WEG Star Wars

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Stevethulhu

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I picked up a copy of 1e cheap on ebay. Turns out the 30th anniversary reprint is hideously expensive here in the uk.

Anyway, I was wondering what else I might need. The SW universe book? Other setting books or adaptations. Any errata that might be out there, good scenarios other than Tattooine Manhunt. Things loke that.

Its been a LONG time since I last played WEG SW and I'm thinking of using it to introduce my 11 year old to the wonderful world of RPGs and some house runes to make the game run smoother or more simply wouldn't hurt.
 
With WEG Star Wars I kind of find less is more. You probably want the "Rules update" to patch the 1st ed rules.

The Sourcebook with ships with the Anniversary edition has a stats for a few more ships and aliens. The stats given for the characters from movies are nonsense though. I don't find I use it much.

The Gamemaster Kit isn't too bad. The GM screeen has all the stats and chart you need and comes with a ready to go campaign setting. I've seen this go pretty cheep.

The Tramp Freighter sourcebook is also quite popular, and hence it can be pricey. It also has its own campaign setting.

Finally, while it's not WEG D6, the Star Wars D20 Galactic Campaign is probably the most versatile Star Wars resource of them all. It's largely rules neutral but but it is just packed with useable information.
 
Are there any fan made resources that you would recommend?
 
It’s technically piracy even though WEG doesn’t hold the rights to the property any longer.
 
How cross compatible are the various editions? From the look o this, I'd guess closer to CoC than to D&D. But I could be wrong.
 
I did pick up the WEG Star Wars 30th Anniversary edition, and it still the best in my view (although I did personally like the recent Mongoose Traveller version on PDF too). Its one example that marries system to setting perfectly, whereas I find other systems - notably d20 - felt more contrived.

The main advantage of picking up the WEG Star Wars, aside from system, is that it was made in 1987 and in no way references any of the Prequel or Sequel on movies. This gives the setting a much more open feel and gives a playing group the opportunity that the script-writers never took, of moving the narrative away from being exclusively about the Skywalker family. That is, you can tell your own stories with it, not somebody else’s. Maybe The Mandelorian could be of inspiration, or possibly Rogue One (which focusses on a different group of characters).

From my understanding, it was the late Stewart Weick who was the instigator in approaching FFG and bringing back WEG Star Wars 30th Anniversary, just like he brought back Pendragon previously. Nocturnal Games had also bought WEG and the D6 system as a brand and were looking to build on it before he passed away. He will be missed.
 
How cross compatible are the various editions? From the look o this, I'd guess closer to CoC than to D&D. But I could be wrong.
All the WEG Star Wars editions are more or less compatible, with minor changes between editions.
 
D6 is great although it’s not perfect by any means. The biggest issue with the rules is how the Force works. A single Force attribute would have worked better and has been one of the biggest house rules for years.

Every Star Wars RPG has its pluses and minuses.
 
D6 is great although it’s not perfect by any means. The biggest issue with the rules is how the Force works. A single Force attribute would have worked better and has been one of the biggest house rules for years.

Every Star Wars RPG has its pluses and minuses.
One of the things I liked with WEG Star Wars was that the Force based characters weren’t so heavily focused on in the D6 version. You could play them, but the customizable templates had a lot more non-Force users than Force users. In the D20 version, especially, it felt like every player wanted to play a Jedi.

To be honest, although I did play a demo game I think, I wasn’t really interested in the FFG version to be an expert on it. Was turned off by the three-core-book format and the custom dice.
 
One of the things I liked with WEG Star Wars was that the Force based characters weren’t so heavily focused on in the D6 version. You could play them, but the customizable templates had a lot more non-Force users than Force users. In the D20 version, especially, it felt like every player wanted to play a Jedi.

To be honest, although I did play a demo game I think, I wasn’t really interested in the FFG version to be an expert on it. Was turned off by the three-core-book format and the custom dice.

d20 version also came after the Prequels, which were all about Jedi doing cool shit, not looking like they were trying not to cut their own faces off with a lightsaber, because the fight choreography - and fighters - were more dynamic.
 
Star Wars 1st edition has exactly the right amount of crunch for me, it's one of the very few RPGs I nver felt the need to houserule anything (ecept the stats for film characters in official publications). If you let loose and get into the free-wheeling nature, I find it recreates the feel and mood of the original trilogy perfectly and even watching the Mandalorian, I often found myself seeing scenes played out using the D6 rules.

Further editions added complexity, including the (now-ubiquitous in D6 games) "Wild Die", but I never personally found that any of the added crunch was worth the trade-off.

If there are quirks to the rules, we simply never noticed them.
 
The main advantage of picking up the WEG Star Wars, aside from system, is that it was made in 1987 and in no way references any of the Prequel or Sequel on movies. This gives the setting a much more open feel and gives a playing group the opportunity that the script-writers never took, of moving the narrative away from being exclusively about the Skywalker family. That is, you can tell your own stories with it, not somebody else’s. Maybe The Mandelorian could be of inspiration, or possibly Rogue One (which focusses on a different group of characters).
I don't think the whole 'Skywalker Saga' thing was a thing before the last movie.
 
I don't think the whole 'Skywalker Saga' thing was a thing before the last movie.
I mean the Prequels and the Sequels just kept returning to the same family saga over multiple generations to me. Those Star Wars movies would have fared better if they just made different trilogies about other characters in the universe, in my retrospective view.
 
Although Star Wars was always "From the adventures of Luke Skywalker."
The novelisarion was "From The Adventures of Luke Skywalker, an excerpt from the Journal of the Whills." But that never made it into the movies until Rogue One used the Whills as an easter egg and plot point. And Luke wasn't namechecked in that.

I mean the Prequels and the Sequels just kept returning to the same family saga over multiple generations to me. Those Star Wars movies would have fared better if they just made different trilogies about other characters in the universe, in my retrospective view.
Technically, the OT and prequels were the story of a father falling to evil and being redeemed by his son. Story over.

As an aside, no, the prequels never changed my childhood. They came out 20 years too late to have any effect on my developmental years. Saying they did reeks of the kind of entitlement that people say ruined being a fan. At least to me it does.

Anyway, the sequels. They didn't follow the Skywalker family until Rey decided to take on the name. Yes, Luke was a character in the movies. But it wasn't about him. And the Skywalker Saga wasn't mentioned until the last movie's promotion cycle started. Not that I'm aware of.
 
Technically, the OT and prequels were the story of a father falling to evil and being redeemed by his son. Story over.

As an aside, no, the prequels never changed my childhood. They came out 20 years too late to have any effect on my developmental years. Saying they did reeks of the kind of entitlement that people say ruined being a fan. At least to me it does.
Part of my humour is to exaggerate. It isn’t a literal claim that my childhood was ruined by Star Wars, merely that the Prequels were so bad they soured the generally high regard I had for the original trilogy, which were part of my childhood.

Anyway, the sequels. They didn't follow the Skywalker family until Rey decided to take on the name. Yes, Luke was a character in the movies. But it wasn't about him. And the Skywalker Saga wasn't mentioned until the last movie's promotion cycle started. Not that I'm aware of.
Kylo Ren was Skywalker’s nephew, and it was a continuation of the same family melodrama in any case. When it came to plot writing, the latest trilogy ended up just being an exercise in trying to cram in as many references towards the original trilogy as was possible. This is what I mean - the writers should have tried to do something different with the franchise, with entirely new characters and different story arcs. Admittedly, the only one that tried to do something different was The Last Jedi, and some fans hated it, so I guess it will always be a case of my Star Wars enthusiasm being a thing of my childhood, primarily.

At least Dune comes out this year.....
 
I love the 30th anniversary edition of 1e. I am looking forward to running it (the kids want to, thanks to the Mandalorian).

However, while I dislike adding to the simplistic rules, I wondered how others would handle thinks like Mandalorian armor and weapons. Or adjusting the Force system to be a bit less... clunky? Someone mentioned using a single "Force" skill...

EDIT: in other words, what official / unofficial rules would you add-on or change, without drastically bulking up the complexity?
 
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The Star Wars RPG was from a time when Jedi were all but extinct, and Force powers were meant to be very rare. I guess this is why I never found the Force powers particularly "clunky", it's just not the acrobatic superheroes that Jedi became ala the prequels. Your Quixotic Jedi would maybe use one to get past some guards, or later one to reach an object from far away, and your skill with a lightsaber improved as you gained a closer connection to The Force, and that was mostly it, because it was a Buddhist-zen thing about being connected to and talking to the universe and sometimes the universe talking back, rather than a microbial Mutant power engine
 
Fair enough. Most of my experiences with were later editions, where we, the players in High School, were trying to emulate stuff we found in the meagre expanded universe and the Phantom Menace. Yikes.

Edit: re-reading the 1st ed Force rules, and they're a lot more simple and easy than I thought.
 
Necrozius Necrozius You'll want to look at the lightsabre skill in 1E, if I remember Char Gen correctly it was impossible for a starting young Jedi character to actually hit anything with the silly thing.
 
Kinda like Luke never used his for the entire first film...
 
I remember D6 as buckets of dice. I got the 30th anniversary edition for Christmas and it's much simpler than I remember. I think huge dice totals mainly came about when things of different scale were rolling against each other.

At some point in a few months, I'm gonna try a non-rebellion adventure with my one shots group. I've found some pregen characters. I think I can explain the rules in a page if I leave out starships and force powers.
 
Necrozius Necrozius You'll want to look at the lightsabre skill in 1E, if I remember Char Gen correctly it was impossible for a starting young Jedi character to actually hit anything with the silly thing.
Hm. The duality of Jedi and stormtroopers ...
 
Necrozius Necrozius You'll want to look at the lightsabre skill in 1E, if I remember Char Gen correctly it was impossible for a starting young Jedi character to actually hit anything with the silly thing.

Yeah. You needed a 20 via the base rules to hit someone, and that wasn't counting a defense roll. That wasn't even a sure thing even if you had a 6d skill.

I recall my crew had some arguments about whether you could use Dodge against a lightsaber. This prompted conversations about what the melee defense skill represented.

My apologies, it has been a while. I don't recall if there was a melee parry skill or just melee or what it was. But I recall us discussing about whether someone without a lightsaber could use any melee or unarmed defense against the lightsaber attack, since there was definitely an attitude among us that those skills represented someone using something to block the lightsaber and not getting out of the way of it. If those defenses meant getting out of the way, surely that would be a Dodge skill use, right?

Combine that with the fact that all defenses added on top of the base difficulty (basically, all defenses in 1e are Full rather than the later concept of Reactive), and someone with a lightsaber was NEVER going to hit anyone if Dodge was usable as a defense, unless the fight was so damn mismatched as to be irrelevant.

I basically just said Dodge was "Ranged Defense" and the others were "Close Combat Defense" and left the rest of the the situation. Although once there was a heated argument about a Wookie using Brawling Parry against a lightsaber, and the player getting mad when I said the lightsaber chopped his arm off.

Then again, I didn't run much.
 
I think Melee Parry would be what you against lightsabers and ducks and feints are part of that. If you want to call it Melee Defense instead, that would work. I believe Brawling Parry can be used instead of Melee Parry if you have no weapons, but a failure doesn’t necessarily mean your character uses his arms to block the attack. It’s all based on what he said he was doing in his defense.

Dodge should really only be used against ranged attacks.
 
If I remember the Jedi was much better at parrying, which, logically, would chop most other weapons in half. I seem to remember doing a lot of parrying anyway.
 
Yeah. You needed a 20 via the base rules to hit someone, and that wasn't counting a defense roll. That wasn't even a sure thing even if you had a 6d skill.

I recall my crew had some arguments about whether you could use Dodge against a lightsaber.

You cannot. Pg. 14 - Dodge is used when someone fires at you.

I coulda swore the 20 Difficulty for using a Lightsaber was for non-Jedi - it's only mentioned in the rules when it says "anyone without Force powers can use it as a melee weapon", but I can't find where it says differently for Force users. Maybe that was a houserule we used, or maybe it's changed in one of the sourcebooks?
 
You cannot. Pg. 14 - Dodge is used when someone fires at you.

Well, good. That means I was right in viewing it as "Ranged Defense" rather than literal dodge.

Looking up an image of the character sheet (can't access my books right now) shows there's a Melee Parry and Brawling Parry. That maps with my recollection we saw those as explicitly about blocking an attack rather than getting out of the way of it.

So I guess the question is whether you can use any other defense against a lightsaber other than another lightsaber and a lightaber skill + sense. It makes a big difference.

Skill dice versus a 20 with no potential defense is very different from Skill dice versus 20 + defense roll. If nothing can roll defense against it other than another lightsaber, then the 20 base difficulty is very justified.

But no one is going to hit someone in a lightsaber duel short of a horrific die roll on defense or the use of a force point.
 
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