Starting in 2017, my job flew me out to San Francisco around 5 times each year for work. At the time, my older brother lived out there too, so I always used it as an opportunity to stay for a week and visit.
This was a win-win all around — while work would pay to put visiting employees up in a hotel, they preferred if we stayed with employees living in the Bay Area. To incentivize this, they would provide the visiting employee $100/day to expense in gifts for their host. My brother worked for the same company, so if I stayed for a full week, that was $500 to add to his dragon’s hoard each trip. And that’s on top of the main benefit of hanging out with me!
After about a year of these trips, I was invited to join in on a Star Wars RPG game my brother and some friends held every month or so.
Known by other kids as “That GameBoy kid” growing up, I’d always wanted to try playing an RPG with people, but the social stigma of being seen as a “nerdy D&D guy” kept me out of it (whether that stigma was real or not). Instead, I kept to doing karate in front of the TV when Power Rangers came on, playing GameBoy and Xbox, and eventually competing in sports. Not knowing anyone else who knew how to play or how to run a D&D game also kept me out of it, but it was mostly the stigma thing, probably.
However, in the past few years, RPGs have seemed to transcend beyond nerd culture (or maybe what’s nerdy has come into vogue) and become less of a “neckbeards in the basement sweating out their Mountain Dew” characterization — maybe due to its popularity in Netflix’s hit show Stranger Things (Netflix please pay for this name drop). Or maybe I grew up and cared less about being seen as a nerdy person. (It’s more the Netflix thing, probably.)
For the unaware, a Star Wars RPG is essentially Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) set in the Star Wars universe. RPGs are a mix between board games and improv: they are played with dice, and every player has a character in the story. Each character has aptitude in several skills and is terrible in others (shooting, persuading, lightsabering, swinging from vines in an ancient and overgrown ruin, etc.). The level of expertise in each skill is assigned a number that corresponds to how much of a bonus the player gets when rolling their dice to take an action: You want to shoot a big tentacled alien and are good at shooting? When you roll your dice, you get to add 8 points to your roll, which makes you more likely to successfully shoot that slimy, scaly, definitely-oozy, tentacled alien. Trying to charm the socks off a space babe and have no skill at speechcraft? When you roll your dice, you add nothing, which makes you more likely to fail and get a drink thrown in your face. Just like real life!
The players act out their character’s personality and actions (playing a role in the “roleplaying game”) and use their dice to progress through a Star Wars story of a friend’s creation (“the Game Master” or “GM”). The GM responds to the players’ dice rolls and describes their successes and failures in the context of the plot and their intended action: “You wanted to swing from the vine, but rolled 2 out of 20. You start to swing and the vine immediately snaps, dropping you several floors below where you wanted to go.”
For the players, it’s a fun combo of luck and acting. I always thought it sounded awesome, though was foiled by my lack of self-confidence and what other people would think of me, so never played. But now I finally had my opportunity to play a game — and unlike when I was a kid, I could drink beer and whiskey while playing!
The games were held at the home of Chris (one of our GMs) and his wife Jess while their twin toddlers slept. The other players were my brother Jack, his wife Kate, his roommate Alex (who traded off GM responsibilities with our host), and me.
From this group, Chris and Alex took the reigns of the story. Each session, one would run the game as the GM while the other played their character with the rest of us. In this way, they passed the narrative back and forth to create an original story in the Star Wars universe.
The Setting
Star Wars famously takes place “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” The galaxy is made up of hundreds of planets and alien creatures, but with a large portion of humans too (who knew a movie filmed before believable CGI would rely heavily on humans to fill their cast in an alien galaxy?). This particular galaxy is in the middle of a war (a “star war,” if you will) between the tyrannical Imperial Empire that rules with an iron first, and the plucky Rebellion that seeks to topple the Empire’s rule. For those familiar with the global phenomenon, this story took place just after Episode 4, in the wake of the destruction of the first Death Star.
The Characters
Our cast of characters included a human Force-user who frequently signaled that he would turn on us. He usually stuck by the team, but would often do things like recruit an enemy Sith to train him in the dark ways of the Force, or run away to the big bad villain to join them.
Another human character was our gunslinging smuggler. He had two blaster pistols named Chocolate and Peanut-butter, and had an aptitude for charming people, shooting people, piloting ships, and being on the run. It was his starship the group used to navigate the galaxy, a freighter named the Cream Cheese.
Our pilot was another human. She often took over piloting the Cream Cheese before she single-handedly stole her own Imperial Transport Ship. She was on the hunt for her missing sister who had potentially joined up with the Rebel Alliance — family drama!
The next character was also a human, and the group’s resident goody-two-shoes Jedi. Gradually learning more powers and gaining strength throughout the campaign, she had a strict morality that kept the crew from murdering everyone while she sought to discover the fate of her missing parents. While it sometimes felt like her morality restricted our potential actions, it ultimately led to more creative solutions when approaching seemingly straightforward situations.
Our mechanic and explosives expert was, you guessed it, a human Dug. Dugs are strange aliens that feature prominently in the Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace with the antagonistic podracer Sebulba. They have short little legs that often don’t reach the ground, ridiculously long arms that they walk around on, and a head like a leathery horse with jowls. This character was played in a Russian accent, the only one who put on a fun voice.
My character was the pit droid 3F-D3 (pronounced “Eff-Dee”), a big game hunter with a rifle way bigger than his short metal body. Since it was my first time playing one of these games and I only wanted to dip my toe in the pool, I picked a character that wouldn’t require a ton of weird voices, or tough decision-making (droids can be calculated without empathy, which takes some of the trickiness out of decisions of morality). And since I was joining the group in media res, I picked a character that could easily have been found in a junkyard in between sessions — which is the plot hook we went with: the Dug (named Dug) found me in a junkyard and repaired me. I had no memories, so characterization would be easier for me. My only big quirk was that I was always looking for some big game to hunt. Strangely, we found that twice.
The Story
Since I was coming into the story later than everyone else, I missed a few sessions at the start where the plot got rolling. But I caught on quick: the pilot was looking for her sister who may or may not have joined the rebels. The Jedi was looking to save her parents, rulers of an entire planet currently under Imperial (and Sith) occupation. The smuggler had acquired the Cream Cheese, our means of traveling around. The indiscreet other Force-user was probably plotting some nefarious way to betray us. And Dug was smashing his hammer in the engine room to “Cum On Feel The Noize.”
As 3F-D3, I joined the crew on the Jedi’s home planet to help out with rescuing her parents. Our plan was to steal a boat and breach an enormous wall out in the bay next to the city so we could get inside. It’s a galaxy of spaceships and magic tricks, who would expect a boat?
Luckily for us, there was a Moby Dick-esque space-fishing boat next to the junkyard, complete with giant harpoon cannon. Unluckily for us, we were attacked by a giant fish monster. Thinking we would be playing a Star Wars space opera story, consider my surprise when we would actually playing Captain Ahab and his crew (in space) — not really what I expected, but it was surprising and fun, and I have learned that some of the best situations in RPGs are those that spin your expectations in strange and unexpected ways. And together, with the giant harpoon, we killed the monster, blew through the wall, found the Jedi’s parents, fought (and captured) a Sith Lord, and stole an Imperial transport shuttle before escaping off the planet.
The next several sessions were filled with planning how to rescue the pilot’s sister, making an alliance with the Rebellion, scavenging supplies, and hunting some big game. For the monster hunt, we had hoped to create a trap that disguised a giant cannon — when the monster stepped onto the trap, it would launch the monster up into space to blast into an Imperial Star Destroyer and take out two birds with one stone. But our GM thought that was a little far-fetched for a universe with laser swords, telekinetic monks with beards, and a Russian-alien mechanic that listens to Quiet Riot, so we took care of it the old fashioned way — guns and explosives.
Our final session consisted of us attacking the Star Destroyer and rescuing the sister. As luck would have it, a group of pirates were also attacking the spaceship at the same time as us. By the end, we rescued the sister, defeated the Empire and the pirates, and 3F-D3 charmed the pirate queen so well that she gave him her mask and when he put it on, everyone thought he was the pirate queen. The galaxy was saved and I was queen of the pirates!
It was fun!
As my first foray into D&D, the mechanics were easy to learn, the story was consistently engaging, and I had an amazing time. From there, we lost a few players, so the four of us remaining (Alex, Chris, Jack, and me) jumped into a new Star Wars story a few months later, with new characters and no goodie-two-shoes Jedi to keep our morality in check. But my time as 3F-D3 was so great that several games later, in a different fantasy world, the “pirate queen” idea had continued to stick with me, and I decided to play a pirate character, Captain Maelstrom.
And when thinking of what to make my header image of this website’s D&D-focused posts, I knew I had to memorialize 3F-D3 as one of the characters I included. Complete with his gun that was way bigger than his body.