MadCap's Tabletop Tales - "Stay on Target!"

This is a story about a hard lesson for players to learn - sometimes, the dice just don't go your way. You can have your stats maxed out. You can have all your buffs and debuffs up and running, sure.  But the fact is that - even if it's only a five percent chance - you are eventually going to roll that 1. Sometimes more times than not in a single session. In some games, it doesn't mean an automatic failure, but pretty much everyone who plays tabletop knows that rolling a 1 is never ever ever a good thing.  It's so ingrained in popular consciousness that even non-gamers equate it to ruinous, cataclysmic failure.

Which brings us to our story today: learning to accept that, sometimes, life is just going to take a dump on your hopes and dreams.  And nowhere is this more apt an explanation than in the Star Wars d20 game that I'm currently involved in with my group.  Run by Pathfinder GM Cassie (who you may remember from my tale of the Swiss cheesing of Sean O'Malley), we were placed in the Imperial Era, exactly a year after the first movie in the Star Wars saga - A New Hope.  However, we were not the glorious heroes of the Rebellion, nor were we Jedi on the run from the oppressive grasp of the Empire. Nor, in fact, any combination of the two.

You can imagine how dismayed I was.

However, Cassie told us all we got a "freebie" feat of Force Sensitivity for just being in the campaign, as she apparently wanted to have Force Powers be an open possibility. I was intrigued, and took it for my soldier character - Calen Darkhaven, Soldier (the SWd20 equivalent of Fighter) and former Imperial TIE Pilot hopeful.  Along with Keith and Ripley, I found myself transported to a galaxy far, far away...and then promptly dumped in a backwater system called Minos, which is actually the planet that is farthest from the bright center of the universe.  Eat it, Skywalker!

Calen and the two others, Ben and Dax, had been hired on by the skipper of the Star Dancer to be his crew after his last one had left by hitting the lottery...or some such. Either way, it was only the four of us, a badass repair droid, and our ship. Like Firefly, but without any of the memorable cast. Glad that I wasn't being impaled, I took to the first adventure with my shipmates gusto.

In short order, we lost our captain, got a brand new pre-owned ship, and were left with a crate full of Imperial blasters that were hotter than the pair of speakers I bought from Enrique the other day. This, by the way, being after a nine or so body pile up when a local bandit group thought they could just kill us and take our ship.  So, needless to say, we were indeed going for a Firefly feel to things, and took to it by becoming mercenaries in the Minos Cluster, hauling cargo both legitimate and not so much as we still have that damned crate in our cargo bay. As such, we eventually took a job to bring several crates of Imperial turbolaser parts (highly, highly illegal) to an Imperial prison planet called Gesaril.

...in our defense, the money was insanely good.

So, long story short, we actually ended up losing our shipment and flailing our way onto Gesaril. The planet itself was actually not the prison, but the asteroid in orbit around it was. On the planet was a lush jungle teeming with life. Needing repairs for our ship, we journeyed across one of the nine wrecks of Imperial Star Destroyers for spare parts. We got them without a hitch, got an introduction to the Force via some Satanic Hammerhead Ewoks bringing us a magical computer pyramid (or a "holocron" for those in the know), and headed off after some repairs had been made. And here, six paragraphs in, is where the story finally begins.

Calen, being our pilot (and quite skilled at it as well), was already dealing with problems knowing that he was Force Sensitive in a galaxy where the main authority looks down upon such a thing, and was quite distracted when we left Gesaril orbit with our stolen parts barely holding the ship together. As luck would have it, we managed to evade Imperial patrols and headed towards a planet where we could make some more permanent repairs, Karideph.

And, as we hit the atmosphere...given the shaky nature of everything...Calen rolled a 1. While Star Wars d20 has it where rolling a 1 is not necessarily a critical failure, rolling beneath the required Difficulty is still always bad...and Calen had gotten quite a bit below that. And so, as one could expect, crashing happened. The Star Dancer fell like a stone out of the sky and thankfully managed to avoid any heavily populated areas in its descent. It took us three weeks of game time, but we did some heavy repairs, slapped on a new coat of paint, and everything was right as rain again.

In truth, we got off easy. None of us were even a little maimed from the endeavor! However, it's important to know that even with Calen's bonus to his Pilot checks (fairly high for a third level character at the time of this writing), that 1 can completely throw a wrench into things. It's the same with any skill check or save a character might do. Sometimes, you're just going to have to bend over and ask for it gentle, it's just how the dice roll. It's a hard lesson to learn, but I'll give any newbies out here this freebie one. Minmax all you like, prep yourself with everything from skill bonuses to feats and so on. But, in the end, the dice determine everything, and they can go from hot to cold from one roll to another just as easily as the wind blows.

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