Star wars - which version?

Wik said:

I have played d20 Star Wars (not SAGA, though). I was not impressed, for a couple of reasons.

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I'm going to pick apart your reasons, not because they are wrong. But they were all addressed in the Saga edition. If you are playing the original or revised d20 versions, then I agree 100%.

And just so my biases are upfront. Saga has become my go-to game for Star Wars and is probably my favorite flavor of 3.5-era d20 rules.

Wik said:

First, the rules didn't streamline as well as d6. Flying a ship felt different than flying a speeder bike. And combat was something entirely different than a negotiation. While this might be a minor quibble, I've always preferred to mix up my scenes in Sci-Fi - so that while one guy is flying the ship, another is using the guns while a third is trying to plan a route using a computer.

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Character, vehicle, and starship combat all use the same rules in Saga. There is some scaling at the starship scale, but all the rules are analogs of what is one at the character scale.

On a starship/vehicle, players can take different roles. So you can have a gunner, pilot, and senors operator working flawlessly.

Wik said:

Second, the action economy of d20 doesn't work to emulate that cinematic flavour. In d6, I can fly a speeder bike at top speed while also shooting a pistol at someone - this is more or less impossible in RAW d20.

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Saga pretty much removed full round actions and iterative attacks. So, combat moves swiftly and characters are always moving around the action (since a move action is almost always available).

As far as operating a speeder bike and shooting on this same round. I'm pretty sure it is do-able.

Wik said:

Third, the characters in d20 are way too limited, in comparison to the source material. When you have X number of classes to choose from, and you have a character type in mind, sometimes it becomes a matter of sacrifices to your character concept because of the class you play.

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The base classes in Saga are much more versatile and there are no multi-class penalties. Saga also introduced the + half heroic level to skills, so a medium level character is fairly competent at most tasks and a high level character can do a variety of things.

Throw in talents every even level and feats every odd level and you can make a very focused character or a jack-of-all trades.

I guess my point is, when comparing Star Wars games, Saga Edition is a very different beast than the other two d20 versions. It won me over enough that I didn't feel bitter about buying the prior two d20 lines.

wingsandsword said:

The Saga Edition version of requiring Dark Side points equal to your Wisdom to be completely fallen, and start to take penalties and be affected at half your Wisdom score means you take a lot longer, and it's a lot more obvious you're falling. Anakin slaughtered an entire village of Sand People, and that was before the entire Clone Wars and killing a helpless prisoner. It wasn't until he struck down Mace Windu that he finally fell. By strict old D6 standards he probably would have been Dark Side by the end of AotC, much less everything between then and the duel in Palpatine's Office.

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Interesting. So if I had a high Wisdom, it would take my character longer to fall to the Dark Side? Does Saga have rules for redemption?

giant.robot said:

So...an on-topic reply...

If you want to try out the D6 Star Wars can don't want to or can't find any of the WEG books the free D6 Space rules are essentially the revision Star Wars rules without the Star Wars license. It's even got the "Metaphysics" chapter which are the same as the Force rules with a slightly different naming convention. Outside of some specific skill names I've found these rules to be fairly compatible with all 2nd and 3rd edition WEG material. The best part is you can give copies to all the players so everyone can get up on the rules and you're not limited to a single WEG book you bought off eBay.

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d6 SPACE is a good book, however, it pales in comparison to the old d6 SW games. In fact, I was pretty bugged at the direction they took the game.

For starters, it's very confusing in how it is written. The old Star Wars books had only a few real pages of rules on how to create a PC, or base mechanics that players needed to know. It was written very clearly. The new d6 rules, while mechanically very similar, are written in very clunky terms.

This isn't helped that the game presents multiple optional rules on how to handle things like damage, but never sets a default. There is no "core" game to d6 space - the GM has to interpret the rules to arrive at his own preferences.

Finally, the game has a character point creation format, with optional powers and abilities tied in. While these are cool, and give a character a bit more granularity than he may have in old Star Wars, it leads to HUGE imbalances in characters in play - one guy will be a god, while another guy will be a low attribute jack of all trades. In old star wars, it was generally impossible to start with a score higher than 6D... in d6 Space, it's quite possible to have a guy, after specializations and the like, to have a score around 9D, which is pretty huge.

When I ran a mini campaign using it, I actually made up a couple dozen PC templates, each with two "options" that the player could pick among. This way, I was able to build the various PCs with roughly equivalent strengths in mind, without leading to huge power disparities in the group. I'd recommend any GM of d6 space do the same.

The game requires a lot of work when it comes to acceptable gear, spaceships, and the like. And while it does have a metaphysics chapter, it mostly requires you to make your own spells, using a rather complex system for it.

All those critiques aside, d6 space is still an okay book, and worth picking up. It can be very useful if you want to run a non-Star Wars d6 campaign, and if you have no other options, I do think the generic d6 Space book will still probably fit the spirit of Star Wars more than any d20 variant. Others have disagreed with me, of course, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

As much as I like SWSE, I will admit that I wouldn't mind giving d6 a go. It does sound like it could be fun.

Wik said:

Thus, while Anakin did some bad things, didn't he also do good things to allow him to offset those Dark Side Points?

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Not that I'm aware of. *rolls eyes*

masshysteria said:

Saga pretty much removed full round actions and iterative attacks.

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Iterative attacks maybe, but there are still quite a few full-round actions, including full-round attacks (although there are a number of talents that let you take full-round attacks as a standard action or that let you move as part of a full-round attack).

As far as operating a speeder bike and shooting on this same round. I'm pretty sure it is do-able.

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Indeed it is. Piloting a vehicle is generally only a move action.

The base classes in Saga are much more versatile and there are no multi-class penalties.

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This is one of the things I love most about SWSE. Its class structure is basically just one big toolbox that allows you to build whatever you want. You can run into a few issues like having a horribly low BAB (since only Jedi and Soldier grant full BAB), and I've houseruled multiclassing so that you can take Skill Training instead of a normal class starting feat, but other than that it's great!

kitsune9 said:

Interesting. So if I had a high Wisdom, it would take my character longer to fall to the Dark Side? Does Saga have rules for redemption?

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Yes and yes.

Some more thoughts on why I am seriously thinking of going back to d6 SW

Saga was probably the best class/level based Star Wars game that can be done, but the more I think about d6 SWRPG, the more I think that system has several big merits.

In terms of depicting the characters from the books and movies, it's a lot easier when you don't have to fiddle with the limitations of character classes. Anyone who has ever tried to write up a d20 version of Darth Vader or Palpatine that can do everything the character does in the movies (or worse, movies and EU) knows that pain.

In terms of creating characters, both PCs and stock NPCs, a lack of character classes does create a lot more flexibility. No worrying about class skills, or feat slots, just buy the skill and be done with it. I remember when I ran d6 SWRPG that my prep time as a GM was so low.

I am thinking that the insane brokenness I recall of d6 SWRPG from over a decade ago was that I was an inexperienced GM (my first game ever) and was running for a pretty experienced crowd, all in an ongoing campaign. After 50 or so weekly sessions the PCs were pretty much unstoppable. In retrospect, I think I gave out way too many Character Points and declared events Dramatic Heroism (so PC's could get force points) way too often, and made too many newbie GM mistakes. I also was afraid to kill off PCs, and more than once fudged dire rolls so PCs were Mortally Wounded instead of Killed.

The few rules changes I can see would be to go with the alternate DSP scale from the Tales of the Jedi Companion (where you go dark at 6 DSP and not before) and to rule that you can't gain more than 1 DSP per scene/encounter (or Anakin would have fallen from the Sand People massacre alone).

wingsandsword said:

Saga was probably the best class/level based Star Wars game that can be done, but the more I think about d6 SWRPG, the more I think that system has several big merits.

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I'm not as familiar with Saga as I am the original d20 version of Star Wars. It is a good game, is a GREAT interpretation of the d20 rules (although d20 Conan is better), and it fits the Star Wars universe fairly well.

The thing is, for me, that WEG's D6 version is just...fantastic.

The "no-level" concept fits the SW universe so much better, imo. I mean, Darth Vader has as many dice in his stats as any other character (though he's a mean moe-foe when it comes to using the force), and I think that shows a regular person--just like everybody else (because his stats use the same dice)--but how the Force, itself (not a character level or class) enhances the human condition for good or evil.

Luke, in ANH, is a 1st level character, right? How does he pull off some of the things he does in the movies (swinging on a rope, with Princess Leia cradled in his arm, and about 50 stormtroopers blasting at him....or even evading Darth himself and blowing up the Death Star) as a 1st level d20 character?

With D6, it's very believeable, because his stats are like every other human character's. He's a human and he taps into the Force, as he did in the movies, to pull off what he did, and the rules completely provide for this without a stretch of the imagination.

Now, I'm sure d20 Star Wars, or even Saga, has its explaination of how Luke did what he did. But, with D6, it's totally believeable within the context of the rules.

As I said up-thread, the D6 Star Wars rules are probably the best set of mechanics meeting a gaming universe I've ever seen in over 30 years of gaming.

That's not to say that Saga and d20 aren't any good. They are good. For this SW fan, though, it's the D6 version that wins the cake.

Man, when you've blown a Force Point, and you've got a big honkin' handfull of dice, and you throw those puppies, you can actually feel the Force flow through you.



And, what I mean by that...is that it's a nice game mechanic to make a particular throw feel special...different from your normal throws. It's got a much bigger impact than just throwing a d20 with some heavy modifiers.

For me, D6 is THE DEFINITIVE version of the Star Wars RPG.

I was really sad to see it go.

Still....there's plenty of D6 stuff on the net, and the old official books are great (I own everything from every edition). So, when I play Star Wars, in whatever section of the timeline, its D6 that I use.

Until a company comes out with something better (and it's a hard act to follow), it will be my Star Wars set of mechanics of choice.

WEG Star Wars d6 for the win.

It's honestly the best, most fun version of the game for me.

Okay, after just coming off watching all of season 1 & 2 of the Clone Wars cartoons, I'm pretty pumped to try a Star Wars game (again). I have the d6, d20 and SAGA versions, and even a SW work-up I've been contemplating. I'm most familiar with d6, only have scratched SAGA. Bad experience with the d20 version.

Can someone summarize the Strength/Weaknesses in bullet-point format? Something like (just going off my own experiences here):

Jedi:
- d6: Very hard to model the power seen in the movie without a lot of advancement. Designed for the era where Jedi don't exist. Best with no more than one force-user in the group.
- d20: ???
- SAGA: Models the power and abilities seen in the movie from the start. Jedi abilities can trivialize non-force sensitive characters if not monitored closely. All Jedi or no Jedi cast works best.

Space Combat
- d6: Abstract, narrative approach. Characters must have devote skill to piloting/gunnery to use as group. If you're playing a premade adventure expect your ship to crash and be non-functional at the start of the adventure. Can use Star Warriors for expanded ship-to-combat exercises, but works best for small-scale dogfights.
- d20: A wreck. Use the Silent Death rules if you can find them.
- SAGA: Elegant, tactical approach that supports a battlegrid. All characters can participate and function (to a degree) in a space battle. Can use Fleet Battle rules/minis for big honking fights.

Stormonu said:

Jedi:
- SAGA: Models the power and abilities seen in the movie from the start. Jedi abilities can trivialize non-force sensitive characters if not monitored closely. All Jedi or no Jedi cast works best.

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In my experience, Saga supports a mixed group where everyone feels able to contribute, yet where Jedi can still feel cool.

Your bullet point is inaccurate for Saga. If you meant the previous d20 versions, your bullet point is on-target.

Cheers, -- N

I've had the opinion that Saga space battles work best without the battle grid. Space isn't an ocean, after all. Think of all the things that Han did in the OT, most of them in three dimensions.