Star Wars RPG Character Groups

The Party as a Mechanical Unit

Everything above treats the group as a social arrangement. The system also treats it as a mechanical one, and this is the part most new tables miss entirely — which is a shame, because it is the machinery that stops a party being four people who happen to share a ship.

Obligation Is a Group Track, Not a Personal One

Individual Obligations are pooled into a single percentile track covering the whole party. At the start of a session the GM rolls against that combined pool, and if the roll lands inside a character's slice, that character's baggage is this week's problem — their creditor surfaces, their old unit makes contact, their past walks into the cantina.

The crucial detail: when an Obligation triggers, the entire party feels it, typically as a small penalty to everyone's strain threshold for the session. That single rule is what converts backstory from decoration into a shared concern. Your smuggler's debt is not merely flavour; it is the reason everyone is tired and on edge tonight. Tables that house-rule this penalty away usually find that Obligation stops mattering within a month.

Two Consequences Worth Planning For

• Bigger parties start with smaller individual Obligations. The pooled total is what the GM rolls against, so it is kept roughly constant regardless of headcount. Adding a sixth player does not mean six times the complications.
• Extra Obligation buys extra starting resources — more XP or more credits at creation. This looks like a personal choice and is not: taking on more baggage widens your slice of a track everyone shares, making it likelier that your problems dominate the campaign. Agree it as a group in session zero, or you get one character whose past is the plot and three who are along for the ride.

Age of Rebellion's Duty and Force and Destiny's Morality work the same structural way — see Character Creation for how the three differ, and note that a mixed party needs each track rolled separately.

The Question Session Zero Usually Forgets

Groups spend an evening deciding what each character can do and almost none deciding why they stay. "We met in a cantina" explains the first session; it does not explain the fortieth. Answer one of these instead, out loud, before play:

• A shared debt — they are collectively liable for something, so leaving is not free.
• A shared asset — the ship belongs to all of them, and it is worth more together than divided.
• A shared enemy — someone is hunting them as a set, whatever they would prefer.
• A shared belief — the hardest to sustain and the most rewarding when it holds.

Then have each player name one specific thing they owe another character, and one they resent. Two sentences each, eight sentences total, and the party arrives at session one already entangled rather than politely cooperating.

When Someone Cannot Make It

Decide the absent-player rule before you need it, because deciding it in the moment always favours whoever is loudest:

• Write them out — the character is off doing something plausible. Cleanest, but they miss the session's developments and can drift.
• Run them as a quiet background presence — present, contributing nothing decisive, taking no risks that would matter. Fair, and requires no bookkeeping.
• Hand the sheet to another player — works well for combat-heavy sessions, badly for anything touching that character's Obligation or relationships. Never let a borrowed character make a decision the absent player would want to make themselves.