Concise Locket wrote:No, not really. I found the sourcebooks only amplified the core book's issues.
Pretty typical for a d20modern successor. Or indeed RPG games in general.
Having a look at Starships Of The Galaxy right now to check out Dean's claims about it...
...and it is terrible. It does NOT rewrite the base flawed starship rules. It does not correct some of the most glaring bugs in those rules or clarify some of the glaring "WTF?" miswordings or contradictions in those base rules.
It does go over the base talents of the game, mostly to stamp a bunch with "NOT IN STARSHIP COMBAT" thus creating a greater split between minigame dominance/uselessness when it SHOULD have been doing the opposite.
It adds in some more starship specific talents... which are largely the same incremental sometimes outright non-funtional due to bad wording shit as in core.
It takes time to give 8 new Talents (as terrible as the old ones) to the Ace Pilot prestige class in particular. Which is hilarious because the Ace Pilot prestige class is, mostly, so bad that you make better pilots out of most Jedi, and also hilarious because that class already has 10 useless talents of it's own and a legacy talent tree to spend its
five talents ever on.
The book adds "Starship Maneuvres" that work like the crappy tacked on per encounter system of Force Powers. And as such pretty much definitively suck, and more so thanks to being starship specific, thus causing more minigame break downs as you blow the same resources (your Feats) on choosing which part of the game you should sit on your hands for.
Only Pilots and Gunners get to do Maneuvers, and indeed actual actions other than bullshit aid anothers and "lets just ignore the shitty condition track rules ok?". And basically close enough to everything this book adds is for pilots and gunners only. All the other (terrible) roles introduced in the core, like the laughable "Commander" role, (my favorite as he is the ONLY MAN on his starship permitted to provide tech support to others in the form of an aid another on Computer Use) get crap all or just short of crap all.
This books message for you if you are not a Pilot?
Just be a fucking Pilot already and that's literally as there is totally a section titled "But I'm Not A Pilot!" that instead of covering your cool new options as a "not a pilot" just tells you "aw, go on just be a fucking pilot, it's easy trust me, and you don't need to invest anything in it" (just after a chapter or more of material dedicated to investing character resources into pilot/gunner only maneuvers).
The base starship rules have two (broken) scales which resulted in twice the rules wording fuck ups if not more when they wrote the base actions you can take in starship combat. Those rules include the "mixed" scale of "character scale" but basically defined the switch between the scales so poorly and incompletely that they never bothered to even include "you can have separate battle maps on separate scales running simultaneously". Which they sorta needed. That finally gets mentioned in Starships of the galaxy and is basically the one step forward in the book.
The base starship rules have serious issues dealing with character level and appropriate challenge levels for encounters using the games incredibly broken CL guidelines and whatever you pull from your ass. Because even if the game flat out tells you to play an XWing pilot from level one, X-Wings are +9 CL templates for NPCs and the game has NO COMMENT to make on what impact that +9CL should have on a PC, much less on mixed encounters with mixed PCs not all of whom will be in X-Wings. The Starships Of The Galaxy book seems to notice there MIGHT be an issue, but only acknowledges it or discusses it in the context of EVERYONE being in X-Wings and fighting only other vehicles that are also lower level than X-Wings. Then it does something randomly stupid to the CL math that makes just sort of no sense.
This doesn't solve the issue that a level 1 X-Wing Pilot is maybe 9 levels better than his OWN party in mixed encounters. The game still has a major issue where the elephant in the room it ignores is that it only even really begins to work under it's own non-functional terms IF
everyone is in vehicles or everyone is not at all times.
This doesn't solve the thing where the base game flat out tells you that a standard party of 4 characters
on foot should face 1 Star Destroyer in personal combat as a
standard "challenging but fair" encounter at a mere 7th Level (or less!) before anyone even qualifies for prestige classes.
The core rules also have issues with how players are supposed to even afford basic space transports let alone all these ships. These rules take the time out of their day to tell the GM to just give the players ships anyway. But adds in such gems as "Your NPCs should loan them to the PCs then take them away if the PCs don't suck your dick enough" and "Stealing ships is doable, I guess, only it's really really hard and everyone will hunt you and punitive stuff might happen!"
And then the basic borked underlying starship rules remain. Momentum is just short of non-existant, there is no real limit to stopping, turning or moving slowly, ramming rules are insane, the "run in a starship" action is spectacularly poorly written. The Max Velocity rule and Full Stop exist in a quantum state of borkness. The Increase Speed action is written without reference to scale and lets you risk damaging your ship for EITHER a few extra meters of move OR a few extra "hundreds if not thousands of kilometers" of move depending on largely uncontrollable context. The Max Velocity movement cap for character scale movement of fast vehicles is given in km/h instead of squares per round so you have to do conversion maths whenever you use it.
I haven't even bothered looking at the starship customization rules yet, they look like fairly standard points based customization crap. That on it's own tends to break, but in the hands of the d20modern guys, they will have some spectacular failures... but it doesn't matter, the base system remains shot so it doesn't matter what the fuck starships you build they have insane rules for how to fly them or when they are or are not even part of a fight.
If someone sits down with Starships of the Galaxy and comes away thinking that problems with Starships in the core are solved instead of just added to... they are incapable of the most basic analysis of RPG rules.