Best Star Wars RPG?

My group started a new Star Wars game using the Final Fantasy Games version last night. We have played a few single-session adventures of the game before now, but this was the first attempt at a campaign, with characters we generated ourselves.

I have to say that I find the FFG version a mixed bag. The art and presentation are very nice, at least. My group finds the dice symbols non-intuitive, but I expect we'll learn them well enough over time that we'll be able to read results almost as fast as traditional numbered dice. The talent trees are easy to understand and use, and it's nice that you can buy skills and talents that aren't in your tree, and even whole new trees, with a surcharge in XP.

What I like least about the system is the main dice mechanic. How does the GM interpret a roll with a net 3 failures, 4 advantage, and a triumph AND a despair at the same time? Especially when it was something simple like rolling to unlock a door while not in combat? This isn't an academic question, since something very like it happened in our session last night. The die mechanic seems just a little too random to me, frankly. It might make for some entertaining improvisation from the GM, but with this system he has to do it with practically every roll.

I'm a little miffed by the low power level of beginning Jedi in the setting as well. My starter Jedi doesn't have a lightsaber (he couldn't afford one), and if he did have one he couldn't deflect blaster bolts with it anyway. Plus he is almost certain to have to use the Dark Side in order to get any of his Force powers to work at all (you start with Force 1, rolling 1 die at a time, and the 12-sider Force die has more Dark Side results on it than light).

I would have preferred for my group to play another Saga version campaign, personally. That was a system where Jedi could do most of their tricks from the movies quite early, and the other player classes could still almost keep up. Saga is probably my favorite version, though I really liked the West End Games version as well, back in the day. The d20 versions before Saga were also less impressive to me.

What's your favorite? Do you like the FFG version?

I played a short Age of Rebellion campaign run by a friend of mine over roll20, then ran a game myself using a hack of the Atomic Robo RPG (based on Fate). The second worked a lot better - the dice weren't as clunky and new races were a lot easier to include.

Star Wars D6, the fanmade Revised, Expanded and Updated version. It's simple to understand, almost trivial to homebrew for, and fun to play as long as you grasp the basic concepts (die code versus difficulty or opposed roll, and multi-action penalty)

Me and my friend's collaborative webcomic: Forged Men

So basically a revised WEG version? Where can you get it?

I read an article the other day that noted that much of the foundation of the Expanded Universe came from the WEG version. Stuff like the names and basic character of some of the most well known Star Wars races, like Twi'leks and Rodians, were inventions of the RPG.

A quick google search turns up the download here on D6 Holocron, an SRD-style site that hosts a large number (if not all) of the out-of-print Star Wars D6 books.

Me and my friend's collaborative webcomic: Forged Men

The FFG system does require you to be on your toes and ready to come up with circumstantial advantage/threat results. I used a lot of indirectly related consequences. So net success, a few advantages/Triumph, plus a Despair would mean you get the door open in record time, but the guard comes back from his break early and gets an incident action to sound like alarm.

But doing it for every roll can be a doozy. I often "bank" Despair/Threat and have the consequences come up later.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

"Bank" all the Threat? I can see it now - we blow up the Death Star, and as we cruise back to a landing on Yavin IV, the GM says "roll to land your X-wing." We say "great, we got it just fine," and he says, "Oh, I'm dumping all the threat that we've been ignoring the past few sessions on this one roll. So 20 Threat and 5 Despair means you land relatively safely, but your X-wing smashes into the great hall and kills Princess Leia while she's waiting to award your metals."

I mean, that's extreme, I wouldn't bank anything across more than one session for instance. It would be more like "You rolled up half a dozen threat, so the end encounter has an extra group of Stormtroopers, and the Despair you got earlier has Scout Troopers prepared to use Overwatch from a sniper nest."

Now I wouldn't outright say this. I'd just adjust it covertly. The system is flexible like that, between this and destiny points.

I wouldn't apply it to outcomes of rolls, I'd restrict that to assigning setback or adding/upgrading the difficulty.

edited 13th Mar '17 11:52:54 AM by Rationalinsanity

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

That is a bit more reasonable, but I still don't like it. Basically the party is getting screwed not because of any mistakes they made, but because the dice came up with lots of Threat, even while they probably succeeded at most of what they attempted.

I know, RPGs with dice (and I strongly prefer dice to no dice) all have that problem to some degree. However, most RPGs don't have separate success/fail and advantage/threat axes on every roll. Like I said earlier, it seems to be a little too random.

We recently switched from D20 Revised to D6 REUP, in part thanks to crits being overpowered in D20 (one of our characters would have been able to one-shot Grievous with a crit despite not even being level 10)

Edit: Turned out, we kept playing both games, with our old still-ongoing prequel-era campaign in D20 and an early-Empire-era campaign in D6.

Edited by Medinoc on May 10th 2019 at 4:56:36 PM

"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."

I had no idea there were still so many fans of the WEG Star Wars system out there.

I generally keep negative results from threat, especially indirect or delayed ones, pretty minor. So things like one or two setback dice, an extra minion group, or even a minor narrative hurdle.

I try to keep Despair results as instants, or close to it. Mainly because upgrading difficulty of the next check is a powerful tool.

Then again, I do have most of specialization supplements, and those contain useful tables for using advantage and threat.

I guess I'm biased towards FFG because the only other one I've played is Saga Edition, which is the most hilariously unbalanced system I've ever seen outside of Death Watch. Characters got stupidly overpowered compared to challenges, and vehicle combat....required you to have wargaming levels of dice.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

It's Star Wars. The players are supposed to be over-powered.

Where else is it possible to go in the space of a few hours from "naïve farm boy" to "mowing down dozens of professionally trained and armored troops, rescuing princesses from maximum security facilities, and piloting state-of-the-art starfighters on precision bombing runs?"

Or how about going from "dirt-poor scavenger" to "able to out-pilot professional fighter pilots in a freighter you've never flown that hasn't had regular maintenance in a dozen years, escaping from within an enemy base by learning to do mind tricks from your interrogator, and defeating the leader of the Knights of Ren in lightsaber combat when you've never even seen a lightsaber before?"

Saga edition was a version of Star Wars where I felt you really could rescue a princess and blow up the Death Star in your first adventure. In fact, in the first campaign I ran of it the players did just that (the blowing up the Death Star part - the princess didn't actually turn up until later. It's a long story...).

FFG beginning characters are very under-powered in comparison, and we're even playing in a campaign where we received 50 bonus points to create characters with.

edited 15th Mar '17 7:45:57 AM by Bense

Regarding vehicle combat in Saga edition; IIRC the most you ever need is around 9d10 (and a d20) - for Proton Torpedo damage. Plus you could always roll 4d10 twice, and roll your d20 as a d10 on one of the rolls.

As an old-school gamer, my opinion is that if you don't have 10d10 in your dice bag, you're Not a Serious Gamer. How are you supposed to roll fireball damage in D&D if you don't have a dozen d6s handy? Or GURPS with modern firearms?

Yes, I'm joking. A bit.

Anyway, you need a lot of dice to play FFG Star Wars too. Most of the serious rolls with modifiers seem to be at least 6 or 7 dice. The WEG version needed a dozen d6s to play properly too.

I remember trubolasers requiring over a dozen dice, and vehicles such as capital ships having thousands upon thousands of health. And each of those have multiple attacks per turn. That was a nightmare to manage.

Now, FFG vehicles have their own problems, namely the issue that foot soldiers (aside from a few very special abilities) can't damage anything with even a low armor rating, outside of narrative damage. And starfighter combat is pure Rocket Tag.

What I like about FFG is that, while characters get stronger over time, they rarely get so powerful that its difficult to challenge them. A run of the mill blaster rifle will always be a threat, though it will be lessened as you get options to reduce and avoid damage. In Saga (and a lot of D20 systems), a standard issue blaster eventually becomes a non-issue thanks to health inflation. But if you are running a campaign with the Empire as the central foe, how do you address the fact that after level 12 or so, most of their conventional forces don't threaten the players? I mean, throwing Dark Troopers, vehicles, etc at them does work as a challenge, but I feel like those shouldn't be the backbone of an encounter all the time.

Essentially, I like it that basic enemies remain something of a threat, so I don't have to arbitrarily cut out the entire Stormtrooper Corps after a certain level because they are literally a waste of a turn and everyone's time.

And GURPS is cancer.

edited 15th Mar '17 9:04:41 AM by Rationalinsanity

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

Not as bad as it should realistically have been, actually. You were supposed to generally stay away from capital ships anyway. That's why turbo lasers have penalties against smaller-than-capship-targets and why they all had a built in "support the fighters" ability that they would generally use instead of actually shooting a lot of turbolasers at the players that would have mostly missed, but has the chance of a lucky shot obliterating their ship. Captial ships vs. other capital ships isn't all that bad. And you could always pull out the Starship Miniatures game if you really wanted a lot of capship battles.

How does FFG handle capital ships and all their multitude of guns? I haven't seen that yet.

Well, my solution in the first campaign was to have the campaign end, with the players defeating Vader and the Emperor, around level 13. It still took us almost a year to play out.

The secondary solution was to have cannon fodder like stormtroopers hold the front line for a few rounds while the big guns hurt the players from behind their minion screen.

The third solution was to simply use a lot of stormtroopers. High-level Jedi will be able to deflect the first few blaster bolts, but then the penalties get too high even for them. Or for non-Jedi have the troopers use cooperative tactics, like a squad all using "aid another" until one or two troopers can easily hit the players.

The fourth solution - if the stormtroopers can only hit the players if they get a 20, stack the encounter with darkness, smoke, rain, rough terrain, lots of cover for the troopers, etc. so that the players have a harder time hitting them but the troopers still have the same "will hit on a 20".

In any case, stormtroopers are never really much of a threat to the heroes in the movies either. They only ever manage to land three hits on them: two of those are on the droid sidekicks and the other is Only a Flesh Wound. How many stormtroopers do the heroes kill onscreen? I don't know, but it seems like an awful lot.

Bite your tongue, man! I quite like GURPS, and they have excellent, well-researched books with indexes!, though I admit I have rarely actually played it, and never for a very long campaign.

See, in D6, stormtroopers were just that, stormtroopers. They weren't bad shots, and had great armor (which hindered their shots, though it was said elite stormies bypassed their armor restriction). There was never really any health scaling; with the exception of armor, you probably started and ended the campaign just as effective at taking damage. Admittedly, though, it had some problems, like how a full-strength wookie could survive a lightsaber being swung by somebody without the Lightsaber Combat power and take no damage at all.

Me and my friend's collaborative webcomic: Forged Men

That actually makes some sense - amateur with a lightsaber, very big and angry wookie - the intimidation factor alone should make it hard to hit the wookie.

I know the mechanics are a lightsaber damage roll vs. the wookie's body roll (if the "Constitution" attribute was called body, it's been a long time since I've played WEG), so the guy did hit the wookie but did no damage, but the explanation "you were a freaked out amateur" works to explain the result.

edited 16th Mar '17 7:27:52 AM by Bense

FFG capital ships fire their weapons in groups (so even the big ones only get a few attacks at most, and only if the attacks are pointed in the right arc), and they use the game gunnery score that any other weapon does (though they take large negatives for shooting smaller targets, so they are often rolling 4 or 5 difficulty dice against most player ships), only with high damage on top of it.

Health inflation is dodged by the crit system (even an ISD can be scuttled with a good roll on that table) and the fact that FFG vehicles take 10x less damage from personal scale weapons (normal from vehicle scale), assuming it does anything at all (10 points of regular damage overcomes 1 point of Armor, and then you need 10 points to do 1 damage in hull threshold). So a capital ship might "only" have 80 health, but you'll need a bomber at least to do anything more than nic the paint (from the outside of course).

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

No, the Lightsaber Combat force power was what made lightsabers so effective in the game; you added your Sense to attack and Control to your damage, which could get messy. In the game coming up, my partially trained jedi has 6D in lightsaber (pretty good), but lacks the power, so its just a flat 5D damage, same as a blaster rifle or heavy blaster pistol.

Me and my friend's collaborative webcomic: Forged Men

So FFG handles the Star Destroyer pretty much like every other version of Star Wars has - grouped weapons that have significant penalties to hit small ships, ship weapons do 10x or more damage than personal weapons, etc.

Except, interestingly given that Saga PCs are generally more powerful, you can't instakill an ISD in Saga with a lucky critical hit.

We had our first space combat last night. It was so short that it's hard to draw conclusions. The TIEs missed our commandeered freighter completely, and we took them out very quickly. The only damage was a little strain from doing it so quickly.

We still get odd-ball results with every other roll, and need to say things like "well, you have five successes, so you totally killed the bad guys, but you have one threat, so you take a strain in the process." And then we roll a test immediately after to completely recover the strain, making it pretty pointless.

Space combat's flaws really show when you run fighter to fighter battles. Whoever fires first and hits, wins.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

Our session this week continued to feature rolls that confused everyone.

If you're trying to crack a force field to get at an ancient scroll of wisdom behind it, what do you do with a roll that is a net 1 failure and 3 triumphs? Our GM ruled "you don't open the force field, but you discover you can read the scroll through the field anyway."

We had a bit longer space combat Wednesday, against a more evenly matched ship, but it did prove again that whoever shoots first wins. If you get the right critical hits your opponent might as well give up right then - even if his ship has a long way to go before it is destroyed.

We got a power fluctuation result on one of our first hits, which prevented our opponent from spending system strain on anything, and the fight was effectively over. He couldn't outmaneuver or out-shoot us when we could spend strain and he couldn't.