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As you may know, if you've perused one of the sub pages on my humble web page, I really like the Star Wars role-playing game, and I've had a quiet yearning to run or play in a Star Wars game for, oh, most of the current Presidential administration without any fulfillment. However, what with the regular GM going to a wedding, and the other regular GM not being ready to start her game back up again, I had mentioned possibly running a Star Wars game, and KT and Liz both seemed pretty interested, so this Saturday, I came out of a long hiatus as a GM and ran a game.

Oh, boy. Could that have gone better.

Quite a bit of it was my fault, I admit. I forgot some cardinal rules about being a GM, and running an adventure that someone else has written.

• Prepare, prepare, prepare. Read the adventure about eighteen times, so you know most every little detail by heart, because odds are something you think is fairly trivial will be scrutinized with exacting care by the players.
• Re-write every pre-written speech or scene. They always sound like crap when you read them out of the book. I think the best way to do this is possibly to make a bullet outline of the key points that need to be made in the speech, get a grip on the NPC or NPCs talking, and then just improvise the damned thing.
• Find the stupid assumptions the writer made and be prepared to account for them. In the Star Wars adventure, it expects the characters to land their ship outside of a city that isn't the obviously-main city for their first-contact mission. Huh?! The main flaw is that it plans an encounter for the PCs while they're going from one city to the capital. Why wouldn't they land outside the main city?

But some things... some things happen that I don't think were my fault that sort of dragged things down.

I have to break in here and state that I have a problem when I think that my significant other, whether my wife (present) or the person I was dating (past) did better in a game. I always feel like if I reward them appropriately for playing better, that I'm opening myself up to criticism that I did so because Liz is my wife (present), or I'm dating KT (past).

The basic plot is that the Rebel Alliance needs a safeworld to send some injured so they can get better, while the main Rebel fleet in the area does the fighting the Empire thing. The characters are given a possible safeworld to check out. Big time first contact situation. The ship lands near the capital city, the populace rushes out to look at the sky chariot (the sentient species of the planet is sort of humanoid winged cats), accompanied by about 20 soldier-types. The head soldier started asking them questions, "Who are you," "What do you want," "Where are your weapons," "Why do you need a safeworld," etc.

Liz played the scene about how I thought it should be done. Calmly answering the questions, etc. She's the Young Jedi, that's all good. She did screw up by lying when they asked if they had any weapons, and I did try to make it come back to haunt them later. KT's character, however, the Twi'lek ex-slave, was really flippant and almost denigrating in the way she treated the Kentra (the name of the species). They asked who they were fighting, she says, "The bad guys." And she's not playing a stupid character. Quite the opposite, actually. She's playing a really smart character!

KT's defense was that she felt as a slave she wasn't allowed to speak much, so she never really learned social skills, and now that she can say what she wants to, she's going to, regardless of the consequences. I'd thought slaves would learn submissiveness, and how to hide emotions, but... ::sigh:: The thing is that, yes, it's KT's character, and she's free to play it however she wants to, but I feel rotten about wanting to have the whole mission turn sour on all the players just because KT's feeling a little sarcastic this evening.

And, to get even *more* convoluted, since I know KT will probably read this within 24 hours of when I post it, how can I make it understood that I'm not angry or anything, just a little exasperated? (By just saying it. Duh.) I mean, I really wanted this adventure to be this sort of neat-o keen, gee whiz, look at this, we're starting characters, and we can really help out the Alliance here by getting this safeworld colony negotiated, and instead it's sort of turned into a bitter little "I bet they kill us as soon as we get in the throne room." talk.

The thing is, I still have hope for the game. There's about two layers of plot they still have to stumble into (oh, but soon... soon...), and I think I can still pull it out. But the next possible time for a game is in two weeks, and odds are that the GM-at-a-wedding will be out of the wedding by then, and be able to run the game, or the GM-not-quite-ready-to-GM-now will be ready to go, and the Star Wars game will get pushed to the back-back-burner. :-(

Oh, well. Back on hiatus again, I suppose...