Nice Work, Kid.
In exploring the possibility of running a Star Wars RPG campaign, I started my research with our own collection of Star Wars RPG supplements—the proper d6 system designed by West End, not this d20 crap. I was a little surprised at how much we had; I only bought the rulebook, and I won a few odd prizes at conventions, but Eileene bought rather a lot. Buried in that stack are not one, but two copies of “Imperial Doublecross,” a solo adventure.
A very few systems dabbled in solo adventures, which are little more than choose-your-own-adventure stories, the only difference being that solo adventures employ game rules—not only do you choose whether to shoot the bad guy or run, but you also roll dice to see whether your decision worked, reading the appropriate paragraph for either. Solo RPG adventures also tend to provide a little more objective coherence, in the sense that they portray more fixed elements, like a floorplan or characters with fixed motives, but that’s just a rule of thumb, reflecting their roots in the tactical dungeon crawls of D&D.
Solo adventures were never very popular. By dispensing with an intelligent human judge, the player is restricted to a sharply limited set of options, namely, what the author could think to include. But, while they fail as adaptations of true RPGs, they can perform other functions. “Imperial Doublecross” feels more like a promotion than an adventure in its own right. It highlights the virtues of the d6 system in a way that seems more tutorial and exposure than anything. A complete newbie picking it up can see enough about how the game works that he may decide to get the main rulebook, and away he goes. (In fact, now that I think of it, we may have two copies because West End was handing those out as convention prizes one year, a cagey way to disguise an ad as entertainment.) Also, the adventure is clearly aimed at kids, which West End wisely targeted as a new crop of customers.
I say the target audience is kids largely because your character in “Imperial Doublecross” is a kid, a pre-adolescent who decides to run away from home by stowing away on a smuggler’s starship, a decision so spectacularly stupid that I instantly hated the alter-ego the adventure saddled me with. Additionally, the NPCs’ motives are transparent, excuses are found to isolate the PC from adult supervision as often as possible, and the situations place a premium on hiding, dodging, and perception, which a kid can do pretty well, as opposed to, say, piloting a starship or wrestling a Wookiee. In several possible plot branches, people just give the PC stuff, including thousand-credit tokens and laser pistols, for very little reason—a situation that children, still provided for by their parents, can relate to far better than adult players can. Also, several of the branch points are inappropriately forgiving: in one spot, for example, you try to shoot a bounty hunter before he nails the smuggler/pilot hero to which you play the sidekick. If you hit, the bounty hunter goes down…but if you miss, he still goes down, anyway; your wild shot hits a steam pipe, which scalds him and buys time for your partner to shoot him.
But above all, every damn NPC in the whole damn book calls you “kid” (if they’re a good guy) or “brat” (if they’re a bad guy). “Good work, kid.” “Stick close to me, kid; you’re good luck.” “Okay, kid, I want you to stay here while I negotiate the arms payoff.” “You’re pretty resourceful, kid.” Which brings me to my point.
Nobody wants to be treated as “the kid” when they’re supposed to be thrilling to vicarious adventure. It’s patronizing, and makes such victories as they earn seem undeserved, just like Johnny Quest’s inexplicable ability to topple three or more thugs by bolting through the door of his cell when the bad guys come to check up on him. When Batman got his sidekick Robin, and a host of superheroes followed suit, Robin was meant to be someone for young comic book fans to identify with. They didn’t want to be Robin, eternally second fiddle, they wanted to be Batman. When young Anakin of Star Wars: Episode I “accidentally” got locked into an armed spaceship, and “accidentally” started up the controls, and “accidentally” pushed just the right buttons to activate the blasters and zap the bad guys, saving the day, it looked stupid, a condescending way for George Lucas to make kids in the audience feel like they should identify with the kid because he’s the real warrior-hero of the film.
Kids are smarter than that. West End was smart to employ a solo adventure as a high-class ad. If they were really smart, they’d have let their target audience play the smuggler, instead of the child sidekick to the smuggler.