How "over the top" do you like your Star Wars games?

Today, in my Star Wars SAGA roleplaying game, I had an interesting revelation.

Basically, I was thinking about the climax to an adventure where the player characters are going to track down an Imperial Admiral for a bounty. I decided to end the game by mimicking the final scene from Wedge's Gamble where a Super Star Destroyer pulls out of the planet's surface on Coruscant. The climax of the game would be the player characters proceeding to sabotage the interior of the vessel and blowing the whole thing sky-high before making their dramatic escape.

It then occurred to me that this isn't the climax to a campaign. It's just a regular adventure and the player characters are fairly low to mid-level (7th or so). I wondered about the nature of whether I was making the game too "over the top." I then judged, this being Star Wars where the first movie ends with the player characters blowing up the Death Star, that this was just the right amount of over the top.

I was curious about other players and Game Masters in various games. How over the top do you allow your games to be? What are the ups and downsides of going way over the top? Which is better, players thwarting galaxy wide and planet busting weapons every week versus more subdued opponents?

How should this effect gameplay?

 

I like to look at the destruction of the death star the same as every climax to a Star Wars movie, whether it's a droid control ship being destroyed, and a Sith Lord defeated, or a nigh-invulnerable battle station getting blown up, as the climax of the campaign story arc, to be picked up again perhaps at a later date (a la Darths & Droids) with RotJ the final campaign climax.

So as the topper to your story, having a SSD blast it's way off of a planet can work, so long as your players are familiar with Star Wars, period.

 

I will throw in an "Over the Top" once in a good, long while.
What I really like to do is bait&switch what they think is major with something relatively minor, and turn what sounds like a side trek into a full-blown majorly important find.
The other little trick I like to try to pull is fore-shadowing with innocuous comments and references that slowly build up to something huge after a few months of playing.

 

I think it is how you sell it. I have played for ages and went through all kind of stages of "spectecularism". When I did my first campaign in Star Wars we had Darksider armies, thousands of ships and giant GIANT ships replacing ordinary stardestryoers. Well, I was young. But my players loved it. Today we are much older and much more grounded. If I throw them into a huge battle it has more of a galactica feel, actually. Dirty and dangerous. I have send them in battles so huge one couldn´t describe them without John Williams, but I try to keep them somewhere in the battle instead of being the center of it. Only when the climax approaches my heroes must face the danger alone.

There is some good material in the Wizards archieves about Roleplaying on an epic scale, by the way. Recommend that.

 

A story I have to tell, and this seems to be the best thread for it.
I was running the party through one of the "Instant Adventures" books. One of the setups is called "Heavy Lifting", where the party has to rescue a Hutt Crimeboss who has fallen out of favor with the local underworld get off-planet. They have to transport him from his warehouse to a starship.

OK, so the party steals a large enough repulsor-lift truck, pacifies the angry wookie driver, and gets the flat-bed tow-platform for the Hutt to ride on under cover of some Tarps. They fight off an ambush at the warehouse while picking up the Hutt, get him on the transport, and start racing for the spaceport. Cab of the truck holds 3, the other 2 are on the towplatform as escourts, along with the last of the Hutt's body guards. Another ambush starts. One of them shoots the truck, and scores the towhook. The platform starts scrapping on the ground, mommentum carries the bodyguards forward (they failed Dex checks--PCs made them) only to be crushed and scrapped when the trailer catches up to them. One of the PCs shoots a tow-line gun from the platform to the truck and anchors it around the Hutt.
Oh dear.
The Hutt not only D'OHed on his strenghth check, his remaining roll as a 3. On top of that, he D'OHed his Dex check.
The players on the tarp grab hold of the ropes wrapped around the Hutt. The Hutt is dragged forward off the tow-platform while the driver of the truck repeats that he is slamming down the accellerator. The Hutt is dragged over 5KM of ferrocrete streets and his hide is torn to bloody ribbons and shreds. But a now sport was invented: Hutt Surfing. Very Rare, Very Dangerous. Very Extreme. Not only did the party make new enemies of the Hutt's opponents, they made enemies fo the Hutt's allies. Worse still, they didn't get paid because they failed to perform their job and provide service in a rather spectaular way.!