Lit Fantasy Flight Games and the Star Wars TCG

Did you ever get these?



The male scoundrel is excellent aside from his head; the female scoundrel is great as is the Rodian, erm, scoundrel (no, I don't have a "type"!). The male human Jedi Padawan was probably the best quality though.

 

Nope, I missed out on those. I actually won a copy of the Theed adventure game at a trivia contest at Star Wars Weekends, sort of my introduction to roleplaying, but I didn't get around to buying the book for a while after that and I think those were a bit hard to find already by then---or maybe they weren't out yet? I didn't play enough to really have much of a collection, and if I got anything, it wound up being old WEG stuff on eBay.

 

You didn't really miss much. In fact, excepting WotC's character minis line, there's precious little in terms of RP-aligned collectibles that was worth getting. The WotC ship game promised a lot but delivered little, in that most of the cap ships were bendy and warped (my ISD has a squiggly bow!). The Micro Machines lacked detail. FFG is really delivering on the ships stuff, like nobody's business. Plus mechanically it may be my preferred system, though lots of nostalgia love for WEG.

 

Yeah, WEG wound up with some bad balance in the end, but they can't be blamed; for the depth of content they delivered, it was bound to burst at the seams sooner or later. Saga was plenty playable, but from my brief experience with OCR/RCR, there was absolutely no excuse for the imbalance, considering the superficiality of their books.

It's so weird how it changes; in the wider gaming spectrum, I'm hearing that even Cryptozoic---formerly the absolute worst thing to happen to franchise gaming, getting licenses left and right and cranking out cart-before-the-horse garbage---has actually started doing something decent with their stuff. All the while, WotC is about a decade behind on everything that isn't a CCG (where the second "C" is for "Crack").

 

Kind of a metaphor for their approach of taking the square peg of Star Wars, the round hole of d20 OGL, and a sledgehammer to force the two to get along.

As you well know, Iello, I am a fan in unwavering terms of the WotC minis line. But that would honestly be the full spectrum of my liked-WotC-Star-Wars-product list. WEG built the EU then, and their system required you to have a metric tonne of dice and infinite patience to play a Jedi; FFG have the sweet spot balance. But yeah. WotC. Mehhhhh.

 

Ugh, GM forcing people to play. I love FFG's system because it just works no matter the party. And Jedi? Elegant. You're weaker than others until after enough time and investment, you're suddenly just so not weaker. Which is how it should be, because some people will decide it's too much effort and quit and others will follow it dilligently and bam.

 

Saga was the best iteration of Star Wars d20 but yes, as Ender said, it simply wasn't the right system.

 

WOTC also wanted everyone and their mother to play a Jedi and was so much worse for it.

 

And more-or-less made it impossible to play a non combat oriented Force user

 

I think FFG found the perfect solution for this with F&D... because I get the inclination that every Jedi should have a modicum of saber skills. At the bare-bones level where you figure out what's Star Warsy and try to find a way to fit it in, that is a concern... but WotC used the most convoluted solution, by trying to balance it across multiple books. Now we have FFG, from the very first beta of the Jedi book, allowing you to take your favored characteristic and use it with a particular saber style. Genius.

 

I quite like the FFG approach too. You are less powerful, until you're not; you have to cross spec into a lightsaber specialist class to get lightsaber skillz, and generally it requires dedication. For too long, you saw this horrid effect where munchkin kids would want to play Jedi!!1! in games and have all the powah and have force lightening but also be a goodie not a baddie and have froce choke like Kyle Katarn and, and...

I mean, legit, people used to complain because they couldn't fry people in KOTOR like they could in JK:JO without getting dark side points. Effing millenials.

Now, the whole points about "the deepest commitment, the most serious mind", or Qui-Gon's "it will be a hard life" make sense and are supported by the rules. And if you want to be Light Side Jedi Darth Powah with a green sabor and froce lightening but a goodie, you can GTOFTB.

EDIT: Also, forgot to say, I love that the dark side is as consequential as it was in WEG, without the arbitrary "5dsp? Oh that's not good..."

 

But what if I want to play an ecological priest of Ithor?

 

Do you hate your GM or something?

 

It's quite easy: You pick the career (or combo of careers) that most evokes an ecological priest of Ithor.

None of it is named, and besides the saber specs, not even the "Jedi" careers actually say "Jedi." There are plenty which fit adepts, and as a matter of fact, quite a few which are entirely unsuited to actual Jedi PCs.

 

I also like how lightsabers aren't materially stronger weapons in F&D than, say, a blaster rifle.

 

Love the use of color in that last one!

They should make a book of these -- like the Star Wars Art: Comics collection volume. They deserve more attention.

 

FFG's very good-looking, and I applaud it keeping "Legends" material alive in some fashion ... but.

I still like Saga the best - admittedly, the mechanics were fairly simplified, but I could churn out character stats easily.

Force-users decidedly got more toys in the toybox, granted, but I always felt as if the other classes could fill in where needed without being pigeonholed (say you wanted to create a doctor-focused noble, instead of a negotiator; the talents and feats were available).

(Besides, IMHO, it's something of a conceit of SW that outside of Confederate special weapons or ysalamir-in-a-box, Force-users auto-imbalance combat.)

If GMs aren't sensitive to players' desires, then that's bad GM-ming, IMHO. I don't blame those who felt burned by such a situation.

I'm allergic to large numbers of dice unless they're necessary. So, while I respect WEG for helping build much of the old EU, I'd never play d6, at least not that system. Similarly, OCR/RCR was just too headscratchingly number-centric for me to be comfortable. Just my two credits.

 

I find these odd statements to make to try and contrast Saga with FFG... As I'd say they're easily more true of FFG than any previous system. The mechanics are the simplest, and there's very little class pigeonholing by design, as multiclassing isn't near as expensive as in other systems. It's sort of a fun sci-fi mashup game in itself, simply combining classes and talent branches to represent an archetype. It's not going to say "this is (for instance) a Jensaarai Defender" on the talent tree, but the satisfaction of cobbling together the essence of (for instance) a Jensaarai Defender is far more gratifying than simply being told what one is.

I'm wondering if you've just had a bad introduction to it. Most complaints about FFG I've heard come from preconceived notions and old comforts about what RPGs should be---the only value of which is nostalgia. I feel like people have just gotten used to inelegant, convoluted, mechanically-outdated systems, and if they would just let their apprehensions go and get on board, those preconceived notions would fade pretty quickly.

 

Ah! My apologies - I didn't mean to imply that I had tried FFG.

I've not tried it, mostly out of economic reasons (more entertainment $ going to update other RPG E-books and my Transformers collection

You raise an interesting point ... I'd thought that Saga was simple AFA multiclassing (outside of the in-game XP cost). Maybe I should find an FFG core E-book and examine the character creation ... ?

 

For the things you've mentioned about Saga, FFG really is the next logical step in refining it. You only need one pack of dice, or can use the roller app, so it doesn't get as crazy/boring dice-wise as WEG. I think the comparisons to WEG are more "spiritual" similarities than anything, and by the sound of it, I'd say you'd probably enjoy it. You can practically improvise any balanced NPC you want, and that's the beauty of it: It's just complex enough to remain "gamey" (more than something like, for instance, the Cortex or FATE systems), but it stays just simple enough that you can pretty much go, "Hey, I just had a cool idea! Boom!" concept to execution, right on the spot, like a direct synapse.

The thing is, they haven't done e-books because of the way the old publishing licenses worked... but... yunno... that's the official stance...