YMMV / Star Wars: Roleplaying Game

• Broken Base: Each product line is meant to be taken as a separate game, albeit ones that have cross-compatibility. However, this means there's a great deal of reprinted information in each core book, as well as among individual source books in the form of species, additional rules, weapons, vehicles, items, etc., including some Specializations. YMMV as to whether or not this is to be expected of the segregated nature of the three product lines, a sensible approach so people who aren't looking for fringers/rebels/Force users don't have room in their book taken up by extraneous rules, or if it's a marketing ploy to get more money by forcing gamers to buy three $60 rulebooks in order to get the complete Star Wars experience. Also, whether or not having to buy three core rulebooks for the complete experience is a bad thing, as any veteran tabletop group will tell you that having multiple core books (so players aren't waiting for one person to finish looking something up so they can look something else up) speeds up play and character advancement tremendously.
  • The GM screens for each product line are almost exact duplicates of each other, with only small details changed in the equipment area (and different art on the outside). However, this is mitigated by each screen being part of a "GM Kit," which includes a booklet containing a unique adventure and additional rules for that particular product line.
  • Moreso than almost any other Role-Playing Game, the core mechanic gets a massive dose of this. It requires seven different types of custom die (which, naturally, can only be bought from Fantasy Flight themselves), and enough of them that many groups found it hard to play without multiple sets - often around $50 worth. Then, the results involve comparing a number of different abstract symbols, some of which cancel each other out while others don't. On the other hand, there's almost no math beyond adding or subtracting numbers lower than five. These factors combine to make a system which often feels more intuitive to people who have struggled with other games, and therefore assume that established RPG fans calling it unituitive are gatekeeping snobs. The Alexandrian's review showcases many of the issues that make the game unplayable for a large chunk of potential players, the comments on that same article demonstrate how deep the break can get.
• Cheese Strategy:
  • Most nemesis and adversary level characters have a lower strain threshold than wound thresehold with the few exceptions being characters that rely more heavily on social abilities than physical. This usually means it's far easier to drop major characters by opting to deal stun damage (provided you're using a weapon that allows this) and then if the player is so inclined simply executing them once they're incapacitated. With a lucky roll it's possible to drop characters like Darth Vader by simply auto firing at them with stun damage using a blaster jury rigged to reduce the cost to activate auto fire.
  • The Bad Motivator talent allows a character to make a hard mechanics check once per session to make a device break. This can be either a result of the character's direct interference or simply because they happened to notice it was about to break down and is up to the players discretion. Because of this there may be situations where a player can effectively assassinate an NPC without their character having any actual intent in doing so by using bad motivator to break something in such a way that it kills a particular target, giving them essentially a bulletproof alibi even with and especially if there are witnesses. In addition, this also ignores NPC statblocks which means that a player could for example cause Darth Vader's life support to spontaneously fail in the middle of combat and there wouldn't be anything he can do about it.
• Complete Monster:
  • Edge of Empire:
    • Beginner Game's Escape from Mos Shuuta & The Long Arm of the Hutt: Teemo the Hutt is an ambitious junior Hutt who has decided to reverse-engineer himself a battle droid army to betray Jabba and attain power. A drug-peddling thug who hires mercenaries to terrorize a community full of innocent Twi'leks off their lands, Teemo is also a fan of Gladiator Games. He pointlessly tortured and then threw a Geonosian representative into the games to die after his attempted relations with the Geonosians soured, and he may even force the player characters into the games should they not be careful. Easily Teemo's worst crime is his Wookie skin trade; to provide to depraved bourgeoise across the galaxy, Teemo systematically has Wookies skinned and their pelts sold for money.
    • Debts to Pay: EV-8D3 is a labor master droid designed to ensure other droids work at maximum capacity. Hiding a bloodthirsty sadist beneath his metallic shell, EV-8D3 terrorizes and humiliates his fellow droids on the planet Gavos until his sole inhibitor program malfunctions, giving him the sapience to turn on even his human owners. Organizing the droids of Gavos into a "revolution", enslaving and mind-wiping any who try to refuse his command, EV-8D3 slaughters a large of group of miners and plans to sabotage facilities across Gavos to kill all life on the planet. EV-8D3 then intends to travel the galaxy and indoctrinate entire armies of droids to his will, hoping to stage a violent, brutal war against all organic life in the galaxy, not for the supposed "freedom" of droid life that he proclaims, but in truth simply because he loves causing pain and death.
  • Age of Rebellion:
    • Onslaught at Arda 1: Malau Jocaos is a fanatical believer in the Empire's dictatorial tyranny, having ascended through the ranks quickly with his ruthless cruelty to become a top-tier Imperial Intelligence Service operative. Jocaos orchestrates a vast network of spies to bring him any and all info on the Rebellion and sympathizers to their cause, and uses local street gangs to terrorize and suppress the populace of worlds he controls. Responsible for hundreds of people disappearing should they show dissension from the Empire, Jocaos's worst act was when he bombed an entire street of family-owned shops and killed Var Narek's family down to the children, then pinning it on Rebels and corrupting Narek into his puppet. Using Narek to kidnap a Rebel general that Jocaos hopes to brutally torture, Jocaos just laughs at Narek when the man discovers Jocaos murdered his family, before Jocaos guns Narek down and gleefully tries to ensure he obtains the locations of all Rebel bases so he can be the key component in the slaughter of the Alliance.
    • Friends Like These: Prince Sono Molec is a particularly vile member of Zygerrian royalty who takes his role as a slaver to cruel heights. Responsible for thousands of innocents being captured, abused, and broken into slaves that he sells throughout the galaxy, Molec often has entire villages ravaged just to capture the few survivors for his operation. If the players try to dismantle his slaving outfit, Molec attempts to activate detonation collars on hundreds of his slaves to kill them out of spite, and should the players recruit Molec as an ally, Molec connects the collars to his heart rate so that if he dies, hundreds of his slaves will, too. Should Molec survive the adventure, he reveals his intention to assassinate his own father and assume control of even larger Zygerrian resources to further spread his heinous slaving to more worlds.
• Game-Breaker: Classes focusing on item modification can quickly make powerful weapons and armors. The Gadgeteer and Outlaw Tech being the most infamous abusers of this. Improving the base stats on items, while increasing the number of upgrades that can be added to them.
  • Auto-fire can be a huge game breaker, and it can be accessed with starting credits and XP (the above-mentioned Gadgeteer can even modify an Auto-fire weapon to be easier to use). Of course, being a roleplaying game, some application of logic can reduce its usage, but few other builds can deal as much damage on the mechanical side of things, even outperforming lightsabers, and there's very little to be done outside of introducing house rules or banning the weapons altogether.
  • Linked is a similar rule, allowing the user to spend advantage to generate an extra hit, but only on the original target and up to a cap. While you can't mow down multiple enemies it does allow you to seriously hammer a single foe. Unlike Auto-fire you don't need to declare you're using it or increase the difficulty of the check either. Double-sided lightsabers have this innately, so any combat focused force user can do some serious damage.
  • Force Powers, as you would expect. A few ranks into Force Move gives players the ability to throw entire groups of enemies and small ships. While misdirect can make them invisible to Non Player Characters.
  • Signature Abilities, though this is intentional. Their effects range from Colonists, reducing the difficulty of all skill checks to Hired Guns instantly killing every Minion in the encounter. They're usually only once per session and require Destiny Points.
  • The Colossus specialization's "Power From Pain" talent temporarily increases the user's Force Rating based on how many Critical Injuries they are currently suffering. A character with a rating of 1 can shoot up to a 3 with as few as two injuries, allowing them access to powers far beyond what they should have XP wise.
• Let's Split Up, Gang!: While the standard tabletop RPG warning about splitting up the party applies, the Star Wars RPG is more forgiving of this trope than some of its contemporaries. Virtually any PC build is competent enough on its own, and the rules for Minion groups allows the GM to turn down the heat if a PC is alone or in a smaller group than expected. That said, Rivals are intended to be a challenge for PCs one-on-one, and Nemeses are explicitly designed to be a threat to groups of three or more PCs, and will likely be overpowering to individuals or smaller groups.
• Role-Playing Endgame: There's little in the game to indicate when it's time to retire a character or close down a campaign, which leaves it to gaming groups to make that decision for themselves. While the system has no metric to indicate this, many players have found that the game reaches "epic level" around 1,000 earned XP, if not sooner. It's certainly still possible to challenge the PCs at this point, but they're likely to begin exhausting their avenues for character development, and at this point they might have better-than-even odds of going up against Darth Vader or Emperor Palpatine and winning.
• Saved from Development Hell: Sourcebooks for the games have typically been announced three to six months in advance, with a few less than that. Cyphers and Masks, the Spy sourcebook, was announced in mid-2017 but with no word of its projected release date until it finally shipped in August of 2018.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Edge of the Empire was a great game right out of the box, but it had some of the standard difficulties of RPG core books, including some iffy writing and a sizable errata. Age of Rebellion was considered a slight improvement, fixing a lot of the errata'd material, removing the divisive jetpack stats, and including a somewhat more expanded section for space combat, but it still felt like Edge of the Empire with the scum-centric parts find-and-replaced with rebel-centric parts. Force and Destiny, however, is widely considered by the community not to just be the best core book that FFG has produced, but perhaps the best core book for any RPG ever. The writing is polished, the layout is damn near perfect, and the overall quality of publication is impeccable. While the art in the other books was great, the art in Force and Destiny is stunning.
• That One Attack: The "Gruesome Injury" critical hit result, which permanently reduces an attribute by one. Crippling a character with no way to fix the damage other than cybernetic which cost a small fortune, or spending the one attribute increase earned at the very end of a talent tree to bring it back up.