The Inside Scoop on Gaming

My friends and I ran out and bought ourselves copies of this book as soon as it was released; one of the guys in our group is an excellent GM with cyberpunk-ish and sci-fi games, and we were looking forward to see what he could do with Star Wars.

Not much, it turned out, and I place most of the blame for that squarely on the classes. In D&D, classes are broken down primarily into roles, you get the guy who hacks things, the girl who nukes things, and the guy who backstabs things and steals stuff. In Star Wars, however, the classes are more like social strata. The most obvious two are Fringer (read: bum) and Noble. What does being poor or rich have to do with your role in a group that is so unique to how much money you have that they needed to make it into a class? I'll tell you, not enough. They would have been HUGELY better off with profession-based classes like technicians than something as nebulous as "rich guy" or "poor kid". While the D&D classes are crystal-sharp in the distinctions what they do, you can break the SW classes into force-user and non-force-user, beyond that it's very difficult to come up with an exact purpose for any one class.

I have an example for this from our game sessions, we were playing around the time of Empire, so there weren't any jedi in the group, just a couple of scoundrels, a scout, a fringer, and a soldier. Nobody really had anything that was unique to them, everyone could shoot a blaster at about the same effectiveness, everyone could fix the hyperdrive, everyone could pilot the shuttle, and nobody felt in any way important to the party. Nobody wore armor, because armor is terrible in the game, which is pretty true to the movies, I must admit. Never seemed to keep the stormtroopers from dropping like flies that I ever saw.

Anyways, when the D20 system is used in D&D, you might have a situation along the lines of, "Okay, the rogue will pick the lock, the wizard will toss a lightning bolt into the room, the fighter and paladin will run in and beat up anything still standing, then the cleric will heal anyone who's hurt and cast any other spells that the situation needs." When it's used for Star Wars, however, we got, "Okay, we'll blast open the lock, then everyone will pour blaster fire into the room until everything dies."

The mechanics involved in Star Wars doesn't really hamper anyone from being a jack-of-all-trades, most classes have more than ample skill points to take useful class skills and still take one or two good cross-class skills. The force-users will be burning up all of their skill points for force stuff, but everyone else is free to be a technician pilot spy hedge-trimmer. They make you take feats to be good at a few skills, such as piloting, but most of the feats are so useless that you'll be scraping the bottom of the barrel in any event, so you might as well take those profession-enhancing feats as opposed to the "You get +2 to your bellydancing skill!" feat.

The Force. It fills us and surrounds us and binds us all together, and it hurts us to use it, apparently. You have to burn vitality points (the SW equivalent of hit points) to use force abilities. Why didn't they make a different set of points to spend on force abilities? Even though vitality points can be reclaimed quickly, it would be downright disgraceful to die from stubbing your toe against that R2 droid because you'd burned up all of your vitality from doing parlor tricks to impress the kids. While I realize that they had to do something to keep someone from being able to use the force infinitely and just breezing through all troubles, I don't think they chose the right way with this.

I do have to complement the game on its vitality/wound point system. On top of the basic vitality points, you get a number of wound points equal to your constitution score. Once your vitality points are gone, or you take a critical hit, damage is scored against those wound points, representing much more serious damage. In this way even 20th level characters can die from a good blaster shot, as opposed to 20th level D&D characters who can (and I'm not making this up) fall from space, reenter the atmosphere, and impact the rocky surface of a planet and still have a chance of surviving it. That's under second edition rules, but third edition characters still have a huge quantity of hit points to work with.

Star Wars also lacks any real motivators to increase in levels, there aren't any spells to be gained, any magic items to get, just small refinements in skills. When looking through the book, I couldn't find anything that made me think, "Wow, I couldn't wait to get to x level to get that!" All of the technological toys can be bought at any time, none of the force abilities are all that spectacular, there's nothing there to grab a player and inspire them to take down that Death Star. On the other hand, that leaves it up to the GM to provide incentive through storyline and other rewards, which is a good thing, but the classes themselves don't have anything to offer greater experience.

Overall, I consider Star Wars to be something of a disappointment. I don't think Wizards spent as much time as they ought to have when converting D20 from swords & sorcery to firearms & force, some of the mechanics just didn't work very well, and many of the core aspects such as classes, skills, and feats were not done as well as they could have been. While I don't think of the D20 Star Wars as bad, I do think they could have done a much better job of it.

Style: 2 (Needs Work)
Substance: 2 (Sparse)

Star Wars RPG Core Rulebook
Author: Bill Slavicsek Category: game Company/Publisher: WotC Line: Star Wars Cost: $35 Page count: 320 Playtest Review by George Jackson on 01/06/01. Genre tags: Fantasy Science fiction Historical Space	My friends and I ran out and bought ourselves copies of this book as soon as it was released; one of the guys in our group is an excellent GM with cyberpunk-ish and sci-fi games, and we were looking forward to see what he could do with Star Wars. Not much, it turned out, and I place most of the blame for that squarely on the classes. In D&D, classes are broken down primarily into roles, you get the guy who hacks things, the girl who nukes things, and the guy who backstabs things and steals stuff. In Star Wars, however, the classes are more like social strata. The most obvious two are Fringer (read: bum) and Noble. What does being poor or rich have to do with your role in a group that is so unique to how much money you have that they needed to make it into a class? I'll tell you, not enough. They would have been HUGELY better off with profession-based classes like technicians than something as nebulous as "rich guy" or "poor kid". While the D&D classes are crystal-sharp in the distinctions what they do, you can break the SW classes into force-user and non-force-user, beyond that it's very difficult to come up with an exact purpose for any one class. I have an example for this from our game sessions, we were playing around the time of Empire, so there weren't any jedi in the group, just a couple of scoundrels, a scout, a fringer, and a soldier. Nobody really had anything that was unique to them, everyone could shoot a blaster at about the same effectiveness, everyone could fix the hyperdrive, everyone could pilot the shuttle, and nobody felt in any way important to the party. Nobody wore armor, because armor is terrible in the game, which is pretty true to the movies, I must admit. Never seemed to keep the stormtroopers from dropping like flies that I ever saw. Anyways, when the D20 system is used in D&D, you might have a situation along the lines of, "Okay, the rogue will pick the lock, the wizard will toss a lightning bolt into the room, the fighter and paladin will run in and beat up anything still standing, then the cleric will heal anyone who's hurt and cast any other spells that the situation needs." When it's used for Star Wars, however, we got, "Okay, we'll blast open the lock, then everyone will pour blaster fire into the room until everything dies." The mechanics involved in Star Wars doesn't really hamper anyone from being a jack-of-all-trades, most classes have more than ample skill points to take useful class skills and still take one or two good cross-class skills. The force-users will be burning up all of their skill points for force stuff, but everyone else is free to be a technician pilot spy hedge-trimmer. They make you take feats to be good at a few skills, such as piloting, but most of the feats are so useless that you'll be scraping the bottom of the barrel in any event, so you might as well take those profession-enhancing feats as opposed to the "You get +2 to your bellydancing skill!" feat. The Force. It fills us and surrounds us and binds us all together, and it hurts us to use it, apparently. You have to burn vitality points (the SW equivalent of hit points) to use force abilities. Why didn't they make a different set of points to spend on force abilities? Even though vitality points can be reclaimed quickly, it would be downright disgraceful to die from stubbing your toe against that R2 droid because you'd burned up all of your vitality from doing parlor tricks to impress the kids. While I realize that they had to do something to keep someone from being able to use the force infinitely and just breezing through all troubles, I don't think they chose the right way with this. I do have to complement the game on its vitality/wound point system. On top of the basic vitality points, you get a number of wound points equal to your constitution score. Once your vitality points are gone, or you take a critical hit, damage is scored against those wound points, representing much more serious damage. In this way even 20th level characters can die from a good blaster shot, as opposed to 20th level D&D characters who can (and I'm not making this up) fall from space, reenter the atmosphere, and impact the rocky surface of a planet and still have a chance of surviving it. That's under second edition rules, but third edition characters still have a huge quantity of hit points to work with. Star Wars also lacks any real motivators to increase in levels, there aren't any spells to be gained, any magic items to get, just small refinements in skills. When looking through the book, I couldn't find anything that made me think, "Wow, I couldn't wait to get to x level to get that!" All of the technological toys can be bought at any time, none of the force abilities are all that spectacular, there's nothing there to grab a player and inspire them to take down that Death Star. On the other hand, that leaves it up to the GM to provide incentive through storyline and other rewards, which is a good thing, but the classes themselves don't have anything to offer greater experience. Overall, I consider Star Wars to be something of a disappointment. I don't think Wizards spent as much time as they ought to have when converting D20 from swords & sorcery to firearms & force, some of the mechanics just didn't work very well, and many of the core aspects such as classes, skills, and feats were not done as well as they could have been. While I don't think of the D20 Star Wars as bad, I do think they could have done a much better job of it. Style: 2 (Needs Work) Substance: 2 (Sparse)

Star Wars RPG Core Rulebook