[Star Wars] Somebody bought the license

While I'm not a Savage Worlds fan I think Star Wars and Savage Worlds fit well together.

It wasn't evil Stevie
[Star Wars] Some company unknown purchased the tt games license - Steve Jackson Games Forums

Klaus said:

That being said, I'd prefer if it was still the Saga edition. Awesome mechanics and very true to the setting!

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I couldn't disagree with you more. Here's why...

This...

Wednesday Boy said:

I liked SAGA but the books progressively went downhill to me. It seemed to me like they covered as much as was available and didn't have enough novel ideas for the later supplements.

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...and this, for example...

delericho said:

That just leaves the various 'crunch' topics. But the problem here is that you don't go very far before you run out of meaningful distinctions - once you've got the top 25 playable races statted up, plus various archetypal weapons, armour, droids and spaceships, what more is there? It's really not that long before you're really digging into niche topics.

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...speak to the big problem with SW RPGs in the past. They focused on too much crunch, too many rules, too many long lists of equipment and weapons and vehicles, too many fiddly esoteric details that only the most OCD fans care about.

This is a bit anecdotal, but bear with me... I like Star Wars, and I like it a lot. For the last 20 years I've been trying to get a Star Wars game going in every edition of every system it was published under. I'd end up with maybe one or two players who were big fans and knew all the trivia that the rule books referenced, and at best everyone else had seen the movies a few times and thought they were pretty good. Invariably, the latter were turned off as the overload of subtle details from the "Expanded Universe" passed them by, and they simply weren't interested enough in taking the time to learn it. They got bored, because the action in the game wasn't remotely like the action happening in the movies their characters couldn't do anything as cool as what the characters in the movies did, and the campaign would fall apart after only an adventure or two.

I firmly believe that for a Star Wars game to succeed, it needs to largely ignore everything other than the movies. Most people who are aware of Star Wars haven't seen any more of it than that and don't really care about any more of it than that. Adding in further details from the extended canon excludes these people and seems to actively turn them away from the game.

I think the game should focus the players on the high action-adventure scenes and plot and character development the original Saturday-afternoon-matinee-summer-blockbuster format of the movies engenders, rather than focusing them on the stats and numbers abilities of characters, equipment, weapons and vehicles. I think there's a lot of systems out there that could do that a LOT better than D20 ever did.

That not to say that D6 or Saga aren't good systems... I just don't think that the way they work (and especially with regards to how they were implemented with Star Wars) is the best fit for the style of Star Wars.

But hey... That's just me. Maybe I'm just pissing in the wind.

Honestly most of you are right, most of the fluff could easily be done off of Wookiepedia alone.

There are a few keys to owning the license that would be necessary to succeed IMHO.

1. Decent Mechanics - something fresh but not to drastically different from what the average fan already knows.
2. Offer something Wookiepedia doesn't. Currently it is filled with all the novel/movie facts and history. Your average player knows the basic history of the movies, but continue down the Legacy Era. By doing so, nothing you write fluff on will have been done yet.
3. Electronic Support. How many of you would fall over yourself for that? One for character creation and one for starship creation/mods.

I'm currently in a Saga (Legacy Era) game now, and I actually like it a lot. I'm currently reading the novels in chrono order now. It is giving me a great feel for the campaign I'm in.

But back to the OT:
So far we have denials from on their boards from:
Paizo / Margret Weiss Press / Steve Jackson Games / Mongoose

Pbartender said:

This is a bit anecdotal, but bear with me... I like Star Wars, and I like it a lot. For the last 20 years I've been trying to get a Star Wars game going in every edition of every system it was published under. I'd end up with maybe one or two players who were big fans and knew all the trivia that the rule books referenced, and at best everyone else had seen the movies a few times and thought they were pretty good. Invariably, the latter were turned off as the overload of subtle details from the "Expanded Universe" passed them by, and they simply weren't interested enough in taking the time to learn it. They got bored, because the action in the game wasn't remotely like the action happening in the movies their characters couldn't do anything as cool as what the characters in the movies did, and the campaign would fall apart after only an adventure or two.

I firmly believe that for a Star Wars game to succeed, it needs to largely ignore everything other than the movies. Most people who are aware of Star Wars haven't seen any more of it than that and don't really care about any more of it than that. Adding in further details from the extended canon excludes these people and seems to actively turn them away from the game.

I think the game should focus the players on the high action-adventure scenes and plot and character development the original Saturday-afternoon-matinee-summer-blockbuster format of the movies engenders, rather than focusing them on the stats and numbers abilities of characters, equipment, weapons and vehicles. I think there's a lot of systems out there that could do that a LOT better than D20 ever did.

That not to say that D6 or Saga aren't good systems... I just don't think that the way they work (and especially with regards to how they were implemented with Star Wars) is the best fit for the style of Star Wars.

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I think I really have to hop in here and defend SWSE on this score. I thought that they did a pretty decent job of compartmentalizing major aspects of the Star Wars expanded universe in the SWSE supplements. Not interested in the Force Unleashed stuff? Skip that supplement and its impact on the game is relatively light. I've been able to pretty much ignore large segments of the expanded universe by just leaving out a supplement or two.

That said, I don't think SWSE is immune to criticism on the topic of running out of some things to write about, but I thought their approach to the whole Star Wars enchilada and the question of focusing on the expanded universe or away from it wasn't a bad one.

Pbartender said:

I couldn't disagree with you more. Here's why...

This...



...and this, for example...



...speak to the big problem with SW RPGs in the past. They focused on too much crunch, too many rules, too many long lists of equipment and weapons and vehicles, too many fiddly esoteric details that only the most OCD fans care about.

This is a bit anecdotal, but bear with me... I like Star Wars, and I like it a lot. For the last 20 years I've been trying to get a Star Wars game going in every edition of every system it was published under. I'd end up with maybe one or two players who were big fans and knew all the trivia that the rule books referenced, and at best everyone else had seen the movies a few times and thought they were pretty good. Invariably, the latter were turned off as the overload of subtle details from the "Expanded Universe" passed them by, and they simply weren't interested enough in taking the time to learn it. They got bored, because the action in the game wasn't remotely like the action happening in the movies their characters couldn't do anything as cool as what the characters in the movies did, and the campaign would fall apart after only an adventure or two.

I firmly believe that for a Star Wars game to succeed, it needs to largely ignore everything other than the movies. Most people who are aware of Star Wars haven't seen any more of it than that and don't really care about any more of it than that. Adding in further details from the extended canon excludes these people and seems to actively turn them away from the game.

I think the game should focus the players on the high action-adventure scenes and plot and character development the original Saturday-afternoon-matinee-summer-blockbuster format of the movies engenders, rather than focusing them on the stats and numbers abilities of characters, equipment, weapons and vehicles. I think there's a lot of systems out there that could do that a LOT better than D20 ever did.

That not to say that D6 or Saga aren't good systems... I just don't think that the way they work (and especially with regards to how they were implemented with Star Wars) is the best fit for the style of Star Wars.

But hey... That's just me. Maybe I'm just pissing in the wind.

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Well, that's more of a problem with the old Star Wars as a "story" and Star Wars as a "setting" thing. If you reference only the movies, you have very limited material to play with. Most races are never named, and fewer still have more than a cameo.

I think a good Star Wars game needs to pretend that those reading know nothing of Star Wars (specially EU stuff) and present all the details needed so I don't have to reference Wookieepedia to run a game.

I think SWSE was very good, specially if you use the Core book, Starships of the Galaxy and the era book you want to play in (Clone Wars, Rebellion, Legacy, Force Unleashed, KotOR). That gives you enough material to run some very good games, and pares down the ammount of fiddly bits.

Katana_Geldar said:

If Wizards made Saga OGL then that would be great...

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But not really necessary. Granted, another company would not be able to call it D20 or Saga, but it should be rather simple to recreate Saga using the OGL. They could just call it Star Wars OGL or OGL3. If whoever bought it wanted to go the OGL route, it would probably be significantly easier than creating a new system...unless whoever has it now is going to use one of their own in-house systems...

billd91 said:

I think I really have to hop in here and defend SWSE on this score. I thought that they did a pretty decent job of compartmentalizing major aspects of the Star Wars expanded universe in the SWSE supplements. Not interested in the Force Unleashed stuff? Skip that supplement and its impact on the game is relatively light. I've been able to pretty much ignore large segments of the expanded universe by just leaving out a supplement or two.

That said, I don't think SWSE is immune to criticism on the topic of running out of some things to write about, but I thought their approach to the whole Star Wars enchilada and the question of focusing on the expanded universe or away from it wasn't a bad one.

Click to expand...

I disagree. If you didn't own Force Unleashed, you were running SWSE with one character-building arm tied behind your back. Especially if you were playing in the early Rebellion era. They refused, refused, refused to print an Alien Anthology, so most of the aliens in the Cantina and early EU novels were scattered across sourcebooks, many in completely unrelated eras to when the race first appeared. It was the "core everything" problem of AD&D 2e all over again.

The real sin of SWSE was not choosing to include or not include X, but in making it hard to mesh SWSE with as much or little of the EU as you wanted. Example: Imbuing lightsabers, which is prominent in some novels, no evidence for it in the films, treated inconstently in EU sources; SWSE makes it canon for all Jedi. Example: Stun batons, described in detail in the Essential Guide to Weapons and Technology, including their ability to deliver a powerful electric charge, but treated with little detail and no attention paid to their lethal capacity in SWSE. Some of the writers were pretty open about not caring about details, even things easily looked up on Wookipedia. They really goofed on the Ithorian's booming voice ability, refused to backtrack, and thereby introduced an element completely inconsistent with the storyline concerning the Ithorian homeworld in earlier EU novels. Maybe they were fans, I don't know, but they didn't treat the setting the way I, as a fan, felt it to deserved to be treated.

Since talking about the merits of Saga is a bit off topic....

I personally dont want FFG to pick up the license. Trying to do Star Wars would either mean:

To little support for Star Wars to do the game justice

or

To little support for Rogue Trader to do the game justice

Either way, I lose.

I don't know, I ran a SW Legacy era game for a few months and it was very well liked.

All the history and continuity never got in the way because I refused to allow it to do so. So the SW experts were a little peeved that I ignored things, but those who weren't experts didn't feel lost, and we all had a lot of fun.

My system was Saga, and I call it SAGA because I think it is so good it deserves to be yelled out every time it is said.

It amazed me at how well the feel of the Jedi, and the aliens, and the fundamental flavor of SW just oozed throughout every game session.

I never experienced that before, not even with D6.

Still, I think FFG is definitely the most likely to have obtained the license, and I too hope they do not do it like they did Warhammer 3E. If they do have the license, and they do it the same way, I will not buy it until others convince me it does the "flavor" as well as or better than Saga does it.