Using Star Wars SAGA Skill Challenges in 5e

[Zardnaar]

Star Wars SAGA's approach was better but still had some underlying maths problems that made failure very likely & the 3 successes before X failures was not a model that fit all situations.

I made a "Skill" Challenge for an upcoming 5e game, and you can see my approach here: Crossing the Nsi Wastes - travel challenge. I put "skill" in parentheses because mine have run better since I stopped thinking of them as "skill challenges" following a mold, and more organically as "challenges" each with a unique structure/approach.

EDIT: One of the keys is that for each step of the challenge, I try to include 3 possible solutions and restrict myself to writing down only 1 skill check. I'm a big fan of clever role-playing/negotiation, creative spell use, and outside-the-box class feature use contributing toward success (without requiring a roll).

Have been tempted to ad hoc a 5E/Saga hybrid and rejig the Saga talents replacing the weak +1 talents with expertise or advantage. The smaller numbers would also fix use the force and probably replace the level based thing to defences with prof to defence (if you're not wearing armor). And tone down the prestige class defences.

 

[MarkB]

Have been tempted to ad hoc a 5E/Saga hybrid and rejig the Saga talents replacing the weak +1 talents with expertise or advantage. The smaller numbers would also fix use the force and probably replace the level based thing to defences with prof to defence (if you're not wearing armor). And tone down the prestige class defences.

One thing I was always tempted to do with the Saga rules was to remove classes altogether, and just bake everything into feat trees and talent trees. The main things impeding this in the original rules were how to handle attack / defense progression and hit point progression.

Doing it in 5e, with bounded accuracy, would solve at least one of those problems. If I still had players who were definitely interested in going back to an older Star Wars system, I might be tempted to try and make it work.