How much of the movie settings do you incorporate

[jawa1138]

Or more to the point how much is too much.

I have been running off and on a consistently inconsistent Star Wars campaing. We reboot often while working out what rules work for us and what we need to house rule and the players become more comfortable with different character types and decide to roll up new ones.

But we spend all of that time bouncing between planets from the movies with some side treks thrown in. How much revisiting of the movie planets do you do in your campaign and do you spend more of your other time on planets from WEG resources or homebrew locations?

Our campaign is still new enough and my players mostly young enough to be ok for now but I'd like to see how the rest of you run your Star Wars universe.

[cheshire]

I've played with a few different groups, and it depends on the group chemistry. The group I'm with now, we rotate GMs. Usually the other GMs pull from either the movies, or the EU. They're eager to incorporate their EU knowledge into the backstory of the adventure, or some dynamic of the setting.

When I took us on a side-quest and came up with planets and locations from scratch, it threw one of them through a loop entirely. He started scrambling with his iPad on Wookieepedia thinking that he'd been out-obscured on locations. He then started asking questions on where the planet might have appeared. Once he realized we were entirely off the rails things settled down. Suffice to say, the expectation was that we'd pick something that was at least able to be researched out of game, even if it didn't provide any in-game useful information.

Other campaigns and groups it has been the expectation that you would visit otherwise unexplored areas of the Star Wars universe. As in, you may visit a planet near Dantooine, but Dantooine itself was merely a landmark for this planet that you'd never heard of before, OOC.

Honestly, I don't think that there's a right or wrong answer to this If your players enjoy hopping from location to location on RPG tourism, then heck, why not? Let them see the sights of Hoth, Tatooine, the Couruscant under-city and other festering crap-holes of the galaxy. If they want to feel a bit more off the rails, then let them enjoy it.

Honestly, there are a lot of things that are overused in Star Wars games, RPGs, video game, or otherwise. If Tatooine had a nickle for every time some adventurer wound up there, then the tourism board would account for 87% of the GDP of the planet. Sure, the Emperor made a nearly clean sweep of the Jedi, but from the look of video games, novels, and RPG adventures, the galaxy is so full of Force-potentials that you can hardly throw a rock in a cantina without hitting one or two. But I say, if you want to have a force-sensitive evading the Empire, and he feels like he needs to duck into Mos Eisley to stay out of trouble... then I say more power to your group.

Why, has the movie tourism been an issue for your players?
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Before we take any of this too seriously, just remember that in the middle episode a little rubber puppet moves a spaceship with his mind.

[jawa1138]

No there has been no issues so far with the players. Most of my players are under the age of 14. The reason I asked mostly is because a good majority of the published adventures seem to hit the movie planets or mimic them in a cheesy fashion. I just don't want to over do it but at the same time I don't want to accidently create worlds that miss the Star Wars feel.

I did have them visit hoth at a time before the battle of Yavin. They were setting down to hide from an Imperial cruiser and accidently ran into a small group of men and woman working on the beginnings of a make shift base. The workers asked for thier help fighting a group of pirates using a canyon cave as a hideout and they shared the loot in exchange for help installing a looted shield generator and bacta tank into thier ship. My players are not yet rebels so it was fun to have them mix it up with a premovie hoth rebel base.

I agree with Tatooine being the "you meet in a tavern" stereotype but it so easily sets the mood.

[Whill]

Metagaming in general is inevitable (and in certain circumstances I even promote it), but players asking what EU product the planet appeared in and attempting to look up a planet on their tablet in-session is overt metagaming that I would never allow in my game, even if the game was meant to be set in the SW Expanded Universe. (At least sneak that research under the game table when the GM is in the restroom or something!)

But then again, I am clear up front that my game is not set in the EU (or the canon universe). It is set in my SWU which only some aspects of those universes exist in while others don't. And for EU/canon planets that do exist in mine, they may not be exactly the same in my universe, so it may not conform to Wookieepedia. I'm guilty of even occasionally using player knowledge of the EU to intentionally lead my players astray and surprise them with something unexpectedly different. I determine what my players know based on what their PCs may know from their character background and the outcome of skill rolls to remember/learn the information in-universe.

As far as film planets in my game, you just gotta have them sometimes. Two consecutive adventures is almost definitely too much, unless it has been a long while since we've had any. I only use film locations every so often, because more than that is just too unoriginal. I don't even want to overuse non-film EU/canon planets for the same reason. I enjoy world-building so like to use original planets, unless we are playing a published campaign that is focused on a particular sector like Tapani or Minos. Even in those I sometimes just have to contrive a reason to go to Tatooine for one adventure - It's such a fun place to have adventures! In the first adventure of my next big campaign, outer rim fringers are going to have to travel from Dac to Coruscant and back because, how could Coruscant not be fun and epic? But most of the campaign's adventures after that will be set in original locations (some of which may be inspired by film locations with as little cheese as possible).
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[cheshire]

[Pel]

That's commendable but way more effort than I usually spend in a basic adventure.

Our original games began right after the Battle of Yavin. Everything after that was completely up in the air and left up to the players' influence, if they so desired. We hit most of the major movie planets (Bespin, Hoth, Tatooine, Coruscant) but it was for stuff the players (and GM) were interested in, rather than furthering the canon storyline.
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Aha!

[TauntaunScout]

Well... I am building a table's worth of Hoth scenery for D6 SW Miniatures Battles, so... pretty soon it'll be constant. Even then though I will probably just be running an arctic warfare campaign, presumably not on Hoth itself. It just messes things up too much for me, in my own head, to use movie planets too often.

As for the player with the tablet on Wookiepedia... that is what KNO rolls are for! Make a Knowledge roll and if you bomb out, your character doesn't know jack about the planet, even if it is a movie locale. KNO is such an underused attribute by so many groups I've played with. Man, if someone ever gets out a tablet or smartphone to look up stuff during one of my games, they'd be a long time in earning enough character points to upgrade any skills.

[jawa1138]

It isn't metagaming I'm really concerned with. I just want to offer the excitement of visiting the places that the movie heroes were at as well as the fun of exploring new and strange places. It is striking a balance that I am mostly worried about.

[TauntaunScout]

I guess my real answer is, having never thought about it before now is that it changes. I start my campaigns very heavily tied in to the original 3 movies to keep everyone on a level playing field and in their comfort zone so to speak, then it rapidly changes from there. They all start on a known movie location and it rapidly moves into a homemade location and story.

[Bulldogzeta]

I have 2 campaigns going at the moment. The first is the longest running - started recording the events in 1998 but the campaign started a few years earlier (before the prequels came out). At this point, the campaign is about 2-3 years after the Battle of Endor.

I have occasionally used movie settings and events and characters in my adventures, but 90% or more of the settings are created by either WEG or myself. The group has participated in a couple big events like the Battle of Endor and events leading to it. They have even met characters like Luke, Han, and Leia a couple times. Supporting characters like Mon Mothma and Admiral Ackbar they've met and worked with several times. Doing these things has been popular because I use it sparingly and it doesn't interfere with what the group wants to do.

I am using some of the EU as background events to what the group is doing, but there's likely to be some divergence of that in the future.

It will be interesting to see what comes next in the movies, but if I can't easily fit it into my campaign, then I won't use it. I guess I'll have a divergent universe at that point.

The newer campaign is currently in the months leading up to the Clone Wars. I have used a couple movie settings and that's it at this point. That campaign is wide open at this point. How much I stay with the movies will depend on what the characters do. I plan to do as I have done in the other campaign and bring in just enough to make things interesting, but not dominate the campaign.
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