d20 Star Wars Saga Edition news from Gen Con?

[Staffan]

I mean, sure, the system meant you could have 5th level stormtroopers (ha!) that still fell down like punks, but it also meant some random blaster bolt could take out the 20th level Jeci hero at any time. i don't recall Yoda every taking one to the back of the head...

No, but Leia got a pretty nasty wound from a stray blaster bolt at the Battle of Endor.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

- Skills; It doesn't sound like they're doing a massive skill consolidation, just the basic level that just about every non-WotC d20 game has done (i.e. stealth/awareness instead of spot & listen/hide & move silently, and probably a few other things on that level) and moving away from the buckets-of-skills mechanic for the Force. Both of these are Good Things.

That that seems fine to me also. Hopefully all those +2/+2 skill feats will be consolidated as well. There's really no reason for each to have their own entry when one feat with a table of examples would serve the same purpose.

- Classes; since it was pretty easy to make a better tech specialist or fringer from a scout or scoundrel, I can definitely see dropping them, especially if a bit more flexibility is built into the other non-Force classes. And Force Adept really didn't seem sufficiently generic to cover all the non-Jedi traditions out there, and was strictly inferior to both Jedi classes.

The addition of the Tech Specialist seemed to be a half hearted gesture in the first place. The cynical part of be tends to think that they were designed to be subpar so that when the next edition came around they could be dropped because "no one played them".

For the most part I think the TS and Fringer could be subsumed into a more robust Scout class. Chewie is presented as a Scout, and in the movies I saw him doing more repair work than pathfinding.

As for the Force Adept, if it's removal means that each force tradition gets its own class (in the appropriate source book) that is different but equal to the Jedi classes, I'm all for it.

 

[BadMojo]

I'm one of those people that don't find VP/WP any sort of improvement over HP/MDT.

I've done the skill-compression thing for my own games, so, good improvement there.

And I'll be interested in seeing how the new Force system works (since it sounds like a whole new bag). Force is sticky wicket territory. I've not entirely liked the WEG D6 version or the D20 version, honestly. Both had places I liked better than eachother, etc.

--fje

I've only read the D20 version of SW, but did play and enjoy WEG's version.

I never quite got the "need" for VP/WP system myself. It's still abstract, like HP, and is IMO slightly more clunky to boot. If you want to make the game less or more deadly, you can do things with a Massive Damage threshold and/or something like Action Points.

Merging Move Silently and Hide is great. I never quite got the fact that you could hide like a ninja but anytime you moved you were loud as a tank. Doesn't make sense AND introduces more skills than necessary.

I actually like the armor as DR rule for certain genre, Space Opera being one of them. I'm planning on using the armor=DR rule for a city-based swashbuckler-y Eberron game. I just can't imagine heroes in games like that jumping, tumbling and swinging on ropes in full body armor. IMO, it's nice to have the game make heavy armor less necessary than in D&D.

 

[drothgery]

The skill list is being reduced/simplified from fifty some skills to about thirty-seven.

Just as an FYI, there are twenty Force skills in Star Wars d20 Revised, so that's definitely where the overwhelming majority of the skill list reduction is coming from.

 

[Anime Kidd]

i don't recall Yoda every taking one to the back of the head...

Well in Episode 3 he nearly did get hit at the battle for Kashyyyk. He certainly didn't seem to of seen it coming either.

 

[Shalimar]

The vitality rules were important in not letting the Jedi run roughshod over everyone else via an unlimited amount of Force use. Same with tthe hefty skill and deat requirements, not saying they are the only way to go, but it was a major balancer against the Uber jedi overshadowing the rest of the party, which did still happen on occasion anyway.

The vitality wound point system gives you the sense that no matter how experienced a human was, he was still a human, and a blaster to the face was a blaster to the face, he couldn't just laugh it off because he could take x blaster bolts before having to worry.

 

[Starglim]

They may well be creating the optimum version of a d20 Star Wars I wouldn't enjoy.

I'd pretty much agree with this. These changes will strip out most of the things that I found innovative and attractive in the RCR.

 

[Ranger REG]

I'd pretty much agree with this. These changes will strip out most of the things that I found innovative and attractive in the RCR.

Perhaps, but you have to ask yourself, were the elements they're removing actually appropriate for emulating Star Wars? After all, WotC did fought tooth and nails for the right to publish official Star Wars game, and not just in name only.

By all means, please provide strong arguments using the 6 films as evidence.

 

[Shalimar]

Perhaps, but you have to ask yourself, were the elements they're removing actually appropriate for emulating Star Wars? After all, WotC did fought tooth and nails for the right to publish official Star Wars game, and not just in name only.

By all means, please provide strong arguments using the 6 films as evidence.

Yes, they were appropriate for emulating star wars. The Star Wars galaxy was a wide place, Jedi were not the only force users, so the Force Adept did have a logical role, especially if the Jedi were refusing to take on anyone beyond a certain age. The films just brush the surface of what Stars Wars is, they don't go into incredible depth on the universe, because above all they are the story of the Skywalker Clan, that does not invalidate the Expanded Universe, becase the EU is exactly that, they are official expansions to the knowledge base. Granted they don't have the same weight as the films, but they do flesh things out.

In the EU there are many example of Force Adepts from all sorts of different cultures, especially when the Jedi Order was destroyed. The same for tech specialists, they play a role in the setting, while they may not have been played too frequently it doesn't invalidate the reason for having them in the first place.

The amount of skill points and feats to be invested in the force was a balancer, and a good one when taken with vitality points that prevented Jedi from just doing everything and making everyone just stand around and watch. At a certain point balance has to come first since this is a game people play for fun, and being constantly upstaged is not fun.

 

[trancejeremy]

Sounds like they are streamlining it, much like was done in the KOTOR games.

Which is what I was hoping for, actually. Though having been an enormous fan of the WEG star wars game, I can understand how people might be upset that their version of SW is being replaced.