Who Should Make The Next Star Wars TTRPG, And What Should It Look Like?

[Parmandur]

Counterpoint: Wookiepedia.

IMNSHO, Star Wars is the poster child for why "rules light" and "narrative focused" isn't a gaming panacea. If there was ever a fandom that screamed for crunch, details, and complicated subsystems, Star Wars is it. There is no silver-bullet unified mechanic that can distill everything from giant space ships, magical superheroes, cyber hacking, WWII dogfighting, sword fights, espionage, guerilla gunfights, international politics, and social arguments into a single die roll and be satisfying for all of them.

Embrace the power of the complexity. Let it flow through you. Then, and only then, will your Star Wars RPG training be complete.

I mean, I think the D6 WEG game being so early and central in Star Wars Fandom formed this to a large extent.

 

[Parmandur]

I think it is a mistake to assume the most fervent fans represent the majority of fans. 99.9% of Star Wars fans do not edit Wookiepedia, and 99.8% of them have never even gone to the site.

Wookiepwdia has over 28 million registered users.

 

[TwoSix]

I think you are quite right, which is why I think the Cosmere/Plotweaver system is a solid fit. Also solves the Jedi/Protocol Droid power gap elegantly.

I didn't think of Cosmere, but that would also be an excellent fit. Variations on the common tropes as classes, and use talent trees to fit to the specific concept.

 

[Parmandur]

I didn't think of Cosmere, but that would also be an excellent fit. Variations on the common tropes as classes, and use talent trees to fit to the specific concept.

Brotherwise Games haven't exactly made it a secret that one of the Plotweaver Settings they are working on is Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off...and I think it will be a good fit.

 

[Reynard]

I didn't think of Cosmere, but that would also be an excellent fit. Variations on the common tropes as classes, and use talent trees to fit to the specific concept.

Brotherwise Games haven't exactly made it a secret that one of the Plotweaver Settings they are working on is Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off...and I think it will be a good fit.

Is there a SRD for that system? I have zero interest in Cosmere stuff but I am curious about the rules.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

They do, but I don't think YZE (which I generally really like) would fit Star Wars very well.

My feeling is that whoever got the Star Wars license, I'd want them to do a (mostly) bespoke system for it. Nothing would kill my enthusiasm for a Star Wars RPG than seeing feats, long rests, and subclasses, for example.

Yo, Star Borg is right there! And it's really good. And it has a full-length adventure, an expansion zine, and two more expansion zines in the pipeline.

Okay, I'll admit the "you're the rebel grunts and you could die in 1-2 hits" is maybe not what most people think of when they think of Star Wars, but Star Borg is actually a lot more forgiving than many other Borg games. You can see it in how JP and Kyle streamlined some of the rules, mostly removing a lot of the penalizing states: heavy armor isn't constricting; there is no "negative HP" state, etc. The Broken table isn't quite as deadly as people make it out to be, but more importantly reframing the Broken table is dirt simple; just come up with different results that feel more Star Wars-y: options could be getting captured, getting stunned or knocked out, breaking an item, losing a hand (because that's the only limb main characters can lose, it seems), or having a minor ally (droid, grunt, etc.) get critically wounded.

Plus it nails starship combat by keeping it entirely balanced around personal combat: PCs take "stations" on their ship, and their HP is what's tracked, not some nebulous number for their ship. Therefore, enemy ships are built the same as normal enemies, and you just have a Scale Dice rule for when you interact with stuff on a different scale.

I've actually worked on two different Cortex takes on Star Wars, and while that system can nail some of the interpersonal drama really well, Star Borg gets the fast and furious combat just right. With the smallest of tweaks it can very easily feel a lot more heroic, too.

Hah, that's awesome! Glad someone actually did that.

Years ago I had the vague idea of running a Dark Heresy campaign, only it was Star Wars: A New Hope, with Chewbacca (probably an Ork), Princess Leia, Luke, and Han as the PCs. Pretty much just translate it to the Warhammer 40K crapsack world and keep the plot intact.

 

[Kannik]

I mean, I think the D6 WEG game being so early and central in Star Wars Fandom formed this to a large extent.

From various accounts I've read, when Timothy Zahn was brought on board to write the Heir to the Empire trilogy, he was given the WEG sourcebooks as reference material to build upon, making much of what was included/added in those books canon.

(After RotJ there was essentially no new SW being made, so the RPG was inventing/extrapolating off old concept art/etc reams of new stuff. Very cool to think that thanks to 'us gamers', SW's universe continued to grow. )

 

[dbm]

It's funny, I love The One Ring and don't have much interest in their other games

Free League didn’t write The One Ring, they just publish it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Free League didn’t write The One Ring, they just publish it.

I know. I don't really care for the systems they write.

 

[Celebrim]

I'm not so sure. Characters in Star Wars, even the "mundane" ones, regularly pull off some amazing feats and skin of their teeth escapes. Without some sort of tool (Savage Worlds Bennies for example) you are subject to the whims of the unmodified dice and that results in a different genre. Genre isn't just trappings, it is also tone and style. This is why SWd6 is not a particularly good fit for Prequel/Sequel Star Wars.

Isn't this true of adapting all fiction to a game though? In the fiction, the characters have plot protection always. That is, whatever happens to them is ultimately just the whim of the author. But in no game does the character have plot protection always. They are always subject to the whims of the random number generator or to the limits of the players skill and attention.

In almost any heroic fiction, the hero struggles with somethings and triumphs in others. From a modelling perspective why can't we say that this was just the variations of random luck, with a sliding scale that simply says how weighted the dice are in the characters favor when attempting a particular task. Presumably Luke could have missed the shot on the death star and Anakin could have failed in all of his risky stunts, it's just we assume for game purposes that if Luke in the narrative is the sort of person that could have made the shot that in those circumstances the odds were in his favor for whatever reason. D6 for example suggests, he spent a force point at that time which it backs up by the narrative of the scene. Luke might have been only a marginal better pilot than those around him, or not at all, but he had "the Force" with him.

I don't see how your critique is particular to Star Wars and not basically all heroic fiction, nor do I see how in this sense the prequel era differs.