Best Star Wars RPG?

I've found now that you start to reach Jedi power levels in FFG Star Wars when you're around 300XP in (300 beyond beginning character generation). At that point you can buy up a decent amount of Deflect or Parry, depending on your trees, and won't be knocked out in any firefight where you don't act first. Plus you can get a fairly broad base of Force powers and finally get an extra Force die which makes them often useful, though you still have to channel the Dark Side a lot.

I'm in a group that was planning for ages to get into the FFG system but the prospective DM ducked out (working theory is that he was impatient being in a group that shifted DM duties around).

I was new to gaming when this went down, so I didn't really understood any system that well, but everyone else at the table was clearly relieved that they wouldn't have to play an over-complex system seemingly built around shilling products (buy an often out of print book, different books for different races and classes, and a set of specially made dice).

Instead, we went with D6 and have really enjoyed. In particular, I've actually found it to be one of the most intuitive systems I've ever played.

edited 2nd Aug '17 9:37:11 AM by Selay47

The d6 "pass/fail" rolls certainly are easier than trying to interpret what a net 5 advantage, a triumph, and 4 failures on a knowledge check should mean. That's a result our GM had to deal with last night.

To be fair, there is one area where d6 Star Wars is off the mark, and that's the Hyperspace travel times in the original edition, which were days and days. They only had three movies to work with, and in one of those Luke trains to be a Jedi essentially in the time it takes the Falcon to reach Cloud City from Hoth.

The prequels make it pretty obvious that travel times are supposed to be much shorter, though. The FFG travel times seem closer to where they should be.

I just go by the assumption that Star Wars travel times are "as long as the plot needs them to be".

I note that today FFG has announced that they will be reprinting the classic WEG Star Wars Role-Playing game and Star Wars Sourcebook. The two books will come together in a slipcase, and the only changes from the originals mentioned are a new introduction and a few differences in art.

edited 16th Aug '17 12:13:22 PM by Bense

Been reading some WEG books on the D6 Holocron site recently. I've been a Star Wars fan since before I had a second digit, and yet it was only recently I realized just how important the WEG game was to the foundations of the franchise.

Edition conflicts can cause some fun weirdness sometimes. We're playing D20 revised, and our player who designed a ship recently noticed the supplement he used was actually for D20 Saga, and the two editions use radically different rules for ion cannons. Turns out our ship's Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon array of octuplet-linked ion cannons (dimensioned to be able to stun-lock an enemy ship according to the supplement) is actually ridiculously overkill as per Revised rules...

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

Today was a good day.

Our Star Wars d6 REUP party, led by my character, conducted a breach and assault on the cobbled-together pirate mothership we had crippled in our escape from it a mere hours earlier (they had captured us like three hours away from Nar Shaddaa, so we did a pit stop there to gear up and come back in force). Eventually we captured the Togorian pirate captain's son, and successfully negotiated their surrender in exchange for guarantees of safety.

And I didn't fire a single shot. Fitting my position as officer, I was instead making Command rolls to make our own goons™ shoot better.

edited 13th Jan '18 2:01:53 PM by Medinoc

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

Yesterday, we concluded our years-long Star Wars d20 Revised saga with the end of the Clone Wars. The player characters were:

• M'roo, Togorian jedi (started as padawan, now a master). Very big and very badass, especially in terms of raw damage.^note When fully buffed his main attacks do 2d10+3d8+18. Great tactitian, admiral rather than general.
• Ankar Shinto, Codru-ji jedi (started as padawan, now a master). Very badass too (he's basically jedi Grievous, with a grand total of 9 attacks per turn), killed Count Dooku in a duel in the previous mission.
• Sanrit, Kushiban jedi (started as padawan, now a master). Not as much of a fighter as the other two, but almost invisible, unhittable and adept at disarming people, even those much bigger than him, with martial arts. A lethal combination against anyone he doesn't deem deserving of a proper duel.
• Arto Pak, Muun banker and merchant, turned expert slicer (my char). Started as a tagalong using the party's fast ship to trade in exchange for a cut of the profits, now member of the team and close friend with Sanrit.
• Elan Pry, pilot/engineer turned ship designer and CEO. Designed the Prytech Compact series and flies the Prytech One, the closest thing we have to a Super Prototype.^note It's actually commercially available Prytech Compact, but has all the impractically expensive options.
• Ceile Inessa, Duros ace pilot.

The whole party was level 12 except for Ankar Shinto who hit level 13 after duelling Dooku.

---

The actions of our player characters significantly changed the outcome:

• Militarily speaking, the CIS suffered much worse losses than in canon (in no small part thanks to M'roo and Ceile^note She happily targeted the hyperdrives of damaged enemy ships, when she wasn't opening her starfighter's canopy to shoot buzz droids off), with the battle of Coruscant leaving their fleet in tatters. Anakin didn't kill Dooku since the latter had already been killed by Shinto. To prevent metagaming, Grievous's hiding place wasn't Utapau this time.
• Ankar Shinto managed to defeat Grievous with Sanrit's help, black-knighting him and capturing what was left alive.
• In response local minions received orders to "kill them all", including the separatist leaders (whose shuttle was on the verge of leaving for Mustafar). Sanrit managed to save and capture one of them, which turned out to be Nute Gunray.
• This allowed the jedi order to work with the Senate (through senator Organa in particular) instead of trying to bypass it: Gunray was made to publicly surrender and the Senate voted that the Chancellor had to give up his emergency powers. He refused; a vote of no-confidence was planned for the next day but it requires a supermajority the anti-Palpatine side knows it lacks. Mace Windu took his refusal to give up his powers as greenlight to arrest him, accompanied by M'roo and Shinto.
• They were in the middle of banter with Palpatine when they felt a disturbance in the force and were notified that the clones were attacking the temple: Furious at his plans unraveling, the Chancellor had triggered order 66 before Team Windu even reached his office (and without a proper "casus belli" against the jedi, thankfully). Everyone lit up their sabers and the fight started.
• The fight was much shorter than in the movie:
  • Darth Sidious struck first at Windu, scoring a critical hit threat and spent a Force Point to win the confirm roll: In this game, any critical hit with a lightsaber wielded by a high-level force user is pretty much a One-Hit Kill^note Crits bypass Vitality points to hit Wound points directly, Sidious rolled high with 5d8 against Windu's 15-ish Wound points, bringing him down to -15: He killed Mace Windu as fast as he had killed the first two masters in the film.
  • M'roo attacked next, also scoring a critical hit threat, and also confirming it with the Force: No more Sith Lord. (Note: Sidious was level 20, and Windu was level 18)
  • This was very important for Anakin, since he arrived after Sidious was dead.
• Meanwhile, Sanrit was watching over Arto Pak in some holoconf room in the Banking Clan building. When he learned of the attack on the temple, he moved to a window with a view on it, and cast an illusory fog to cover the defending jedi.
• Immediately after the fight, M'roo called a military commander and told them that the Chancellor was dead, his emergency powers no longer applied and Order 66 should be rescinded: The commander immediately suspended it for investigation, saving the lives of everyone still in the temple (a lot of jedi on mission were still killed since even though the order lasted a very short time, that was often all the clones had needed). The order would later be fully rescinded.
• After that it was mostly debriefing and epilogue. Anakin explained his plight, M'roo got through to him by suggesting the cause of Padme's predicted death may have been Palpatine slowly killing her through some dark side power; it's expected she'll survive giving birth since Anakin will no longer be turned against her.
• Senator Bail Organa was elected new Chancellor, narrowly beating senator Mon Mothma.

---

In the end, all our characters got pretty cushy situations:

• Our three jedi master characters were admitted to the Jedi Council. M'roo originally declined because he didn't trust himself to replace Windu, but relented after learning several other jedi masters were lost.
• Arto Pak managed to save the Banking Clan from being dragged down by the separatists' imminent default on debt^note The Clan should have been able to take it anyway, until a few short-sighted idiots Madoff'd it up, leaving the Clan without the funds to cushion the impact thanks to a desperate plan to seize the Techno Union's industrial assets.^{the plan} Thanks to being assigned to crack Nute Gunray's captured comlink, he got the coordinates of a number of CFOs of the surrendering separatist factions, and negociated forgiving their own debts in exchange for their help in seizing the Techno Union: In other words, he encouraged them to throw the Techno Union under the bus, and he was driving the bus. Then he partnered with another Muun who had the political skill he lacked, rising to vice-chairman of the clan (with his partner as chairman).
• Elan Pry is still CEO of Prytech, and got a lot of good publicity thanks to some ships of his being used in the war effort.
• Ceile Inessa was promoted aide to admiral M'roo.

Edited by Medinoc on Mar 24th 2019 at 3:17:08 PM

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

Nice. I use D6 now, before that I used (and still do, the campaign is on hiatus) a homebrew system. (I only got D6 recently, and the other campaign is several years old). I found D6 to be suited for Star Wars, though it is more technical than the homebrew system which could be described as "D&D, but simple and sometimes arbitrary".

I probably won't give details of the campaign without asking the players for permission, though.

Edited by AzurePaladin on Mar 27th 2019 at 1:13:39 PM

The awful things he says and does are burned into our cultural consciousness like a CRT display left on the same picture too long. -Fighteer

I finished a Wraith Squadron-inspired campaign using a kludge of Jadepunk and Tachyon Squadron Fate mechanics (Assets from Jadepunk, starfighter combat from TS) a few months back. The high point was probably when they stole a half-finished Star Destroyer I was half-expecting them to blow up, and the member of the party who was super-rich gladly sacrificed that Aspect and the Stunt that gave him benefits to persuasion when he bribed people in exchange for bringing the ship most of the way up to code for the final battle against Grand Admiral Thrawn.

Edited by CountDorku on Mar 28th 2019 at 7:18:02 PM

Nice. Did you manage to outplay Thrawn?

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

He was defeated, yes, although part of that was that once his Interdictor was online, I had Rogue Squadron just happen to get caught in the bubble while passing through and offer some assistance. (It's Star Wars, after all; when it comes to coincidences, "outrageously unlikely" means a thirty percent chance of happening, "completely ridiculous" means fifty percent, and I say that as a committed fan.)

The character lineup, incidentally, included a Twi'lek sniper, a renegade apprentice from the Imperial Inquisition, an actual Lieutenant Kettch, a nobleman with access to a heap of money (up until he used it to pay for overhauling the Star Destroyer), and a one-eyed Gungan demolitions tech. I used X-Wing Miniatures ships for the dogfight tracker (we had an X-Wing, a stealth-custom X-Wing using Poe Dameron's ride, a HWK-290, a Quadjumper and a TIE Interceptor), which worked pretty well and looked cool on the table.

These words strike fear in my heart.

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

That is proof you are still sane.

Arise, my thread...

My group finally finished their FFG Star Wars campaign last night, after about three years of play (with some breaks, but with the Star Wars game as the main game). Final XP for my Jedi was an even 2000, and he had four career trees and a half-dozen force power trees. We went far above what the system was balanced for, I think, and yet it was still quite deadly. You never get enough wounds and defensive techniques that a couple blaster bolts from a lucky stormtrooper won't still take you down. Even a character that can match the Emperor is still only a few bad die rolls away from death. Conversely, the Emperor is also only a few die rolls away from death.

The dice pools get very large at those levels of play. During the last space combat my Jedi pilot was rolling six yellow dice, five Force dice, three red dice, one or two purple, and odd numbers of boost and setback dice for every attack roll. Around 20 dice for each attack, and then it would take about five minutes to sort out all of the talents in effect, sort out the symbols and what was cancelling what out, and decide on how to spend the Force dice and Advantage to get the final result. So rather than a lot of short combat rounds, you have your battles decided in one or two combat rounds that take a half hour to get through each.

Rumor has it that FFG will not be producing any more books after their starship and vehicle book. I didn't much like the system, but it did provide my group with three years of play.

Sorry for using the dark side to resurrect thread, but it seemed better than starting a new one.

Years and years ago my group of college friends did an FFG one shot and I enjoyed it, I played a medical droid unknowingly patched with an HK personality chip, making him a rather pleasant doctor for the team and thoroughly ruthless in "dealing with" (read, kill) threats to their health. Ever since I've wanted to play a game again, but not had much luck until this past week. My group has pretty steadfastly stuck to D&D 5e for the sake of convenience/lazyness, and that's fine, but when the current DM had to drop do to work constraints, I suggested trying a different system... and it stuck!

I'm reading the Edge of Empire book and binging videos to get a handle on it. I'll post some game updates later, so far had a Session 0 with two of the players and went through the basics of dice mechanics and character creation. Player 1 is making a Jawa Technician Mechanic (using the template for Geonosian) who has left Tatooine as a traveling musician with a little band of instrument playing gadgets (Perfomer specialization). The other is thinking on his concept, and I still need to try and wrangle 2 to read the material or it's going to be a session 0.5 next week and not actual play.

I know the game says the party starts with a space ship, but I'm planning on the first session being a "warm up" where they are tasked via obligation (or learn through leads) to embarrass a merchant, with the main option being to steal their custom made yacht at its unveiling. This gets them either a ship to keep as a base, with heat and notoriety attached, or a source of credits to get better gear and a more combat ready light freighter.

We've become a mostly online group because of covid, and so far the Discord Bot from https://www.rpgsessions.com/index.html has been pretty seamless, though configuring their talent trees and weapons is going to take foreeeeeever.

Nice! If it's the game I think of, medical droids were actually better shots than battle droids.

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

I think it was a different system, or I really didn't optimize my deadly droid doc right, I had terrible luck throwing grenades. However the FFG Droid is probably the minmaxer race of choice, given it has the highest available XP to spend. Which makes sense, given how Droids are nearly fully customizable in universe.

Huh, I wonder if Darths & Droids got inspiration for that with the player making the super optimized R2?

Edited by Earnest on Aug 15th 2022 at 4:26:57 AM

'kay, just had the actual session 0. Last 2 weeks have been more chill hangouts and explaining mechanics, partly because of MIA players.

The dynamics will be interesting, since the two veteran players know mostly only D&D, but have nearly no SW knowledge, while the TRPG newbie knows a lot about SW.

Said new player actually asked for the setting to be pre Clone Wars, which I was not expecting but will make for interesting stories. Now I'm thinking of them helping the Separatists pre-war without knowing it, and/or discovering secret shipyards and assets that make them enemies of the corporations and Sith. I'd been planning on making some Grey-and-Gray Morality with the Empire being a stabilizing force... but now it'll be the broken promises and corruption of the Republic, with occasional glimmers of former justice and hope.

The big increase in difficulty for me as a DM is that one or two players really want to play force sensitives, so now I have to learn the Force sections. Though it does open up running into Jedi as antagonists and/or wanting to "save" them from dark side tendencies.

Edit: In terms of challenges, so far it's been the paradigm shift away from Classes and Levels towards the Point Buy system, and what is essentially an sort of obligatory "multi classing" via getting new specializations. My experience with Chronicles of Darkness helped me a bit, though Splats there are pretty static, the similarity was enough to help. I had to go heavy into the way the dice pool works to emphasize how buying up Characteristics / Stats is important, since they can't be bought after character creation.

Edited by Earnest on Aug 29th 2022 at 8:34:05 AM

Finally, finally had our first session of Edge of Empire! Keeping this post short, we used Discord, along with https://app.rpgsessions.com/ to simulate the dice. All 4 players and me were new to the system. I'm running a lightly modified version of the Mos Shuuta adventure (changes being mostly cosmetic, the bar owner is Bea Arthur from the SW special, and since it's pre Clone Wars no imperials, more Gamorreans).

So far everyone's enjoying it, the players are a human Martial Artist, Dathomiri Archaeologist, Bothan Doctor, and Droid Performer. No combat encounters yet, still getting a hang of how rolling skill checks work, and using the occasional Destiny Point. Had a few fun successes and failures. Specifically the Droid failing a roll to make an ear-splitting screech on a night club's loudspeakers, but succeeding in creating a mass distraction of holograms and sound via rolling 5 Advantages on hacking the DJ console. The session ended on a Despair, where security droids identified 2 of the party as escaped fugitives, and they'll have to make a break for it to escape capture. Still early for a verdict, but as a DM I am immensely enjoying the narrative dice system so far, though it is challenging to remember / invent uses for Advantage symbols.

Highlight: the players asking the droid performer if he can Slice another droid to steal its ID Badge. His response "Can you build me a liver? Not all droid are good at programming!" The Bothan doctor "I could clone a liver, actually!"

My party just had a wild session of the "Beyond the Rim" campaign.

To give a bit of set up, the party has discovered survivors of the crashed spaceship Na Salaor, and are in one of those tense Gilded Cage "guest" situations where the locals are trying to stay hidden and not sure whether they can be trusted. My players enjoy pacing out campaigns, but I'd expected they'd want to progress the plot yesterday, and in the meantime I had a bit of "filler" minor events to keep them entertained, and one of them just completely took over the session.

One of my players is a latent force user, and he hasn't bought any force powers yet, but I wanted to do something with it. So I had them all roll a Force Die to see if they had any meaningful dreams, and the force user player gets a vision of a crying woman in a cage at the base. Since he rolled 2 Light side points, I had the dream be relatively stable and clear (Dark side points would have made it more vague and nightmarish). The woman begged to be freed so she could reunite with her children, or if she died, asked the player to save them from starving, and gave their location as a cave in a hill surrounded by orange flowers.

I'd expected him to say "Yes, I'll help" since his backstory is as an escaped slave, but he surprised with a very neutral "Help yourself, no one else will". I changed the music to a more dark dream theme, she dried her tears, didn't thank the player, but acknowledged the advice.

I did a couple of secret rolls, and next morning all hell breaks loose because a wild Nexu escaped from its enclosure and nearly killed a villager. The party spent most of the session helping with the fallout (doctor healing, mechanic restoring the droid to see what happened, and the other two patrolling). I think I freaked out the force user player, as the party slowly finds out from clues that the same cage as in the dream was the one with the escaped Nexu. The creature becoming far more wiley and cunning. And later finding a cave just where the dream woman said, with a reunited family of Nexu inside... which ignored the force user player instead of attacking, like all other wild Nexu did.

I'd originally intended that if he said "I'll help" and opened the cage in the dream, then in the real world the player would have unconsciously used the force to unlock the cage. This was sooooo much better because it left more room for ambiguity. When she's telling the rest of party and they RP that she's basically a cursed or a bad luck magnet that will get them kicked out.

Thought this Spoony video would be of interest here.