…it’s been too long since my last post, but life has been hectic. Over at Ruins of Empire we’ve just concluded a major public adventure, which ended with victory over the nasty olde vampire – hooray hooray hooray! Add to that some Dark Heresy blog activity – and another session of Star Wars Clone Wars RPG. Plus RL stuff too boring to mention…

Which brings me around to the theme for this post. It’s about choosing a game system that fits the setting. As opposed to the other way around. IMO there is a big difference there. It will take a while for me to get to the point, but please bear with me…

I started playing Star Wars back when West End’s D6 line first started coming out. For the time it was a very good system that had the advantage of being easy to learn and play. Take a bunch of D6s, roll them and add everything together. The higher the better. End of story. It scaled wonderfully – the more bad-ass you were, the more dice you got to roll. And you could do multiple stuff simply by rolling fewer dice for each action. There were a couple of weak areas, but nothing that couldn’t be tweaked. Except one thing. The bean-counting.  4D6+2. 5D6+1. 7D6. Again and again and again. It gets really tedious really quickly. In conclusion it was an easy and playable system that suited the setting very well. But all those dice…goodbye West End Games!

Next was the WotC D20 version. I never played the original edition; I only got into it after the Revised edition came out. It’s basically the D20 system from DnD with a few tweaks, such as a Wound Point system (like the one found in Unearthed Arcana) and stuff for using the Force, piloting starships etc. I found the system to my liking, although there were some weak spots – the Force was badly done I think, using hit points to fuel you attempts at using it. Made it completely unplayable IMO. Other stuff like vehicles and starship I also think was sub-par. We had a short campaign back when the Revised edition came out, but it eventually fizzled into nothing. All in all was a good system that fit the setting well – a relatively non-heroic campaign set in the Rise of the Empire/Rebellion era.

Then last year my interest in Star Wars rose again as I started watching The Clone Wars animated series and felt a need to cut droids in two…and I also ended up re-playing Knight of the Old Republic and so had an equal need to battle the Sith. By now there was a new edition the Sage Edition – but I didn’t have any of the books and I didn’t know the system, so we started playing with Revised. But years had passed since last time we played and I found the mechanics in Revised really didn’t allow for the swift and heroicaction I wanted – like the one seen in the series.

So we decided to have a go at the Saga Edition instead. Turned out it was more or less what we were looking for. Far simpler and more streamlined. Another take on the Force. Overall much more suited to our style of play. It was also fun to see how Saga edition foreshadowed several developments found in DnD 4E (SW Saga came out between v.3.5 and 4E). But some of the good 4E stuff (yes, it actually exists) wasn’t in there. Which gave me an idea – I’ve never like 4E, not primarily because it’s not neat and logical (just look at the 4E level progression table…let’s see, I get to swap a power…a utility power, oh great now I have to look through that dammed power list…4E is not neat, end of discussion!), but because it is a development in the wrong direction as with regards to the type of games I want to play.

So I had this idea…what if I took Revised edition and Saga edition and elements from DnD 4E and meshed it all together? Mix and match of the best elements? Power cards for Force Powers seemed a good idea…30 levels seemed swell…the Tiers turned into Jedi Apprentice, Jedi Knight and Jedi Master…lots of cool stuff. And you know what? This DnD 4E turned Star Wars hybrid was exactly what I was looking for. It allows us to play fast and furious action with a minimum of fuss, exactly what I was looking for.

Which is my conclusion – if you are to enjoy a game and its setting, then the system used MUST support the kind of stories you want to tell. Star Wars Clone Wars and its heroic lightsaber-wielding Jedi fighting hordes of minions and battling vile Sith champions…it’s quite a different setting that the dark and dismal future of Dark heresy…or the bleak mortality and political backstabbing of Birthright. So from now on I’ll pay more attention to the systems I use than I have in the past.

And I’d like to thank you Lucasfilm, for making something useful come of out of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition!