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

[Waylander]

. . . The first PCs I made were the crew of Firefly and which one was the hardest to create? Kaylee! . . .

Just as an aside, I haven't received my copy yet but I was toying with using the rules as the basis for a Firefly campaign. I'd be really interested in seeing your versions of the crew.

 

[atomn]

His biggest complaint? Loss of granularity of the skills.

Does granularity refer to how they clumped many skills together?

 

[Vigilance]

I'm finding a lot of people telling me that this hammer also makes a pretty decent torque wrench in addition to a great hammer, which to me is a hallmark of a pretty good game design. A couple of my game group is getting disillusioned from what they read, though, precisely because of the lack of fine-tuning that is in the core book. They want to keep an open mind for when we get a chance to play it, but it's disappointed the group's most rabid Star Wars (and expanded universe) fan, and that came as a surprise to me. His biggest complaint? Loss of granularity of the skills.

Paring down the skills is a big bonus with me. I recently did an OGL book (that I dearly wish I could talk more about dangit) where I pared the skills down to something like 10. It actually suited me and my playtest group just fine.

But yeah, I would consider the fact that SW would work for a variety of sci-fi settings a definite plus.

 

[ValhallaGH]

I wanted to sit down and look at Endurance for a while before replying to this. Endurance seem like a pretty suboptimal feat for a scout,

Endurance is a Skill, not a Feat. The difference is smaller in Saga than in most D20 systems but it's still a difference. Also, depending upon the GM, it may be the most important skill in the system or the most worthless. Just like the social skills are in most d20 games, Endurance can be a huge deal or utterly worthless depending upon the style of the campaign.

and it doesn't act as a gateway to any feats other than Extra Second Wind.

Which is just wrong, as it is the gateway for Shake it Off as well. Shake it Off is a solid feat, especially a few levels into the game, when your character can survive enough damage to move a couple steps down the condition track without just dying.

Which does turn it into a matter of personal choice here: do you want another second wind more than you want to train some other skill on the scout's list?

Since Scouts get Shake it Off, not Extra Second Wind, this statement is not very relevant.

If you opt for the former, you come out one feat ahead of the scout. If not, you can pass on the feat and come out ahead on skills with the same number of starter feats, and I'd suggest that WF with rifles is as much of an offensive boost as Point Blank Shot, as rifles serve up a damage and range increment boost.

This is just confusing. It's as if you're changing between being confused as to which abilities are feats, which are skills and which are Starting Feats that the class doesn't have to take. It makes it difficult to extract meaning from this statement. I'll assume that you were headed towards this:

A scout gets Extra Second Wind as a bonus starting feat if he meets the requirement. So, he can either choose not to meet the requirement of having trained Endurance, and still come out with the same amount of feats as a scoundrel and one more trained skill, or he can train Endurance, thus meeting the requirement, which nets him the bonus feat but basically has him flushing a trained skill.

Ignoring the factual error of which feat is granted, we're left with the value judgment on the utility of the Endurance skill.

I foresee Endurance coming up every session, or even two or three times a session, assuming the GM is running the game by the rules. Running, swimming, facing extreme weather, starvation and thirst, hostile atmospheres, and sleeping in armor are all problems that the iconic Star Wars heroes face with regularity. In my experience, player characters face them just as often. Assuming the GM doesn't hand wave it (and I've seen it done that way many times, ignoring the endurance mechanics because none of the PCs, fragile things, would survive; or ignoring the interaction mechanics because the PCs, antisocial things, couldn't convince children to take candy) then the skill will be of vital importance.

 

[ValhallaGH]

I haven't read the Force section so I'm not making allegations of class imbalance, but what does everyone think about balancing Force users with normal folk?

All folk can be Force using folk. Keep that in mind.

Generally, Jedi can be better at it due to their free Force Sensitive feat and their available talent trees, but any non-droid can become a powerful master of the force. Arguably, the most powerful force users are not Jedi, nor Sith, but are the Force Adepts and Disciples of other traditions. Those mo-fos are powerful; at least, their prestige classes let them be extremely powerful.

As for the balance of Force characters versus non-Force characters, it looks solid. Doing anything more than a few basics with the Force requires a hefty investment of character resources, as already mentioned. So it should be just fine.

 

[drothgery]

I agree there should have been more stuff for non-combat characters included. *Especially* so you could write up Kaylee, allowing me to use this book as written for Firefly too.

Eh. Especially since 1st-level heroic characters are decidedly non-mookish in Saga, Kaylee as a relatively low-level scoundrel/scout (talents from the fortune, spacer, slicer, and/or fringer trees) spending most of her feats on skill focus should work pretty well. Now, a tenth-level Kaylee would be pretty hard to build, but a 3rd level or a 6th level? Not so much.

 

[Felon]

There are, I think, two distinct camps of (potential and current) Star Wars RPG'ers. One wants to 'play the movies', the other wants to 'play the universe'. The new edition seems weighed heavily in favor of the former. Hopefully future source books will, er, bring balance to the Force as it were, and allow those that want a more immersive experience that option.

Well, in the movies, most of the non-jedi characters aren't especilally awesome at combat. Han's not a crack shot or anything, and Chewebacca doesn more as a co-pilot and mechanic than he does as a some melee brute.

Consider the Saga preview where the skirmish at Sarlacc's pit is recreated using the new rules. Luke kicks butt left and right, never failing at anything. Han, Chewbacca, and Lando, OTOH, are basically the three stooges.

I'd say the movies give us plenty of noncombatant characters to play.

 

[Henry]

Well, in the movies, most of the non-jedi characters aren't especilally awesome at combat. Han's not a crack shot or anything, and Chewebacca doesn more as a co-pilot and mechanic than he does as a some melee brute.

Consider the Saga preview where the skirmish at Sarlacc's pit is recreated using the new rules. Luke kicks butt left and right, never failing at anything. Han, Chewbacca, and Lando, OTOH, are basically the three stooges.

I'd say the movies give us plenty of noncombatant characters to play.

Han's no crack shot, but he is possibly the best pilot in the Galaxy, Force or not (ESB). Chewbacca repeatedly mauls and tosses the Empire's elite like they're Keystone Cops (ANH, RotJ). And Lando managed in disguise to sneak into the innermost chambers of a planet's top Crime Lord (RotJ). Luke kicks butt, but his friends are also formidable in their own right.

 

[Felon]

Ignoring the factual error of which feat is granted, we're left with the value judgment on the utility of the Endurance skill.

I foresee Endurance coming up every session, or even two or three times a session, assuming the GM is running the game by the rules. Running, swimming, facing extreme weather, starvation and thirst, hostile atmospheres, and sleeping in armor are all problems that the iconic Star Wars heroes face with regularity.

Wow, two or three times a session, huh? Anyone else want a piece of this? Most of the time they get in their land speeder or spaceship and zoom off to where they need to go. You can come up with "marooned" or "enslaved" scenarios where characters are deprived of their possessions, but Endurance is kind of a weak skill for the same reason Spell Mastery is described by D&D designers as a weak feat. Characters are almost never without their gear.

In my experience, player characters face them just as often. Assuming the GM doesn't hand wave it (and I've seen it done that way many times, ignoring the endurance mechanics because none of the PCs, fragile things, would survive; or ignoring the interaction mechanics because the PCs, antisocial things, couldn't convince children to take candy) then the skill will be of vital importance.

Well, you've homed in on why Endurance won't come up every session and won't be of vital importance. Not for most folks anyway. In all the years of playing 3rd edition, I've found it's a rare thing to have a DM ever invoke the fules for forced marches, extended running or swimming, extreme enviironmental conditions, or malnourishment. That seems odd on face value, because long treks across wilderness is par for the genre. Yet, the DM generally doesn't even take note of how many miles the party can travel in an hour. It's usually "a day/week's travel", and then cut to the chase. Maybe there's a random monster encounter before getting there, but that's about it. And this is a game where characters lack mundane means of fast travel.

I suspect the DM simply views theses rules as nuisances rather than challenges. They're in dsifavor much the same way traps seem to be falling into disuse. The DM doesn't want the character to *not* get to where the adventure is. He doesn't want the party starving to death, dying ignominiously from exposure, or giving up and going home.

But the ironic thing about this discussion is that proving Endurance to be a wonderful skill to train would actually reinforce the discrepency between the scout and scoundrel. I was actually making a concession.

 

[Felon]

Han's no crack shot, but he is possibly the best pilot in the Galaxy, Force or not (ESB). Chewbacca repeatedly mauls and tosses the Empire's elite like they're Keystone Cops (ANH, RotJ). And Lando managed in disguise to sneak into the innermost chambers of a planet's top Crime Lord (RotJ). Luke kicks butt, but his friends are also formidable in their own right.

Henry, my post was rebutting a remark about "focusing on the movies" equating to focusing on combat ability. I was pointing out that most of the characters don't contribute through their combat prowess, so your rebuttal doesn't seem to be rebutting my rebuttal except for the part where you contradict me about Chewbacca beating up stormtroopers--something I just don't recall happening a lot.

I really gotta get my book back and look at the droid rules, because C3P0 and R2-D2 are good examples of almost entirely noncombatant characters who make contributions. Does R2-D2 have a class?