Star Wars RPG and Miniatures lines discontinued

[Tiriol]

I have no idea should this be posted here or in G&C, but perhaps it might be best to post the news here. So Wizards of the Coast will no longer produce new material for Star Wars Saga RPG or its Miniatures game after May 2010.

There have been several questions lately regarding the future of the Star Wars Miniatures and Roleplaying Game and until now I haven’t had definitive answers to give you. After a lengthy evaluation, Wizards of the Coast has decided not to renew the Star Wars license with Lucasfilm. We’ve had a long and fantastic run, but with the economic downturn, we have made the tough decision to discontinue our Star Wars lines.

The license officially ends in May this year, with WotC product available through August. In the meantime, we have awesome new products still coming your way. This week, we released The Dark Times minis and Galaxy of Intrigue RPG. We’ll have more coming with Masters of the Force minis in April, which will have some of your most favorite characters along with rare creatures from the Dejarik Holochess game that have never appeared in our game. We’ll also release The Unknown Regions RPG in April, which includes entirely new planets and mini-adventures for each world.

We are finishing the line with a bang so look for special programs at your local game store to stock up on favorite sets before they go into the vault. We will continue to support our Star Wars forums on the Wizards Community site so you can reach out and chat with us and other fans.

While I know the news is disappointing, we wanted to make this announcement as soon as possible and thank you for being such great fans. It’s been a fantastic ride with the Star Wars community and working with Lucasfilm. We hope you enjoy the next several months of great products. You never know when we may circle back again!

Greg Yahn

Director of Marketing, Wizards of the Coast

Personally I've liked the Saga rules very much. Easy to learn and easy to use. But apparently it has been hard to make much money out of Star Wars RPG and the current financial situation being what it is, the decision is easy to understand.

[AMT]

Not a big surprise. I used to work with them and I was dropped a few years ago when they "revamped" their site and started their new focus across the board. A focus which seems to have spent huge amounts of money with no noticeable return.

I don't even want to talk about the Gleemax debacle.

[NecronLord]

A shame, many of WotC's inputs for Star Wars were quite impressive. Their giving the New Republic a true Star Dreadnought, for instance, was a breath of fresh air.

[DrStrangelove]

Meh, at least Sarli's minimalism will go away.

[Raesene]

I like SWSE, and am happy that they put out a lot of source books covering the important aspects (eras and events) of Star Wars. More adventures (besides the free 10-part Dawn of Defiance-campaign) might have been nice, but adventures are easier to design than writing a whole source book.
Still a pity, though, I'd have preferred a few more books (Good thing the Unknown Regions book will still be published, I'm waiting for this one).

I do try to keep the minimalism in my game - e.g., a 'real' Star Cruiser would blow apart the ship a usual group of heroes uses quite quickly, or how in Space should they defend their freighter against a real fleet carrier's TIE capacity. A realistic planetary garrison would have enough troopers or vehicles to annihilate them utterly. I warned my group, should they ever attack a Star Destroyer for fun and giggles, the gloves would come off

[Connor MacLeod]

A shame, many of WotC's inputs for Star Wars were quite impressive. Their giving the New Republic a true Star Dreadnought, for instance, was a breath of fresh air.

Saga edition stuff was pretty good in most respects, Sarli's attempts not so much (he tried intorudcing Mass Lightening into Star Wars, for example. Who legitimately thinks Mass lightening tech is a reasonable explanation?) Better than WEG in most ways, but their pre-Saga edition stuff was pretty "meh".

Still, I'll miss it. Wonder who they'll get to pick the license up next?

[HeavensThunderHammer]

I've been following this on several forums on the internet. I have the following "facts" that seem to be verified by people "in the know" so, while not 100% accurate for sure, together they tell a compelling story. Please correct me where necessary if you know more accurate info.

1.) The licensing fee was so exhorbantly huge that only WotC could even think of a.) paying it and b.) maybe making a profit so we can conclude that:

2.) Until WotC picks up the license again, no new Star Wars RPG.

2.) LucasArt/Film wanted a bigger licensing fee, since editing university textbooks, I mean, an RPG book word for word is incredibly time consuming, and it was apparently eating into their license royalties to edit the RPG books.

3.) The RPG license was under the umbrella of the Mini's license, not a seperate license. This means that:

4.) Del Ray has the exlusive BOOK license, so a seperate RPG book only license would probably violate that agreement .

5.) I personally believe the economy is in deep long term trouble, so this could be it.

[Eleas]

Core Saga was awesome, as was some supplements. The system itself, however, wasn't respected, and the mounting pile of (badly conceived) add-ons turned its robust and streamlined engine into an incoherent mess. In other words, it was just a matter of time.

[Edward Yee]

Core Saga was awesome, as was some supplements. The system itself, however, wasn't respected, and the mounting pile of (badly conceived) add-ons turned its robust and streamlined engine into an incoherent mess. In other words, it was just a matter of time.

What do you mean by the part I've boldfaced?

My opinion of the problem with Saga is that the Saga Edition Core Rulebook (SECR) was TOO good... for WotC. Everything you absolutely needed to run a campaign was there in one book, instead of stretching it out for three each as they did for D&D, both 3E/3.5E and 4E. How could they keep making money of it if everyone was "one and done" using a core book so good that a group might be able to run a campaign using just one copy of the book (avoiding the whole PDF discussion here), with character creation so simple that a basic character or NPC could be created in mere minutes off of the top of one's head? Doing so is a past-time of mine I do while commuting on the subway, by the way.

Heck, if you wanted to GM... the damn thing was so good it didn't warrant a "Galactic Campaign Guide," unlike the previous edition. While it didn't necessarily mandate minimalism as Raesene talked about, I think it was either the SECR or Starships of the Galaxy (SOTG) talked about using Star Destroyers as battlefields in and of themselves instead of direct combatants for plausibility reasons, and this was the reason for the "tactical fire" gameplay option for capital ships.

SOTG was an okay sourcebook in that it added a lot of new but useful content while also being a good GM advisor on running a corresponding campaign, but beyond that? There wasn't much afterward that justified a full-fledged sourcebook, and that was on top of things like implausible/inconsistent stat builds for certain characters from the EU (Threats of the Galaxy is outright ridiculous at this), or typos with in-game relevance or just outright "incorrect" stat builds such as Mara Jade's in Jedi Academy Training Manual, the lessening quality which I would think also dampened sales and the line's reputation.

when they "revamped" their site started their new focus across the board. A focus which seems to have spent huge amounts of money with no noticeable return.

I don't even want to talk about the Gleemax debacle.

Hey, I like some horror stories, mind if I pull up a chair?

[Oskuro]

Here are some reliable news on this issue, relayed by Stark himself: ENN

[Edward Yee]

That was actually amusing... too bad Wizards would have only been that full of shit had they actually used that excuse.

[Eleas]

Core Saga was awesome, as was some supplements. The system itself, however, wasn't respected, and the mounting pile of (badly conceived) add-ons turned its robust and streamlined engine into an incoherent mess. In other words, it was just a matter of time.

What do you mean by the part I've boldfaced?

That you can't create a system whose virtue is minimalism and structure and then not adhere to the structure.

When you want to extend a given system, you can go two ways. Either you patch it from below, for instance by introducing new details into the mix. Or you can change it from above, and add entire new mechanisms designed to mesh with the old ones.

SAGA was a parade example of the latter. It pared down many -- although not all -- of the rules and minutiae in D&D that made no sense, that were redundant, or that actively hampered game flow. It was a system that recognised the need for balance and that was in fact predicated on not patching by just stuffing new ad-hoc rules into the game until it broke.

When you write a computer program by the object oriented model, the object is a closed system. You know it works, so you don't mess with it anymore. All you need to know is what the object can interface with - what goes in, and what goes out. The analogy is relevant to this discussion because SAGA, just like D&D4, was consciously designed this way. We've yet to find a better way to create systems that don't break, after all.

So. With SAGA, Wizards wrote a few surprisingly awesome core objects. Then, the idiots promptly added new lines of code by each supplement, code that often referenced and affected the same facets of the "program", as it were. This is mind-bogglingly stupid, as it defeats the entire point of following the object model in the first place. Once you open the door to unrestricted addition of (poorly tested) character-specific rules (Feats, and to a lesser extent Talents), which are then tied to the character, you're already hacking into the core of the system. That is the very opposite of the brilliant economy we see in the core rules.

Consider the Starfighter Manoeuvres (or their abominable successor, the Lightsabre Cadences). Here, the designers clearly had picked a generalised model to follow, namely the Force Powers. So what do they do? Well, not an overarching rule that would lock two very similar objects together, of course. Nor indeed something that could not have been done through other means. No, instead, they spawn a new, very similar instance of the same object, and then they open each up to modification, destroying any benefit of generalised design that might have remained.

The reason? Difficult to tell. What it accomplishes, on the other hand, is clear enough.

• It means a new part of the rules needs to be taken into account whenever you play, slowing the game.
• It gives an implicit sense of there being a commonality between the Force and piloting.
• It means the bar is raised for a character, who must now - or so it appears - pursue additional paths in order to reach the same relative level of competence. To do so, of course, the player must spend limited resources.
• It means there are now additional potential bugs in the system due to synergetic effects. That doesn't mean "theoretical" - it means "actual, but not found". Because you will encounter them.

The wonder is not that SAGA became mired in abject failure. The wonder is that it lasted as long as it did; a testament, presumably, to the original vision.

[The Dark]

I've been following this on several forums on the internet. I have the following "facts" that seem to be verified by people "in the know" so, while not 100% accurate for sure, together they tell a compelling story. Please correct me where necessary if you know more accurate info.

1.) The licensing fee was so exhorbantly huge that only WotC could even think of a.) paying it and b.) maybe making a profit so we can conclude that:

1.) Until WotC picks up the license again, no new Star Wars RPG.

2.) LucasArt/Film wanted a bigger licensing fee, since editing university textbooks, I mean, an RPG book word for word is incredibly time consuming, and it was apparently eating into their license royalties to edit the RPG books.

3.) The RPG license was under the umbrella of the Mini's license, not a seperate license. This means that:

4.) Del Ray has the exlusive BOOK license, so a seperate RPG book only license would probably violate that agreement .

5.) I personally believe the economy is in deep long term trouble, so this could be it.

I don't believe #3/4 is true, given the old WEG RPG. There was no specific miniatures game, so it couldn't be covered under that sort of a license. #2 is probably also not true, since the minimum payable on the toy license was reduced by $85 million when Hasbro and Lucas Licensing negotiated that deal in 2003. #1 depends on how much was actually being asked, and whether any other RPG company has both deep enough pockets and an interest. The most probable claim-jumper I can think of would be Mongoose.