No more FFG Star Wars?

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.

FFG Star Wars systemic thoughts

Here are some thoughts on the FFG Star Wars RPG system, based on actual play.



Never tell me the odds! In fact, I have no idea how to easily calculate them. I'm sure it can be done but it's not instinctive math for me.

This is good and bad.

The good is that you have a lot more, "Just try it!" moments. Will it work? Maybe. Is two green dice and a yellow vs. a purple and a black die a good enough shot of success? No idea. Roll and we'll see. It certainly drove a lot of very directed play.

The bad is that you have no idea if something is supposed to be reasonable or not. Did I fail despite the odds, or fail because what I tried is totally unlikely to succeed? There is a line between "heroic risk taking" and "betting success on dice" and it's easy to go over to the latter.

It's fun rolling, but it's also novel, and we'll see if it's still fun when the novelty runs out.

False Hope I have to say I was disappointed with the number of times the blue bonus die didn't pan out with anything. Four in six it does something positive, but when we needed it, it mostly did nothing. Sigh. Same with the black die - we granted one to someone when we really needed bad stuff to happen to him. The GM rolled a blank. It was like, well, too bad I wasted that. Some of that is just complaining that things didn't go well, but as a game design issue, it did feel kind of lame that our ability to shift the odds in our favor really wasn't mattering very much.

I can't think of an advantage. A few times we had, say, a fairly trivial action come up with one success and two threats. Uh, okay, they are what? Play slows a little for a few moments. Or failure with some huge stack of advantage (I got a failure and four advantage once), say, and we all need to figure out how to work that. It's fun when the rolls really matter, but it means the more trivial "all we need to know is pass/fail" rolls that were still of consequence were more complex. I bet we smooth over and brush over a lot of that in the future.

Chargen vs. In Play

I was pretty excited because it seemed like "XP" for Chargen and "XP" earned in play are one and the same. They are, except stats bought up in play don't feed into secondary traits. If your Wounds are 10 + Brawn, getting Brawn 3 at Chargen is worth 13 Wounds, but if you then buy a Brawn 4, you stay at 13. Hmm. You can buy talents that up Wounds, for example, but it's not tied to play.

I dislike that specific kind of chargen vs. in play splits. Bah. Just making it work the same way all the time is easier on everyone involved, don't people realize this?

Careers

I'm intrigued by the Career & Specialty approach. Especially since you can have multiple specialties and cross-career specialties. It's just weird trying to fit the guy I want to play in my head into the path that lets me do that the best. I have some cool character ideas that flow from careers, but they aren't actually guys I'd want to commit to running. I may yet change my mind and do so, but mostly I've been flipping around two different rulebooks trying to find the guy that has the stuff I see myself wanting my guy to be.

So as usual I'm trying to shoehorn myself into a career. At least in fantasy games I just want to be a fighter or a monk.

You never know. But it's down to picking where I want to end up, and finding out which career leads there.

Star Wars: Episode I - Escape from Mos Shuuta

Today one of my gamers GMed Star Wars for us. He ran a short campaign of d20 Star Wars for us back in the day. Similar plot - get a ship and get off of Tattooine. That campaign ran a few sessions, the last of which happened shortly after I moved overseas. It didn't continue for a lot of logistical reasons. But we had great memories of it. So when he mentioned this game, our instant response was, "YES, we will absolutely play any system for Star Wars if you run it."

Today, that's what we did, using Edge of Empire and pre-made characters in a starter adventure.

Star Wars - Edge of Empire

I'll put up a summary tomorrow - but for now, suffice it to say we played some Star Wars: Edge of Empire.

The highlights:

- droid jokes. And Futurama bot jokes.

- terrible Star Wars names

- a GM who pulled out all the stops, such as a soundboard full of Star Wars music, wookie noises, sound effects, and more.

- shopkeepers who are tougher than slavers.

- fooling droids and rescuing other droids

- crazy dice

- our first steps towards rebellion

- finally a game where our off-topic Star Wars comments are on-topic roleplaying.


It just made me sad I can't find my DVD copies of the movies. I may have to re-attach my VCR and watch Star Wars again.