Star Wars RPG

I couldn't resist.

West End Games' Star Wars RPG is a fun, easy-to-learn system. Because of this, people hate it and avoid it like the plague.

There were a lot of supplements and modules made for the system; you can see them all here. As some of the earliest Expanded Universe works that weren't in the "technically happened but so shit you shouldn't remind people they exist" bin, some of the concepts and characters introduced have become fairly widespread. Timothy Zahn was actually given copies of this game and the supplements available at the time as reference books for use when writing the Hand of Thrawn duology.

Star Wars D6 is also infamous for failing utterly at the metric system. Someone went and worked out the size of all the ship models used in the movies in feet, then someone printed these directly but changed the unit to meters without doing any math (not even converting it to yards first). This resulted in some fantastically fucked up measurements the EU would often repeat without question.

Fantasy Flight Games has acquired the rights to the Star Wars RPG and will be reprinting both the core rulebook and the Star Wars Sourcebook as a limited-edition 30th anniversary set. The release data has since slipped from Q4 2017 into 2018, but FFG is accepting preorders now.

The system:

Every character has six attributes: Strength (punchin' and liftin'), Dexterity (shootin' and dodgin'), Perception (lookin'), Knowledge (knowin'), Mechanical (drivin', bantha ridin'), and Technical (droid fixin'). These are rated by how many dice are in them; an average human character has a Strength of 3D, which means she rolls 3d6 every time she makes a Strength check.

Skills fall under attributes, and their dice are added to the attribute when making skill checks. For example, if you have a Dex of 4D and you put one point into Blasters, your Blasters skill starts at 5D.

NPC characters get 12D to divide between their attributes, and PCs (or important NPCs) get 18D. The minimum attribute rating for a human is 2D, and the max (for a human) is 4D.

One attribute die can be split up into bonuses applied to other attributes. You can split it up into three +1s or a +1 and a +2. The bonus is then applied to another attribute (so your Strength 4D becomes 4D+2, and all skills under it gain a +2). You can't put all three points into one attribute.

Skills are rated the same way as attributes, but the cap on a skill is 13D. Characters get 7D to put into skills at character creation. No more than 2 points can be put into a skill at creation.

You can take one point from your 7 starting skill points and use it to make 3 specializations for other skills. If you had Blaster Pistols 5D and used one of the specializations on it, you could have Blaster Pistols 5D (Heavy Blaster Pistols 6D).

In a little twist, they added the Wild Die in 2E to spice up the rolls, witch meant that one of the dice rolled was replaced with an Exploding die.

Different Editions

The game has various iterations which are all pretty interchangeable:

• Star Wars (1987)(Simplest, least options, but still some people's favourite)
• Star Wars 2nd Edition (1992)
• Star Wars 2nd Edition, Revised & Expanded (RE) (1996)

And finally:

• Star Wars Revised, Expanded & Updated (REUP) (2015)(free, massive new fan created version, top choice for most people)
• Star Wars 30th Anniversary Edition (2018) (reprint of 1E)

Example

If you have a bounty hunter character with a blaster skill of 5D, you roll 5d6 every time you shoot at something. If the GM decides that you rolled high enough to hit (usually 10-15 is good enough), the other character rolls a Strength check (and adds on any dice they get for wearing armor). If their roll's total is higher, they shrug it off; if the attacker's roll is higher, the victim gets hurt (and depending on how crappy they rolled, they might die).

Halagad Ventor

Halagad Ventor was a minor character for the module Domain of Evil. He's a Jedi that gets tortured into the Dark Side by Vader and escapes, hides on a swamp planet and creates a creepy swamp filled with with partially real Force illusions. The horror setting made the module popular and well remembered so Halagad Ventor is referenced everywhere. He's even co-star of a book.

D20 Star Wars

One could also ignore all the previous shit on this page and just play the Wizards of the Coast Star Wars D20, which is exactly like D&D similar to d20 Modern. There are mostly just two versions: the original/Revised edition, and Saga Edition.

Despite certain opinions, both editions are pretty wildly different in several respects. Revised is arguably far, far more detailed: you are guaranteed followers/cohorts at certain points in your career, there's a LOT of detail in skills and certain class abilities, there's a much heavier reliance on prestige classes as a way to train up certain abilities, starship battles are pretty complex (on par with the d6 system, if you get down to it, with different math behind it all), and the Force is absolutely a whole other system (i.e. you have to learn additional skills, feats, and other stuff to even use certain things). It seems like a big, hot mess of a game, but it actually was pretty charming in its way. It didn't suffer nearly as much "bloat" as D&D 3.5 did in it's later life, and you could come up with some pretty wild combinations of things if you wanted to play not-Jedi Force-using characters with some combat ability.

Saga Edition was published before D&D 4th edition, and you see almost all of 4th editions best ideas in this game. They simplified a LOT of stuff, making it so that instead of dealing with two dozen classes, you just have five basic classes and a smattering of prestige classes. The diversity comes in with Talent trees: each class gets access to certain lists of Talents that give that class special abilities. Additionally, starship combat (and creating custom starships) was simplified in certain ways to be more narrative in nature than crunchy. The Force was dramatically simplified: you have the Use The Force skill to make any checks, and a combination of class talents and feats unlocked the powers-per-day you can use. Spending Force Points (or accruing Dark Side Points) could alter how powers worked.

In some ways, Saga Edition was better. It vastly reduced the "bloat" of bonuses, penalties, and stats, simplifying a lot of the game to make it faster and smoother to play. Rather than needing to multiclass a lot, you might only pick one or at most two additional classes to grab talents or skills you really needed for a particular build. The way the Force was handled was by making it more like the way abilities in D&D 4th edition were: you had a suite of powers you can use, and it takes a few minutes of rest/meditation to recover them.

In other ways, Saga Edition was shit. They butchered the starship stuff so bad that back-porting the Revised system is sometimes arguably better, for several reasons. They eliminated the arc/facing of starship weapons, meaning that GMs had to "wing it" on how much firepower a ship could bring to bear on other ships at any given time. They tried to force-feed the size category mechanic for ships so that they fit their actual relative size (a Gargantuan starfighter was exactly as big as a Gargantuan creature/droid), then had to add silly sub-size categories like Frigate, Capital, and Station because they realized Colossal was only the biggest thing in a D&D game, for the most part. Moreover, the system for modifying or constructing starships was a little borked up in places, making it impossible to customize stuff without GM fiat.

Aside from starships, Saga Edition also gutted a lot of stuff from Revised that was kind of welcome. The rules in Revised where you got automatic henchmen was stripped out, then they went back and added shitty mechanics to get minions in a later supplement, along with some odd rules about giving them orders and what action economy it costs. Never mind that NPCs in Saga Edition fucking suck. No, really, if you don't have heroic character levels, you are simply an "ordinary" person who can't do shit.

Droids were a mixed bag: several improvements to keeping them moderately realistic in a game as PCs were made, but with some strange, convoluted schemes that mixed equipment and actual character levels. It takes some reading to figure out, but in the end droids aren't really more or less powerful than before, just different.

There is also one interesting mechanic in Saga Edition that is of some use to some of you GMs: organizations and military requisition rules. Organizations follow the rules for such things found in late D&D 3.5: you attain levels/ranks in the group, and you get stuff in excahnge (stat boosts, equipment, etc.). Military requisition works very identically, with your relative success/popularity determining how easy it is for you to get shit done. Your military rank and victories have a direct correlation to how much you can ask for, whether it's better blasters and armor for the party, or a handy orbital strike during your mission.

Best idea might be to kludge together parts from both systems, such as the Revised edition vehicle/starship rules with the rest of Saga Edition.

Graveyard

The simplicity and straightforwardness of the system inspired loads of MUDs based on this, but most are dead or small.