Despite not being a massive Star Wars fan, I've played a few Star Wars games. The first one was d6 Star Wars (which I think is officially called Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game) and second was Star Wars: Saga Edition. But since I only played a couple of sessions of each (I was more of an occasional cameo in that group that a regular player, due to living in a different town) I don't remember enough about them to say anything particularly useful.
More recently, I've tried a couple more.
Savage Star Wars
I can't tell you which of the many fan-made Star Wars conversions of Savage Worlds we were playing. What I can tell you is that despite a sterling effort not to make Jedis overpowered, all but one of us ended up playing them anyway (although that was partly a side effect of the campaign brief).If I ever want to know if a system is prone to being min-maxed there's one guy in the home group I can count on. I forget what type of alien he was playing. All I remember is that he took so many abilities/drawbacks/whatever Savage Worlds calls them that affected his movement speed that he could barely move. Fortunately, as a Jedi, he was able to force push himself around significantly faster than he could walk.
I had a lot of fun with this campaign, and was pretty sad when it stopped. A big part of that was the character I'd created. Min-maxing issues aside, the options presented were very helpful to me, not a massive Star Wars nerd, in creating an interesting character. While it was years ago now, I still have fond memories of Tamaga, my Twi'Lek former slave, who'd accidentally killed her owner because she didn't know blasters has a kill setting as well as stun, and couldn't read the switch on the blaster because her owner hadn't allowed her to learn to read.
The Savage Worlds rules themselves, however, I don't feel added much. They're functional, because Savage Worlds is a perfectly reasonable generic system, but unless you're particularly keen on it, there's no real reason to pick this particular version of Star Wars.
Star Wars: Edge of the Empire (Fantasy Flight Games)
This is a game I absolutely should not like.It's got a setting that's so big and complicated that I feel completely lost in it. It's got a ton of splatbooks, and massive lists of aliens with completely meaningless (to me) names. The character sheets go on for several pages. It uses my least favourite dice mechanic, dice pools. And not just any dice pools, it's the weird narrative dice that nobody liked in Warhammer FRP 3e. It only needs a ton of marginally different types of equipment to...oh look, it's got that too.
It's like someone tried to shove all my least favourite RPG things into one massive bloated monstrosity. And somehow came out with a really enjoyable game.
Zatti, my constantly stressed out Noghri thief, might not be as conceptually well realised as Tamaga, but the game mechanics are somehow serving to build her story as the game progresses. I doubt she's in any way an optimised character build, but I feel like she's got her place in the group all the same.
Part of what's making it work, I think, is the restrictions the GM has put on us. Obviously the group is mostly Noghris. He's also restricted which books we can use for buying equipment, which as someone whose head explodes when faced with the Cyberpunk 2020 Chromebooks (and not just because of the cover art) I really appreciate. He knew the story he wanted to tell, and set things up to make it work.
EotE can do pretty much anything, which could lead to trying to do everything. But so long as you know what you want to do, and can keep focused on that, you can be reasonably confident it'll do it.
No comments:
Post a Comment