No more WotC Star Wars site

[pukunui]

Christopher Perkins was the lead designer of the original core rulebook, with Owen Stephens and myself freelance designing. Gary Sarli developed the book. I feel, and the others can chime in here if they want, that the bulk of the design of the book was a team effort, with some directives coming from WotC, some original design from Owen and I, some design coming from development changes, and all of it combining to produce Saga Edition. Saying that any one person wrote the bulk of the game's rules is incorrect, in my book.

I was the lead designer of all of the subsequent sourcebooks on the line.

Fair enough. It was not my intention to discredit any of you guys. My apologies. You all did a great job, and I, for one, am very thankful for it. SWSE remains my RPG of choice.

However, now that you're here ... on the off-chance that you've got another spare moment to read and respond to this thread: would you be able to give me an update on the pending errata for the last half of the SWSE line?

A lot of people presumed that the expiry of the license would mean no more errata, but when I asked Bill Slavicsek, he said you guys were still working on it. I inferred from his response that the end of the license was not an obstacle to publishing errata, but rather it was just a matter of getting it done (and I recall you saying on an Order 66 podcast earlier in the year that you were pretty much doing it in your spare time at home, so I imagine that's why it's taken longer than expected). My understanding is also that with the official website gone, any additional material such as errata can (and will?) be posted in a sticky thread in the WotC forums.

With that in mind, I'm wondering if you are actually still working on the errata with the intention of someday releasing it. Help me, Rodney Thompson. You're my only hope!

 

[MerricB]

My group spent most of the Dawn of Defiance wishing Star Wars Saga was a little more like 4e.

If we played again, we'd put in two new rules:

* Force Powers would work as Charisma-based attacks per 4e. (Cha vs Will) and so forth.

* There'd be healing surges, because it makes no sense for a heroic game with so much battle to make it so impossible to heal.

Cheers!

 

[pukunui]

* Force Powers would work as Charisma-based attacks per 4e. (Cha vs Will) and so forth.

This is close to the "skill attack" house rule that I use. It's essentially the same since pretty much all skills that can be used against defense scores (Deception, Persuasion and Use the Force) are Cha-based skills, but the rule is a little more complicated than that.

The formula is essentially character level + ability modifier + miscellaneous modifiers

Character level is essentially the same as full BAB, but you don't add +5 for being trained. Instead, you take a -5 penalty for not being trained, just like you do for not being proficient with a weapon.

Miscellaneous modifiers covers things like Skill Focus, which only grants a +2 bonus to the skill attack modifier.

It's fairly simple when applied to things like Deception rolls and Persuasion rolls to intimidate and such. Where it gets complicated is with Force powers. I have it so you make one d20 roll, then use your "skill attack" modifier to see if you "hit", then your regular skill check modifier to determine the effect.

So it is rather complex, but I feel it fixes the underlying math progression problems (by making skills vs defenses work like weapons) better than just limiting Skill Focus to a certain level or whatever.

* There'd be healing surges, because it makes no sense for a heroic game with so much battle to make it so impossible to heal.

I'm not a fan of 4e's healing, but I will admit that when I first started playing SWSE, I didn't like the way healing worked in that game either. However, now that I've played a medic, I've found that it's not actually that hard. There are two ways to take care of healing in SWSE: outsource it or do it yourself.

You can outsource it by purchasing (or otherwise acquiring) a medical droid. This is probably the easiest solution. There are multiple medical droids to choose from, and all of them come with Skill Focus (Treat Injury) and Surgical Expertise.

Doing it yourself might seem a little more costly in terms of investment, but honestly, all it requires is some credits (for equipment), one trained skill (Treat Injury) and two feats (Surgical Expertise and Skill Focus [Treat Injury]). That's it. Sure, surgery in and of itself doesn't heal much damage, particularly at low level, but with Surgical Expertise, the medic can perform 6 times as many surgeries as he can without it. And with Skill Focus, he won't need to worry about killing anyone on the operating table, either. You can, of course, make your character more specialized, but that's all you really need. My medic was able to provide more than enough healing at level 3 and she was hardly a one-trick pony. She was also the group's main pilot and a fairly strong Force user (specializing in mental powers).

Gary also introduced some fairly nice optional healing rules introduced in Jedi Counseling 114.

Anyway, I reckon healing in SWSE is nowhere near as tough as a lot of people think it is. And the investment needed to get enough healing (in terms of credits and/or character resources) really isn't that great.

 

[MerricB]

Anyway, I reckon healing in SWSE is nowhere near as tough as a lot of people think it is. And the investment needed to get enough healing (in terms of credits and/or character resources) really isn't that great.

That's because the investment might not be "much", but it's mind-bogglingly stupid.

It's a way to "game" the system so you can keep going, but does it make any sense when you see the action in the films? Nope. R2-D2 doesn't have a set of surgical tools he deploys after every battle, but he'd need to if combat in the films works like it does in the RPG.

The fact that it's *necessary* to have a dedicated healer in the party is a problem.

I can just see the infiltration of the first Death Star now... "Uh, why is that medical droid following you, trooper?"

The joy of healing surges is that they provide:
a) the ability for individual combats to maintain their threat of lethality
b) a way to recover from each individual battle
c) an upper limit on how much you can continue before becoming fatigued and needing to "press your luck"

Cheers!

 

[pukunui]

You're forgetting that in the films, the heroes generally have quite a bit of downtime in between action sequences. Most of the time, they don't go from one encounter to the next with no rest in between. For all we know, they could very well be getting medical treatment (or just plenty of rest) of some kind off-screen. In fact, we even see them getting medical treatment on-screen on several occasions.

4e's healing system is too video-gamey and artificial for my taste. I much prefer SWSE's grittier approach. And I think that's really what it comes down to here: personal preference.

 

[MerricB]

Count how many times a hero gets shot in the films. Go on.

Compare to how often a hero gets shot when playing the Star Wars SAGA RPG.

It's the primary difference between the two mediums. In the Star Wars RPG, a hero gets shot a *lot* of times. Often twice or more in the same combat. (There was one combat near the end of Dawn of Defiance where most of the group used 5+ Destiny points just to stay alive from attacks, because you can only take one or two shots before going down).

Now, the Saga healing system works if you have basically one or two combats per day. More than that, and it falls apart rapidly. Guess how many combats were in Dawn of Defiance? Lot more than that? Sure there were!

To make a healing surge more attritional, I'd only allow 1 or 2 surges to be regained per night; perhaps allowing healing to return more. However, with the high incidence of characters getting hit, you must allow more healing if you want the game to be able to flow.

Cheers!

 

[pukunui]

Count how many times a hero gets shot in the films. Go on.

Compare to how often a hero gets shot when playing the Star Wars SAGA RPG.

It's the primary difference between the two mediums. In the Star Wars RPG, a hero gets shot a *lot* of times. Often twice or more in the same combat. (There was one combat near the end of Dawn of Defiance where most of the group used 5+ Destiny points just to stay alive from attacks, because you can only take one or two shots before going down).

Now, the Saga healing system works if you have basically one or two combats per day. More than that, and it falls apart rapidly. Guess how many combats were in Dawn of Defiance? Lot more than that? Sure there were!

To make a healing surge more attritional, I'd only allow 1 or 2 surges to be regained per night; perhaps allowing healing to return more. However, with the high incidence of characters getting hit, you must allow more healing if you want the game to be able to flow.

Cheers!

Don't forget that getting "hit" and losing hit points =/= getting "shot". Cinematically/narratively, you can merely be "shot at" and still lose hit points. If the heroes in the films were instead characters in an RPG, they'd undoubtedly be losing more hit points than it might look like on-screen.

That being said, I have run my group through DoD 1 and we have just started DoD 2, and we're having no troubles with healing. One of the characters is a medic, yes, but I've also been beefing up many of the opponents (I'm using Jango Fett-clone stormtroopers due to the time period, so they're all CL 2 opponents rather than the measly official CL 1 stormies ...). Plus, two of the characters are Force sensitive, and one has vital transfer, so that also helps with healing.

So as I said before: it's personal preference. You might not like the way healing works in SWSE. You might have even had some bad experiences with it. That doesn't make it "mind-bogglingly stupid", though. I could say the same thing about 4e's healing system, but I won't. I'm just going to respectively disagree with you and leave it at that.

 

[MerricB]

Don't forget that getting "hit" and losing hit points =/= getting "shot". Cinematically/narratively, you can merely be "shot at" and still lose hit points. If the heroes in the films were instead characters in an RPG, they'd undoubtedly be losing more hit points than it might look like on-screen.

That indeed is the point. Healing surges work with hitpoints as the abstraction of recovering after battle. Requiring a medic using surgery for just "battle fatigue" is overkill.

Speaking as someone who has completed Dawn of Defiance, the early adventures didn't give us much problem at all. The pacing is quite gentle, in fact. Once you get to the later adventures, I'll be interested to see how you go... especially in Echoes of the Jedi and Sword of the Empire.

Cheers!

 

[pukunui]

All right, I'll concede that there is a bit of a disconnect in SWSE with regard to damage not always being physical while mundane healing is, but there's enough of a similar disconnect with 4e's treatment of damage (vis-a-vis the extra stress on hit points being more than just physical damage and yet there are quite a few monsters and effects that clearly dea physical damage [goblin harpooner, I'm looking at you] ... and yet a PC can shrug off that physical damage with nothing more than 6 hours' rest). My point is: I would hardly describe 4e's treatment of hit points and healing as superior to SWSE's. It's just different.

I can see how people might like to include healing surges, although I don't think it's necessary. For the record, Gary did introduce an optional rule that makes second winds more like healing surges. It was in a Jedi Counseling article. 114, I think. Speaking of second winds, granted while SWSE's mechanic is a daily thing, I like that it's a swift action, whereas second winds in D&D require a standard action (unless you're a dwarf or have some other exception).

Regarding DoD: it's interesting that you found it got harder as you went along. I've seen plenty of people over on the WotC forums complaining that it's too easy all the way through to the end. I'm not running it as written, so I'm not too worried about it.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Christopher Perkins was the lead designer of the original core rulebook, with Owen Stephens and myself freelance designing. Gary Sarli developed the book. I feel, and the others can chime in here if they want, that the bulk of the design of the book was a team effort, with some directives coming from WotC, some original design from Owen and I, some design coming from development changes, and all of it combining to produce Saga Edition.

Rodney, for my money Saga Edition has been the high point of WotC RPG design. Some rough edges, sure, but it seemed to me the culmination of the 3e -> d20 modern -> design sequence. Elegant, great match with the films, smooth system. I don't think that WotC has bettered it yet IMO.

Cheers (and thanks!)