
I'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.