[Design Review] Star Wars Roleplaying Game Saga Edition

This will hopefully be my first of several “design reviews”. These will basically be reviews of games, but with a focus on what can be gleaned from the game in terms of game design. I would be very interested in reading other people’s thoughts on these games and their designs.

What is the Star Wars Roleplaying Game Saga Edition?

This is a roleplaying game based in the Star Wars universe. Rules-wise, it is based off of the “d20” game engine developed for the 3ed edition of Dungeons & Dragons. This makes it more on the denser end of the spectrum of rules complexity. This game is called the “Saga Edition” to make it distinct from the previous original and “Revised” editions of the Star Wars RPG by Wizards of the Coast.

Let’s talk about some of the basics of this game. The game uses a simple d20 mechanic. This means that, most of the time, when your character attempts something that has a chance for either success or failure, you roll a 20-sided die and add or subtract modifiers based on your character’s statistics and circumstances. Then, you compare the resulting value to a target number based on what they are trying to achieve. If you roll high enough, then your character is successful. That is the core of the game rules right there. I like this because it is relatively simple and easy to learn. In addition to this, a simple rule of thumb is that anything that should help your character succeed gives a +2 bonus on the roll, and anything that might hinder them imposes a -2 penalty. There is a lot more detail to the game than that, but with that little bit of knowledge you can pretty much follow everything that is going on in the game.

Creating a Character

An important aspect of any RPG is the player characters and how you make them. Because this is Star Wars it is important that people be able to play as any of the many different aliens from that setting. Between the RPG’s core rulebook and its many supplements, the game provides over 100 species as options for player characters. For the most part, aside from story implications, choosing a species for your character will modify a couple of your character’s statistics and grant them one or two minor abilities.

I like that they covered so many of the species. I like that your choice of species has some mechanical effect on your character, but it doesn’t define them completely. I think this fits pretty well with the way aliens are portrayed in the movies and books. Often times, the different species are just different-looking humans with a couple of cultural or physiological quirks.

In addition to choosing a species, you’ll choose one of five classes for your character to start in. These classes represent archetypical characters, and include the Jedi, noble, scoundrel, scout, and soldier. It is easy to relate the heroes of the Star Wars saga to these classes. Obi-Wan is a Jedi, Princess Leia is a noble, Han Solo is a scoundrel, etc. This makes it pretty easy to create a new character by comparing them to your favorite Star Wars characters. If you want to play a cunning smuggler like Han, just pick the scoundrel class. Each class has a list of special abilities, called talents, associated with it. You choose talents from your class as you level up, allowing you to customize your character even within their class. So, one Jedi might be a master with the lightsaber, while another Jedi might focus on Force-assisted negotiations.

If you really want to create a character that doesn’t quite fit one of these five classes, you have the option of taking levels in multiple classes as your character advances. So Lando Calrissian might be a scoundrel/noble, and Boba Fett might be a scout/scoundrel/soldier. There are also “prestige classes”, like Jedi Knight and Bounty Hunter, which you can move into once you get to higher levels. These give your character access to new abilities, but make your character a little narrower in focus.

Actually, I’m torn on the classes. I do like the simple, pick-up-and-go nature of classes. And I like that the talents these classes have give every character some really interesting abilities. For example, with the right combination of talents from the noble class you could neutralize an opponent in a fight without ever dealing a blow – effectively “talking them down”. If I’m imagining my character as a high-minded political figure, I can just grab the noble class and I’ve got what I want. But, if I’m imagining my character as a Force-sensitive trader from a backwater world, who’s got a knack for stealth and for understanding computers – there’s no easy way to create that at first level. Some kind of system that allowed for quick character creation based on an archetype, but that also allowed more advanced players to create a character to their exact specifications without jumping through a lot of hoops, would be nice.

There are also feats. These are special abilities that any character can gain over time which make them more proficient at certain things, or grant them new maneuvers. This adds another level of customization that transcends classes. Feats are a good idea, making certain abilities and proficiencies available to any character, regardless of class. I sort of think that the difference between feats and talents is superficial. Talents are basically class-specific feats. As such, I kind of wish they would have just made all talents feats and maybe just suggested certain feats would be good picks for certain character types – if it wasn’t self evident.

In addition to all these things, characters have a variety of other game statistics, such as their ratings in six major attributes (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma). These affect pretty much everything they do by adding a bonus or penalty to their die rolls. They also have three different defense ratings for resisting different types of attacks, Hit Points, skills, and so forth. I won’t go into detail on these here because they’re things that are pretty typical to a lot of RPGs.

On top of all of that, you can trick your character out with cool gadgets and weaponry that evoke the style of the Star Wars universe.

Getting Things Done

Here is something I’d like to touch on, because as a GM it kind of bugs me. As I mentioned earlier, most of the time when you want to do something, you’ll roll a d20, add some modifiers and compare the result to a target number. This is fine, and pretty simple. However – to give a more thorough explanation – most of the time, you’ll also be using a skill. In the Star Wars RPG there are nineteen skills that characters can be trained in, ranging from Acrobatics to Use the Force, covering such things as Deception, Mechanics, Survival, and Swim in between.

This can become a problem when you have to decide which skill a character is using to perform a certain task (and this can be important, depending on which skills they’re trained in, etc.). For example, if I describe my character as jumping over the heads of a group of stormtroopers to make my escape, is that the Jump skill? Sounds like it, but according to the rules, it is actually using the Acrobatics skill to tumble – specifically because I would be attempting to move through a space controlled by my enemies. There are some other tricky ones, too, like Deception and Persuasion. I think it might be nice to have a few less skills, and have each skill more distinct.

Another thing about the way skills are done is, because skills are used for nearly everything, they’ve also tried to provide rules for using skills in nearly every situation. For example, there is a specific rule for changing your story when someone sees through an attempted deception. If that particular situation ever comes up in actual play, I doubt I’ll remember that rule or where to find it. If I’m GMing I’ll probably just say something like “roll again, but take a -5 penalty because he’s very suspicious now”. Personally, I think giving the GM a few broad guidelines on how to handle second attempts, or things like this, would be a better approach than trying to provide a rule for every situation.

Action!

Action – be it an epic lightsaber duel, a shootout with blasters, grand armies clashing on the ground, sprawling space battles, or an intense chase scene – is a staple of the Star Wars saga, and it’s one of the things that make the movies so exciting and memorable. So, a good Star Wars RPG needs to be able to handle these types of scenes.

This game uses grid-based combat for close-quarters fighting with individuals and small vehicles. The combat system is designed to provide a lot of tactical options and encourage good strategy and cooperation among the players. There are some fiddly rules, like line-of-sight, cover, flanking, and opportunity attacks, but most of these are pretty easy to grasp for anyone familiar with tactical miniatures games. I think that even people who are new to this particular brand of gaming can pick up on this stuff pretty quickly, though they may forget to take advantage of some things as often as they could.

One problem with combat that I’ve found as a GM, is that it can be hard to judge the difficulty of an encounter. Especially at low levels, it is hard to throw a bunch of enemies at the players without overwhelming them. The game also doesn’t handle lone “boss” characters very well either. It may be impossible to design an NPC who can effectively challenge a group of player characters on his own, without being so powerful as to completely overwhelm them.

Another complaint about the combat system is the way healing up afterwards works. It seems rather difficult to do any substantial healing in this game without taking quite a bit of in-game time to do it. While this may be more “realistic” than other games, I don’t know if it really fits the Star Wars universe, where heroes generally push through a fight and then go racing off to the next one.

An innovation that the Saga edition has, which can come into play when things get rough, is the condition track. Other games with the d20 system have specific conditions that can afflict a character, such as Stunned, Dazed, Poisoned, etc. Each of those conditions would have a specific effect on your character, like penalties to certain actions, and specific criteria for removing that condition. The Saga edition streamlined this with a unified condition track. When you’re at the top of the track, you’re in normal condition and operating just fine. When certain things happen to your character (like they take a bunch of damage from a singe attack, or they got poisoned, or they spent a week wandering through the desert) they move down the condition track. The first step down imposes a minor penalty. The next step makes that penalty a little worse. If you get five steps down the track you are unconscious or disabled. Moving back up the condition track is a fairly simple affair, but it will slow you down. I like this, because you’ll never be stuck trying to remember what the Stunned condition does, or how that differs from the Dazed condition. There is one hitch in the system though. That is something they call persistent conditions. Some things are just harder to shake off than others, and while you’re exhausted – for example – you won’t be able to move up the condition track at all until you’ve rested for eight hours. To me, this results in a kind of hybrid system between this streamlined, unified condition track that the game proposes, and the system of individual conditions with their own specific rules that other games have used. Personally, I think it might be better to go one way or the other, but I guess the system here works well enough.

Later supplements provided rules for massive army-scaled battles. While I haven’t used these myself, they seem pretty solid, and not too much different than the basic combat rules. The core rulebook provided rules for space combat, which are also a good bit like the basic combat system. These are a little more intimidating to me, because you’re operating on a very different scale, and you have the added complication of integrating the stats of the starships involved in the battle with those of the characters that are operating them. I suspect it won’t be too difficult in practice, but reading over the rules, I have to admit that I’m not terribly eager to send my players into a conflict in space.

It wasn’t until one of the last few supplements for the game that they introduced a neat mechanic called the “skill challenge”, borrowed from the 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Personally, I think this is the best way to handle non-combat action scenes like a chase or a race. I think the skill challenge sub-system is a nice addition to this game, but it kind of overwrites a lot of previous rules regarding skill use given in the core rulebook and other supplements – so you sort of have to take one path or the other.

May the Force be with You – but Only These Powers

It’s not surprising that a central element of the Star Wars RPG would be the Force, and how characters interact with it. The way this works is a bit nuanced. Characters can take the Force Sensitivity feat, representing that their character can feel the Force around them and learn to manipulate it. A character with this feat can make use of the Use the Force skill to do a few basic things, like move an object small enough for them to hold through the air across several meters, or “search their feelings” to get some insight on whether a certain course of action is going to have immediately good or bad consequences.

Once you have the Force Sensitivity feat, you can also choose talents from a list of Force talents, instead of from the talents associated with your class. These will let you do more advanced things like use the Force to remove all debilitating conditions from yourself, or use the Force to guide your piloting.

Another feat you can take once you have Force Sensitivity is Force Training. This grants you a number of Force powers depending on your Wisdom stat. Force powers are very powerful, very pronounced, uses of the Force such as moving massive objects, pushing down a group of enemies with a Force push, or strangling an opponent with Force grip. These Force powers require a Use the Force skill check to be successful, and you can only use each power once per encounter. There are a few talents or other options that can let you use a power more often than that, but once is the general limit.

There are also Force Points, which every character gets. These represent the innate connection that all things have with the Force. Players can spend their characters Force Points to give a boost to a die roll, to boost certain Force powers, or to avoid death when they run out of Hit Points.

There is also the Dark Side. When a character does something evil, they gain a Dark Side Point. Too many Dark Side Points and your character becomes corrupted. Generally, they advise that a corrupted character should become an NPC, but there can be exceptions to this, depending on the nature of your campaign.

I think all of this is pretty neat, and fairly well done, but it does have one drawback. For modeling the original trilogy, where the Force was a lot more subdued, it does pretty well. But it takes a lot of investment to create a Jedi character that can pull off even a fraction of the tricks that we see Jedi perform in the prequel movies or the Clone Wars cartoon. I think the reason they designed the game this way is to keep Force using characters balanced with non-Force using characters. Let’s face it, by the end of Return of the Jedi, Han Solo wouldn’t stand a chance against Luke Skywalker in a fight, but that’s not the way we want it to be in an RPG.

Some RPGs restrict players to playing a very specific character type. I could see this working with an all-Jedi RPG. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about balancing Force users with non-Force users. However, this would cut out a lot of options that are there to be explored within the Star Wars universe. You couldn’t play a campaign where the player characters are smugglers, X-Wing pilots, bounty hunters, or anything else.

A much simpler compromise might be to borrow an idea from Mutants & Masterminds, a superhero RPG. That game has something called Action Points, that work similarly to Force Points. One of the uses for Actions Points is that you can spend an Action Point to gain the benefits of any feat for one scene or encounter. If you made it so that players in the Star Wars RPG could spend a Force Point to gain the benefits of any feat or talent for one scene or encounter, it would allow for Force-users that more closely resemble the characters in the movies and cartoons. For example, your Jedi doesn’t always need the Deflect talent, but in that one instance where you come under heavy fire, a Force Point could let you start scattering those incoming blaster bolts. Or, if you need to pull your starfighter out of a swamp, you could spend a Force Point to gain the Force Training feat and select Move Object as one of your Force powers. To keep things balance, I would let any character do this to “borrow” any feat or talent they qualified for. So, your soldier could pick up a second blaster from a fallen comrade and spend a Force Point to temporarily gain the benefits of the Dual Weapon Mastery feat.

These are my general thoughts on the Star Wars Roleplaying Game Saga Edition. I know it’s extensive, but I tried to cover most of what stood out to me about this game, design-wise. I’d love to read any observations you may have about the game and its design, or any thoughts you might have on my own observations.