Star Wars Saga, the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Now that book has been out for a while, discuss your likes and dislikes.

The Good - Excellent art (even though some is recycled from prior products) and production value. Love the feat and talent system ala d20 Modern. Love the mechanics for the force, skills, combat, space combat, and pretty much everything with some issues below.

The Bad - Square book size? Not a big fan. It feels like a gimmick, doesn't match with my other books and seems designed to obscure the fact that I paid 40 bucks for a lot less content then the previous rulebook by artificially inflating the page count. Still, its a great book so I can't complain too much, but I hope we don't see any more square books.

Also, no substantial setting info on KOTOR, or SW Legacy? Far more interesting settings in my opinion than the overdone Rebellion Era. And Lucas' butchering of the prequels has soured me on the Clone Wars era. I hope to see sourcebooks for those settings soon.

The Ugly - No explanation on leveling beyond 20. But that combined with my utter hatred for a level based action point mechanic really stands out. You should never be forced to level to regain a resource, in my opinion. Never. It bugged me with the whole XP for magic item rules in 3.0 (but you could at least always get more XP), and the action point rules in Eberron just drive me insane. It feels like a DM is forced to rapidly level advance his players. Something like force or action points should replenish every session the way Spycraft does it.

But then to add insult to injury, not only are you forced to level to regain these critical resources, but you hit a wall at level 20. Absolutely no discussion of level 20 play and its affect on force and destiny points, nor rules on advancing beyond 20 are offered. So once you spend all your Force and Destiny points a level 20 character is just permanently screwed barring GM houserules? This is a huge flaw in the game in my opinion.

I've been reading over the book for a few days now, and here are my thoughts:

1)They streamlined the rules, so that's a good thing, right? I mean, it's simpler, isn't it?
Not really. Because it's about 75% the same as the SWRCR, at first glance, you can overlook a lot of the changes and thereby think it's 90% the same. In other words, upon first glance, so many mechanical things are the same, you miss the subtle differences that make a big impact. Some sort of conversion document needs to be forthcoming as a web enhancement, pointing out exactly what's changed, a la 3.0 to 3.5 conversion.

2) No crafting. While they did sorta fold some Tech Specialist abilities into the scoundrel and scout classes, there is no way to mastercraft anything. Some people think it's a good thing, but it's still a big gap IMO.

3) Vehicles and Starships. I understand this is the core rulebook, and I do like the new approach they took to vehicle combat, but the examples are very sparse. The starships not so bad, but there is only one speeder (luke's sandspeeder), one capital class ship (Star Destroyer), one speeder bike (the scout bike from RotJ), etc etc etc. Leaving room for forthcoming sourcebooks is good, but the "out of the box" selection is extremely lacking. Which brings me to...

4) Equipment. Really no different than the RCR, but the equipment chapter is slim. And on top of that, the ranges for weapons takes a step back in Saga. Previously, you had a base range, and for every multiple of that base, you took a -2 to hit, with a cap of 10 range increments. Now, all weapons have Point Blank, Short, Medium, and Long. How far each category is varies for each weapon, but the penalty is static for each range.

There were lots of things I like about Saga, but in lots of places, they stripped out detail that I felt should have been left in. I mean, if you are going to include Attacks of Opportunity, reach, and some of the other more complicated rules, why take out some of the other features, like the galactic map and astrogation travel times (now it's 1d6 days times youre hyperdrive rating, no matter how far away the destination)? And now area of effect attacks can't deviate, ALWAYS doing at least half damage (barring Evasion, of course)? Huh?

I'm sure I'll dig up more as I read it more. In the end, it seems like they stripped out a lot of detail, detail I'm sure will be slowly added back in as new suppliments are released.

Interesting. Most of the attributes you found "bad" I felt were strengths of the product. Originally skeptical of the square size, I soon came to see it as a distinct improvement over previous RPG products. If there ever was a sacred cow of D&D, here it stands. Hands down, the square format is far more effective than what was used previously. It feels more natural, it lies flat far easier (An important quality for a reference book), it is far less inconvenient to carry around than RCR, and to be honest, it looks far nicer when laid closed on an end table (Although I'm not sure how often this aspect comes into play). I for one, hope to see more square books.

Regarding the lack of specific campaign information regarding the KOTOR-era: I think the greatest strength of this core rulebook was that it succinctly follows a design goal - model what is seen in the films into a roleplaying system. While I too am a big fan of the Old Republic era, I'm not sorry to see it absent this book. At the end of the day, it simply is not part of the films. Furthermore, in my opinion, it represents a significantly different tone than what is seen in Episodes I-VI.

One bad so far - ALL diagonal movement costs double; they cut out the "1-2-1-2" thing, which makes for some REALLY odd square movement zones.

It's my first house rule, and I haven't even run the game yet.

Henry said:

One bad so far - ALL diagonal movement costs double; they cut out the "1-2-1-2" thing, which makes for some REALLY odd square movement zones.

It's my first house rule, and I haven't even run the game yet.

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I haven't picked up the book yet, but I can already tell I'd be house-ruling this too.

Dragonblade said:

The Ugly - No explanation on leveling beyond 20. But that combined with my utter hatred for a level based action point mechanic really stands out. You should never be forced to level to regain a resource, in my opinion. Never.

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You're not regaining the resource. Once an action point is expended, it's gone. In that respect, an action point is (as Unearthed Arcana points) like a magic device with one charge.

If you dislike the idea of gaining an intangible expendable resource, that is of course your perogative, but I'm not seeing any rational, objective basis for unilaterally saying "never" to the concept.

I guess it's a matter of opinion as to whether action points are so critical that a character is entitled to almost always have one, or whether it just provides a boost for a character that already has an effective array of talents, skills, and feats (and in D&D's case, spells and magic items).

Felon said:

You're not regaining the resource. Once an action point is expended, it's gone. In that respect, an action point is (as Unearthed Arcana points) like a magic device with one charge.

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In which case, you should be able to save them up between levels.

Wasn't there something about regaining force points between fights, though?

Also, don't forget the Force Secret called "Force Point Recover" which, taken a couple of times, can be a big boon to Jedi. Yoda's got it twice...so he can spend 2 FP's per encounter and get them back at the end. That's pretty renewable at high levels, and not too shabby while levelling.

Henry said:

One bad so far - ALL diagonal movement costs double; they cut out the "1-2-1-2" thing, which makes for some REALLY odd square movement zones.

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Oy. Where'd I put the rolleyes emoticon?

This is definite Barbie "math is hard" material.

Also not a fan of the dumbed down skill system.

Psion said:

Oy. Where'd I put the rolleyes emoticon?

This is definite Barbie "math is hard" material.

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It's actually the Manhattan distance. Mathematics FTW!

Also, Rystil Arden does this better than me.