Quote from: Piestrio;736920The force was pretty easy to reign in simply by disallowing Skill Focus: Use the Force.

You need to really make it pre-requisite 7th level as without it the Force becomes too weak at higher levels.

Quote from: Skywalker;736916I would be careful not to use too many of the sourcebooks as they do generally work against all that's good in the corebook. I would recommend Starships of the Galaxy though, both as a way of making starship combat interesting, but also providing a way to make transports combat capable and one of the best ways of dealing with capital ships.

This touches on something that I hated about the d20 version of Star Wars. Ships that were suppossed to be transports often had better weapons and shields than some warships as standard equipment. A transport should be a transport, not a pocket battleship. How can a repressive dictatorship like the Empire maintain control with all these heavily armed freighters flying around.

"What about the Millenium Falcon?" If you remember, Han Solo got away with a lot because he was a smart man who used guile and trickery whenever he could. The ship itself looked like a flying scrap heap on purpose to allow for smuggling and avoiding authorities. It could fight very well when it had to, but that was because it was a unique ship. The equivalent of a ship that had been in possession of the PCs for hundreds of adventures, not right off the showroom floor.

Quote from: jeff37923;736924This touches on something that I hated about the d20 version of Star Wars. Ships that were suppossed to be transports often had better weapons and shields than some warships as standard equipment. A transport should be a transport, not a pocket battleship. How can a repressive dictatorship like the Empire maintain control with all these heavily armed freighters flying around.

I can't say that I found that issue with Star Wars Saga Edition TBH. In the corebook, transports were the worst as presented in any version of a Star Wars RPG including WEG and FFG.

Quote from: jeff37923;736924"What about the Millenium Falcon?"

The MF is a special snowflake in any version of a Star Wars RPG including WEG and FFG In fact, Star Wars Saga Edition had very limited modification for Starships compared to the mad stuff that you could do in early D20 versions and WEG. That was one thing I liked about it.

Quote from: jeff37923;736924This touches on something that I hated about the d20 version of Star Wars. Ships that were suppossed to be transports often had better weapons and shields than some warships as standard equipment. A transport should be a transport, not a pocket battleship. How can a repressive dictatorship like the Empire maintain control with all these heavily armed freighters flying around.

That's simply true of Star Wars as a whole. For a repressive dictatorship, they are awfully lenient when it comes to freedom of movement and weapon ownership.

I mean, what was Luke Skywalker flying around in and shooting wamp rats with? You never saw it in the movie, but they had concept art. Basically a fighter jet with a laser cannon

I've played WED/D6 and I've played Saga Edition. I'd play the latter over the former in a heartbeat, even with my usual reservations about D20.

As people have mentioned, it suffers many of the usual problems of high levels and supplement-bloat, but they're fixed with judicious GMing-with-awareness. Skill Focus: Use the Force needs banning at low levels. Climb, Jump and Swim need merging into Athletics (and watch how still no one will bother to train it).

The five base class format is brilliant, though it's perhaps a little too punitive with BAB (fixed with fractional BAB rules). It actually balances Jedi with non-Jedi, without nerfing Force users like WEG did. Nor does it suffer the godlike signature character issues either.

Our problem was that we just aren't steeped enough in D20 to make it intuitive or obvious. It required too much book-referencing in play for our tastes, and even after a half-dozen sessions that didn't seem to improve.

D6's biggest flaw is probably the blaster-proof Wookiee, especially if he's wearing armor.

Quote from: JeremyR;736931That's simply true of Star Wars as a whole. For a repressive dictatorship, they are awfully lenient when it comes to freedom of movement and weapon ownership.

I mean, what was Luke Skywalker flying around in and shooting wamp rats with? You never saw it in the movie, but they had concept art. Basically a fighter jet with a laser cannon

I disagree, if you look at the weapons, armor, and vehicles available to citizens of the Empire in WEG d6 Star Wars they are outclassed by what is available to the military (any military). Yet if you look at the same of d20 Star Wars, civilians are on a par with the military and even exceed it in certain cases. Particularly egregious examples of this were the stock Corellian freighters of Star Wars Gamer issue #2 which had better weapons than the Imperial customs ships or TIE fighters who were the usual opponents.  

Luke's T-16 Skyhopper was only armed with stun weapons if you look at the stats.

Quote from: jeff37923;736940Particularly egregious examples of this were the stock Corellian freighters of Star Wars Gamer issue #2 which had better weapons than the Imperial customs ships or TIE fighters who were the usual opponents.  

If its in Star Wars Gamer, I assume you are talking about an older D20 edition of Star Wars than Saga Edition.

I really liked the Saga edition It had only two real mechanical flaws a new GM should be aware of.

1) mentioned already the Skill focus Use the force. Simplest fix I have seen is the Skill focus bonus is +1 per 2 levels up to +5. That way still useful for any character and any skill not just trying to balance Use the Force skill.

2) while the condition track is cool the ability to inflict condition "Damage" can get out of hand. You can fairly easily at low level (3rd-5th) knock someone down 3 to 4 levels on the track and cripple them before they can do much. This is solved by me by saying if you exploit, I'll exploit and I have more bad guys. It usually keeps it in check. This is also due to Supplement bloat as well. So monitoring that is a necessity but I think that is true with any system. The more moving parts the more that can go wrong.


Just my thoughts.

Quote from: Skywalker;736943If its in Star Wars Gamer, I assume you are talking about an older D20 edition of Star Wars than Saga Edition.

I think we are all better off if we ignore any possible d20 Star Wars systems.

As far as Saga is concerned, it really scratched my SW itch for a while.  We never got into high level play (we never do...) but up to 10, it works very well.

Force Disarm was horribly fucked though.  Even with the power and the upgrade, Vader himself needed a natty 20 to disarm Solo.

Good math, kids, buy a freaking calculator.

My impression of Saga was that it made me like the previous d20 Star Wars a lot more than I thought I did.

JG

Ran a few games early on. It was fun but it didn't stick and we moved on to something else. Which was D&D 4e iirc, and that didn't stick either although I managed to subject the bastards to something like 14 weeks worth of Keep on the Shadowfell so at least I got value for my money on that one.

My biggest regret with SAGA is that I have the entire run except for the KOTOR book and at these bullshit prices I'm not likely to complete my collection any time soon. That nags at the OCD a little bit, I won't lie.

Yep. Several Saga books are phenomenally expensive.

On that note, I have a complete set I am considering selling, but I wouldn't split it up due to cherry picking. Shipping from New Zealand is high, but not so high when you factor in this prices

I've ran two full campaigns of Saga. Here are my experiences -

1) UTF is by the RAW over powered. My solution is to disallow Skill Focus - UTF until a PC reaches character level 6, rationalizing it as the later stages of Padawan training.

2) Force Wizards are broken, especially at very high levels, especially with the huge damage that Move Object can do. One way I have of toning it down is to have the roll you have to beat equal to the entire Fortitude Defense+base TN for object mass.

3) Force Choke is also broken due to it's actional denial aspect. As a house rule I generally only allow two instances of a particular Force Power in a Force User's suite.

4) Because falling damage is so severe in Saga, Force powers used to push, pull and move things can be very powerful in dangerous environments, such as  cliffs, canyons and so on. Take this into account with your PC Jedi.

One thing that I did find to my liking is that non-Force User PCs are competitive with Force Users, far more so in Saga than in D6. This allowed more diversity, instead of PCs picking to be Force Sensitive and then running straight for some other PC with Force Skills as was done in D6.

Also, understand that Saga was designed to support Han Solo at Star's End play up to The Force Unleashed. You need to as a GM state your assumptions and style at character generation and put in place house rules for your particular Star Wars style. For example, I usually don't allow the Starship Manuevers from Starships of the Galaxy, as I usually don't run a lot of starship combats. However, those rules would be great for a Rogue Squadron game.

Overall I get the impression there's a lot of "fixing the rules" going on. The consensus, even among people who like the game, seems to be that at least some fixing is required. I don't find that particularly appealing.

Also, a sneak peek revealed a lot of repeated illustrations throughout the core book. How bad is it?