MortonStromgal
First Post
While I'm not a Savage Worlds fan I think Star Wars and Savage Worlds fit well together.
That being said, I'd prefer if it was still the Saga edition. Awesome mechanics and very true to the setting!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
If Wizards made Saga OGL then that would be great...
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.