19 in 2019: Play an RPG!

It's still January and I've crossed another 19 in 2019 off my list! Number 7: Play an RPG! is now complete. I've been interested in playing an RPG such as D&D for years and even created some Shadowrun characters with a friend back in college and I still hadn't managed to actually play a game.

On Black Friday, I saw a screaming deal for the Star Wars: Edge of the Empire beginner game. I figured Star Wars was a great place to start my RPGing adventure, since I'm familiar with and love the Universe already. The package came with a condensed rule book, an adventure book, maps, specialized dice, four pre-made characters and another adventure available for download online. Knowing I wouldn't be able to find anyone to play in December, I set it aside for examination this month.

Setting this up ended up being much easier than I ever expected. I thought since I'd previously never played, it might be hard to find people willing to try an RPG with me. I had a lead on a DM already; my good friend S is an experienced one and great at games in general and very fun to play with if you don't mind losing. Thankfully, he agreed and took the materials home to study.

The character folios.

So now I just had to find 2-3 players. Befriending a good chunk of the IT department in 2018 made this task laughably easy. I sent one email to three people and immediately had three interested people reply. Soon after, I found a fourth.

DM S reads us the beginning of the story.

On Saturday afternoon, we met at our local board game bar Rook & Rogue for our first session. Two of the folks couldn't make it, so we started with three players and our intrepid DM. We decided to start with the pre-made characters so we could get the hang of the game and see if we liked it. T was the human rogue smuggler, D served as the droid medic/mechanic, and I was the former-gladiator wookiee.

As soon as I discovered that the game came with a wookiee, I knew I wanted to play that role. My general game playing style is to fight and attack, so the rage-full wookiee Lowhhrick would be perfect for me. Perfect he was. I did everything a hotheaded wookiee would want to do, used my blaster, vibro-axe and fists to beat up people up!

My favorite game moments were when Lowhrick, after backing a droid into a closet and having a hard time disabling it with fists, finally ripped its arms off. He also had such success with the vibro-axe that he killed two stormtroopers and convinced a third to surrender allowing the group to steal the stormtrooper's suit. (Who knows? We might need it later.) It also sent us into giggles because it reminded us of a favorite moment from the Star Wars Lego game series.

Wookies are slightly larger than Stormtroopers. That's a fact.

The game itself feels very thoughtful. After the bad guy called my Lowhrick "a carpet", I was struggling with the need to rip that bad guy limb-from-limb and blowing our party's cover in the process. DM S had me roll for discipline and said I could interpret that roll as I wanted. I rolled a crazy success and decided that meant Lowhrick should be highly disciplined and think of the group instead of letting his anger rule. I'm still not sure it was the right choice as days later, I still would like to destory that baddie. I love that the game has so many different characteristics to roll for that seem to fit the character.

There was one part of the story, a side quest, that I wish we had attempted. The map had a small pen that held three grown dewbacks and one baby. Immediately, I wanted to ride or steal (or both) the dewbacks. I became a bit obsessed with the idea of a Dewback Derby through the streets even though that would have definitely attracted unwanted attention to our party. I'm still thinking about it and I hope that a future session might involve this pen of dewbacks.

The first session was a success and I immediately walked over to the game store and bought the core game book and also a second set of dice. All the players had fun and we are looking forward to playing again. I hope it becomes a regular thing for the year.