Gaming: Savaging Star Wars, Part I - A Brief History of TIE... Fighters

The setting which I have run more games in than any other setting is Star Wars, across a variety of times and places in the timeline.  I have very strong feelings and a sense of attachment where that universe is concerned, and can still put together an entire game in the old West End Games d6 Star Wars system, which was, to my mind, the best system put forward for Star Wars, and probably featured more loving care than any subsequent iteration.  There's a reason that LucasArts once handed Timothy Zahn a stack of WEG sourcebooks and said "here, these are a pretty good start."  The Expanded Universe owes its eventual shape, in many ways, to WEG's Star Wars.

Unfortunately, WEG lost the license during a period of financial upheaval, and since it hasn't been kept up, WEG Star Wars has not aged well.  Oh, it's still playable, still plays well even, but it was never really intended to play a wide scope of games, and it had a real "linear fighter, quadratic wizard" problem - which is arguably in keeping with the movies, but it's not even fun to GM a table where the Jedi's power level so greatly exceeds that of everyone else at the table.  We have since had iconic Star Wars stories told since WEG's system that you just couldn't tell with WEG, because falling to the Dark Side instantly removed player agency in WEG Star Wars, which meant that the story of Revan or Ulic Qel-Droma, or even Kylo Ren, requires the GM to tweak the system in order to make it playable.  The idea of mechanical penalties for evil actions may fit the Lucas movies, but we have had some excellent stories in that universe that we could not tell at a table with that system.

The next iteration in the Star Wars gaming canon was the Wizards of the Coast d20 version, both its initial release and the subsequent Saga Edition version.  The base version had a lot of the same design team as WEG Star Wars, and it showed.  The addition of the Force skills of Control-Sense-Alter to d20 design was awkward, and various other WEG bolt-ons made the base version a beautiful, but slow-playing, series of books.  If there is one thing that is toxic to a Star Wars story, it is when the game is plodding.  This is one of the most common criticisms of the prequel movies, and it is doubly so a criticism of the d20 edition of the game - D&D 3.x and Star Wars shared the same core mechanics and they were slow in 3.x and even slower when trying to run WEG Star Wars through a d20 emulator.

It is perhaps a surprise, then, that the same team produced Saga Edition, and also that Saga Edition shared so many simplifications with D&D 4th Edition, yet that what drove many gamers away from 4th Edition worked beautifully in Star Wars.  Jedi were awe-inspiring but other classes had things that made them competitive, it played very quickly, and its mechanics were simple, but not too simple.  My biggest complaint about Saga Edition was that the books themselves were weirdly shaped and did not fit well on a shelf, which, as I have gravitated towards PDFs, is a pretty minor complaint.  Unfortunately, Lucas did not extend the Saga license; I was busy elsewhere at that point in my life and don't remember the details, but the next iteration of Star Wars was the Fantasy Flight Games version.

I am deeply conflicted about FFG Star Wars.  On the one hand, it features innovative mechanics and the fact that a roll of the dice can produce a tactical success and an operational or strategic failure is one of the things that endeared WEG Star Wars to me.  Still on that hand, its "class" system isn't a straitjacket and it allows distinctive, interesting characters and equipment - a friend of mine has a story about a socially-based character who was as combat-effective through talking their opponents into a stupor as any of the combat characters.  As long as we are counting fingers on that hand, it encourages collaborative storytelling around the whole table.  These are all strong points in its favor.  Why would I be conflicted then?

Because the dice mechanics are gimmicky and seem like a ploy to sell specialized dice more than anything else, and because the collaborative-storytelling approach requires even more GM improvisation than a normal game, it requires a very specific group and a very specific skill-set to play.  It does not lend itself to pick-up games or convention play, which is great for campaigns but is terrible for breaking a new player into a system or game.  When it works well, it works well; when it does not work well, it does not work at all.  Those are common traits of high-end cars, not a role-playing game.

So - for one reason or another, I have found myself dissatisfied with literally every published version of Star Wars, though able to play them all.  However, I have come to love Savage Worlds for its simplicity and adaptability.  The design philosophy of "fast-furious-fun," the simple dice mechanics and extreme probability swings produced by exploding dice, and the fact that an unfamiliar group can whip out characters in an evening, or learn to play with pregenerated characters in about two hours, are all huge selling points for me.  What Savage Worlds lacks is Star Wars specificity.  After a literal lifetime in Star Wars - my first memory is AT-ATs on Hoth, and Empire came out when I was a year old - and more than 25 years playing and running various Star Wars games, that seems like a task I can handle.

After all of that, future blog posts on this particular thread will be dedicated to specific aspects of Savaging Star Wars.

LUCAS DEFLECTOR SHIELD: Keep in mind, this is for personal use and not for publication, and the copyright holders for each of these things are the ones you need to throw money at on these subjects!