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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 6036056" data-attributes="member: 22424">Because in the context of the Star Wars films (the very thing that the game is attempting to model), Luke, Han, and the rest are not NPCs. They're the protagonists of the stories, a role that in RPGs is filled by the PCs. (And, indeed, they're the very reason the classes in the game are "Jedi", "Scoundrel", and so on.)Therefore, if a Star Wars game cannot model the heroes from the Star Wars films as PCs, then it's doing a bad job of providing the Star Wars experience - just as surely as if it failed to provide a suitable representation of lightsaber duels or starfighter combat. (And, indeed, the VP/WP rules in the first two d20 Star Wars games meant that lightsaber duels as written didn't work anything like those in the films - and so, whatever merits those games may have had, they failed as Star Wars games.)Well, I rather doubt that the designers rolled the stats for those characters!But I'll grant that that one is much more questionable. And, indeed, the whole premise of the 25 points is flawed - it's supposed to represent the 'average' results of 4d6-drop-lowest, but the analysis that's been done indicates that the rolled method is much closer to a 30-point buy. Even allowing for system mastery, and the ability to optimise a point-buy system, it's still likely that 28 points would be more suitable.However, right or wrong, 25 points was the baseline that WotC chose for their "Living..." games. They decided that that would be the standard for PCs in their game. And it's also worth noting that that's already exceptional - the vast majority of NPCs use a 15-point array for generating their stats.In which case, if they're going to exceed their own baseline, they're saying that those characters are not only exceptional, but they're exceptional even amongst PCs. But the evidence from the films just doesn't bear this out - Han Solo is a competent smuggler, but he's not a superman. ESB largely consists of him flying from one crisis to the next, failing to repair his ship, and eventually getting captured. In RotJ, he fails to be stealthy, he fails to hotwire the Imperial bunker, and he's a sufficiently competent general that he and all his troops have to be bailed out by Ewoks.(And, yes, I know that the EU has decided that he graduated top of his class in the academy, and threw away a glittering military career, and has rebuilt the Falcon from scratch on more than one occasion, and... It seems that the EU is guilty of the same over-reverence for these characters.)Luke, for his part, spends most of SW alternately being beaten up and running away. ESB sees him being ambushed, being shot down, failing the tests in his training, being defeated by Vader, and then finally being rescued by the very people he rushed off to save. And in RotJ he finally defeats Vader only by giving in to his anger, the very failure he was warned so strenuously about.They have their successes, but they have a lot of failures as well. In fact, the characters actually joke about their own incompetence: "How are we doing?", "Same as always", "That bad, huh?"(Or the prequel version: "We thought we'd come and rescue you." "Good job!")In fact, that's a key difference between RPGs and the films and stories that form their sources - PCs in RPGs actually spend much more of their time winning than do the heroes of the books and films that inspired them. If anything, Han and Luke should be being pulled up to PC level, not placed away out of sight.Edit: Actually... I think I've derailed this thread enough, and gone on at way too much length here about a pet peeve of mine. If you don't mind, I'm going to try to bow out at this point.</blockquote>

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