Rebellion Era Campaign Guide

[RodneyThompson]

But there really is no excuse for naming a book the Rebellion Era Campaign Guide and having precious little info about the Rebellion Era.

Can you tell me, specifically, the kinds of things you would have liked to have seen included that weren't?

 

[Shalimar]

Personally, I would have avoided adding a bunch of uber starship weapons that make most other starship weapons a joke like the Anti-Aircraft flak Guns (starship scale area attacks?), Advanced Missile Launcher, and Proton Beam Cannon. Your giving weapons that are better than capital ship weapons to starfighters.

The other major major complaint I have is the levels that people are given. Wedge Antilles is acknowledged as the best pilot in the galaxy with the possible expception of Baron Fel, so Wedge is level 9. The generic Ace Pilot from ToTG who should be used for the average Rogue Squadron Pilot is Level 14 with 7 levels of Ace Pilot, Wedge only has 2 levels of Ace Pilot. The other top tier rogues are also similarly unimpressive.

The background/Occupation/Event system is great, and much appreciated, and so are the species feats. The book is okay, but the issues above sort of harsh my happy for it. I'd be happy if species feats were made availible for the other species in the game and did just stop dead right here.

 

[Obryn]

I think I've been spoiled by DDI and the Character Builder...

I became a huge fan of SWSE right after it came out and ran a very successful game for quite a long stretch. But the new character options - Talents, Feats, and Force Powers - are scattered over quite a few books, now, and it's all become more than a bit overwhelming. It's more difficult to follow, now, than 3e or 4e because any character (even a single-classed one) has a truly bewildering array of choices, and there aren't any programs out there which do a competent job of organizing them. (All I could find when I went looking recently is an expanded-beyond-practical-use version of Kenad Broki's Excel sheet.) I can't even reliably say what's a good or bad choice at this point, and many are so specialized that I don't think I'd see even 10% of them in play.

In 3e, most of your stuff is constrained based on your character class, and what isn't - feats - are relatively easy to track since it's just one thing.

In 4e, again, pretty much everything is constrained by your class, but it's also constrained by your level. So you can't choose from an infinite menu every level, only a small part of the menu. Also, DDI makes the huge variety completely manageable.

SWSE, on the other hand, has a huge number of feats - some of which are very specialized - and a huge number of talents, which are what would happen if 4e's Powers weren't level-limited. It also expands the actual rules in new books, and provides either new subsystems or replacements for old subsystems - like this backgrounds thing.

I think SWSE at its core is a wonderful game, but I think it needs something external for better organization at this point. (And a revamped Force system which doesn't use skill rolls as attack rolls, but that's besides the point. ) It's gone from a wonderfully concise system and a brilliant revision of the d20 rules to a massive, option-bloated system that makes my head spin.

(And no criticism intended to you, Rodney! This is kind of unavoidable with a game that expands in the way SWSE does.)

-O

 

[pawsplay]

Can you tell me, specifically, the kinds of things you would have liked to have seen included that weren't?

Well, since you are bold enough to ask for feedback, I must be bold enough to offer it. I am working from my memory here, so I hope I am fair and accurate.

I would have liked to see more of the Imperial war machine. Although the book included a number of specialty troops from a variety of sources, I do not remember seeing much about the command structure. A lot of players are not familiar with the division between the Stormtrooper divisions and the regular military, and there are a number of EU sources that offer plausible command structures. I personally am enough of a Star Wars buff to know a lot about those kind of details, but this is a place where visuals would be a great value for a gamer. Having a page that showed an Army trooper, Death Star Trooper, armored trooper, etc. would provide not only sensory satisfaction but a useful visual tool for showing players. In addition, with all the specialty troop types, I think the book could have been made big enough to include more general NPCs, particularly ones of obvious utility like platoon leaders, sharpshooters, and so forth. It's a lot easier to take a bunch of spec forces troopers and put them in rad suits than to generate squad leaders for Rad Troopers, Spacetroopers, etc.

The Rebel alliance, similarly, although the command structure is seemingly not as detailed in most sources. It would be nice to at least know what planets joined the Alliance at what times and so forth. We all know how the Empire is ruled, but how about the Alliance Council? What rights and obligations do member systems have?

Aliens... there is probably a good rationale why this didn't happen, but for me it comes down to this: the original trilogy is when we were introduced to a whole bunch of cool aliens. I get annoyed when I find the creatures from Jabba's palace scattered among several books, none of them the Rebellion Era guide.

Film by film versions of Han, Luke, Leia, Chewbacca, Lando. Stats for each named Imperial officer or Rebel character.

I would have liked a big, fat book full of geek vitamins. Instead I saw a slim GM's guide with a booklet of prestige classes and talents and a monster manual supplement. Of all the books published for the line, this is the one where somebody should have said, "Somebody really wants this stuff. Let's take off the wizards.com-staff-writer hat for a moment and think about what a fan would like to read in a Rebellion era gaming guide, not just cover the usual bases and follow the same old new Talents, new Prestige Classes, one new nifty rules mechanic format we've done with the other books and give them the whole feast here." It is certainly possible, maybe even probable, that the LucasFilm authorization process and the manpower limitations at Wizards made this unfeasible, but if so, that's a real shame. I have most of the Essential guides at home and I have now played six versions of a Star Wars rpg, not counting Hero and GURPS conversions I have worked on but not completed. I really don't need encyclopedic level detail, as I already have that, and I don't need stats worked out for relatively low level opponents very similar to other low level opponents. I am looking for a useful level of detail, covering all major areas of interest, all in one place. I want a book that's fun to read and fun to use. Not all of what I'm looking for is "functional" in the sense that Monopoly money is useful for playing Monopoly. RPGs are an imaginative game, and campaign sourcebooks are a door to an imaginary world.

I'm sure you have lots of marketing data, but I happen to think that even with the economy being what it is, you almost could not made a Rebellion Era book that was too big and too awesome.

 

[Remus Lupin]

I love that fact that Rodney is willing to invite feedback.

It's a little bit hard for me to pin down why the book felt underwhelming to me. I've loved every book so far, and perhaps it's just a saturation question. I've already mentioned the lack of deck plans.

Part of the problem with, say equipment, is that mechanically, most of what you'd need in terms of weapons, etc., has already been covered well in other books. At this point, equipment often feels like "more of the same, only moreso".

I might have liked to see one or two additional new prestige classes, but here again, I think we're running into a problem of game bloat. Same goes with Talents. If I've only got 20 levels worth of feats and talents to play with, having quite so many options tends to diffuse the meaning of what it is, for example, to play a soldier versus a Jedi, since there no longer seems to be a core set of things that soldiers in particular or Jedi in particular do well.

I appreciate the work that's been done on mechanics innovations, but one problem with introducing new kinds of mechanics with each new book is that it risks making some serious retconning necessary for characters that would like to use the new options but have already been created.

To be frank, I'm happy to admit that one problem may just be that the Rebellion Era is not my favorite era of play. Everything seems to overdetermined by the mythology of the movies. I have the same issue with the Clone Wars, though there there's a lot more room to contribute to the story line.

I would definitely like to see future books concentrate not so much on radically expanding mechanical options, but in helping players flavor their characters more fully, and allowing GMs to introduce interesting new story developments. I'm looking forward to the Droid book, precisely because I think that's an area where players could really use some help, and by the same token if "Galaxy of Intrigue" helps to develop espionage based campaigns, that will be a great well for GMs to dip into.

Thanks again for being able to hear feedback Rodney. I'm loving the new edition, and appreciate your work.

 

[RodneyThompson]

I would have liked to see more of the Imperial war machine.

See, the tricky thing about the RECG is that we already had The Force Unleashed Campaign Guide come out last year, which had a huge amount of information on the Empire in it. I don't like to duplicate material in books, so I took the opportunity to provide as much new material as possible.

What would you have wanted that wasn't already covered in that book?

The Rebel alliance, similarly, although the command structure is seemingly not as detailed in most sources. It would be nice to at least know what planets joined the Alliance at what times and so forth. We all know how the Empire is ruled, but how about the Alliance Council? What rights and obligations do member systems have?

Hm. We devoted a full 10 pages to the Alliance structure and organization, including a solid list of systems in open rebellion. The trick with getting much more specific that that is that, in many cases, there are conflicts in the timeline. Even when there are gaps we can fill, we're usually discouraged from doing so, because the RPG is such a small part of the EU empire that it ends up tying the hands of novelists, the makers of cartoons and video games, etc.

Aliens... there is probably a good rationale why this didn't happen, but for me it comes down to this: the original trilogy is when we were introduced to a whole bunch of cool aliens. I get annoyed when I find the creatures from Jabba's palace scattered among several books, none of them the Rebellion Era guide.

I wanted this book to really focus on the alien species of the core rulebook, because most of those are the iconic races of the Rebellion Era in the first place. This book was very much intended to be a companion volume to the core rulebook, and I also wanted to provide some more incentive to play those iconic races.

Film by film versions of Han, Luke, Leia, Chewbacca, Lando. Stats for each named Imperial officer or Rebel character.

How useful is this, really? I'm as much of a completionist as the next guy, but I have to disagree that this adds value to a book. How often are you really going to need those iconics' stats? I think, of everything we put into our books, stat blocks for movie characters are among the least useful. Practically speaking, they just don't see as much use. With stats for the movie characters in the core rulebook, I didn't see any reason to produce a whole bunch of stats like that here.

This may just be an area where we agree to disagree, but statting up every single minor character seems like a huge waste of resources, as well as an invitation for everyone to nitpick and gripe about how Lando's Charisma CLEARLY is two points too low, etc. etc.

Of all the books published for the line, this is the one where somebody should have said, "Somebody really wants this stuff. Let's take off the wizards.com-staff-writer hat for a moment and think about what a fan would like to read in a Rebellion era gaming guide, not just cover the usual bases and follow the same old new Talents, new Prestige Classes, one new nifty rules mechanic format we've done with the other books and give them the whole feast here."

I'd like to think I've been trying to plan these books out to be exactly that. This book had the disadvantage of coming out much later in the line than Rebellion Era books typically would, so a lot of the material you would expect to see has already been covered elsewhere, because I took off my wizards.com-staff-writer-hat (whatever that means) and realized people would want those things for their campaigns.

I really don't need encyclopedic level detail, as I already have that, and I don't need stats worked out for relatively low level opponents very similar to other low level opponents. I am looking for a useful level of detail, covering all major areas of interest, all in one place. I want a book that's fun to read and fun to use. Not all of what I'm looking for is "functional" in the sense that Monopoly money is useful for playing Monopoly. RPGs are an imaginative game, and campaign sourcebooks are a door to an imaginary world.

It sounds, then, like your complaint is that we didn't reprint the Imperial stuff from the Force Unleashed Campaign Guide/Starships of the Galaxy/Threats of the Galaxy/etc. in this book. I can understand that--there's a lot of appeal to having everything consolidated into one place.

I guess I'd like to know what kinds of "major areas of interest" you're referring to that we didn't cover. We already clearly disagree on the value of statting up movie characters; is there anything else you would liked to have seen, specifically? What constitutes an area of interest we didn't cover?

Mind you, I can't promise we will cover it in future books, but it always helps to know what people are looking for.

 

[RodneyThompson]

I love that fact that Rodney is willing to invite feedback.

Well, sure, I always like to know what people are looking for. Even if I may disagree with a thing or two (see the debate about iconics stats above) I still want to know what people think.

Part of the problem with, say equipment, is that mechanically, most of what you'd need in terms of weapons, etc., has already been covered well in other books. At this point, equipment often feels like "more of the same, only moreso".

I'll admit, I think that the mechanics in the book aren't the strongest, but I do think they are mostly solid. It's tough to design for Star Wars, but we're always trying to get better.

I appreciate the work that's been done on mechanics innovations, but one problem with introducing new kinds of mechanics with each new book is that it risks making some serious retconning necessary for characters that would like to use the new options but have already been created.

One thing we suggest between "Episodes" of the Dawn of Defiance campaign is to let players rebuild their characters after major story arcs to better reflect their character's evolution. Sort of how Luke in Return of the Jedi is vastly different than the Luke of Empire, your heroes evolve to the point where you should be happy with what they do, and I think it's OK to let players reenvision their heroes every so often to match the character's evolution.

I would definitely like to see future books concentrate not so much on radically expanding mechanical options, but in helping players flavor their characters more fully, and allowing GMs to introduce interesting new story developments. I'm looking forward to the Droid book, precisely because I think that's an area where players could really use some help, and by the same token if "Galaxy of Intrigue" helps to develop espionage based campaigns, that will be a great well for GMs to dip into.

Thanks again for being able to hear feedback Rodney. I'm loving the new edition, and appreciate your work.

Yeah, the Campaign Guides have been good, but I'm glad we're going away from them for a bit. I'm really trying to focus on making the game easier to run for the GM, and giving them some more options for adventure and campaign design. I think, even starting with Galaxy at War, you'll see us start to put a lot more tools in the GM's hands.

Thanks for the feedback!

 

[pawsplay]

See, the tricky thing about the RECG is that we already had The Force Unleashed Campaign Guide come out last year, which had a huge amount of information on the Empire in it. I don't like to duplicate material in books, so I took the opportunity to provide as much new material as possible.

What would you have wanted that wasn't already covered in that book?

The Force Unleashed was my favorite of all the sourcebooks except Starships. It did have a lot of that kind of information in it, and I appreciated it. For the Rebellion Era, my response could be pretty much summed up, "Yes, more, please." I think there is a lot that could be done without much duplication. Twenty something years separate the eras, and indeed, during the course of the first movie we see the dismantling of the Senate and the consolidation of Imperial rule and the Alliance's first major military victory. Clearly this relates to the picture we get in Return of the Jedi of a more organized, better equipped Rebellion prepared for open warfare. There is a lot of history to cover there.

Hm. We devoted a full 10 pages to the Alliance structure and organization, including a solid list of systems in open rebellion. The trick with getting much more specific that that is that, in many cases, there are conflicts in the timeline. Even when there are gaps we can fill, we're usually discouraged from doing so, because the RPG is such a small part of the EU empire that it ends up tying the hands of novelists, the makers of cartoons and video games, etc.

Ok, as I said I was working from memory. While I can understand the possible value of being conservative, I think this reluctance really showed through in the final product. There was little memorable about it. Anyway, the Saga writers already decided to seriously alter the presented image of the Ithorians, I think a few dates here and there is not such a big deal. Plus, it's possible to be vague while still being useful. "X system joined the Alliance later in the war, after Y."

I wanted this book to really focus on the alien species of the core rulebook, because most of those are the iconic races of the Rebellion Era in the first place. This book was very much intended to be a companion volume to the core rulebook, and I also wanted to provide some more incentive to play those iconic races.

I'm not sure there are "iconic races." The Empire encompasses hundreds if not thousands of species and sub-species. Many characters we meet are the sole representatives of their race on-screen. Partially as a result, many species have been reduced to one-note stereotypes, when the on-screen evidence suggests that most Galactic races have a flourishing culture with many different facets.

I have never conceptualized "I want to play a Duros" as an important part of the Star Wars experience. "I want to be a Wookiee/Ewok/Greedo guy," sure. Honestly, any Star Wars rpg could probably benefit more from a "build your own alien" sourcebook than trying to exhaustively cover in details aliens that are seen a few times and appear with varying regularity in games.

So I'm looking at a book called The Rebellion Era sourcebook, but I know it does not contain Saga versions of Klatoonians, Nikto, Weequay, Talz, and so forth.

How useful is this, really?

How useful is a book called the Rebellion Era guide that does not have the stats for the main characters of the trilogy the whole game and EU was based on? If not in this book, then where?

I'm as much of a completionist as the next guy, but I have to disagree that this adds value to a book. How often are you really going to need those iconics' stats? I think, of everything we put into our books, stat blocks for movie characters are among the least useful. Practically speaking, they just don't see as much use. With stats for the movie characters in the core rulebook, I didn't see any reason to produce a whole bunch of stats like that here.

This may just be an area where we agree to disagree, but statting up every single minor character seems like a huge waste of resources, as well as an invitation for everyone to nitpick and gripe about how Lando's Charisma CLEARLY is two points too low, etc. etc.

Yes, we do disagree. To me, this is one of the most important functions of an era sourcebook. It's not that they see a lot of play, it's just that when when you need them, there they are. I own monster manuals with well over a thousand monsters in them; I don't expect to use a fraction of them in years of playing D&D. But they are useful because I have them in front of me should I care to use them.


Statting out iconic characters serves a number of important functions. First, it provides usable versions of on-screen characters in case the GM does decide to include them in adventures. This is particularly important if you are running a divergent history campaign, but can be nearly as useful for campaigns focused on events outside the main action of the movies. Second, they are enjoyable to read. A good conversion is a work of art. Noting precisely when such-and-such characters take a level of Soldier causes one to reflect, "Ah, yes, that is what happened, isn't it?" Third, iconic characters are a good demonstration of how to use the system. A really workable Han Solo showes us what kinds of feats and skills and so forth are intended. Since the movies inspired the game, I really hope the game allows us to build characters with similar capabilities to those characters. Fourth, iconic characters function as benchmarks. Stats for NPC Stormtroopers or rancors tells me how strong a particular encounter is. Iconic NPCs serve the same function; if Jabba is an N level Crime Lord, then I can guess what level other crime lords should be relative to his stature. If I decide to run a 12th level campaign, it will help me to understand what kind of game to run. Most of the major characters range from level 8 to about 14, so I can observe that as the game was written, level 12 characters are going to mop the floor with ordinary opponents and are more appropriate to a "the other heroes of the Rebellion" game than a low-key Rebel cell operation game.

In short, statting iconic characters serves as an important reference functions as well as serving important game design functions as well as providing pure chewing satisfaction. And if you are are going to do it, you might as well do it right. Every major character, times three movies. We're not talking about a lot of extra pages.

I'd like to think I've been trying to plan these books out to be exactly that. This book had the disadvantage of coming out much later in the line than Rebellion Era books typically would, so a lot of the material you would expect to see has already been covered elsewhere, because I took off my wizards.com-staff-writer-hat (whatever that means) and realized people would want those things for their campaigns.

I bought the KOTOR campaign book mostly for that extra material. I'm not a big KOTOR fan. I guess my question to you would be, "If I owned just the core book and the Rebellion Era book, would I be satisfied?"

I definitely was not satisfied.

Being referred to other sourcebooks gives me bad memories of AD&D and Rifts. I don't want redundant, reprinted material, but I want complete material. In some cases, that might mean a minimal amount of reprinting or reworking, but that's not what I'm talking about. There is very little in the other sourcebooks I would insist on being reprinted in the Rebellion Era sourcebook, so I don't find this a satisfying answer, either.

What I meant about the writer hat was this: It is easy to become attached to a formula of success. New prestige classes, new feats, new talents, one new central mechanic has been successful in the line so far. But that's a beginning for a new book, not a complete concept. This really should have been the book that said, "Hey, dude, I'm not your average sourcebook. I'm the one you should write as though no other sourcebooks exist, removing redundant material only carefully and with reluctance."

It sounds, then, like your complaint is that we didn't reprint the Imperial stuff from the Force Unleashed Campaign Guide/Starships of the Galaxy/Threats of the Galaxy/etc. in this book. I can understand that--there's a lot of appeal to having everything consolidated into one place.

I guess I'd like to know what kinds of "major areas of interest" you're referring to that we didn't cover. We already clearly disagree on the value of statting up movie characters; is there anything else you would liked to have seen, specifically? What constitutes an area of interest we didn't cover?

Mind you, I can't promise we will cover it in future books, but it always helps to know what people are looking for.

Well, I'm at a disadvantage, since I sold off my books. So without going into a line by line account, my suggestion is that every time you wondered whether something belonged in the game, you should have considered saying "Yes." When you were thinking about a good size for this book, my suggestion would have been "bigger." The Force Unleashed is a cool game, and it's a cool era, but it's not something that is going to define Star Wars for the coming decade. The Force Unleashed has relevance because it bridges Revenge of the Sith (awesome) with the original trilogy (awesome). It increases in value in direct proportion to how much that era gets us closer to the original trilogy.

The Rebellion Era Sourcebook is not awesome. It is an average book of average size, full of averate stat blocks and good, but ultimately average campaign design advice. And really, when it comes down to it, that's not good enough. I can see a line drawn between the core rulebook and The Force Unleashed that continues in a certain direction and leads to awesome, but that's not what happened. There is no way to please evey fan, and I'll allow I'm probably a harder fan to please than most. So I can sympathize with your reply, which amounts to, "What's wrong with it?"

When you write the Rebellion Era Sourdebook, the goal is not to write a sourcebook with nothing wrong with it. The original movies were not a bunch of movies that basically had nothing wrong with them. In fact, they had some real problems. But they are awesome films.

 

[Remus Lupin]

I'll just add another advantage to including stats for iconic characters: It gives you a baseline set of stats for accomplishing a particular type of character. For example, suppose I wanted to play a jedi patterned on Qui Gon Gin. It would be helpful to see how the Saga writers conceptualize such a jedi, to give me a good basis as a player for what that would entail.

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

You know...all of this has just convinced me that this book is EXACTLY what I want.

I have to say I'm baffled by the desire for major character stats, when I clearly remember that was one of the things most argued and complained about from the last edition of the game. Really, if they belong anywhere, its either the main book(which...I believe they're there in some form) or on the website. Not taking up pages and pages in another sourcebook when they are just as limited in use as stating up Deities for D&D, IMO.