Recent Star Wars Saga chat session with designers

SteveC

Doing the best imitation of myself

• Oct 31, 2006

• #1

Hey everyone!
I didn't see anything posted about this earlier, so I thought I'd put in a link. Here is a link to a recent chat session with the designers of the new Star Wars Saga game.

The highlights:

Simplified skills: skills are folded together and you pick either unskilled/trained/master with them. No more skill points.

Vitality becomes hit points with a sliding condition scale. High level characters have the ability to do more damage versus low level opponents and upgrade their conditions.

Force powers under one skill but multiple feats. After using a power it must be 'recharged.' (Tome of Battle, anyone?)

Classes are made up of multiple talent trees, meaning smaller numbers of classes can make more broad character archetypes.

More miniatures aspects = pictures of miniatures are used for examples of movement and combat, not a simplified minis game.

Take a look and tell me what you think...

--Steve

 

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Vigilance

Explorer

• Oct 31, 2006

• #2

I was intrigued by what they said and definitely plan to pick this up.

 

D

DarkKestral

First Post

• Oct 31, 2006

• #3

I'm looking forward to seeing the condition/HP track system. It both intrigues me and makes me think 'cinematic'. I preferred VP/WP before, now I may have a new favorite HP mechanic. The Talent trees thing: also another great idea IMO. Likewise with reductions in numbers of skills. Always good to see characters become more generally capable at low levels, while reducing disparity between skill abilities at high levels.

 

N

Nadaka

First Post

• Oct 31, 2006

• #4

eh... No skill points? don't like it. really don't. Personally I do like W/VP so I am sceptical if they can replace it with something better.

Everything else seems good though.

 

Odhanan

Adventurer

• Oct 31, 2006

• #5

Wow. These are not what I'd call "light changes to the rules"! I like what I've read so far. From a "maybe" my purchase of the Saga edition just hit a "probably" on my list.

 

SteveC

Doing the best imitation of myself

• Oct 31, 2006

• #6

Nadaka said:

eh... No skill points? don't like it. really don't. Personally I do like W/VP so I am sceptical if they can replace it with something better.

Everything else seems good though.

Click to expand...

I think the Skill Point mechanism will end up being something like this. I think the idea is that players tend to keep most of their skills at max ranks or at max cross-class ranks. I'm not sure that I agree with that assessment, but I'll take a look at it.

As far as VP/WP goes, once you use a system like Spycraft's where named NPCs are the only ones that can crit a PC, you take care of the major problems with the system. I was amused by their comments that so many people had house-rules for VP/WP that the system had to have some serious problems with it. This is another change that I'll look at a bit skeptically. Might work better for D&D...

--Steve

 

Plane Sailing

Astral Admin - Mwahahaha!

• Oct 31, 2006

• #7

Thanks for sharing this - I'm more and more interested as I see more about SWSE. I wonder how much of these rules might find their way eventually into a 4e (or even better, an SRD? And no, I'm not holding my breath )

Cheers

 

Pbartender

First Post

• Oct 31, 2006

• #8

SteveC said:

I was amused by their comments that so many people had house-rules for VP/WP that the system had to have some serious problems with it.

Click to expand...

Yeah... I just read that comment in the transcript.

Seems to me, it boils down to, "A lot of people had to houserule how critical hits worked with vitality and wounds, so instead of fixing the way critical hits work, we're chucking out vitality and wounds altogether and switching to a completely differnt variant on hit points."

Doesn't seem to be the best of logic, there.

 

SteveC

Doing the best imitation of myself

• Oct 31, 2006

• #9

Plane Sailing said:

Thanks for sharing this - I'm more and more interested as I see more about SWSE. I wonder how much of these rules might find their way eventually into a 4e (or even better, an SRD? And no, I'm not holding my breath )

Cheers

Click to expand...

That's what I was thinking as well. I had considered posting this to general, because I think that many more people would see it that way. I expect that if these changes are well received, we may very likely see some of them (eventually) in 4E.

--Steve

 

Viktyr Gehrig

First Post

• Nov 1, 2006

• #10

DarkKestral said:

I'm looking forward to seeing the condition/HP track system. It both intrigues me and makes me think 'cinematic'.

Click to expand...

I'm keen on seeing it, myself. Of course, I'm thinking more of stealing it for D&D than using it in Star Wars.

I'm even more keen on what they're doing with Talents and with the Force system. The whole Guardian/Consular split has irritated me ever since Yoda started doing all that bouncy stuff in Attack of the Clones.