anybody else following Darths and Droids?
its a web comic based on the star wars prequels, but told as if it was a roleplaying game, somehow the story makes a lot more sense then most fan wankery
the story is allmost at its climax
Well, it’s almost at the end of Episode III, at least-- They’re planning on doing all six movies.
And you have to respect the talents of anyone who can make Jar-Jar lovable and R2D2 an annoying twit.
I’m really looking forward to them starting in on Star Wars. I can’t wait to find out who’s going to play which character.
I got linked to this a couple months ago, and I pretty much spent the entire day reading every single comic. Episode III has been kinda boring though, a little too much exposition. For a stretch you would have no idea that it was supposed to be guys playing D&D Star Wars. But it’s getting good again and I can’t wait for A New Hope.
That’s my main criticism; Darths & Droids started out okay, but at this point it doesn’t resemble any tabletop RPG campaign I’ve ever played in. As opposed to DM Of The Rings, which resembles just about every campaign I’ve ever played in. 
I haven’t read through all of DM of the Rings, but what I have strikes me as being a very dysfunctional gaming group, especially the DM (who seems to know no technique beyond crude railroading and a high-powered DMPC). The Darths and Droids group certainly has its annoyances, but there’s a basic level of competence there, and the DM is much, much better at improvisation, which I think makes for a more interesting tale.
That was a deliberate choice by the strip’s creator:
If you read the notes along with each comic, it’s a pretty good primer on how to be an effective GM.
So much so that after discovering the comic a few weeks ago, it’s inspired me to get the old gang together and start a campaign - the first one I’ve DMed in almost a decade.
The beginning of Darths & Droids was a pretty standard, funny take on the “DM Of The Rings” formula, I thought. But after a while, the references to rolling dice or game rules or adventuring parties started to become more and more infrequent and it drifted from being a quite funny RPG comic to a not especially funny Star Wars comic.
(Similarly, I have the same sort of mild disappointment with Erfworld, which has also been getting less “game-like” and less funny over time.)
Probably because there are only so many times you can make a joke like “haw haw you rolled a one on your spot check!” before it gets old. It gets a little refresher when you transplant it into a new setting (from generic DnD like OotS to LOTR and Star Wars) but eventually all that’s left to make fun of is the setting itself.
I blame Cerebus.
Nevertheless, DM Of The Rings managed to make it through a trilogy of movies without suffering from genre drift. So it can be done!
I don’t know; it always felt grounded in role-playing to me. Though that’s probably partly due to the DMing comments at the end of each strip, not just the strip itself.
That’s because it largely consisted of the DM griping about what the players were doing. If you take that out, it “genre shifts” the exact same way.
Or course, that’s because D&D doesn’t abandon its premise for more than a couple comics at a time. Just as you think it’s left the premise, it pulls you back. And after a little bit of game-light comics, it comes back and rubs it in your face–like the most recent comics.
I mean, I’ve noticed occasionally that the players are out of character, and was about to freak out about it, and then we learn that they had all just gotten a lot better at staying in character.
And, anyways, the alternate history of the prequels is itself quite interesting, I think. Far more interesting that DMotR’s story, which was the one you already knew.
In fact, when I saw this thread again, I was hoping to have us make guesses on how they will handle episode IV, since, at that time, Darth Vader was not Luke’s father or even really a main character. He was a just an iconic lackey. I personally don’t see a way to pull that off unless Annie leaves the group, but if they go with the current direction, they’ll have to do a lot to make Vader more important. And I’m not sure how they can go about making it not obvious that Luke is Vader’s son, unless they don’t show the twins here, ending the story early.
(Yeah, I just got through reading “The Secret History of Star Wars”, so the differences in the two trilogies weighs heavily on my mind.)
You mean like in the beginning of Darths & Droids?
It’s the shift in genre over time that has made me lose interest a bit.
I think it’s pretty clear Ben stays Obi-Wan. Who will die. At the same time Leia shows up.
Pete will stay R2.
Sally… well, she could be Luke, or she could be Chewie and incidentals.
Jim likes to turn off his mind and shoot things. All about action. Han.
Annie… Luke?
Yeah, I’m curious how this story will progress, because they have the change of the prequels actually happening first. So they know Darth Vader is Anakin.
They could REALLY turn the whole thing on its head. This is a reinterpretation of Star Wars using just screenshots to drive the action. There’s absolutely no reason they couldn’t devise a story where Luke and Darth always know they’re father and son…or one where it never comes up at all because in their universe it’s not true.
Yeah, considering that in the comics so far, they’ve turned Darth Maul from a Sith apprentice to a hard boiled private eye, made Sidious into as big a dupe as the Jedi Council, and smelted down the entire planet of Naboo to make the first Death Star, I doubt they’ll feel particularly constrained to maintain the father/son dynamic between Luke and Vader.
Although they have kept all the names the same, so I’m assuming Anakin and Luke Skywalker will be related somehow.
I think the jump to a New Hope is gonna be a huge benefit for the comic. I think a big problem with the last episode is that there were a lot of extra major characters that had to be played by the DM. Focusing on a smaller cast will be helpful. They also needed a lot of exposition to cover Anakin’s transition ot the dark side.