Happy birthday to my daughter, Sofia, who turns 7 today. Seven?! Sheesh...how time flies. Last year, her "party" was a Zoom call with her class. This year, we are actually having a small gathering (three kids) which will be held outdoors, with masks and social distancing. The theme is "garden party" and there will be croquet, lemonade, and shortbread cookies...also tiny sandwiches that I am supposed to make. The weather looks to be beautiful (again).
But the sandwich making won't be going down for a couple-four hours, at least (and I still need to pick up a gallon of guest-friendly hand sanitizer). Which gives me a chance to blog a bit. Yay!
I've been working with the old West End Games version of Star Wars this week, what is commonly referred to as "D6 Star Wars." I usually just refer to it as WEG on Ye Old Blog, and if you check through my old posts, you'll find the last time I wrote about the game did NOT have me saying many (any?) complimentary things about the game.
Welp, that was more than ten years ago. And just as time flies so, too, do past complaints and bitchin-moaning flit away on summer breezes. It ain't that I've "mellowed" so much as I'm just a bit smarter (maybe) than I once was about what makes (and breaks) a game. Much of the time the proof is in the play, and there are reasons designers do what they do.
Of course, I'm also smarter about doing what I do, which is to say running games. And part of this is ignoring true dross...like the scripted intro to the Rebel Breakout adventure found in 1E WEG...and getting to the meat of play. Which is what I did yesterday afternoon (more on that in a minute).
Why O Why, though, am I looking at Star Wars again? As with most of my motivations these days, it stems from my kids. As I've mentioned before, my son has been running his own game that he calls "D&D Five," which is more-or-less Star Wars run using a D&D (mash up edition) chassis. Players choose from races like human, wookie, "yoda," droid, and ewok and then one of several classes like bounty hunter, Jedi, pilot, etc. He's put together his own club at school the last couple weeks and has been running the game for a group of five or six kids.
[some might be curious about my children's "version numbers" for their game designs, and I'm not exactly sure where their numbering scheme comes from. My daughter started this a year or so ago when she started running her own game she called "D&D Three" to distinguish it from both the B/X game I was running and the B/X campaign of her brother (which consisted of a rather endless megadungeon with no name). Sofia's campaign is this weird world of "tower" dungeons, talking animals, and superheroes that really deserves its own post. I'm not exactly sure what game is supposed to be "D&D Four" in my son's mind...that perhaps is our current Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaign. I should probably ask him about that...]
ANYway...the boy working on his own game and the kids rewatching Star Wars Rebels during their lunch breaks got my mind turning towards Star Wars again, and wondering if maybe I should/could be running a SW game. Not only because the kids are reaching that age when they're really starting to dig on RPGs (and are trying new styles and genres) but because it might help them with their own game design development.
So enter, WEG Star Wars. Oh, I own all those Fantasy Flight Games books for the latest version, but the tomes are far too massive to incorporate all of them into a single game (which is kind of the beauty of the original SW universe, what with its rebels and scoundrels and Jedi)...at least not effectively in any meaningful way. And even Saga Star Wars (which I ALSO still own) is too fiddly for my kids (and me) to make practical use of. No, fast and loose is the order of the day for the SW (space opera) genre and WEG does a good enough job of that...better than "good enough," in fact.
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| 1500+ pages or less than 140? Hmm... |
However.
There are a couple issues. The first is relatively minor: my preference for the 1st edition of the game. I know, I know...I have badmouthed this edition to no good end in the past for all its "deficiencies." Can a person be allowed to wise-up with a decade plus of experience under the belt? I should hope so.
Increasingly over the years, when I've revisited old RPGs, I have found the original "first editions" to be the best, especially when it comes to explaining and maintaining the designer's clarity of vision. 2nd edition seldom improve the original design...they add mechanical nuance that cloud the maker's vision or "patches" that create new flaws. Some of the 1st editions I've come to prefer to later editions (even when I actually started on later editions) include: Advanced D&D (naturally), Heroes Unlimited, Vampire the Masquerade, Top Secret, Gamma World, Shadowrun, and Traveller.
WEG Star Wars now (for me) falls into this category. I know I decried things like "lack of scaling rules" or "missing force powers" or the need for "character points" (both for advancement purposes and narrative control)...I now see all those complaints as pretty much bunk. There are rules for difference in scale between vehicles and people (for example), and they are far simpler than the 2E rules (and do we really need a scaling chart to show Death Star class threats? Shouldn't that kind of be self-explanatory?). More definition of "force powers" aren't needed...the Force should be mysterious, strange, and hand-wavy, and the powers are fine the way they are. And the original game's "skill points" don't need to be altered from the way they already work, and attributes shouldn't be dithered about with anyway (why make advancement even more glacial?). No, the 1E version is JUST FINE...although I did just order a copy of the original edition Star Wars Sourcebook off the internet the other day (still want my extended equipment list).
The second issue though, isn't quite so minor: giant handfuls of D6s. At the moment, the basic WEG system doesn't work for me for a couple-three reasons:
- I don't want to invest in buckets of D6s.
- I don't want to add big handfuls of D6s and compare them to other giant added sums of D6s.
- And (mainly) I'm running Star Wars for my kids as an inspiration for their own games (at least for that of my son). And the boy is already invested in polyhedral dice having picked up several sets (with his own money!) to supply his school crew with their own dice (he also took the time to sanitize them and bag them in individual packets...the kid is meticulous!).
SO, silly as it may sound, I spent the last couple days (Monday and Tuesday) converting the entire WEG game to a system that uses polyhedral dice instead of dice pools, calculating probabilities, altering target numbers, etc. Madness? Yeah, sure. But guess what? It works. We ran Rebel Breakout yesterday (the sample adventure from the book) with the conversions, and there weren't any issues whatsoever. For running something like Star Wars Rebels or The Mandalorian, the system works fine. It's Star Wars...not D&D. Which I understand doesn't appeal to everyone, but it's a nice change of pace now and then.
All right, that's all I have time for this morning. I've got a garden party to organize!
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Sounds like you need several followup posts. I'd be interested in seeing the conversion to polys.
ReplyDeleteI’m a little busy this afternoon, but I’ll try writing something up in a day or two.
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I'd be interested in seeing your conversion, too. I do like my funny shaped dice!
ReplyDeleteI am also interested to see thst system. In the past, instead of rolling buckets of dice, I used a rule where you rolled 2d6 plus you adds uf any, then added 4 for each die of ability or skill above 2. So if you had a skill of 6d+2, you'd roll 2d6+2 and add 16. Simplified things, and those who were highly skilled always do better, kind of as expected.
ReplyDeleteWow. That is...um...a LOT of math.
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I think my system has more "wiggle" (i.e. randomness) than yours does. Higher end skill characters are plenty likely to succeed, but can still fail the less-than-heroic challenges.
By contrast, your 6D6+2 guy (modified to 2d6+18) is going to succeed at any challenge of 20 or less 100% of the time. That's anything short of "Very Difficult" if you use the standard difficulty numbers (for example such a character would always hit at "long range" unless the target was using a dodge roll). Not sure I like that, when the standard rules would at least allow a small chance of failing a "Moderate (15)" ...or even "Easy (10)" ... difficulty checks!
That being said, I'm glad I'm not the only one hesitant to invest in buckets of dice!
I was with you and super excited until you suggested...I don't know if I can bring myself to even write it...switching the beauty and simplicity of D6s to...uhh. I need to sit down.
ReplyDeleteWhile I find this...*shudder*...I do hope you and your kids gave a blast with the Star Wars game. WEG's Star Wars D6 is perhaps my all time favorite RPG system and of course it is set in one of my favorite universes so I am eager to read what comes of this.
But man...have a pineapple and liverwurst pizza while you're at it. Blech.
@ Adam:
DeleteI hear you, man. And I admit it looks and feels weird for Old Timers who've used the D6 system.
But the D6 system DOES get cumbersome at the higher end of the scale. You may never have PCs with die scores above 6D or 7D, but when you start doubling that with force points you're talking 12D and 14D, and that's a pain in the ass. It also means a lot of decapitation when fighting high-end 'saber wielders (say an Inquisitor type like what one finds in SW:Rebels).
I'm a big fan of liverwurst, though I haven't tried combining it with pineapple nor adding it to pizza. That being said, I don't think your analogy is particularly apt: there's no particular dice type that is inherent to Star Wars or space opera. I think that Star Wars, as a GENRE, benefits from a simplified, streamlined system unlike (say) something as crunchy as WotC's D20 system. And it IS possible to make a simplified system that uses funny-shaped dice.
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I've just grown to dislike the need for dice other than 6s. All my favorite games - Star Wars, Traveller, ALIEN, Champions, and many more use only the D6 in one way or another.
DeleteI find it much easier to add 6s together than have to figure out THACO, check charts, or remember what die of damage which weapon is. A lot of that is simply how often I have played these game I'm sure.
I understand the desire to simplify. A lot of my own game designs use only D6s or card drawing (or both). I'm also a fan of the "counting evens" die mechanics you find in many games these days (from Hollow Earth Expedition to Sorcerer to...well, lots of games).
DeleteWEG's D6 system is one of the earliest of its kind and I think it shows its age in a certain lack of elegance (at least at the upper end of the scale). But, sure, if you've run a lot of it over the years, you're probably quite used to it.
I spend a lot of time on anydice.com trying to build strange dice pool combinations and charting probabilities
DeleteHuh...I haven't ever seen/used that web site. Too bad, as it would have saved me a lot of time!
DeleteThanks for the link.
I know what you mean about preferred original editions, a purer vision.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I love handfuls of dice. What's the max you would need for WEG Star Wars... 12?
If you had a Jedi character using a force point with a lightsaber attack, you could end up rolling 20+ dice for damage (I think). Maybe not...it's been a while since I've run the game RAW, but there are a lot of "dice adds" (starship combat has a lot).
DeleteMuch of the time, this can end up as overkill: a 10D dice pool has an average result of 35, which qualifies as a "Heroic" success (I don't think there even was a "heroic" category in 1st edition SW..."very difficult" at 30 is the top). You can see that dice pools as high as the NPC protagonists have (Solo's piloting, Obi-Wan's force skills, etc.) are pretty ridiculous. With adds, it's nearly impossible for them to fail.
But then WEG SW isn't really about "failure," seeing as how it's one of the earliest RPGs encouraging GMs to fudge dice rolls and not let PCs fail.
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I don't remember dice pools being over 12, but our "campaigns" lasted 4 or 5 sessions. I'd probably cap it there as a house-rule to keep things from getting out of hand. Wish I had the foresight to do that with AC back when I was running 3e D&D. I cap it at 20, these days.
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