So, Star Wars group RP; Rebellion-era, OC's, cliches abound. I remember creating a group of pilots with diverse backgrounds, and a friend of mine created a force sensitive Padawan accompanied by a Jedi Master of their own creation, but the Padawan was considered the main character, and we were playing against some of the most obnoxious special snowflake characters ever. I remember this guy--who would later regrettably become co-GM, a decision that was NOT popular with myself or my friend--having a Sith Lord from the past--CRINGE--who had GOLDEN FORCE LIGHTNING--MEGA CRINGE--and probably the most bloated moveset and skillset ever, just by design. I mean I don't remember a thing this character couldn't do alone; just the strongest thing alive, up against what were grounded characters without even a fraction of his character's strength.
The GM had no idea what he was doing, I'm talking total pantser who used advice given to him mid-story. But that's not really an issue because hey, at least he's trying and isn't afraid to take advice, right? Wrong. This motherfucker gave my friend another Padawan WITHOUT CONSULTING MY FRIEND WHATSOEVER, and I think this should've been the warning sign that this story wasn't gonna work out in the long run. But hey, my friend and I, we tried keeping optimistic about it, so we pushed on--which was a HUGE MISTAKE on our parts lmao.
So the guy with the OP Sith Lord talked some shit and implied that "I wanted to win" because I was asking about the plausibility of destroying a ship on this planet we were meant to attack, and me, not wanting drama, held my tongue and denied that I cared about winning. My characters are pilots with a set of talents, but none of them are going to go and solo anything by themselves. But this piece of shit insisted I wanted to win while having hands down the most overpowered RP character I've seen in forever. This annoyance didn't stop. I ended up having to block this motherfucker in Discord because he was so obnoxious about it, which he later complained about to the GM, and I needed to unblock him to stop the crying. Insanity.
The biggest offender was much later when my time to have a personal mission came up. So I'm using pilots, and it stands to reason that any GM worth a shit might include the talents of the character in an assignment to help them shine, right? Wrong. I go inside this location, I try to talk to this character, shit predictably goes wrong (not the issue), and this assailant flees not to the skies, but to the city, and my entire cast was on standby in their ships because I still figured this guy sent a group of pilots to have something, you know, pilot-y to do. Not the case. I gotta take a conveniently placed speeder and chase this motherfucker into the city, and I am the ONLY ONE coordinating up to four different characters at once, so it's a pain in the ass lol.
One of my characters--who was kind of the coolest, he had Sebastian Stan (The Winter Soldier, Bucky Barnes) as a faceclaim and he was SO COOL, ugh I miss writing those characters, AHEM--took the time to stun one of the assailants, but before I could get any worthwhile information, this motherfucker iced himself with a cyanide pill or whatever. Zero information. Zero gain. Okay, cool, maybe the guy my MAIN CHARACTER is chasing might obtain something of value instead, right?
Wrong.
So we get to the spaceport, gunfight ensues, my characters are all assembled together like it was some Avengers-type shit, and you'd think to yourself... Huh, maybe this is what it was all building to, and maybe it isn't so bad. Wrong. So a Deus Ex Machina of a character shows up, ices all the enemies, and punishes my characters, and its later revealed that the entire thing was orchestrated by the guy that "saved" my characters. The entire mission was ultimately pointless because this wasn't revealed at all. My characters get punished because...*check notes*... they chased murderers through a city and only shot after the assailants did. I guess my characters were just supposed to get shot at, I don't know.
My character skillsets weren't put into play as pilots should, you know, be flying and gunning and doing all sorts of stuff like that, and I really didn't have a mission like that occur. Felt like a complete waste. Everyone else seemed to have assignments play to their character strengths except me somehow, so that was pretty fucking lame lol. It sucks because this could've been a cool sequence if I was allowed to contribute to the ending in some form. Instead, my entire sequence was designed to get something of value to another character indirectly, and go home again. It's like a filler episode of Naruto where you're asking, "Bro, what's the point?" He could've saved me some time and just given me something else to do. I guess he was afraid of my characters appearing too good at something.
So throughout all this, the OP Sith Lord guy becomes co-GM, the discussions become more about how the Empire can win, etc. If you know anything about the OT, you know Endor. So the GM and co-GM were talking about going back to Endor for another battle, and me and my buddy couldn't quite see the point of it. They said symbolism; it would be bad for the Rebellion/New Republic to lose Endor... except we don't have Endor. There's nothing out there, lmao. No cities. No fleets. No base of operations. It's just a place they killed the Emperor and blew up the DSII, so going there is more about ego than anything else. I tried to argue (barely, because I really didn't care, because despite what the co-GM thought, I wasn't in this to win fights) that this didn't make any sense for my characters to go along with. But the issue would just be forced in the end, and it was obvious that these two were sniffing each other's farts so much that they wouldn't have heard me and my friend out regardless, so we let it go...
We stomached a lot of stupid conversations in that Discord, and a lot of terrible story decisions, but I think what broke us was this: In the middle of a fight scene, my friend's opponents ignored everything his character did to fight them and walked away because they got what they came for. It was like the fighting didn't exist once the objective was accomplished, like it was a game of fucking Payload on Team Fortress 2. Bro, IRL, and in decent stories, battles typically don't end mid-combat because one guy got something. People don't just drop weapons, ignore attacks, and walk off-screen like none of it happened. By that point, my friend and I were barely keeping interest because we never got to RP together. Despite the issues, we got to have a nice little scene with our characters much earlier in the story, and wanted to try and power through for more. But after this, we couldn't. It was too offensive and too stupid to let slide. So I hit my friend up and told him I was good, that disrespect like that can't be allowed to slide, and we were both just too tired of all the bullshit discussions and power trips to tolerate it any longer.
He informs them that he's out, and I simply leave the conversation.
I've still got the itch for Star Wars, so I join another group RP. My friend is just done entirely, the damage is done, and I don't think he's RPed in a group since then, but I hope so because he isn't bad. Anyway, when this happens, the GM from the old RP I left, a class act if there ever was one, talked shit in that new RP's OOC about me. And me, being a class act, didn't say or do shit about it, because if there's one simple way to piss someone off, its to not give them the reaction they're looking for. I was a ghost; I didn't say a word, I simply peace'd out. And the co-GM, with the OP character and the annoying need to have someone pay attention to him, joined the new Star Wars RP group for a split second before leaving it. To say they were pressed feels like an understatement, I mean these guys were really fucking pressed about it.
And the old RP? Died instantly. I mean, it's crazy because my friend and I weren't exactly making ourselves integral to the plot the GM and co-GM were creating, we were just writing people in a huge universe, and somehow while being deemed unimportant by the end, the story couldn't continue without us apparently. I still laugh about that to this day, its been over four years now and I cannot believe that after all that shit they talked, they couldn't make it work without us. Karma maybe. Or the universe wanted to give us something to laugh about after that travesty of a story.
But yeah, haven't touched group RP's since then. I still think about going back to group content, but memories of overinflated egos and unnecessary drama remain vivid. A shame, that.
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