Tenkar posted this about FFG jettisoning RPGs. Or at least fired the whole RPG staff.
We played that game a while back, GMed by my Star Wars fan cousin. It was great.
I wasn't terribly impressed by the FFG Star Wars system. Chargen seemed needlessly fiddly - making the guy you want took a lot of juggling around races and options and spending, and even then you had to cut corners (or at least I did.) The funky dice made it hard to judge whether I was actually going to succeed at what I rolled or not, or the odds. Yeah, I know - "Never tell me the odds." I couldn't - I genuinely had no idea how to figure out the risk level of my decisions. That made my actions more of a guess than a judgment call, and helped make me less connected to my character.
We haven't gone back to the system. The judgment I had on the system still feel accurate.
I'm bummed for the people who lost their jobs. Especially in this tiny industry. But the product I had contact with didn't thrill me so much I wanted to play with it again. Maybe our two GURPS-fan Star wars nut players will kitbash something out of GURPS. GURPS Action has a good set of rules for chases and for modifiers in general. Ultra-Tech has weaponry that'll do for most purposes. Force swords probably need a little tweaking (based on what I see, they cut really well but swinging them really, really hard has some benefit, so clearly they have a ST-based component in the only movies that matter - the first three.) Jedi powers are tougher, but hey, being a Jedi will rightly be expensive. I'd play.
Nobody would be crazy enough to make a GURPS knock-off of Star Wars.
ReplyDeleteThis does concern me, though. I had the sense that FFG's Star Wars was one of the more popular RPGs, and that FFG RPGs in general were some of the more profitable RPGs. If that's so and FFG is washing its hand of RPGs, then the market must be really bad right now.
If they're serious about kitbashing a GURPS Star Wars, point them at Mailanka's Psi Wars page.
ReplyDeleteOh hey Mailanka, didn't see you up there not plugging your stuff...
And yeah, funky dice are a hard turn off for me, even though I can calculate the odds (roughly).
Dagnabit... and the whole point of discussin Mailanka's Psi wars page was to link drop:
Deletehttp://mailanka.blogspot.com/2016/07/a-psi-wars-primer.html
They'll find it, but it's worth noting that I wouldn't want to play a knockoff or a near-clone, but the actual thing . . . as perceived by those two guys. It's no knock on Mailanka's work, just that I'd want to see what they did themselves.
DeleteOh sure. Like when I next run my "Star Wars" game, Sengoku Jedi, it'll be //my// take on Star Wars. Very shades of grey with heroes who struggle to do the Right Thing in a universe torn asunder by war, where the the Right Thing oftens means doing wrong to those who do not deserve it. But even though my Star Wars/Samurai mashup is //my// take, I am definitely stealing Mailanka's Communion. Probably a few other things as well...
DeleteMy favorite Star Wars is still the old West End Games D6
ReplyDeleteWEG's d6 system has a fond place in my nostalgias... but it wasn't a very good system at all.
DeleteThere are absolutely home-brew GURPS Star Wars materials knocking around on-line. I ran a little campaign of my own about 15 years ago.
ReplyDeleteAs I recall, the conceit of the old West End D6 game was similar to that of Pendragon -- in that the PCs were presumed to be playing in the margins of the same universe as the main characters. That seemed calculated to marginalize the players and their efforts, so for my GURPS game I assumed that Han Solo hadn't come back in the nick of time at the end of the first movie, and Princess Leia and 3PO had narrowly escaped the destruction of the rebel base after Luke got shot down. I had one player playing Leia, with 3PO as an Ally, and all other characters original, trying to rebuild the rebellion. Worked very well.