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Is the Star Wars SAGA Edition RPG any good, in your experiences? I'm considering seeing if my D&D group would be willing to play it every so often if I were to get ahold of the rulebook, but I'd like to know if it's fairly balanced and simple to learn for someone who has been playing 3.5E D&D for a few years now.

Also, any problems to watch out for should I end up running a game?

Hmm. I've played with it once or twice. It IS easy to learn, in any case, although due to my short time with it I cannot comment on "balanced" that much (I'd say it is, although the space battles are still nightmarish in their execution with an Imperial Star Destroyer relatively easy prey to starfighters).

It did have some good innovations (like removing the Force-powers using vitality -system) and I liked talent trees, but the basic game has a ridiculous emphasis on combat, especially in the feat section. I would have hoped they'd import some Hero's Guide feats, at least. I also enjoyed the fact that the Jedi's ridiculously large lightsaber damage progression was removed (although they still have many lightsaber-enhancing talents). The dark side no longer imposes physical degeneration, which is a good thing, too.

There aren't so many ready-to-go NPCs any more, but the good news is that character creation is very easy and smooth. Depending on the opinion, though, the system may produce too similar characters with same feats, talents etc. I'm a little bit leery of that claim, since my own perception was quite different.

All in all, a quick, easy-to-use and to-learn system, if a bit bland.

I actually considered starting a thread on it a month or two back. Some may know of my magmatic loathing for D&D, and the reasons for it, and I was less than favourably impressed with the d20 Star Wars Revised and Expanded edition. The system was clunky, unbalanced, and idiotic, and in a just world, Bill Slaviczec should have been put down like a rabid dog for even suggesting that abomination as a replacement for WEG Star Wars.

Then again, Slaviczec is an idiot. I liked WEG Star Wars, but to my honest knowledge, many of the more egregrious brain-bugs and minimalism issues plaguing the Expanded Universe stem directly from Slaviczec being sloppy. And that's pretty annoying, as was his unvarnished praise for the regular d20 system. Whatever SAGA is, it does remain d20, and I was fully prepared to garrote it... after giving it enough rope to do the job itself, of course. In all this, I was completely unprepared for the game actually being good. But I'm beginning at the wrong end. Let's start at the beginning.

Star Wars SAGA edition uses an updated d20 engine. A lot of chaff has been cut away, and the SAGA edition manages to be far more comprehensive than SWRCR ever was, despite being roughly half as thick. That's fine and all, but the salient point lies in the classes themselves. Breaking with D&D and SWRCR, the classes have been overhauled. Instead of poorly conceived clichés you have to arbitrarily adhere to, the classes now represent the Star Wars archetypes we see in the movies and books, and no one was more gobsmacked than I upon realizing it actually bloody well worked. Part of this is due to the division of Talents and Feats; Feats now determine abilities that basically anyone can get, while Talents are much narrower in scope.

Multiclassing, then? It's no longer regulated by penalties to XP. The natural consequences of taking another class simply makes multiclassing an alternative no better or worse than advancing another level in the same class. In other words, you're expected to multiclass freely in this game, and with the far more flexible structure of the talent trees, this finally allows you to make your characters interesting.

The next major change in SAGA, also rumored to be part of D&D 4, is the skill system itself. Having gotten wind of this change before I picked up the book, I was sort of leery about it. I like to retain some amount of influence over my character's skillset, and this looked awfully like it was going to gum up the works.

It is true that some amount of control is lost. In practice, however, the system automatically does exactly what players had always been forced to do, but with far less overhead. Ranks no longer exist, and a person trained in a specific skill is rather dramatically above what he would be in the older editions. Here, being skilled matters, but at the same time the system doesn't punish you for being untrained in something. Basically, the philosophy seems to be that anyone can help in a pinch, be it as pilot, mechanic or medic, while at the same time the true professionals are shown as head and shoulders above the rest. The amount of skills has been trimmed substantially, with the stupider legacies of D&D having died the death they deserve. All in all, much case for rejoicing.

Moving on - the Force no longer has a lot of skills associated with it. There's now simply a single skill, Use the Force, which allows you to do a slew of nifty things available to a Padawan, such as small telekinetic tricks, minor telepathy, sensing your surroundings, and so on. The feat Force Training then gives you access to a "suite" of Force powers, more powerful applications of the Force, which are used x times per encounter and can be replenished in various ways.

The combat system now incorporates a system for wearing down your opponent - this was one of my major beefs with the earlier system, the fact that wounding never came into play. The "condition chart" is an abstracted system that covers shock, wounding and stun damage. Very nice, as is the Damage Threshold. The removal of the Vitality Points / Wound Points duality was a ballsy move, but in practice, the new system flows much better, and the Second Wind rules are pure magic.

The bad points? Well, first, the book, while not as incomprehensible to beginners as D&D and the older incarnations of Star Wars, is very condensed, and your previous experience with those games will probably serve to disorient you. The online errata is a must; a lot of errors have snuck in, and since the book is so condensed, those errors have far more impact than they otherwise would. Also, you really do need to buy Starships of the Galaxy SAGA edition, but that's not much of a sacrifice, considering the excellence of that book.

Star Wars SAGA, in conclusion, surprised me by being one of the best damn games I've ever bought, and carries the honorable distinction of being a d20 based system free of suck. For that same reason, D&D proponents may find it unsettling - the emphasis rests much less on optimizing a character and finding the most broken rules exception, and overall the gameplay is much more free-form and streamlined. Planning and strategizing isn't as important anymore, and resource management is a non-factor.

All in all, despite the filthy feeling saying so gives me, this game has made me anticipate D&D 4. And that's a fucking miracle in its own right.

EDIT: Cleaned up the wording some.

I'll be dragging my RPG group through the Dawn of Defiance-Campaign in a few weeks.

I haven't played/mastered a single session yet, but it seems to be a relatively easy to use rules system from reading the book.

One thing I'm considering to house rule is the lack to gain another trained skill except by sacrificing a feat. That's something I'll discuss with my group.
The scond wind-rule is sort of magic, but your players are heroes and need any support they can get . I am considering to let them spend a force point to get one hit dice roll of a class they have as healing. As force points are a limited but renewable resource with lots of other applications I don't think it would be unbalancing.

Raesene wrote:I'll be dragging my RPG group through the Dawn of Defiance-Campaign in a few weeks.

I haven't played/mastered a single session yet, but it seems to be a relatively easy to use rules system from reading the book.

One thing I'm considering to house rule is the lack to gain another trained skill except by sacrificing a feat. That's something I'll discuss with my group.

You get a lot of feats in this game. Besides the standard human bonus ones and the ones every three levels, the basic classes give you one every other level. Add in the bonus trained skill for humans and high Int (and the Int ones are retroactive with stat gain) and that's a lot of trained skills.

The biggest problem I've encountered is people far too used to playing vanilla D20 with resource hoarding and the psychological block that low level characters die if they try bold, heroic actions. My best player is probably the guy who has the some of the least experience with D20.

I should reread the rules: skill training is a bonus feat for all classes; having the option to add a trained skill every second level is good enough.

That's the funny thing about SAGA. Mostly, whenever my group wanted to houserule something we didn't like, simply rereading the rules showed that 1) we had misunderstood the rule and 2) the actual rule was everything we wanted it to be.