Fantasy Flight are publishing a Star Wars RPG

[echoVanguard]

As promised, here are my reasons for liking WEG SWD6. I make no claim the rules are objectively great (and in fact will point out some flaws as I go), but hopefully will paint a decent picture of why I, personally, like them.

SWD6 was the first widely popularized implementation of dice pools, and because it was published in, oh, 1987, the implementation was a little different from how most dice pools work now. Instead of counting successes or hits, the game simply has you total the values of all the dice to determine your total success value. The first die in every pool also explodes or causes glitches depending on the roll. This means that rolling generally requires a lot more math than most dicepool games (bad if you're physically counting, but great if you're using a dicebot).

Characters don't have classes as such, but are instead encouraged to pick from a list of "templates" which govern what skills you can start with and give you a fixed stat allocation. The game encourages you to create your own template (and you generally will want to, since most of us like actually having control over our stats and skill lists). Skills work pretty similarly to GURPS in that you have a base attribute (expensive to increase) and lots of skills (cheap to increase) that use the base attribute as their starting value. There are also specializations for cheaper costs, but they're a little byzantine to keep up to date. Starting equipment is pretty much "write in what you want to start with" and the MC can delete things from your list at will (or assign disadvantages to compensate that you may or may not know about at all, which is totally hilarious). There's not much in the way of caps, limits, or forced investments on either skills or attributes, so it has pretty much no balance to speak of past a certain point, but the limitation on only improving a skill once per adventure generally keeps your skills about even with each other and on the same par with your party members' skill levels. You can play as damn near any alien you want, and they have different stat min/maxes than humans and different point pools to buy them up with, plus at least one Weird Aien Power. If your alien only speaks Crazy Moon Language, it's cool - the game treats comprehension of languages as a straight-up Perception roll, meaning it simulates the way Star Wars characters effortlessly jabber at each other in weird languages all the time better than pretty much any other system ever.

Combat uses team initiative (similar to AD&D) with a Declare/Defend/Attack phase model, so you generally know who's doing what when. Contests are straightforward - attacker rolls their weapon skill, defender rolls their defense skill (or, in ranged combat, chooses to take the base defense offered by the range). If the attacker's roll was higher than the defender's, you see by how much. The more the attacker beat the defense roll by, the worse the status effect that gets slapped on the defender, up to and including death. The game also handles initiative and multiple actions very intuitively by making the following statements: doing pretty much anything counts as one action (including defending!), and you can take as many actions in a turn as you want - but each action past the first gives you a cumulative -1 penalty to all your dice pools that round. This is complicated by the fact that pretty much everything is an action, including Moving (and sometimes you have to roll to successfully move), Defending (you have to declare what defensive skills you're using as part of your action, and there are three seperate defensive skills), or using a force power (of which you may have to use multiples). This last bit helps to keep Jedi from auto-winning, because Lightsaber Combat requires using two powers simultaneously just to activate or sustain, keeping the bonuses in a generally reasonable range for the game's total attribute level. Combat rules can be a little byzantine with different types of dodges, but no worse than SR4 for the most part. Cover/concealment adds to the DC to hit. In actual play, combat is extremely quick, very clear, and highly cinematic.

As for Jedi and Non-Jedi, Force Users generally have the option to learn a lot of powers that can't be duplicated by other characters' skillsets, but they tend to have lower ranks in other skills as a result (because Jedi Powers use a totally separate set of skills you have to buy, lowering your other skills). For example, Jedi are generally pretty great at distracting goons and sabering people, but they can't fix or fly ships, negotiate with tough enemies, repair stuff, slice computers, or generally do anything other than things their force powers augment (which is effectively limited to levitation, sabering, healing, and Mind control). Now, that last one is pretty great, but the difficulty rolls to pull it off are almost always higher than just using social skills to accomplish what you want (and using Mind Control in any way other than very gently earns you a DSP, which is almost always a Bad Thing). In general, a party wants at least one force user, but having an entire party composed of nothing BUT force-users will generally leave you feeling small in the trousers when you have to deal with non-fleshy game challenges.

Ships and space combat are pretty great, using a whole bunch of very crunchy rules about blaster codes, targeting computers, scaling, fire zones, relative speeds, scanning ranges, astrogation, shield zones, and all the other fun stuff we associate with space opera combat. I can't really do them justice here, but they work pretty similarly to the way normal combat works (shielding is a defensive action, obviously).

The game doesn't go heavy on the rules - the entire rulebook is less than 180 pages, a good chunk of which is art, fluff, or advice. Again, in actual play, you generally spend a lot more time making tough decisions (I want to dodge, but that'll mean I might not have enough dice to slice the door controls!!) than finding ways to stack bonuses or plan out exactly what convoluted set of feats and magic items you need to meet your character concept. For genre-simulated, relatively story-focused play, I found the game to be highly enjoyable. Your mileage may vary.

It's not a textbook example of a great rules system. Lots of things are needlessly complicated, there are no caps to keep the system from exploding, and the level of enforced failure might offend people used to kindler, gentler systems. But it's fun, which is a lot more than some systems can say.

echo

[PoliteNewb]

I agree with most of what you said, and I also thought SWd6 was a pretty decent game. One thing though...

You can play as damn near any alien you want, and they have different stat min/maxes than humans and different point pools to buy them up with, plus at least one Weird Aien Power.

You didn't actually have to use those alien rules, though (for instance, if you didn't want to buy any of the alien books). You could simply divvy up your 18 dice for your stats as normal and say "I'm a Fosmogorian, and I look like an ambulatory cactus". One of the original templates from the first edition was "alien student of the force"...meaning you were just "an alien" of some kind, it didn't even matter what. You were just supposed to make something up.

Which is really the best way (IMO) to deal with a setting where there are hundreds of different alien races, some of which you will never encounter more than once. Honestly, while I enjoyed the two "Alien Anthology" books, I didn't really care for how they handled the crunchiness of them. If you wanted to play a Nikto, instead of having to dig through a book and look up the stats, you should just design a normal character and say "hey, my guy is a Nikto".

[Fuchs]

Boba Fett seemed to be doing alright against Luke until Han took him out. By accident. Which kind of undermines the "most awesome bounty hunter ever" shtick he had going for him and the scene is generally despised by fans for doing so.

Despised by fanboys.

This sums up the "legendary" Boba Fett well:

http://www.troopsofdoomcomic.com/2008/03/17/legendary/

[Chamomile]

Yes, Boba Fett does not demonstrate a whole lot of individual competence in the movies. But neither do any of the other bounty hunters. Or the stormtroopers who get beaten in a fire fight by a farm boy and a diplomat despite superior numbers. The reason Darth Vader is built up as a legendary badass is because he's the only Star Wars villain who was ever demonstrated as being capable to stand up to literally any named hero at all in a one-on-one fight. What dialogue we do hear from and about Boba Fett in Empire Strikes Back heavily implies that he's really good at his job, and the fact that he can't do a damn thing to catch a ragtag bunch of heroes just means that, just like all the other villains, the narrative hates him and loves his opponents.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The thing is, if you don't have Jedi taking a prominent role in your setting there's little reason to do a Star Wars setting at all.

Star Trek has better team-based ship combat and MacGuyvering. Mass Effect (and again Star Trek) has better racial interaction. WH40K/Star Fox has better vehicles and a wider array of shit to blast. Outlaw Star has better team-based mundane vs. phlebtonium combat. And this is while all of their other multicultural space opera tropes are comparable to what Star Wars has. If not outright superior.

The only thing I'd say that Star Wars does better than other space opera settings is integrating Space Kung Fu mysticism and mythology (training arcs, half-baked Human Potential Movement crap, master-vs-student, etc.) into the story. It does it extremely well. It does it so well that those are the parts of the movies that people are most likely to explain and quote. There's a reason why the good Star Wars games with heavy stories revolve around Space Kung Fu monomyths and the good Star Wars games that don't downplay the story in favor of gameplay. Seriously, can you even tell me the plot of Rogue Trader or Shadows of the Empire off of the top of your head.

I totally understand if you're dismayed by Tartovsky-style Jedi wanking and having your game revolve around Space Kung Fu antics. But if you don't have it prominently featured in the game, I'm really wondering why you want to make Star Wars the focus of your game unless you're in it for cynical marketing reasons or you really really REALLY like the aesthetic.

[PoliteNewb]

Star Trek has better team-based ship combat and MacGuyvering. Mass Effect (and again Star Trek) has better racial interaction. WH40K/Star Fox has better vehicles and a wider array of shit to blast. Outlaw Star has better team-based mundane vs. phlebtonium combat. And this is while all of their other multicultural space opera tropes are comparable to what Star Wars has. If not outright superior.

I'm just going to say that my response to most of this is "disagree", "not familiar with", or "you're insane". How does Star Trek have better team-based ship combat? Their ship to ship combat is stupid; capital ships sitting near motionless and blasting at each other, while engineering guys try to keep the warp core from exploding. No thanks. Better MacGuyvering? You'd rather have Scotty or LaForge pushing buttons than watch Chewbacca use a laser welder? Racial interaction? How does Trek's collection of forehead aliens compare to the Mos Eisley cantina?
I'm not familiar with Star Fox, Mass Effect, or Outlaw Star, except the peripheral. Outlaw Star could be cool (I'm told it's very similar to Firefly, but then I think Firefly is quite similar to Star Wars in a lot of ways). Mass Effect also looks cool, but I don't see how a video game can match the depth of a multi-movie and novel franchise. Star Fox can take its spacefaring furries and fuck off.
40K is a completely different aesthetic than Star Wars...I don't know how you can even call it space opera. And how does it have better vehicles/shit to blast? I've looked over some 40K manuals...how many different vehicles/ships even exist? I could give you a list of 'Wars ships a mile long.

From what I know (again...can't really speak to some of those, but I'm fairly familiar with 'Trek), I find Star Wars to have the most interesting and colorful setting for space opera. I admit that's a subjective judgment, but I don't see how your claim is anything else.

Seriously, can you even tell me the plot of Rogue Trader or Shadows of the Empire off of the top of your head.

Do you mean "Rogue Squadron" (since Rogue Trader is wh40K, I think)? If so, the plot is mostly "hotshot pilots go around dogfighting Imperial space nazis, while also carrying out difficult commando missions, plus occasionally getting drunk, playing pranks, and/or boning alien chicks".

Shadows of the Empire would be "evil sexy-lizard gangster tries to play the rebels and the empire off against each other, plus bone princess Leia. She is rescued by Luke and a Han Solo ripoff character. Also, there is a sexy android. Also, it sucked."

[Lago PARANOIA]

Yeah, I meant Rogue Squadron.

How does Star Trek have better team-based ship combat? Their ship to ship combat is stupid; capital ships sitting near motionless and blasting at each other, while engineering guys try to keep the warp core from exploding. No thanks.

From an action-based video-game perspective, yes, Star Wars team-based ship combat is better because Star Trek ship combat is ponderous and clunky. But from a TTRPG perspective, it's no contest. Star Trek is by far and away better. Star Trek has a metric fuckton of examples where ship combat was not solved by dogfights and people blasting away with pew pew lasers. This is exactly what you want for a TTRPG, because rolling dice and describing how you're dodging turret fire while firing lasers and the occasional torpedo will never be as exciting as doing it in a video game. It certainly won't be as exciting as a hacking minigame designed to learn the enemy ships' shield frequency or sending teleport ambushes to disrupt ship functions. Happens in Star Trek all the time; Star Wars, not so much.

Better MacGuyvering? You'd rather have Scotty or LaForge pushing buttons than watch Chewbacca use a laser welder?

No. But Star Trek MacGuyvering doesn't work like that. Unless it's supposed to be a throwaway piece of technobabble, Star Trek MacGuyvering has an investigation and/or diplomacy phase to it first. That is much more potentially interesting than Chewie rolling dice to see how hardcore he laser-welds something.

Racial interaction? How does Trek's collection of forehead aliens compare to the Mos Eisley cantina?

Because, uh, you actually learn things about Star Trek forehead aliens and how they differ from humans? I'm not going to award Star Trek a diversity award or anything, but just the existence of Spock and Data have given us much complexity than the entirety of Star Wars' cast in all of the movie series. The video games might be an exception.

But really, pound-for-pound you seriously cannot get more shallow non-human diversity than Star Wars. You can get as shallow pretty easily, but more shallow?

[erik]

But really, pound-for-pound you seriously cannot get more shallow non-human diversity than Star Wars. You can get as shallow pretty easily, but more shallow?

Except for all the aliens in Star Wars and all the series without aliens, this is totally true.

Granted, the main characters only have a few non-humans: Chewie, C3PO, R2D2, but there's plenty of prominent named characters who are also non-human: Yoda, Jabba, Akbar and Nien Nunb (okay, I had to look up his name, but he blows up the stinking Death Star II with Lando, c'mon!), not to mention the communities of aliens that play parts like Ewoks, Jawas and Sand People.

I'd say Star Wars has more non-human diversity than Star Trek. You don't learn more about them because it wasn't a TV series and expecting to learn in depth about the zillions of races during a movie is a stupid expectation. You are expected to accept, hey, this is an extremely racially diverse setting and just go with it.

Compare to most of the Star Trek movies and it's about the same, except there's a lot less diversity in Star Trek, and if an alien society is featured prominently, it is as antagonists who are going to get their butts kicked.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Granted, the main characters only have a few non-humans: Chewie, C3PO, R2D2, but there's plenty of prominent named characters who are also non-human: Yoda, Jabba, Akbar and Nien Nunb (okay, I had to look up his name, but he blows up the stinking Death Star II with Lando, c'mon!), not to mention the communities of aliens that play parts like Ewoks, Jawas and Sand People.

Most Star Wars movie/game material would be changed very little if all of the non-human characters were changed to aliens. Seriously; what possible relevance did Yoda or Chewbacca's species have to the plot other than making them talk oddly? The two characters in the movies where the fact that they were Not Human mattered from a biological (or whatever the equivalent is for robots) or sociological perspective were Jar-Jar Binks and R2D2. Hell, if you changed all of the characters in the original trilogy to Wookies for example, practically no changes would need to be made to the story other than requiring subtitles.

For a series with supposedly so many alien species, that's shallow as fuck. Halo managed to do better than that with just two games. If you want to do species diversity in Star Wars, you either end up wasting a lot of space in the books (I burst out laughing at the racial section in the Star Wars d20 book), MTPing things on the fly, or go without. I recommend MTPing it or going without.

Compare to most of the Star Trek movies and it's about the same, except there's a lot less diversity in Star Trek, and if an alien society is featured prominently, it is as antagonists who are going to get their butts kicked.

Uh, I know that Star Trek III and V were awful and we'd like to forget about it, but the plots heavily depend on the fact that Vulcan society and biology are Not Like Humans. Sad as it was, that's much better than Star Wars ever did.

But beyond that, who gives a shit about the quantity of alien races? What matters is the quality. All Spock needed to blend in human society was a headband, but I'd have much more fun roleplaying a Vulcan than a Gungan or a Wookee or a Twi'lek or whatever the fuck. Probably because there's actually something to roleplay about.

[OgreBattle]

There's a lot of casual, institutionalized racism in Star Wars.

*Princess Leia bumps into Chewbacca*
Princess Leia: "Will someone get this big walking carpet out of my way?"

*Chewbacca vents his frustration at losing in chess to a droid*
Han Solo: "That's 'cause droids don't pull people's arms out of their sockets when they lose. Wookiees are known to do that."

*Chewbacca is fixing C-3PO*
C-3PO: "Oh, oh, that's much better. Wait... wait. Oh, my! What have you done? I'm BACKWARDS. You flea-bitten furball! Only an overgrown mop-head like you would be stupid enough to..."
Remember, C-3PO is a PROTOCAL DROID, he is PROGRAMMED to be UPHOLD SOCIAL PROTOCAL, which means he is PROGRAMMED TO DISCRIMINATE AGAINST WOOKIES.

*Chewbacca laughs at a joke Leia made*
Han Solo: "Laugh it up, fuzzball."






But you know what?

Lando: "How you doin' Chewbacca? Still hanging around with this loser (Han)?"

At least one man treated Chewbacca with respect.

[crasskris]

I do have a soft spot for d6 too, but how does this

...and you generally will want to, since most of us like actually having control over our stats and skill lists...

correlate with this

...or assign disadvantages to compensate that you may or may not know about at all, which is totally hilarious...

[Korwin]

Star Trek has better team-based ship combat and MacGuyvering. Mass Effect (and again Star Trek) has better racial interaction. WH40K/Star Fox has better vehicles and a wider array of shit to blast. Outlaw Star has better team-based mundane vs. phlebtonium combat.

Are there (printed) RPG's out for the bolded ones?

[MfA]

Star War's problem is jedi. Either play an all-jedi campaign, or an all-mundane campaign, or you balance jedi and mundanes, and find a way to deal with the fanboys who think jedi are gods and should be treated as such.

Actually the fanboys aren't the problem ... if the non jedi players are willing to play a boba fett or grievous level bad ass there is no problem. Even a wealthy trader with a droid entourage could work.

As always it's the mundane action hero types which are the real problem to having a fun game ...

[Fuchs]

Star War's problem is jedi. Either play an all-jedi campaign, or an all-mundane campaign, or you balance jedi and mundanes, and find a way to deal with the fanboys who think jedi are gods and should be treated as such.

Actually the fanboys aren't the problem ... if the non jedi players are willing to play a boba fett or grievous level bad ass there is no problem. Even a wealthy trader with a droid entourage could work.

As always it's the mundane action hero types which are the real problem to having a fun game ...

From my experiences with jedi fanboys too many of them do not accept that anyone not using the force can be as bad ass as a jedi.

[echoVanguard]

I do have a soft spot for d6 too, but how does this

...and you generally will want to, since most of us like actually having control over our stats and skill lists...

correlate with this

...or assign disadvantages to compensate that you may or may not know about at all, which is totally hilarious...

Apples to oranges. People like to be able to control what their characters are like - in other words, their physical appearance and capabilities, what they're good at and what form their general personality takes. However, things that happen to your character - such as the MC secretly assigning a huge debt to a crime boss your character (and thus you) don't know about - is firmly within the realm of stuff people accept as a challenge. My writeup probably didn't make it clear enough that the disadvantages the MC assigns to counterbalance items are not (at least in the examples) intrinsic changes to the character, but rather persistent malignant circumstances that fall more into the realm of background than attribute. To be fair, the rules don't specifically prohibit the MC from "you have a cool rocket launcher, so your character is crippled", but that's one of the reasons why it's a good system and not a great one. Like most interpretation-heavy systems, it generally requires a fair amount of goodwill on everyone's part to work well.

Some people would argue that they should have complete control over their character's background AND circumstances in addition to attributes and equipment, but this is bad for the game. Once you go past a certain point, you cross the line from a role-playing game to a narrative.

echo

[Lago PARANOIA]

Are there (printed) RPG's out for the bolded ones?

There's an Outlaw Star project on 1d4chan. I haven't looked at it, I just know that it exists. Mass Effect? I'm not entirely sure. But Green Ronin did do a Dragon Age TTRPG and it's not unreasonable to assume that they'll go back to the Bioware well again. Star Fox? Notta chance.

[Username17]

Chewbacca is the only alien character in Star Wars who gets any real attention paid to what their race is, does, or means. And really all we know about wookies is that they are strong, violent, hated, and feared without actually being kill on sight anywhere. Sure, there is some other stuff included in the Star Wars Christmas Special, and the Ewoks get a bit of backstory in The Ewok Adventure - those things are terrible and everyone pretends they never happened.

Compared to Star Trek or even Star Gate, there's no comparison. What's the third most fleshed out race in Star Trek? Trill perhaps? Those are still amazingly more fleshed out as a race than Wookies will ever be.

Star Wars has lots of aliens on the screen all the time, but few of them have any lines, and the number that aren't just sight gags are small enough to count on your fingers. Almost every single episode of Star Trek details a planet's inhabitants in greater detail than you get for any race in Star Wars except Wookies and maybe Ewoks.

-Username17

[virgil]

There's quite a bit of racial background given in the expanded universe. And if you discount that, then aren't you essentially comparing a six movies with multiple seasons of multiple television series (with movies of their own)? Such volume makes any absolute comparison of detail obvious in terms of who wins.

[Lago PARANOIA]

There's quite a bit of racial background given in the expanded universe. And if you discount that, then aren't you essentially comparing a six hours of movies with multiple seasons of multiple television series? Such volume makes any detail given absolutely huge in comparison.

Even if you compare only the six movies of the ST:TOS continuity to the six Star Wars movies Star Wars comes up way the hell short. Star Wars compares poorly in this department to Far Gate, Oglethorp Star Gate or Titan AE or Total Recall. And those were just single movies.

And if you just select twelve non-ENT Star Trek episodes (so that the running time is equal) at random chances are you'll so get much more biological and/or cultural diversity with non-humans that it's totally no contest.

[virgil]

Titan AE? The closest thing to racial diversity given is that they tell us the bad guys are scared of humans and Preed's race doesn't dream; the rest of the aliens are given as much depth as anything in Star Wars. I'm fairly certain they equal that kind of detail in at least one of the Star Wars movies.

Same goes for Total Recall, a movie where the only race is human. The kind of culture created/established in Episode 4 is easily on par with that of Total Recall, and racial depth is a non-issue with there being only humans.

[PoliteNewb]

Star Trek has a metric fuckton of examples where ship combat was not solved by dogfights and people blasting away with pew pew lasers. This is exactly what you want for a TTRPG, because rolling dice and describing how you're dodging turret fire while firing lasers and the occasional torpedo will never be as exciting as doing it in a video game. It certainly won't be as exciting as a hacking minigame designed to learn the enemy ships' shield frequency or sending teleport ambushes to disrupt ship functions.

No. But Star Trek MacGuyvering doesn't work like that. Unless it's supposed to be a throwaway piece of technobabble, Star Trek MacGuyvering has an investigation and/or diplomacy phase to it first. That is much more potentially interesting than Chewie rolling dice to see how hardcore he laser-welds something.

All Spock needed to blend in human society was a headband, but I'd have much more fun roleplaying a Vulcan than a Gungan or a Wookee or a Twi'lek or whatever the fuck.

Okay, we have sufficiently different definitions of "exciting", "macguyvering", "interesting", and "fun" that further conversation on this topic would not be productive. Our tastes are apparently too different. Fair enough.

And yeah, as far as I was speaking, I was including the novels and EU. If you're going to discount that, then we have nothing much to talk about.

[Username17]

Okay, we have sufficiently different definitions of "exciting", "macguyvering", "interesting", and "fun" that further conversation on this topic would not be productive. Our tastes are apparently too different. Fair enough.

I really don't know what definition of macguyvering you could have. In Star Wars, people can jiggle with wires to:

• Open and close doors.
• Disable or speed up star ships.
• Brainwash, damage, or repair droids.

And I'm sorry, that's pretty fucking pathetic. Star Trek wire jiggling opens and closes dimensional portals, creates and disrupts illusions on a planetary scale, pushes forcefields around for fun and profit, teleports things interplanetary distances, transform illusions into physical objects, travels through time, and so on and so on.

It's just not even comparable. Being a "tech guy" in Star Wars is basically a shit deal. You can improve your stuff I guess, granting some miscellaneous pluses to your blaster, your speeder, and your binoculars. And that's about it. The Tech guy rolls some dice and gives people minor numeric bonuses. Also he opens doors. The Star Trek "tech guy" has so many options that they actually have to split that archetype up into "engineering tech guy", "weapons systems tech guy", "medical tech guy", and "other science tech guy". And they are still individually able to solve about a billion times more problems than the "tech guy" in Star Wars can.

-Username17

[Dogbert]

They lost me as soon as I heard it was WHFRP system. Boba Fett doesn't slip in the bath tub and dies. PERIOD.

However, I must commend FFG for delaying Jedi arrival as long as possible. Remember how Lucas ordered Salvatore to kill Han Solo's kid in the Expanded Universe's novels because "he was stealing camera from Luke's"? It really wouldn't surprise me that game imbalance was part of the licensing.

[Red_Rob]

Jedi never really seemed that powerful in the original trilogy. I mean, sure Luke could deflect laser blasts and Vader could disarm people but noone got hit by weapons fire anyway, and it never seemed beyond reason that a skilled bounty hunter or smuggler could get one over on one. I mean, can you honestly say you can imagine Vader surviving his TIE crashing into the Death Star Trench in A New Hope or that Han couldn't have beat the Rancor in Jedi?

Seems like you could easily make a party balanced in Star Wars as long as you stuck to what you say in the movies and didn't give Jedi a load of personal combat powers.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Titan AE? The closest thing to racial diversity given is that they tell us the bad guys are scared of humans and Preed's race doesn't dream; the rest of the aliens are given as much depth as anything in Star Wars. I'm fairly certain they equal that kind of detail in at least one of the Star Wars movies.

The fact that humans are viewed as sad space hobos leeching off of other alien societies is by itself a more interesting racial dynamic than what happened in any of the Star Wars movies. It's not awesome by any means -- certainly no Mass Effect -- but it's a damn sight better than Star Wars.

Same goes for Total Recall, a movie where the only race is human. The kind of culture created/established in Episode 4 is easily on par with that of Total Recall, and racial depth is a non-issue with there being only humans.

Bwah? The mutants of Total Recall are a have-resenting underclass created by class division and corporate abuse. The Gungans just have a hidden city because they like being underwater better and serve as a plot-convenient way to fight the Trade Federation at the climax of the movie. There's no contest.