Karl Green said:
I would agree with you only insofar as when it comes to creating DnD-style wizards. One of my players has complained about this to know end, that by the time he reaches legendary rank, he would still have a fairly limited spell selection (having spent other level-ups on Power Point bumps, Attribute bumps, and the like). Of course, this ignores the point that SW has fewer spells which cover a broader range of capabilities, but that's a whole different post. The fact is, from what I'm seeing, is that advancement opportunities are quite broad and characters are growing by leaps and bounds!
Polar opposite here! I love em. They really get players energized and excited. And while they can throw a monkey wrench into your plans, sometimes, they make the game so much more fun to play, IMHO.
I see no reason why you couldn't add an extra layer on to the skills system. Certain skills could require a focus. So instead of Shooting, the player has to take Shooting: Bows. The give all other applications a -1 penalty. Balance this by letting players buy extra foci at the cost as buying a skill at less than it's base attribute, at one die type less than the former -- or something like that.
Dropping exploding dice from the system would be a bad idea, I think. If nothing else, it would require you to reconsider the Toughness of a lot of bigger, tougher creatures, some of whom cannot be hit without an Ace here or there. But really, what does the Ace get you? They've changed combat so that instead of +2 damage per raise, a raise on your attack roll gets you a single +1d6 to your damage roll. You could roll 54 to hit, and you'd still do standard weapon damage +1d6. So that's not a big thing. Magic works the same way. Once you get a raise, there really is no reason to keep on rolling. It just gives something for the GM and players to play off of. I'm sure you have your reasons for not liking the open-ended die rolls, but I think if you play with it, you'll find the footprint isn't that large.
