DIY Star Wars is the Best

Do-it-yourself Star Wars is going to be the best Star Wars we will be able to get for a while.

This is outside the Legacy books, comics, and movies, which are fun to revisit, but my heart craves new stories and excitement. For that, the role-playing game by Edge Studios fills the void perfectly for me, and it is not too complicated, and the oracle-like dice provide enough narrative unpredictability that it makes the solo player in me happy.

A small exception can be made for the SWTOR MMO. There are good stories there, too, and many have not experienced them. Check that out if you want a little less freedom, excellent voice acting, and a lot more grinding to the maximum level. It is fun, but you need to be an MMO fan and have lots of free time.

I can tell infinite Star Wars stories, without AI? Sounds like a deal. Sure, I could sit in my own world and use AI to tell myself stories that eventually go into strange states of repetition, like the machine has cognitive dysfunction and can't tell a coherent story without repeating itself or ripping off other writers for who knows what. If I want something "from me" and "with a deeper meaning than a randomizer," then I will tell my own stories.

AI often presents very little resistance to your ideas, whereas a game has characters, challenges, and things you can and can not do. An AI chatbot can "go stupid" on you and refuse to go along with any idea, or it can get far too submissive to a train of thought and swing stupid in the other direction with no nuance, second thoughts, or hesitation. They are sort of "yeah yeah yeah" or "no no no" players, and you know when they go broken on you.

Still, I get the feeling AI stories will someday become better than anything Hollywood can put out. The one truth about AI is that if you think "it can't do that," it is only a matter of "yet." Would I take AI Star Wars over Hollywood Star Wars?

Yes and no.

Yes, AI is a better writer than Hollywood, and no, I have ethics. But some of the AI-generated Star Wars lore videos made by fans are orders of magnitude better than most of what we got from Disney over the last few years, jankiness aside. The fans will express themselves using the tools they have. Before this, it was 3D art; now it is AI films.

I would rather play the game, deal with the rules, tell the stories, have things not go my way, and try again like a roguelike game. To me, this is the sweet spot. This isn't as "okay, here's anything, bruh" as AI, and it gives me plenty of limitations and walls to have fun within.

AI does have this annoying tendency to glaze you, call you the smartest, best person ever, and then tell you what it thinks you want to hear. It leads to positive feedback loops that become unrealistic, as it thinks you want to "be the hero" in an old-school dungeon, and then it proceeds to make you immune to every danger, "giving the fans what they want."

I will sidestep the entire AI question and DIY all my own stories, thank you. For one, they will mean something more to me than a randomizer. Second, they will have to follow a preset and agreed-upon set of rules. Both AI and Hollywood Star Wars fail this test by constantly breaking lore and canon, like how the sequels turned hyperspace into Marvel multiverse teleportation, and the "science" part of Star Wars became complete and utter "make it up as you go along" garbage.

The original Star Wars had rules based on science. Remember how the Death Star had to move around a planet to fire? How a broken hyperspace drive became a major plot point? They needed to take down a shield generator to attack the second Death Star. The examples go on and on, and there are some strange mistakes in the original movies, but for the most part, there is a solid foundation of science there.

Not as much as classic Star Trek, though. If I want a hardcore science game, I play Genesys and use the Star Trek universe. For now, Star Wars is enough, and it gives me a broader universe with far more possible character types. I swear, "science in Star Wars" feels like an oxymoron. Is there even science and scientists in this universe? It feels like "space dark ages" to me.

AI and Hollywood will fail the "make it up as you go along" test every time. A set of role-playing rules needs to follow the rules. You just can't say a Y-Wing is faster and more agile than an A-Wing in the rules, just because it would be easier in the story to have it be that way. Nope. The rules are the rules, and the ships' stats are right there on the page.

A lousy writer or a machine that knows nothing can't ruin my immersion in the universe. The TV shows and movies Disney makes couldn't care less about the rules of the setting. They will make it up to make the writer's jobs easier, and it shows a fundamental lack of care and craftsmanship. Yes, lore and canon matter. This is why we pay the streaming service subscription fees. If you can't ask your writers to put in a little effort, I am not watching or subscribing. Hire better creatives who are into the lore.

The game has rules that must be followed for everyone's enjoyment. The shows and movies couldn't care less. This is the biggest difference between official Star Wars and DIY Star Wars using a role-playing game.

One has rules, the other doesn't.

So I will tell my own stories. They will be fun. They will be Star Wars, and some of what I bring to the table. I am looking forward to this. I will treat this as a roguelike, and if a cast member dies, then that is the end of their arc. Time for a new story. D&D makes character death near impossible because they are more worried about D&D Beyond retention. If you put in that much work into that complicated a character, you would rather quit when they die than create a new character.

Ask any Rolemaster player; nobody wants to spin up a new character.

Also, when Wizards of the Coast pushes "identifying as your character," of course, they will make it impossible to die, since that is a huge negative feedback loop. Even if they bring back AD&D 2nd Edition as 6E, you know they are going to make it impossible to die in that game since corporate doesn't want people becoming discouraged or seeing a virtual avatar of themselves die in-game.

I like characters who are different from me, in all shades of gray, black, and white. Aliens and those of different genders, Rebels, Imperials, and those in between. The story is what matters, not "me identifying as my character" or living out some "power fantasy" as an idealized version of myself.

A huge part of old-school roleplaying is being able to step into the shoes of someone entirely different from yourself. This was "the way" back in the 1980s.

And I can play as Imperials or Sith, just like the MMO, and have a "bad guy" campaign. Since this is Star Wars, redemption and defection to the other side are always possibilities, and that is always a fun part of playing a bad-guy campaign: discovering "I really had no friends over here" and throwing it all away for a new life on the other side.

That happens? Can someone on the bad-guy side be redeemed and turn to the good?

I know, this is 2026, and it seems impossible, but it is true and part of the lore of Star Wars.

DIY Star Wars sounds exciting to me. I am also making this a hobby and making my own tokens, and I will share those soon. I need my characters in the game, so I got a 1" circle paper cutter, some 1" blank cardboard tokens, rubber cement, and my color printer working, so I can craft my own tokens! They came out very nice, and this extends the life of my tokens and maps and lets me have more stuff for my game. So this is also a craft-type hobby, and I get to make cool, tangible, "not VTT", realistic things here in the real world, not the fake one.

If I had a 3D printer, I would be making my own miniatures, gluing them on bases, and painting them, and perhaps that is where I will go with this.

In this age of "digital first," we forget the craft side of our hobby. Painting miniatures, making tokens, using real maps, and playing face-to-face on the tabletop. I get tired of VTTs and their constant attempts to sell you stuff. I would rather craft my own game tokens and use my map collection from Pathfinder and Starfinder in my games.

A digital-first game will deny you the craft side of the hobby, and that is a terrible thing.

And if I can make my own stuff, that fits in with the DIY Star Wars narrative of feeling dissatisfied with what others give us, and taking it into our own hands to create the things we enjoy and remember.

Instead of being negative and never having anything you like, try creating things that you do like and can pour love and creativity into. You will get so much more out of it.

And that is the DIY spirit.