EvilDwarf said:
Anyone care to share a bit o' summary of how these others worked? Did they include a feature like the increasing damage threshold talked about for Saga
How injury/damage worked in d6 Star Wars was very much like a "damage save" system:
Let's take a typical scenario, a blaster rifle shooting an average PC.
The damage rating of a Blaster Rifle is 5D. Roll 5 dice, let's assume you get an 18.
The damage is resisted by rolling the Strength ability score. The ability to resist damage does not go up with character progression, but skills like Dodge (and Melee Parry and Lightsaber Parry) make it easier to avoid getting hit in the first place. Armor adds bonus dice to Strength to resist damage (for example, Stormtrooper armor is +2D against energy attacks, +1D against physical attacks, and a -1D penalty to all Dexterity related skills).
An average person (or typical cannon-fodder stormtrooper) would have a Strength of 2D, a typical heroic PC might have a Strength of 3D (a very buff human would have 4D, a Wookiee may have 5D). So our typical PC rolls 3D to resist the blaster shot, let's say he rolls a 10. This means the blaster rifle rolled higher by 8. Uh oh, let's see how bad he was hurt.
There is a small table of how high the damage roll exceeds the Strength roll to see what category of damage is inflicted. 8 is "Wounded", so our PC is now "Wounded" and takes a -1D penalty to all rolls until they heal (be it naturally, medically, or with the Force). If it exceeds by 9 to 12 they are "Incapacitated" and knocked prone and unconscious for 10D minutes (in addition to the penalties for being wounded). If it exceeds by 13 to 15 they are "mortally wounded", they are dropped and dying, and will die within a few rounds unless they recieve medical care, and even if stabilized with First Aid they need serious medical care or they'll still die, just later. If it rolls higher by 16 or more, you're dead outright. Injured categories stack, so if you're injured and injured again to the same or a lesser level, you move to the next one, if you're injured to a greater level you move to that level.
It would be possible, albeit theoretically, to kill any character with one hit if the dice were lucky enough. The rulebook notes that combat is deadly, the key is to not get hit and have high defensive skill scores. The given writeups of the main movie characters give them incredible skills, making them almost totally unkillable. With Force Users, the Reduce Injury power would let you avoid this however, by turning a "Killed" result into "mortally wounded" in exchange for a permanent injury (like losing a limb), which was the d6 explanation for lightsabers chopping off limbs.
In practice, I found it even more brutal than WP/VP, because at low levels PC's can die from random hits from Stormtroopers (5D blaster rifles against 2D baseline human stats), and the open-ending nature of how the dice was rolled meant that sometimes a little derringer-like hold-out blaster could drop an armored wookiee bounty hunter in one hit (I saw that happen). I welcomed WP/VP when it came because it was a big improvement. I really liked the d6 SWRPG, in a lot of ways I wish WEG hadn't gone bankrupt because I would have really, really loved to have seen how they would have treated the prequels with the RPG, but how damage and injury was handled was one of the holes in the system that could have been patched in a later edition.
