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viktor_haagI'm about a third of the way through this new edition of the Star Wars rolegame. On the whole, I'd say that this is a well-written book, but it has a few small glitches and if I were editing this or helping develop this game, I'd have made several suggestions:
• Please be more up front about your scale, especially if you're going to try to cross-pollinate this game so heavily with the minis line. It took me a fair amount of page flipping before I discovered that a square was 1.5m in size. D20 diehards, and D&D/SW mini diehards, might have thought that was second nature, but those of us "new to it" would certainly not have known that.
• Please be more explicit about what a "Skill Modifier" is with respect to task checks. One of the huge streamlining factors made in this incarnation of the D20 rules set is that you no longer have skill levels: you either know a skill or you do not (there is no try). If you do have training in a skill, you can add your Lvl+5 to the task roll; otherwise, you only get to add your Lvl. However, in opposed skill checks the "higher skill modifier" wins ties -- what does this mean? After much thought and page flipping, I came to the conclusion that "Skill Modifier" meant "everything you add to the D20 roll that doesn't come from outside circumstances" (i.e. DC modifiers). This means, plainly that a first-level trained individual will lose to a seventh level untrained individual, all other factors being equal: I think this is probably consistent with the genre, but it does give me a bit of the heebies.
• Your index sucks. You shouldn't even have bothered to include it. I can think of, off the top of my heads, three different ways you could have more profitably included the information your index does contain, and also a better way to use that page. You have a 285 page rulebook, and your index, on the face of it, is a single page? That in itself is a joke. When you consider that 80% of that index is consumed with a list of talents(!), the actual useful content of the index is pathetically small.
• For a simplified skill system, you have a huge mountain of complexity hidden below the surface that might bite a group in the ass: untrained use. There is ostensibly only one skill in the list that's not usable without training: Mechanics. But wait! Each skill in the game has several defined sub-uses: in many skills, not all of those sub-uses can be used without training. So really, your game doesn't have a list of 20 skills, it has a list of, say 100 skills gathered in a simple, two level tree! The character sheet and the skill summary table are next to useless at providing players with a quick reference to (a) what these sub-use "skills" are, and (b) which of those can be used untrained. How is this /simpler/? (Answer, it is not.) In actual play, it might work out to be very smooth and fit in well with the genre, but from my own experience with RPGs, I can attest that this kind of trickily defined sub-use system is hard for a group of casual players to implement. At the very least, before I play this game, I have to make up my own useful skill reference sheet that spells out for players what they can and cannot do with each particular skill, as defined in the game's rulebook.
• The classes seem at first glance to be uneven. The Noble in particular seems very short-shrifted. This is unabashadly a game (in the basic book, anyway) about kicking stormtrooper butt. Your Noble class is, to that end, rather like the Bard: useless as a front line character, and exists only to support other players. There are encouraging signs: some of the Noble's talents lead one to believe that the class would make a useful leader, negotiator, persuader, and so on. But the focus of the game is so clearly not on politics or character interaction (do those 'troopers even have a face under those helmets?), that one wonders what the Noble class might actually be good for amongst naive groups of players. Also, why the heck do we have a Scout and a Scoundrel? With the talents system in place, I think a single Scout class with "scoundrelly" talent trees as an option would have been better. Frankly, I think this game would have worked a heck of a lot better with only three classes: those who live by their wits, those who live by the Force, and those who live by their blasters. Let talents provide more specific character definition beyond that. Oh well. (Rather, it seems clear that what they did was build one character class for all the observed core characters in the SW movies, so once again, "plays well to specific genre", but if you want to tread off the beaten path...)
• For all that this is an "introductory rolegame" there's very little indication in it about what you'd actually do with this game. There are a smattering of actual play resources in the NPC templates, writeups of movie characters (I have an entire rant stored up about whether you should clog up your core game book with that crap -- to be brief: what in game use do they actually serve?), but no introductory adventure, no really useful information about "what your group will be doing/playing with your new shiny characters". The hardest part (to me) about playing D20 only gets a single page of information: how do you, as a GM, construct adventures with Challenge Levels and Encounter Difficulties and all that to model the kind of play you actually want? What should you do for your first adventure? How much content actually goes into an adventure? At what pace should you bring along your players and how do you work the system to achieve that pace? There seems to be very little assistance in this regard...
• Why is cash-counting and equipment-buying such an important part of your game when it has almost no presence at all in the genre!? Can we not have better resource mechanics that are closer to what is actually done in the movies? This is a solid holdover from the game's D&D roots. Do I really want my group of players to go "equipment shopping" so they can upgrade their Blaster Pistol, to Blaster Pistol Comma Sporting? I dearly hope not. The resource mechanics should have been much more abstract here (to the point of encapsulating wealth into a talent or two, and handwaving over the entire issue of equipment).
All that said, I'd like to try this game out to see if it actually works as WotC hopes. I have a neat idea to kick start a series of adventures in the SW universe that has a different focus than any of the movies, and I'd like to see if this game can make that happen.
• Please be more up front about your scale, especially if you're going to try to cross-pollinate this game so heavily with the minis line. It took me a fair amount of page flipping before I discovered that a square was 1.5m in size. D20 diehards, and D&D/SW mini diehards, might have thought that was second nature, but those of us "new to it" would certainly not have known that.
• Please be more explicit about what a "Skill Modifier" is with respect to task checks. One of the huge streamlining factors made in this incarnation of the D20 rules set is that you no longer have skill levels: you either know a skill or you do not (there is no try). If you do have training in a skill, you can add your Lvl+5 to the task roll; otherwise, you only get to add your Lvl. However, in opposed skill checks the "higher skill modifier" wins ties -- what does this mean? After much thought and page flipping, I came to the conclusion that "Skill Modifier" meant "everything you add to the D20 roll that doesn't come from outside circumstances" (i.e. DC modifiers). This means, plainly that a first-level trained individual will lose to a seventh level untrained individual, all other factors being equal: I think this is probably consistent with the genre, but it does give me a bit of the heebies.
• Your index sucks. You shouldn't even have bothered to include it. I can think of, off the top of my heads, three different ways you could have more profitably included the information your index does contain, and also a better way to use that page. You have a 285 page rulebook, and your index, on the face of it, is a single page? That in itself is a joke. When you consider that 80% of that index is consumed with a list of talents(!), the actual useful content of the index is pathetically small.
• For a simplified skill system, you have a huge mountain of complexity hidden below the surface that might bite a group in the ass: untrained use. There is ostensibly only one skill in the list that's not usable without training: Mechanics. But wait! Each skill in the game has several defined sub-uses: in many skills, not all of those sub-uses can be used without training. So really, your game doesn't have a list of 20 skills, it has a list of, say 100 skills gathered in a simple, two level tree! The character sheet and the skill summary table are next to useless at providing players with a quick reference to (a) what these sub-use "skills" are, and (b) which of those can be used untrained. How is this /simpler/? (Answer, it is not.) In actual play, it might work out to be very smooth and fit in well with the genre, but from my own experience with RPGs, I can attest that this kind of trickily defined sub-use system is hard for a group of casual players to implement. At the very least, before I play this game, I have to make up my own useful skill reference sheet that spells out for players what they can and cannot do with each particular skill, as defined in the game's rulebook.
• The classes seem at first glance to be uneven. The Noble in particular seems very short-shrifted. This is unabashadly a game (in the basic book, anyway) about kicking stormtrooper butt. Your Noble class is, to that end, rather like the Bard: useless as a front line character, and exists only to support other players. There are encouraging signs: some of the Noble's talents lead one to believe that the class would make a useful leader, negotiator, persuader, and so on. But the focus of the game is so clearly not on politics or character interaction (do those 'troopers even have a face under those helmets?), that one wonders what the Noble class might actually be good for amongst naive groups of players. Also, why the heck do we have a Scout and a Scoundrel? With the talents system in place, I think a single Scout class with "scoundrelly" talent trees as an option would have been better. Frankly, I think this game would have worked a heck of a lot better with only three classes: those who live by their wits, those who live by the Force, and those who live by their blasters. Let talents provide more specific character definition beyond that. Oh well. (Rather, it seems clear that what they did was build one character class for all the observed core characters in the SW movies, so once again, "plays well to specific genre", but if you want to tread off the beaten path...)
• For all that this is an "introductory rolegame" there's very little indication in it about what you'd actually do with this game. There are a smattering of actual play resources in the NPC templates, writeups of movie characters (I have an entire rant stored up about whether you should clog up your core game book with that crap -- to be brief: what in game use do they actually serve?), but no introductory adventure, no really useful information about "what your group will be doing/playing with your new shiny characters". The hardest part (to me) about playing D20 only gets a single page of information: how do you, as a GM, construct adventures with Challenge Levels and Encounter Difficulties and all that to model the kind of play you actually want? What should you do for your first adventure? How much content actually goes into an adventure? At what pace should you bring along your players and how do you work the system to achieve that pace? There seems to be very little assistance in this regard...
• Why is cash-counting and equipment-buying such an important part of your game when it has almost no presence at all in the genre!? Can we not have better resource mechanics that are closer to what is actually done in the movies? This is a solid holdover from the game's D&D roots. Do I really want my group of players to go "equipment shopping" so they can upgrade their Blaster Pistol, to Blaster Pistol Comma Sporting? I dearly hope not. The resource mechanics should have been much more abstract here (to the point of encapsulating wealth into a talent or two, and handwaving over the entire issue of equipment).
All that said, I'd like to try this game out to see if it actually works as WotC hopes. I have a neat idea to kick start a series of adventures in the SW universe that has a different focus than any of the movies, and I'd like to see if this game can make that happen.
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no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 17:13 (UTC)I'm in agreement with you there, with only one caveat: do the movie character's sheet display how known characters look in a way that's beneficial to the players?
The Victory Games James Bond gave us a half dozen PCs of various skill levels to show what a OO, Agent and Rookie looked like, and all of them were character designs that PCs could attain over play. The WEG Star Wars write ups for the movie heroes were so over-bloated that PCs could never match them, and they made the starting PCs (who were hugely competent) look pathetic in comparison. Obviously, the first was much more useful to me than the second.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 20:34 (UTC)What would have been very useful was actually three to six character writeups for Vader. That could easily have shown players how Annakin starts out as a first level character in the first (story order) movie and grows over time to advance through levels. This, with some very brief comments, would have given players a concrete example of how a character changes through time during the game.
But, as it is, few of the character writeups are even in the same story-world timeframe with respect to one another! This makes them of extremely dubious utility!
To me, you might as well have pulled those writeups and pasted in ads for Lucas Arts, because frankly I think they're on the same level of usefulness (OK, that's probably too bitter, ranty, and over-reacting).
If you want my players to play the movie characters, then write the damn book that way, and give us actual play resources to do that (the James Bond game was set up to do this, and talking with Neill Randall about the game, it was clear that the writers/designers had a very concrete notion that their intended audience would be divided between people who wanted to play Bond and/or Amasova, and people who wanted to create their own characters).
But the game is clearly not intended for that purpose -- starting PCs are on the level of Luke and Leia in ep IV, or Annakin and Padme in ep I -- and yet they have all this cruft of film character writeups. What are we to do with them? Use them as NPCs? Use them as PCs? Use them as examples of characters at their respective levels? I don't see that they're particularly useful as any of these. Indeed, I'm not sure they're very good as advertising -- the writeup for Obi Wan, for example, doesn't seem to me to show very well how you can actually writeup and play Obi Wan with this set of rules: there seem to be lots of talents he exhibits in the movies that aren't included, and a lot of talents that seem to be not-quite-so-central to his character: quick, when I say "Obi-Wan" is the first thing that jumps to your mind, "Oh, yeah! He's that lightsabre duellist God!". Um.... no.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 23:19 (UTC)Your idea re Vader is dead on - it's the sort of thing I would have liked to have seen in the WEG version of the game as well. However, what your describing of their actual implementation sounds worse that useless. Unless they're warning you that their target audience and designed play style is people who see Obi-Wan solely as a lightsaber duelist God. And if that's the case it's a fair warning for me to put down the book and walk slowly away.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-14 01:57 (UTC)However, that said, I think the talent tree notion is rather interesting and just reading through the game so far is encouraging; at the very least it feels like after a good long time in development, the D20 engine has had lots of rather sharp corners filed off. For example, Attacks Of Opportunity are still there, but they're finally explained in a very straightforward and comprehensible fashion, and in a way that makes me think I could use them effectively in a game that didn't depend on a battle-map and minis.
In short, I'd say, if you can get it used or at a deep discount through an online book retailer, then it might be worth a look. If for nothing else as a sort of example of where the industry might be headed. I would not be at all surprised to see an impending 4th edition D&D make just the same kind of switch, right down to matching systems and book designs: simpler, leaner, smoother.
It's an interesting curiosity if nothing else; it's sort of like looking at "the new Cadillac" after they did their design revolution a few years back. It's still a fuddy-duddy mainstream car, but nevertheless, they did a host of rather interesting things to the form and functionality.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-14 02:29 (UTC)All that said, I'd like to try this game out to see if it actually works as WotC hopes. I have a neat idea to kick start a series of adventures in the SW universe that has a different focus than any of the movies, and I'd like to see if this game can make that happen.
What! And still with your great SOTC: Operation Atlantis! game still needing your time and attention?!?
::B::
no subject
Date: 2007-06-14 13:44 (UTC)Sadly, yes. I'm speaking of my Friday night gaming group that includes my wife; we meet every Friday, at our house more often than not, and our group is very happy to play a boardgame in the weeks when I haven't got any prep done or energy to muster on roleplaying. In that respect, all of us are sort of in "casual" roleplaying mode which has advantages and disadvantages. But it does have the benefit of being a standing commitment in my family's social calendar, time with my wife, and therefore committee-approved.