the table, but playing a character who has issues with another race and using that are an opportunity for your character to grow, can work well if done delicately. But even beyond that, you can play someone who has a different view of religion than you do, a different view of politics, of money, or murder hoboness than you do. Or in a different vein but equally as challenging, it can be an opportunity to play an extrovert when you yourself are in introvert, or vice-a-versa.

That’s the theory on why you might play someone different than you and I encourage it, but how do you go about doing that and doing it in a way where it isn’t a stereotype?

I think a good starting point is to create a character who has a tick of some sort. It could be that they are extremely scholarly, or maybe they have a catch phrase (keep it short and use it sparingly), or some default fighting style (every character should have one), but more than that, something that you can always do as your character in a role playing situation. Or something that is interesting about them. In a one-shot game at a convention, I played a monk dinosaur who was observing the other dinosaurs in the tribe and using it as an anthropological study. When I needed a role playing hook, I would lean into that. Or in another game, I was playing a mage who dressed like The Dude from The Big Lebowski and did drugs, so when I needed a role playing hook, I’d channel that.

These are pretty simple hooks, but they gave me a way to always step back into the character. Another way to think about it is to compare it to learning an accent, or doing an accent. Most of the time there is a phrase or a word that you can use to do your version of an accent. It’s that thing that allows you to step into the accent, in the same way, these ticks or hooks are ways for you to step into playing your character. It sounds weird, but it’s going to be a faster way to role playing your character and a good way to jump start it. It also makes it easier to step into role playing someone who isn’t just like you, because you have that way to change your mindset.

I want to address one more thing about these hooks before I talk about combat again. And that is the idea of using an accent or silly voice for your character. This can be used well to keep yourself in character. Such as whenever you are speaking in that voice, you are in character, and when you aren’t, you are out of character. However, there are a lot of people who aren’t great at doing voices. If you’ve listened to Dungeons and Flagons, you can tell that I will do voices for NPC’s and monsters when I’m running the game, but I have a pretty limited selection of voices that I can do. So don’t feel pressure to do this for your character, and don’t compare yourself to Critical Role when doing voices, they are professional voice actors, they literally make a living doing voices.

Now, I want to circle back to combat for a split second. I talked earlier about having your move. The default thing that you go with when you play your character. It’s important to have this a character not just for role playing, as it will become your characters thing, but also for the game, so that you can make combat go more quickly. I know for a lot of people, myself included, I prefer the role playing aspect of the game, versus the combat aspect of the game. And combat, if not done well, can end up being a longer part of the game than the role playing. So, the signature/default move for your character is there for two reasons. One, it does give that hook to get you into the mindset of your character in a combat. Two, and as importantly, it means in combat you are ready for your turn. If you know that you can always roll two attacks with your great sword, when it comes to your turn, you are ready to go. Sometimes you’ll do different things, but if there is nothing obvious and different to do, you can take your turn fast. That’s why I think it’s something that should be required by the Dungeon Master and players at the table to hold people to having that default move.

Now we’ve talked a bit more about how you can get into character and play a character who isn’t just like you. Next time I want to talk more about creating a direction and arc for your character within the game that you control.

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I would say that the ideas I’ve been giving in posts have been medium levels of backstory. It has been more than just suggesting playing a rogue who likes to stab stuff. But it also hasn’t been creating a lot of very depth heavy backstories. I leave stuff generally vague like what deity it is that the cleric is following, what town or area you grew up in that something horrible happened in. It is very possible to set-up a very in depth backstory where you list out your friends, you family members, everyone who has wronged you, what your life was like growing up, what all of your hopes and dreams had been.

There are multiple reasons for me doing that, the first being, if you want to use it, some of those things are things you’ll have to work through with your DM, because I don’t know your game, and some of them are stuff that you don’t need to know. Knowing too much about your character does a few things, it can limit what the DM can do around your character, because there will be a lack of mystery. It can force you into playing a character in a certain way and finding out that you don’t enjoy it. It can limit your character in how they can develop.

The one that I want to focus on for this topic is the fact that it can force you into playing your character a certain way.

The point of this topic was to cover two things, the first being, what’s my motivation for adventuring, the other other being, what’s my motivation for role playing. These two topics are fairly closely held together. Most likely the reason you have for adventuring is also the reason that you’re going to have for some of your characters motivations and interactions in role playing. If goblins murdered your family, you’re probably adventuring to get revenge on the goblins, it’s also probably going to mean that when you run across an injured goblin that poses no threat to you, you’re still going to want to kill it.

With motivation for adventuring, there can be a lot of different reasons. A bard might be in it to see the world, be able to travel and perform on different stages that they wouldn’t have access to otherwise. You could also have a Barbarian who is just in need of and bad with money, so they don’t care too much about the adventuring, but they always need money and the adventuring party always gives them a little money. Or you could be out looking for a lost holy artifact as a cleric, getting revenge on a ruler who slaughtered your village as a fighter, or out to protect your grove against a blight that is on the land as a druid. There are a lot of reasons otherwise that you could be looking into adventuring. But one of your jobs as a player when creating your character is to make sure you have this answered.

Along with having that answered, a lot of DM’s will put your party together, but if you and fellow players can come up with a reason for putting together, or better yet come up with a reason for keeping your party together, that is huge. Whether it’s because your party has similar goals or needs or because you actually like each other, it’s important to have some reason. This motivation with help inform some of your interactions and will help it make sense when the story of the game isn’t focused on your character to keep them as part of the group. Now, this isn’t all on you as a player, the DM has to keep all the characters involved in the story as well, but if you’re creating the loner Druid who cares only about her part of the forest, when the characters aren’t focused on that, that druid is probably going to leave the party to either go off on their own or to find another adventuring party to help them.

But also with motivation, we want to talk about the idea of role playing your character. I talked some earlier about having a medium depth background story. Some of the reason was that it doesn’t lock you into a single specific way of playing your character, but also because it doesn’t lock you into a single path going forward. It’s too easy to lock your self into a single purpose and single goal while role playing and then finding out that you really don’t enjoy it.

Now, I realize that sometimes it’s fun coming up with a ton of backstory and all of these different plot hooks, but often times it’s going to be too much to actually work into a game and there is a chance to feel disappointment because it wasn’t fully touched upon. As a DM, personally I don’t try and avoid using peoples backstories and generally I’ll try and tie them into the campaign as I go. However, if something doesn’t fit in with the overall story, or if I feel like the story is leaning too heavily on a single person, I am going to try and change it up which might keep it from using all of your backstory. If there are too many plot hooks as well for your character, I might not touch on all of them, instead just focusing on one of them to really add into the main story with a nod or two thrown to others of them.

Beyond having too many plot hooks, having too few is bad as well. If, as a DM, I don’t get much to work with, I’m not going to put as much effort into keeping your character engaged story wise. My assumption is that you’re going to like combat more so and I’ll make sure to sprinkle enough of those in as well. But it also doesn’t give you much framework to role play, if you want to role play a lot, a consistent character. They might end up being consistent because you’re just playing your own personality, but it might be that they are very chaotic in how they respond to everything presented to them. Being a little chaotic isn’t bad, and a lot of people play chaotic characters, in fact, the Total Party Thrill podcast has an episode (linked here) about how Chaotic Good is probably where most adventurers should be playing out of.

So there is chaos in a good way and in a bad way. A chaotic character can at times be used as an excuse to do whatever you want, but chaos means less that you just do whatever sounds the most fun in the moment, it more means that you’re willing to do what it takes in situations laws be damned, and you’re willing to be flexible for the greater good, again, I think that Total Party Thrill with their episode does a really good job of explaining it, so I’ll leave that as a listen for people.

There is one major exception for having much of a backstory, or any of one really, and that’s at a Convention or while playing a one-shot. When playing those shorter games, focus in on a single thing for your characters. When I was playing Dungeons and Dinosaurs game at AcadeCon the first year I was there, one person made their T-Rex very impulsive, I had an herbivore and I made him into a researcher who was watching and documenting everything. We didn’t have more backstory or direction for character than what we gave them, in fact about the only thing we knew about the dinosaurs came on a dinosaur fact sheet. In that case, having that one thing you role play to is important as it’s going to allow you to have a focused character for that short time without slowing down the game because you’re trying to pick out or build more depth into your character.

What are some things you’ve used as motivation for either being part of a party or role playing a character in Dungeons and Dragons or any role playing system?

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Highlight #1: Running a one-shot for the second time. This w\game that went in a completely absurd and amazing direction when I ran it for the first time last year, and it was fun to see how things turned out differently running it a second time. It was also interesting because I had one player who is around my age in the group, and then three other players who are probably closer to my parents’ age than mine. So it was interesting to be teaching Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition to someone who really knew how to play 2nd Edition.

Highlight #2: My Pride, PrejuDICE, and Zombies game. This was another game that I ran, and it was a blast; I had two people who were huge Jane Austen fans in the group, and getting to run them through the absurd scenario that is Pride, Prejudice and Zombies was great. We also had two people who weren’t as familiar with the original story, and that was a lot of fun as well, as I got to tell some of the story from the movie (and book, but I’ve just seen the movie). We had Jane, Lizzy, and Kitty Bennett and Charles Bingley as player characters. I also tried a very cinematic version of combat, since they were fighting through a zombie horde; it took a little bit for a few of the players to really get into it, but it is fun to get these absurd scenes and to have a single player describing it, and using other characters to help fight off zombies. The game is a bit short, and the big battle was a bit too easy, but everyone had a ton of fun.

Highlight #3: Hanging out with friends is a huge part of the con. Getting to talk for a long while with Amanda, whom we met last year and who played in the game I mentioned in Highlight #1, and later playing Five Tribes with her and one of her friends was a ton of fun. We also had a great time hanging out with our friend Tom Cantwell (he’s given suggestions for our Eating Nerdy series) at Warped Wing Brewery, having him as a player in the Pride, PrejuDICE, and Zombies group, and then playing Machi Koro with him after that. Last year, we knew a few people through Twitter, but didn’t meet them in person until the con, and this year we met and hung out with even more new people. AcadeCon is great because it’s still growing, so you tend to run into some of the same people, and that’s a lot of fun.

Highlight #4: Playing three new systems, two of them with the game creator. We got to play Axon Punk Overdrive (think Cowboy Bebop and cyberpunk) and managed to get a cure for a disease without killing any guards. That was a ton of fun, and we got to build our own characters for that. I picked up the manual for that game system, and we may be featuring a guest post from him soon–stay tuned! We also got to play Dreamchaser with Pete. It’s an interesting game in which the players build a story collectively, using the dreams of your characters as plot points. We were trying to capture a fairy, and I played as an eccentric uncle character.

Highlight #5: We got to play in some really interesting worlds. Axon Punk Overdrive was a fun world to live in, and the creator had clearly put a ton of effort into creating something that was really immersive. But the one that took the cake was playing a game using the Cypher system. We played as vampires, werewolves, and magi who were fending off techno-zombies, aliens, and a cult. It was a super cool, dark world in which humans had been killed off and the whole earth was generally in perpetual daylight, except for the city we were in. We were playing a raiding team that had to solve how an artifact caused a demon to be released in our town. Kristen and I are thinking of getting the components for that system so we can run a game of that ourselves. It’s fantastical and awesome, and with Cypher, the scenarios are always in the future. Throughout the course of gameplay, you find  items called cyphers, which are always tech items that have a one-time use for your character. You can only hold so many, but they allow you to do awesome actions. Another feature of the system is that the players are the only ones who roll dice, so the GM can focus more on the story and less on the mechanics, as they’re mainly just setting difficulty levels and framing the story.

Overall, the con was a blast. For people who want to play different RPG’s and learn new systems, I’m always going to recommend that they attend AcadeCon. This year, we did a really good job of balancing out how much we did, resting, and enjoying our time there. Many thanks to everyone who made it awesome, especially The RPG Academy.

Peder and I first learned about the Star Wars RPGs through Campaign, a podcast run by One Shot. Campaign is just one of the many great podcasts One Shot runs, but it’s the one I’m most familiar with, and was a great (and hilarious) way to get introduced to the Star Wars RPGs. Through listening to Campaign, I learned a bit about how the game is played — and a LOT about how absurd and fun it can be when your RPG story regularly goes off the rails…but I digress.

There are currently three different modules of the Star Wars RPG — Edge of the Empire, Age of Rebellion, and Force and Destiny. But even though the one Peder and I were most familiar with prior to playing AoR is the Edge of the Empire module, since that’s the one the Campaign group used, this knowledge still served us well. As I mentioned, gameplay is very similar for all three modules; there are just some different options and basic storylines/timelines within each.

AoR is, to my understanding, meant to be set at about the time that the Rebel Alliance was at its peak (so, close to when Luke, Leia, and Han were entering the picture — or at least, that’s how I choose to imagine it). In our session, we and the other players played as the motley crew of a Corellian YT-1300f freighter — the same type of ship as the Millenium Falcon. Together, we had to work together to stop the evil Director Lucas from releasing edited versions of a certain trilogy of beloved films to suit his “great vision.” We had to destroy the master copies of the edited (read: degraded) films before they were released across the galaxy — and before the original versions were destroyed forever! Much quoting and some George Lucas impressions (even one from me…) ensued.

This storyline was a really fun one, and struck the perfect balance between casual fun and high-stakes action that you want for a one shot session. Some of us played as human characters, and some as aliens (I was a young human woman, Peder was a Bothan); this let us get a feel for the spectrum of different characters you can play within the Star Wars RPG universe. And even in that short time, we were able to pack in a fair amount of character development. I kept on rolling horribly throughout the game, so I used that to style my character as absurdly clumsy and absentminded. And during our first combat encounter, Peder had his character use his knife — he then took this moment and ran with it to make his character super sneaky, sly, and obsessed with stabbing people, and used that element to hilarious effect several times.

Though the Star Wars RPGs have character sheets and skill mechanics that are similar in some ways to what you’d see in a few other RPGs, what’s really interesting and unique about these games is the dice system. This is because these RPGs use their own special set of dice — instead of using the usual many-sided numbered dice like in most other RPGs, the Star Wars games have different colored dice printed with symbols, which correspond to different aspects of the game. There are green dice, which determine how successful a given action is, yellow dice, which determine how successfully a skill is used, purple dice, which influence an action’s difficulty, and red dice, which are added in for especially difficult actions. There are also blue dice, or boost dice, that can be used to make a skill more effective, and black dice that add in extra threats. The white die you see in the image is a Force die; however, we didn’t use this much, and it’s one that never really seems to get used often, so for our purposes, I won’t go into it for now.

There are a couple of elements involved in how the type and number of dice to be rolled is determined. Beside each skill on the character sheet, there are symbols showing which dice should be rolled when using that skill. In addition to this, the GM will let the character know how many dice to roll for the difficulty level when the character performs an action.

For a quick example–let’s say I’m dressed up in a stormtrooper uniform, trying to bluff my way past a superior officer. I’d likely use my deception skill to do this. We’ll say I’m really good at BS’ing, and that there are three green symbols and a yellow beside my Deception skill. The GM decides this is a reasonably difficult maneuver, so he’ll tell me to add in two purple dice. So I’ll roll a total of six dice (getting to roll huge handfuls of dice is another great feature of this game, incidentally) to get my result. Successes (on the green and yellow die) and failures (on the purple and red die) cancel each other out, as do advantages and threats. So we’ll say that, all told, I’ve rolled well and gotten two successes, one advantage, and one threat. I would then need to describe just how I succeeded, what my advantage was (maybe I’m so good at bluffing that I strike up a friendship with the officer), and what the threat turned out to be (maybe I don’t know the answer to a key question the officer asks and I have to make up something on the fly).

If it sounds complicated, well…it is, a bit. And this isn’t even touching on some of the other elements of the game (which I’ll avoid going into for now for the sake of keeping this simple as I can). Getting used to the way the dice interact with each other can take a little time to figure out, and I was glad that I already knew at least a little about the dice mechanic from listening to Campaign. However, once you get going, it starts to feel pretty natural, and the GM can likely help out if there’s a dice roll with a particularly confusing result.

In any case, I really like this mechanic overall. Due to the way the advantages and threats affect the successes and failures, players have to be more creative and detailed when they explain what’s happening, and this adds a lot of flavor and depth to the story overall, in a way that feels more baked-in than with other systems. As I tend to favor the narrative side of RPG play over the combat element, this is my favorite thing about the Star Wars games, and getting to experience it firsthand was as fun as I imagined. Beyond the compelling story element, we had a great GM and a player group that gelled well, making for a truly enjoyable session as first-time AoR players!

So, have you played AoR or any of the other Star Wars RPGs? How do you feel about the unique mechanics of this game? If you haven’t played it, is it on your list of systems to try?

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