Gaming: Savaging Star Wars, Part VI: A Digression about Trappings

I have spent some time discussing Trappings, in various places.  Trappings are, at a fundamental level, the thing that take a generic system like Savage Worlds, and make it specific or, ideally, iconic.  To use another setting's example, the Glitter Boy from Rifts is at its heart a power-armored suit that has a single big gun.  That description could be dropped in Starship Troopers (novel) for the Mobile Infantry and pass just as effectively.  Part of the problem with d20-based games is that, over years of play, they all developed a certain... sameness.  There wasn't much to differentiate Abeir-Toril from Greyhawk from Golarion from Krynn.  Oh, there certainly were exceptions - d20 Rokugan was different, Athas was different, Ravenloft was different, but there were a lot of Generic Fantasy Setting games out there, which was part of what led to the d20 OGL Collapse of the late-2000s; the market was just saturated.  We'd seen the same things, over and over again, and they kind of ran together.  At their heart, Trappings are what keep that from happening.

So let's talk about some of the distinctive Trappings of Star Wars.  We've already discussed the Force, and connected to the Force, the fact that there is a bright-line separation between good and evil, or at least Light and Dark.  What else is there?

To my mind, there's the ever-presence of the exotic.  Mos Eisley, Middle O' Nowhere, has dozens of species either living there or passing through, and their presence is considered unremarkable.  This is a place where it is less remarkable that a giant walking dog-bear-man has offered the party a ride than that a man whipped out a laser sword, and even the laser sword is met with aggressive disinterest.  A more cosmopolitan world than Tatooine will have even more variety.

Second, and related to the first, is that it is a galaxy of contrast.  Using Cloud City as an example, there is a bright, Art Deco upper layer, led by a charismatic Baron-Administrator, and then there are the maintenance levels, run by Ughnauts and featuring industrial-ugly blast furnaces and poorly lit industrial conditions.  Coruscant has even greater variety in its contrast - we know that the area around 500 Republica is almost radiant, but just below that are dive bars, diners, and, at deeper levels, "wretched hives of scum and villainty."  There isn't a lot of shading or subtlety in setting - any place anyone is likely to visit is in bold colors and definition, and the impression that a character is supposed to form of the scene is, with a few notable exceptions, very obvious on immediate contact.

Of course, the above could apply equally to Golarion; the difference is that Golarion isn't a soft sci-fi setting.  This is a setting where technology is omnipresent and easily accessible, though the technology tends to be analogous to that present when whatever work came out, only future-ized.  Thus, communications and computing technology in A New Hope tends to resemble that of the 1970s, the prequel trilogy tends to resemble that of the '90s and 2000s, and the sequel trilogy tends to reflect that of the 2010s.  Thus, Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back operates much more like Admiral Halsey, in communication with his superiors but not micro-managed by them, than the First Order, who display a lot of the micro-managed command and control found in modern warfare.

Technology is everywhere in Star Wars, and it is taken for granted.  It may exist right next to primitive conditions - just on Tatooine, we have human slaves right next to droids; a livable desert based on moisture-farming that simultaneously has no communication with surrounding settlements; an entire culture based around techno-scavenging, living in mobile fortresses.  One of the ramifications of this is that even "primitive" societies in Star Wars may be, in some ways, considerably advanced compared to present day.  The Golden Age of the Sith Sith, who practice alchemy, sentient sacrifice, and slavery, clearly have highly-advanced material science and are a spacefaring society, even as their computing technology lags.  This uneven application of technology is another hallmark of the setting.

The final setting Trapping is almost trivial to mention in a discussion of Star Wars, that's the "lived-in future."  This takes two major forms.  First, I've already discussed - this isn't Buck Rogers, where we need to point out to the audience, "Fortunately I have my trusty BlasTech DL-44 blaster pistol!" We just draw the pistol and use it; the technology is taken for granted.  If it needs to be explained, it gets explained through show don't tell, even the Force.  Second, unless it's brand-spanking-new, it's got scuffs and dings and dents, even in a place where things are well-maintained.  Consider stormtrooper rifles; they are shiny and angular, but it's the shiny of a thin coat of cleaning oil, and a close-up examination of any of the props will show dings, notches, and scratches.  Even at 500 Republica, the most expensive real estate in the Republic, the setting is taken for granted by the characters.

That's the tone for the setting - it's lived-in, it's a world of technology that's taken for granted, every setting has a palette that helps sell it, and there's a moral bright line.  How does this work for equipment, and how does it work for characters?

I've discussed this before; I made a conscious decision not to stat every model of blaster pistol, rifle, et cetera, but rather to give baseline models and then options for customization.  This is a combination of conscious personal decision, and Savage Worlds design philosophy - as an example, even in a setting like Deadlands where there are fifty competing models of revolver on the market, Savage Worlds weapons tend to have pretty generic stats in a pretty specific band.  There may be a +1 or -1 (which are substantial numbers in Savage Worlds) to damage, but a revolver does between 2d6-1 and 2d6+1 damage, and have ranges of 12/24/48 (map squares, each equivalent to five feet).

Having existing Savage Worlds stats for things like laser pistols (and rifles) and "laser swords" made it fairly easy to eyeball where those bands should fall.  Unfortunately, that tends to lead to a generic-ness, a same-ness, in the setting, which is exactly the opposite of what Star Wars, as a setting, does.  There's a huge visual difference between Leia's blaster pistol on the Tantive IV, and Han's blaster pistol at Mos Eisley.  Partly, that can be resolved by saying "you find a blaster rifle" for looting a stormtrooper, and "you find an AraTech S-500 blast scattergun," for looting a named character.  What is the difference between those two things, though?

My answer was customization modules.  Obviously, these need to be limited, based on common sense: some customizations can only be applied to a lightsaber; some to conventional melee weapons; some to ranged weapons.  I also chose to limit them based on the damage die, as a measure of the bulk of the weapon, so that, for instance, weapons that use a d4 or d6 can hold one customization module; weapons that use a d8 or higher can hold two.  Thus, Han's DL-44 is a Heavy Pistol (2d8+2, 12/24/48) with a Macroscope on it (halves range penalties) and a Stun Setting (can do Fatigue instead of Wounds).

The only difference between "Heavy Pistol with Macroscope and Stun Setting" and "DL-44" is roleplay; there's no mechanical difference.  The easiest way of stripping away the generic is by naming things; once something gets a name, it's specific.  This is actually given in-universe as the reason clone troopers acquire nicknames, it's an effort to become individuals.  The moment a player writes "BlasTech DL-44" on their character sheet, that's a step towards specificity.

For characters - I mentioned last post that the difference between a Jedi using a telekinetic flurry of blows, and a Sith blasting lightning is the use of Trappings.  Again, this is a matter of writing it down on the character sheet, and of getting into the mindset, that "Lightning Bolt" is the way that Bolt works for the character, or that the character closes their eyes and enters a brief meditative state before using Boost Trait, or makes a distracting hand gesture to Lower Trait - these are the keys to taking the general system to the specific of Star Wars (or indeed any setting, but that's what I'm writing about here).  Similarly, if a character has a named piece of equipment, I expect the character to care about that piece of equipment - lightsaber, starship, droid with a nickname ("Artoo" instead of R2D2), and for that piece of equipment to get its showcase moment, either because I as the GM have arranged it, or because I as the player want to show off.

I suppose the entire affair could be thought of as a garden.  The plants and beds that you tend and that you lavish attention on are the ones that tend to flourish - and, I believe, this is part of why the d20-based settings that dominated the market, and playstyles, for decades, wound up feeling repetitive, because the system, and not the story, wound up driving so much of the game.  The d20 system didn't really encourage "concept" characters so much as it did certain playstyles and behaviors, so that, at first level, most characters generated by people I know had a pretty good idea where they'd wind up at twentieth level - never mind that the players sure as hell didn't know where they'd wind up when they started their careers.  The counter to that, I've found, is to encourage players to be specific about their particular characters, and to be specific about the parts of the world that deserve highlighting.

As a matter of fact, this entire post could probably be simplified to "the key to avoiding the generic game is specificity," but that would defeat the purpose of the post, now, wouldn't it?