Kurgan wrote:Go ahead, bore us to tears, I'd like to hear about it.
All right.
I used to love the old WEG Star Wars. It pretty much exemplified the gritty matinee aspect of the Old Trilogy, the idea of heroes thrown together by circumstance and who were (usually) smart, lucky and canny, but always tended to skid from adventure to adventure, often by accident. We did try to play Jedi back then, but it just didn't work; for one thing, no-one had seen very much of a full Jedi in action, more than the fact that they could deflect blaster bolts, choke people telekinetically and lift huge-ass starfighters; for another, the system was punishing as a neophyte Force user, and then, when you moved beyond that, you were pretty much a god. Still, ignoring that, the game was nothing sort of awesome: quick, simple rules that premiered fast-paced space opera battle, cooperative storytelling, improvisation and rip-roaring adventure.
Then, of course, came the announcement that Wizards would develop a new d20-based Star Wars. We were pretty much united in skepticism; having seen what d20 was about, we figured nothing good could possibly come out of it, and certainly nothing worthy of the name Star Wars. But an incorrigible optimist - that would be me - decided to take the plunge and give the system a shot, just to be fair (and because I had the money to spend on a supplement, for once).
Oh dear God, Star Wars d20 sucked. Where to begin? Artificial and
arbitrary distinctions between Jedi classes (I defy anyone to rationalize the Jedi Counsilor / Guardian paths and the prohibition to jump between them from an in-universe perspective), a clunky grind-based combat system, a starship combat system that just plain didn't work, fresh fallacies in terms of fluff, and the good old D&D balance madness. Graphically it was disturbingly stupid, fusing Wizards' love of heavy machine-like frames with chaotic layout in which vital information was effectively camouflaged. In fact, I will go so far as to assert that the
only good thing SW d20 did was including the Vitality/Wound Point dichotomy, which at least was a decent attempt at avoiding the dread hit point yo yo. You could certainly not have an interesting character at any less than level 4; that too was lifted part and parcel from the d20 model, in which your character begins as a blank manikin and only gradually begins to exhibit life of his own. That wouldn't be so bad, of course, if the game hadn't been couched in language that I swear was deliberately chosen to
stifle creativity. Remember folks - this is a sacred system, and not to be questioned. If you don't follow the rules, there's no telling what will happen!
Then came the Revised Star Wars d20 edition. It did feel a bit like milking the cash cow, but at least the game, though still unplayable, had been improved. It was prettier, if still hard to find your way through, especially in a hurry; what's more, it held all those basic Prestige Classes that allowed you to, you know,
do something with your character. Given the stifling of creativity that was the original Star Wars, and its lack of interesting options for your character, that was a much-needed breath of fresh air. Still, to the core it remained shackled to the legacy it had brought with it from d20 Star Wars and D&D - a bloated, clunky, bland, thoroughly un-Star Wars combat system, a skill system simultaneously too detailed and too large-scaled, a house of cards with hidden cross-system dependencies so blatant that only a complete fucking retard could (and did, of course) call it modular. After rolling my eyes at the carnage of our game testing sessions, I resigned myself to adapting a Unisystem Lite Star Wars system, if only for the ability to use Jedi as characters.
And that's what the field looked like with the coming of Star Wars SAGA system. So why, burnt as I had been twice before, did I buy it? Well, first, I'm a sucker for fresh directions, and so the format of the new book (a square shape, whee!) and its comparatively tiny size made for a very nice change. Second, I had heard rumours of the creators actually wanting to simplify things, and include some D&D 4 changes into the engine, to speed things up and make it suck less. So I figured "hey, it's just one book." And, you know, it was.
So what do I mean by that? Just what I was saying. It's just
one book. You don't need a Power of the Jedi or Dark Side Sourcebook. Everything formerly handled by five or six tomes, each twice the size of the new book, that new book could do, and do better. Sure, if you don't want to create your own starship stats for every crappy little skiff there is, by all means get Starships of the Galaxy (just be aware that you'll get a few kickass new rules additions on modifying and building new starships, as well as starship battles). Same goes for Threats of the Galaxy. Otherwise, you're not just
fine with the SAGA core book; everything else is gravy. And that's something I find intensely sympathetic after the years of active gouging delivered by the previous editions.
The layout, then? I whined about it earlier, so is SAGA any better? I have to say, hell yes. It's obvious the SAGA team started over, because they managed to unfuck the mistakes of all previous editions without adding new problems. Instead of furiously wanking to bizarre graphical spatters, quasi-mechanical panels and random symbols, we're given a clean, colourful and eminently legible design that actually, you know, facilitates
reading the fucking thing. The illustrations are in many cases retained, although new ones have been added - I personally have no problem with this, but I hear others have.
The game itself is, to put it in succinct terms, everything the old post-WEG incarnations weren't, and in wracking my brains trying to discover the underlying reasons, I think I've stumbled upon an answer. The designers of the first d20 Star Wars seem to have set down around a table and asked themselves, "right, now that we've bought the licence for a d20 Star Wars version, how do we make Star Wars into d20?" In other words, they adapted and conformed Star Wars to d20, instead of the other way around. The revised edition retained this, a sort of entrenched mindset of d20 veneration in which the core principles are sacred arcana. Whereas in SAGA, they were daring, they were experimental, and best of all, they seem to have built it on the principle of "hey, how do we make rules that encourage what we
see in the films?" And in doing so, they removed many of the idiosyncratic one-of-a-kind rules that led people to create bizarre multiclassing comboes for "character optimization."
Said character optimization, in all its gangrenous glory, has largely been made obsolete through a hefty infusion of Star Wars. As mentioned above, the designers asked themselves how they would go about encouraging characters to act in a Star Wars fashion. One of the d20 legacies they euthanized was the absurd specialisation of characters in a team. Any Star Wars character, they reasoned, can help out in a firefight, pitch in in a repair session, or try their hand at piloting a ship, so it made no sense not to let them try. Thus, characters generally have a wide degree of basic competence, while still being head and shoulders above the rest in their respective specialities. This is the difference between the whole team taking part in a frantic dogfight and a single player having a blast for two hours of game time while the rest spend it twiddling their thumbs. This broad competence, by the way, extends to Force users.
Did you hear that right? Yes, I did mean that anyone can be a Force user (unless you happen to be a droid or a Vong, that is). You simply pick the
Force Sensitive feat, and you're good to go. It was doable in the previous d20 games, granted. It was also nigh-useless, as the Force was so tightly intertwined with the Force Adept, Jedi Consular, and Jedi Guardian classes that you virtually needed to be one of those classes in order to use it. Now, of course, only one of these remains (the Jedi), and the Force Adept is simply one of the other core classes or a multiclass build who happens to have chosen the
Force Sensitive and
Force Training feats. Multiclassing in this game doesn't overly weaken the character; neither does it lead to godhood.
When looking at the classes, they've chopped away four of them. In the original d20 game you had Fringer, Noble, Scoundrel, Scout, Soldier, Force Adept, Jedi Consular and Jedi Guardian (the final class, the Tech Specialist, was added for the Revised Edition). SAGA has reduced them to Jedi, Noble, Scoundrel, Scout and Soldier; the new classes are instead flexible enough to allow the creation of all that the old ones were, plus a lot of concepts the old ones actively stifled. The difference between classes is uniform now - no more house-of-cards system of special rules precariously balancing one class against another. They differ in attack bonuses, class skills, starting feats, defenses, and talents; talents are the class-specific feat-like abilities that differentiate one class against another. Talents are grouped in trees, and you generally pick your talent from one that has to do with what you want your character to be like (for instance, if you want to be a computer whiz, the Scoundrel talent tree
Slicer is probably up your alley). Certain feats, such as
Force Sensitive, allows you access to unique talent trees (in the case of
Force Sensitive, these talents generally represent an untrained or primal application of the Force, rather than the more specific Jedi or Sith talent trees, who often deal with more martial or sophisticated applications.
Skills are one facet of the game that honestly have elicited my naked admiration. Not content with simply pruning away extrenous skills, the SAGA team decided to create a system in which you simply choose whether you have a skill, or not. Your basic level in any skill is the Ability bonus plus half your total level. If you are trained in a skill, you get +5 to it, and are able to use several applications of it that aren't otherwise allowed (you can also take the
Skill Focus feat for an additional +5, which can be... devastating). This is the same system used in D&D 4, but in my opinion to much greater effect here, because Star Wars has a far greater focus on skill usage. When first I read about the skill system, I thought it would take away freedom of choice. In practice, it beats the hell out of the previous system, which just feels like it's punishing you if you don't optimize the hell out of it; the new system lets you make
meaningful choices instead of devolving into micromanagement.
The Force itself, rather than the nightmare of Feats and skills in the old games, simply requires you to be
Force Sensitive, which lets you employ the
Use the Force skill untrained. The skill gives you a host of abilities right off the bat: you can enter hibernation trance, you can use telekinesis on small objects the size of a milk carton, you can use a short-term Force intuition, you can sense disturbances, you can sense the presence of people nearby, and you can send brief telepathic messages. Nothing overly impressive, but certainly
useful. The feat
Force Training (combined with a number of nifty talents) is what makes you a Force user extraordinaire. It lets you pick a number of powers that you can discharge in a given scene. In the previous editions, you had to fuel the Force by vitality points, a nightmarish bookkeeping situation I'm happy to be rid of. The rules for these powers are generally straightforward. It generally involves making a Use the Force check, and exceeding something (in the case of Negate Energy, the "something" is the amount of damage dealt by an energy attack). Not to harp on it overly much, but in my book, simplicity = good.
The removal of Vitality is another controversy, but to my mind, Vitality (a good idea though it was) is simply not needed anymore with the addition of the
threshold and
condition track system. The resultant system is a tad more abstract, but grounded by the
condition system, which gives a clearer picture of what's happening.
Instead of going on, I'll simply say that the best thing about the system is this: it feels like the old WEG system in all important respects. It allows you what the previous d20 iterations took away from you - the creation of a spur-of-the-moment hero who was quirky, brash and fun to play from the get-go, not at the conclusion of a year-long campaign. A friend of mine, for instance, created a character for a Rebellion era game. It was supposed to be pretty dark, so he made an ISB infiltrator, a talented young agent who had been sent undercover to root out rebels. I can't recall if he was a Scout or a Scoundrel - it's not germane to the example - but the kicker was, he was unknowingly a Force-user. In fact, his uncanny powers of perception that had made him the apple in his superior's eye were a direct result of him channeling the Force. So how to create such a character? Well, take the
Force Sensitive feat, pick the
Use the Force skill (or don't), and from the
Sense talent tree, pick
Force Perception. With a free feat and at least four skill picks to spare, there's your unknowing Force adept.
So yeah, I love the system. It's not perfect - the grappling rules in particular I feel have been neutered for anyone without the requisite feats, and I still have some questions about the Destiny system. But still... it's impressive, it's fast-paced, it's fun, and by
God, it's Star Wars.
