Phonelobster Shakes The Angry Fist at Star Wars Saga

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Phonelobster Shakes The Angry Fist at Star Wars Saga

Post by PhoneLobster »

What Is This?
It's a review of Star Wars Saga Edition. Very possibly "the worst edition". Consider it a substitute for the e20 review I totally promised to maybe definitely perhaps do that will sadly most likely never happen due to e20 stubbornly refusing to exist.

And it's a stupidly large review, chapter by chapter (almost) page by page. Every damn improbably stupid mechanic checked off a list to have the angry fist shaken at it. I can only hope it manages to be marginally entertaining and not as sanity destroying as it was to go through and write the fucker.

Why, just why?
Saga edition is dead, it barely even made it off the ground, even while it was active it's fans told me they had abandoned it (and it's spiritual forebear d20Modern) to play E20 instead (using fucking inter dimensional time travel since E20 still doesn't and may never exist). So why bother with this?

Well because there are dumb asses floating around saying good things about Saga edition, and in typical dishonesty using the “er we didn't mean the parts you know about, we mean the other parts, we totally avoid the parts you know about, even if we didn't mention that until it suddenly became vital to disown them...” defence.

And so like that time someone tried to convince me that d20modern was salvageable because of various bullshit sometimes splat book advanced classes it's time to go look, in way too much detail in order to see just how fucking wrong these dumb assholes are.

And since those same dumb assholes are pretty much exclusively obsessed with defending RPGs using a sort of ever shrinking “God Of The Gaps” thing I'm going to have to eventually cover EVERY fucking thing in great detail.

Wait? Everything?
Eventually, maybe. For now this is the core rule book. But there has been some attempt to pretend the splat books "fix" the game, cursory examination suggests that is a spectacularly stupid claim, but it does mean that odds are once I have finished posting the excessively in depth review of the core book I probably will have to cover at least a few pages each on at least some splat books. And since the fuckers defending Saga edition can't settle on how many or which books magically fix this shit fest beyond "I don't know maybe all of them?" I may yet have to cover ALL the damn things.

Saga Edition Episode 1: A New Hope
Lets start out with a quick background on what Saga Edition is and where it came from.

WOTC has the star wars RPG franchise, it's been sorta dead for a while because the d20 and d20 revised star wars rules were sort of shitty and then the prequels smacked them in the nuts like all star wars related merchandise.

But fuck it, they had the franchise, so they threw some shitty d20modern guys on it, tried out a few things they were thinking of for 4E and so Saga edition was born, a cheap half assed cash in on an struggling but once popular intellectual property that was the deformed offspring of the long dead corpse of d20Modern and the as yet unborn abomination that would be 4E.

Now they needed to justify releasing this cash in... and they did it by pulling the 4E marketing strategy. They told everyone how shit and flawed the prior edition was (and it was), then promised to fix those flaws!... and then published a game which largely ignored and repeated those flaws while introducing entirely new ones.

And from that lets spring board into the first book of horrible horrible RPG rules with... Saga Edition (Revised Core Rulebook)... (yes revised, no I'm not doing a separate one for the real first unrevised edition).
Last edited by PhoneLobster on Wed Nov 05, 2014 2:10 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Saga Edition (Revised Core Rulebook)
Size Matters
Lets start with this, because as petty as it may be it's a major elephant in the room and a surprisingly major issue in it's own way.

This book is stupidly shaped. It's not a standard large sized RPG rulebook of the scale of prior WOTC star wars rulebooks. It's a funny little sorta square thing.

Why they did this? I have no idea. Maybe it was to artificially inflate page count with it's funky little pages. The prior edition core book was 288 big pages... this one was 295 little pages. Maybe they were trying to give off the pretense of a relatively slimmed down easy to run rules set despite it being largely similar to it's predecessor just less complete and more crazy.

Regardless. It's a stupid shape that elevates page flipping requirements. Between that and some REALLY shitty "refer to page X for rule small enough I could have just printed it here instead of the page reference" fuckery this is a pretty flippy mess.

Now, lets start going through the damned book...

Barely Notable Moments In The Intro Section...
There isn't much to care about in the intro section. Though there are a few minor chuckles we can hastily skim through to give the intro some lip service...

Book supposedly offers three era's of play. Also any other era of play. Why did they even bother...

Implied default era of play is the much hated prequel era, they push the hated prequel era for the first example of play and the first introduction any player reading this book will have to the game.

Keeps trying to sell you shitty WOTC collectible minis and battle mats.

It's an RPG... RPG's are anything you can imagine... don't forget to bring people to your RPG... RPG “rules” are just guidelines so Fairy Tea Party all our mistakes Kthanxbye...

Here's an idea make wookee sounds constantly at the table that's not going to annoy anyone...

Here's another idea hide your minis on the floor next to your chair, nothing could go wrong...

Yet another idea! Beginner GMs with beginner players should just throw PCs who don't know each other into a bar room brawl and hope the players decide to group up without any actual motivation or direction from anyone to do so...

And then we are done and can move on to chapters that matter.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Character Creation
It's a checklist of references to other chapters. It doesn't even have short lists of options, the most offensive instance is probably the first check point. Which is “generate ability scores (see chapter 1)” and takes three paragraphs and give or take 100 words to say that WITHOUT actually just putting even the default ability score generation method right fucking there. Chapter 1 kindly does not HAVE a heading for the default method of generating scores, just sort of rambling about it under “Your Ability Scores”, the thing with the heading about generation is actually an optional alternative means of ability score generation, and the one under a heading with “standard” in the name is actually the third and most optional option. I know, I shouldn't obsess but fuck it, it's stupid and it shouldn't be like that either.

But character creation brings up a few of our first notable divergences from more standard d20 games...

Fixed Hit Points... sort of...
You don't roll for starting HP and you start with... rather a bunch tripple HD at maximum actually. On the plus side... hit point rolling IS pretty shit. And star wars d20/modern games had issues with stupidly high weapon damage and crits (at least compared to level 1 characters).

But... they give out a LOT of hit points, it's likely gonna be fairly bullet spongy territory here. And if that weren't enough there is STILL a disparity of nearly DOUBLE between the “ok you are allowed to be good” classes and the “fuck you skill monkeys!” classes, as if they didn't learn ANYTHING from doing that last fucking time.

And then later on there will be an alternative damage progression that makes all of this half redundant in stupid ways anyway. (only it turns out to be itself made largely redundant by other factors).

Oh and then despite realizing that randomizing hit points is shit for starting characters... they don't realize it's also shit for advancing characters so hit dice rolls are back again after level 1 anyways. Because fuck, actually COMMIT to a mechanical change? HA!

Three Defences Model
They trash AC, roll it into Reflex and then treat your remaining two saving throws as defence scores. This might be marginally OK as a base concept but three defences to invest in makes being a defensive character difficult, and the values of the defences vary wildly, almost everything is going to target reflex, attacks that target the others are going to be proportionally more valuable as most of the time only suckers invest in Fort or Will defence, and then the whole thing will get stood on it's head with skills sometimes substituting for defences (and attacks).

In the mean time hey look, you add your heroic level to all your defences. Or in the case of Reflex you add your heroic level OR your armour. Which is, quiet frankly weird as hell. It certainly does... things... but I would certainly hesitate to call them good things to the point of this being really more of a puzzling “WTF did they even think they wanted to happen with that?” moment rather than the “ah clearly they were trying to...” moment.

Damage Threshold
One of the worst rules in d20 modern was the thing where they made the massive damage instant kill rule run on your raw Constitution instead of a nice big number everyone forgets about. But the assholes behind Saga just couldn't let go so it returns revised into your fort defense, which, as a level one character is if anything more than likely to be lower than your raw constitution score. But hey at least it's going to go up.

Still, also, at least it no longer throws you into save vs death every time it's exceeded instead it interacts with the alternative damage track to defeat which we'll look at more when it crops up.

(only later in the review we will discover your damage threshold IS used to determine permadeaths of PCs on a regular basis anyways, but more on that when we hit it, because if you were a chump making a character for this game you wouldn't even know that yet).

Force Points and Destiny Points
One of the OTHER worst rules from d20 modern was the action points thing. One of the worst rules from the prior d20 star wars games were their action point like hodge podge called force points. Hey look who is back. You get Force Points and maybe (but it's here so hint hint, do it bitch!) Destiny Points. More on those later.

Ability Scores
It's your standard 3.x Edition fare. Notably you get double the normal level advancements to raw ability scores, but stupidly instead of staggering them out you just get twice as many just as rarely to keep it as chunky as possible. And no you aren't allowed to spend both points on one ability, that would just be too crazy good to get a WHOLE +1 actual bonus ever 4 levels, you greedy munckin, have two halves of +1s instead! (this is going to set a tone for the whole system here).

And hey look, it refers elsewhere and... the stupidity that is fairly standard d20 aging modifiers to attributes are still here. But hey it's penalties for fucking home alone child vader so we'll overlook that one. But then again they all but explicitly encourage a universe packed with age modifier exploiting Jedi by specifically calling them out has having specifically double the time in the maxed out age modifier table entry. God damnit.
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Species
OK now we are getting into fun sections, because now I can do individual species reviews, which I like, but before we do... languages! There are far too many, and the “common language list” has asterisks and foot notes to point out which languages of on the common language list are not in fact common languages and are on the list because... no wait, why were they on the fucking common languages list?

Anyway, species, this long list are all the species in the game! Hahaha, no, that would be too easy. This long list and a short list at the back of the NPC chapter are all the species in the game! DOUBLE HAHAHA! No, that TOO would be too easy. This long list, the short list at the back of the NPC chapter and then also the never actually defined species of several iconic characters in the more important to the movies NPC chapter are all the species in the game. AHAHAHA, still no, all that AND several name dropped species in the Galactic Gazateer that never get write ups are all the species in the game. And then droids, but we will be getting to droids, god save us all but we WILL be getting to droids...

Humans!
The exciting exotic generic white guys (and those two black guys) who populate much of the star wars universe. Speak the most important language and ignore the language entry fluff text that lies about you getting extra ones, because you don't. Get a bonus trained skill and a bonus feat. But fuck you the trained skill is a class skill only because when we said versatile and adaptable we didn't mean it THAT much. OK, fine, d20 standard bullshit I guess it's pretty OK.

Bothan
IT'S A TRAP! Be a racist jewish stereotype or maybe I read to much into a short hairy swarthy big nosed race known for spy networks with notable mentions of wealth and manipulation in their profile. Whatever, medium, dex bonus, con penalty, the language that matters, a shit language that doesn't, and a bonus feat (a kind of shitty one) that gets picked for you and you only get to have if you also let your species pick one of your trained skills (a kind of shitty one). I don't see any good reason to pick Bothan ever as a player character. They don't really appear in the movies, no one cares about them, and everything they do mechanically is shitty and worse than being human. They exist solely so people can so “oooh THAT's a Bothan” when you go on about how many Bothan spies died to get you these fucking RPG rules.

Cereans
Cereans are a shitty forehead alien race where you trade in your ability to not look like your head is a huge novelty dildo in return for the good language and a shit one, and net +2 attribute modifiers in areas actual Jedi might just care about, and they can reroll initiative checks. They get a preselected bonus feat (even moar initiative) if they train in the skill (have moar iniative). And did I mention initiative is a skill now, inside the broken skill system? This species isn't that bad. But probably not sufficiently better than human to justify having to wear forehead underwear in public to avoid being arrested for public indecency.

Duros
IT'S A TRAP. Wow, big eyed blue dude in background of shot 907 or some crap, these options are just a check list of the who's who of "who the fuck are you talking about you obsessive star wars freak?" aren't they. Be a useless guy who speaks durese (and the language that matters) has net attribute bonuses, but not good enough to justify the shitty racial special of a reroll on pilot checks. This race exists so you can either 1) Focus your entire character on piloting (like some sort of chump), 2) Have an NPC side kick you keep around as the chump who focused his entire character on piloting, or 3) for a player to troll the GM with surprise (but comedically useless) piloting rerolls on his otherwise unremarkable and shitty character who is just crappy at something else people actually care about for his day job.

Ewoks
IT'S A TRAP. It's everyone's favorite/most hated cannibal religious fanatics. They get the pleasure of being illiterate, speaking a language no one else in the universe knows, having a hard time explaining how they got off planet, small size, low speed, dex bonus, strength penalty, an only marginally nice short range smell ability on perception, a fairly useful reroll on stealth checks, a conditional bonus feat on survival skill (if they train in survival) which they can safely ignore as being as shitty as it is, and holy crap a giant fuck you weapons proficiency penalty where they aren't allowed to start the game with any weapon proficiency that you want them to. Unless you are a jedi and care about light sabers, because fuck it no reason whatsoever. Ewoks are basically all about stealth bonuses and are probably, in practice are all Jedi. Your ewok build is some sort of stealth jedi with hide while observed. He doesn't actually benefit specifically from stealth because the other things you might invest in that are sort of shit, he just does it for shits and giggles.

Gamorians
IT'S A TRAP. Be a hideous yokel pig man, I mean everyone wants to be right? Well surely we can bait you in with the amazing package of a net penalty to attributes, ewok style weapon proficiency kicks to your testicles, illiteracy, the inability to speak any language anyone understands EVER, and a modest bonus to fort defense and a preselected damage threshold bonus feat. You are all lining up to select this option now aren't you!

Gungans
IT'S A TRAP. You too can be the least popular character in your own table top star wars movie. Be possibly the most racist of the thinly veiled racist stereotypes half star wars aliens seem to be. But wait, once again the saving grace is surely the mechanical incentive with net negative attribute modifiers, the amazing ability to swim AND hold your breath well, a modest bonus to the most commonly used defence, low light vision and a a couple of stupid bonus weapon proficiencies. AND you can speak gunganese AND the language people care about. You probably in net suck with the attribute penalties outweighing several positive but over all fairly situational and weak bonuses, BUT you DO exist in large part to taunt the party Gamorean for how much fucking better than him you are and in your face weapon proficiency BONUS rather than LOSS ahahahahahaha...

Ithorians
Have a slug for a head for fun and profit, don't worry you still move at standard speed. Get net bonuses to attributes that probably encourage your languid peace loving slug to pick up a lightsaber and start tumbling around and force lightning attacking everyone. Get a modest bonus to your will defence you never asked for, speak slug for head and the language people care about, have a conditional knowledge(fucking trivia) feat you don't care for, get a survival skill reroll you will never care for, and hurt yourself to shout bomb a small cone. There is probably a way to turn an Ithorian into a weird suicide bomber at low levels, but otherwise... you play it as a +2 wis +2 cha in exchange for -2 dex and any other species ability you might actually care about.

Kel Dor
Be a but ugly forehead alien so bad you have to wear an expensive mask or die of shame (you go blind and asphyxiate). Speak a muffled mask language no one cares about and a muffled mask language everyone does care about. In exchange for your crippling sight/breath disability you get to have low light vision and rerolls on force checks. Kel Dor exist to be jedi's who want that extra certainty on their 90% chance of delivering force check based fuck you's to the inferior classes.

Mon Calamari
(Ironically not an obvious trap). You get to be admiral ackbar, he gets to be aqua man and be better at swimming than the party Gungan. Get the language we care about and one we don't, and get a conditional feat (ability to notice “It's A Trap”) as long as you invest in the skill (Ability to notice “It's A Trap”). Get net bonus attribute modifiers. Probably actually on par with humans. Good work Admiral Aquamanbar.

Quarren
Was half of star wars under the ocean and I just forgot? Did the interminable scenes beneath the surface of Nabboo just drive everyone insane until it suddenly seemed important to bring in a solid representation of aquatic races from background shots and the extended universe crap? Well, now you can be a guy with a squid for a head who sort of hates everyone including the lovable Admiral Ackbar. Better at being underwater than a gungan, low light vision, net negative attribute penalties and since they are isolationists who hate everyone with charisma penalties... a conditional bonus feat in persuasion if they train in it... wait what?

Rodians
IT'S A TRAP. You exist to look stupid and get shot by Han Solo. Do I really need to cover this one? Fine, net negative modifiers, low light vision, reroll perception checks (except apparently in your one iconic role against Han Solo where your whole thing was not succeeding at just that) Conditional survival bonus feat if you take the survival skill because fuck why would you? And contrary to the movie you can speak the language everyone else does as well as the crappy one you babble on the home planet no one would go to because holy fuck a whole planet with that fucking face?

Sullustans
It's a trap, but not a capitalized one. Be that one rare collectible toy of a background minor movie appearance that the Necromancer on venture brothers accidentally summoned from a collectible star wars trading card. Bonus dex, minus cons, dark vision, expert climbing like you care, and perception rerolls you can actually use. Sullustans are OK, but their whole thing is pretty much just an opportunity to over investing in climbing just so they can constantly walk up walls and point out to the GM that they can't fucking fail at it.

Trandoshans
IT'S A TRAP. Be a lizard faced freak. Speak a language no one cares about and the usual one. Get a natural armour bonus to your reflex that is lower than the gungan bonus that ISN'T typed to overlap with other things, Strength bonus, Dex penalty, dark vision, Toughness as a bonus feat (blah), and the ability to regenerate limbs in a system that doesn't cut them off and a setting where prominent characters regularly just replace lost limbs artificially without this ability anyway. Trandoshans exist so they can lie around in an isolated swamp for a week regrowing all their limbs in the event that the party is dismembered and abandoned far from civilisation instead of being killed.

Twi'Leks
Just to prove they aren't ALL just exotic dancers the picture is a butt ugly bastard. Still you get your Charisma bonus, Wisdom Penalty, the usual language no one cares for and one they do, rerolls on deception, a modest bonus to fort defence, and low light vision. Its an odd grab bag but probably reasonably playable unlike half the species on the list. But everyone is going to think you are a strippergram.

Wookies
The big foot aliens should be good right? Well they never get to speak languages other than their shitty one, they get a bonus weapon proficiency just to shit all over their similarly savage gamorean peers, they get the same climbing ability as Sullustans, they get to reroll persuasion like a Quarren (but only on intimidate), they get to naturally heal their HP faster (yawn), they get a +4 to strength and +2 constitution in over all net 0 attribute modifiers that are actually pretty nice, AND they get to barbarian rage once a day. Wookies are sort of narrow and odd but if you were building to pummel things are if anything probably too good compared to alternatives. They sure as hell crap all over ewoks, gamoreans and sullustans.

Zabrak
You get one line then some jerk in robe cuts you in half. You are a forehead alien, but maybe a bit less foreheady than some. You get to be bored with a standard reroll on perception checks and a flat +1 to all your defenses. You speak the language we care about and one we don't. Zabraks are sort of shit really.

Over All
There are an admirable 17 choices there. But it's not about the number it's about how many are good. This is a list rife with trap options and painful kicks to the nuts for no reason. At best there are some marginally passable drab options. And Wookies.

Also there are kind of a lot of perception rerolls in there. Keep note of this for later. Because I'll be talking about stealth skills eventually.

Oh, and these aren't the droids you are looking for. Their language is name dropped here but droids are hidden somewhere fuck off far far away from the initial character building stuff. It's like they don't want you to use them and need to hide the droid rules for some reason...

...Wait A Second!
There are no Jawa's on this list. Or Hutts, or Salacious B Crumbs! OK I can forgive you a few. But no Jawas? What the hell man? Really you had almost every kameo other than the fucking infamous walrus guy on the list (he makes it for the additional races in the NPC chapter :/) but you didn't include god damn Jawa's? (not ever) We have three aquatic/amphibious species and you couldn't be assed adding a second small sized option? Screw you too book!
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Heroic Classes
I thought this would be my favorite bit, I enjoy criticizing shitty d20modern style classes, it's pretty much what this review is for. But in retrospect I think it's entirely possible chapters like Star Ship Combat and Prestige Classes managed to be the "WTF?" dark horses of this review.

OK so before the good bits there's some basic stuff with standard d20 level progression (except for those double ability increases), Classes get what are basically non stacking level 1 save bonuses to the three defenses, multiclass enough and you get +2 to all of them (and otherwise probably suck) but you get about average +1 to each, and it's largely dwarfed by the basic level progression of +1 per level. All in all its a bit of a trivial mechanic and a waste of time but thats what this RPG is all about.

We get another shout out to heavily inflated roll free starting hit points, but now get to see the inexplicably rolled advancement hit die, and yep, the sucky skill monkey classes get shitty d6s and the jedi master race (and their lesser soldier brethren) get 1d10s. And no one cares about the scout and their 1d8.

We get a number of trained skills table up front too, presumably an attempt to make a hard sale on scouts and nobles, it's generally what you expect, classes good at fighting are shit at skill monkey, classes good at skill monkey are shit at fighting. This is not a good choice but considering the pedigree of the designers it was utterly predictable.

Jedi
Look no further than the first class on the list PICK THIS ONE. Get the best base attack, the best hit points and the best special powers and the best melee weapon with the best melee attacks and defences. ALSO get basically all the prerequisites for most Prestige classes (other than the "fuck off and wait 7 levels" one they all have) by taking this class as your FIRST level (but NOT by taking it later!).

Are you a fucking ewok? If so DEFINITELY pick jedi, you get to actually receive your starting weapon proficiencies in “kick ass laser sword” and have the option of building force powers and not even caring anyway. You even get a free starting lightsaber just for turning up! One day, at seventh level of all levels, you inexplicably get to be able to build light sabers, then and only then, for some reason, no particular reason it just had to be then and there because??? I mean if you could build light sabers at level 1 then you could have one from the start of the game... like you do anyway because you fucking get one at level 1 for free...

The Force
Jedi get 5+1/2 level force points per level. This is both important and not. Especially since while you might think that this being an entry in classes it must vary and clearly being force related Jedi will get more... and well NO actually this is the same amount everyone fucking gets. Also you get Force Sensitivity as a free feat and that is very important for gaining actual force powers... force powers that are then basically entirely fucking independent of this fucking class after that.

Jedi Consular Talents
Adept Negotiator – Jump through only marginal hoops to simply persuade people nicely to move down the condition track toward defeat. It's actually relatively nice (but should propbably be given to the noble). But it has a fuck off don't try this on high level dudes penalty and is largely redundant compared to much better things you could be doing. And it relies on the condition track without instant KO... so it's not a great idea.
Force Persuasion – That thing where Jedi get less skills, fuck it, just use one skill for everything, here you may use your Use The Force skill for persuasion, but only as a reroll if you clearly failed the normal roll first because Jedi get to have nice things. But take Adept Negotiator first because A) Why not it's useful if you actually make persuasion rolls like this one and B) Fuck you if you wanted to do it the other way round as if it were of trivial importance (like it is).
Master Negotiator – Your Adept Negotiator will sapping doom attack gets stronger on the damage. It's nice, but if you wanted to you took force powers that render this option largely redundant like 3 to 6 levels ago.
Skilled Adviser – Full round action to +5 aid another somebody on a skill check. Throw away a force point for +10. While this is a crazy bonus, especially if your buddy is a jedi who invested their build in actually doing things themselves and yeah their god damn force use skill checks can slam people clear out of combat. It somewhat falls down by being A) a sucky aid another ability everyone wants someone ELSE to take, and B) You only get ONE talent per 2 levels, don't waste it on fucking aid another NPC chump actions. Still, this is kinda a fuck you to aid another focused Noble builds.

Jedi Guardian Talents
Acrobatic Recovery – Don't fall over, IF you make a fairly hard acrobatics check. Kind of shit as an ability really. Because again, 2 whole levels of talent/class feature here...
Battle Meditation – Spend two levels of class features, a force point and a full round action to cast fucking Bless. Wooooh...
Elusive Target – People shooting at you in melee suffer an additional -5 penalty. It's nice and it encourages you to punch your friends when people shoot at you. Groups with multiple jedi guardians pair up and spar sideways towards storm troopers across open battle fields.
Force Intuition – Again, that thing where jedi get less skills? Yeah, fuck that, use Use the Force for your god damn initiative too now, and yeah, again its actually a reroll not just a substitute roll, because Jedi get nice things, including the first actions in combat apparently.
Resilience – Spend a swift action and a force point to heal two points on the condition track, why a Jedi is taking condition damage I have no idea, maybe you are a slug face suicide shouter? Still just one of many fuck yous to people trying on the whole condition track build thing, but not even close to the biggest one.

Jedi Sentinel Talents
Clear Mind – Reroll use the force checks to avoid being detected by other force users. Ok nice... but is it two levels worth of fucking class features nice? Really?
Dark Side Sense – Reroll use the force checks to notice dark side dudes. Again... IS this two levels worth of fucking class features nice. If I took this and fucking clear mind, which is apparently what a dedicated Jedi Senitinel is supposed to do, are they together worth 4 fucking levels of class features? Really?
Dark Side Scourge – Ranger favoured enemy bonuses are back. Only weaker and charisma bonus dependent and only against dark side dudes. Take Dark Side sense first presumably because the designers feared otherwise you'd just hit things and see if you got the trivial fucking bonus.
Force Haze – Is one of those weird d20 modern hack jobs which make you wonder if they even realise what the fuck the rules are. Standard action and force point to “haze” your CLASS (more levels of jedi and don't multiclass bitches) level of targets. It lasts 1 minute so fuck you, it requires a Use the Force vs Will (hint, the jedi fucking wins this roll) then everyone gets Total Concealment, which means you still have to roll fucking perception checks against a big fat total concealment penalty because fuck you you aren't actually invisible, and fuck you it only works on people who DON'T start off observing you no hide in plain sight to be found HERE mr stealth Ewok Jedi. Speaking of which, your stealth Ewok Jedi finds his hide in plain sight elsewhere. Oh and you can't even take this conditional roll fest until you have already wasted at talent on Clear Mind because fuck, this is way too good unless it's 3-4 WHOLE LEVELS of class features. You probably still take it if you care about stealth. But you never forgive your grudge against the system for making you.
Resist The Dark Side - +5 force bonus (so stacking issues may occur) to all defence scores against dark side force powers. So, dark side force lightning but not regular lightning... and that's it actually because Force Lightning is actually the only dark side force power atack in the whole fucking game. You don't get to take this wildly awesome (ok I'm being sarcastic, its shit) defense bonus UNLESS you can first sense the dark side because... ? Maybe your ability to get the bonus when targeted with iconic and specifically labelled dark side only force powers MIGHT tip you off that your attacker has the dark side bad touch (you clearly wouldn't know otherwise) so fuck you take the detection ability first you would be munchkin!

Light Saber Talents
aka definitely the ones you actually take...
Block – You very possibly take this talent, but probably not first from this tree. You turn your Force Use skill into your Reflex Defence for melee attacks, and you are rolling against an attack totals so you only actually do it after you have already had your regular reflex defence fail. It has a cumulative penalty if you do it a lot but... it is awesome, and as noted in the past by others on this board technically lacks the LoS and targeting conditions to prevent you from using this on ANY attack you care to, where-ever it may be.
Deflect – If you are taking the “fuck you I use Use the Force for everything including the most common defence in the game” talents THIS is the one you probably take before Block. It's Block only for ranged attacks. Thats about it. Oh and you can't use it on colossal frigate weapon fire. But fuck it you can use it on anything short of that.
Lightsaber Defense – ITS A TRAP. So spend a swift action with your lightsaber out for +1 Deflection to reflex defense for 1 turn. And, get this, take this talent like up to 3 times to incrementally boost this bonus. Why the FUCK you take this instead of Block and Deflect and even Elusive Target I have no idea. Technically you can stack it on those, but that means you're level 7 when you first take it and... no you just don't even then... Skip it, its a fucking trap.
Weapon Specialisation (Lightsabers) - +2 damage. Woooh. Who said star wars was full of shitty incremental bonus talents now!!! (must first invest in clearly not incremental and shitty Weapon Focus(Lightsabers)).
LightSaber Throw – Throw your light saber with fairly shitty ranges, throw it only about as far as you can walk if you actually want it back. Yeah. Lets not and say we did.
Redirect Shot – It's relatively weak but might be the most fun talent on the Jedi list. Redirect 1 blocked (blaster weapon only??? really?) shot per turn notably other talents note proficiency this one doesn't so fuck you your redirected shot is probably non-proficient unless you splurged on a weapon proficiency feat.

Jedi Bonus Feats
You know the shitty fighter feats only sorta slightly more gimped in d20modern. Yeah, mostly you just get those. But skill training is on there, if you really want it, and you can get Acrobatic Strike which is sorta OK and Strong in the Force... which you probably don't actually want but whatever it's not just another shitty incremental fighter feat to collect. Which is what you will likely be doing with your bonus feats. Notably Force Training is NOT on the bonus feat list (which is a dick move) and neither is Force Sensitivity (which is a double dick move as it is basically just a fuck you to suckers who took their first level of Jedi late because the GM fucked them over on it).

Class Skills
Don't actually live in fucking classes because fuck you flip the tiny pages of the tiny book. Jedi don't get many, but they Use The Force for most things if they want and it's on the damned list and you want it and you wont get it elsewhere. They get all the other actual mechanically important combat skills like Initiative, Acrobatics and Perception and frankly after that who the hell cares, but they get Knowledge, Pilot and Endurance like we care.

Jedi Dollars
You get 3d4x100 credits. Which on average nets you the randomly selected example items of a blast helmet and vest and a slug thrower pistol, or a single security kit. None of which you are proficient with, but fuck that you have a free lightsaber worth over three times that value.

What You Do With Jedi Characters
Mostly what you actually do is qualify for the better advanced classes (still sort of crap but they are better than the other ones). But, in the mean time, you have the best basic survivability and offense and the best ability options. And if you want you have the gateway into force powers that break the game and skill for defence substitutions that break the game. Ideally everyone is a jedi, but if people pick shitty gimp classes instead you can still make your own character be a jedi and not suck.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

The Fucking Noble
No no, I checked that's the official name, look deep in your heart at the character's it covers from the movies and you know it's true.

You get the most shitty hit points, the most shitty base attack bonus, but at least you get to be proficient with pistols. Also you get the linguist feat for free and then forget to record it because why even bother? Also it's not really free because you have to have 13 intelligence or fuck you no shitty free linguist feat.

I want to take the time out to single out the fact that I'm reading the fucking revised edition here and there are no less than three glaring typos on the level advancement list for The Fucking Noble.

Influence Talents
Presence – Intimidate creatures with Persuasion checks as standard instead of full round actions. So... I guess now you can intimidate and walk towards them, or, productively, back away? Hold me back this power it is so god damn awesome!
Demand Surrender – You apparently aren't allowed to without this I guess? You also aren't allowed to take this without Presence. Then you aren't allowed to demand surrender without knocking half your target's hit points off. It has a "higher level than you fuck off damnit" penalty and only targets one guy at a time and only gets one try per combat per encounter. So rather than being a sensible out for a losing side in combat once a side starts losing the noble yells “drop your weapons!” once per round and one by one the opponents surrender over fuck knows how long instead.
Improved Weaken Resolve – Requires weaken resolve but appears before it in the list, great formatting, lets get back to this.
Weaken Resolve – Smash someone hard enough to break their damage threshold and you get a persuasion check to make them fuck off for a whole minute. Requires Presence, but you might conceivably build a character around this, a pity that character needs to deal combat damage but also take at least 3 levels of one of the classes that is the most shit at that. Oh and the target if it matters has force points it can just burn to ignore this anyway so if you burn your career trying to jury rig a build on this it doesn't work on anything but mooks.
Improved Weaken Resolve, Take Two - Vanilla Weaken resolve stops working if your target is “wounded” (not the best language there but we know what they mean, I hope). Now it doesn't. An incremental ability so shit that if you build your character around using weaken resolve you get the fuck out of noble into a fighting class 2 levels ago and don't actually take improved weaken resolve even though your thing is always using weaken resolve.

Wait... How the fuck is it the entire “Influence” talent tree is fucking intimidation and terror, shouldn't it have been called the “Fear” tree or some crap. Goddamnit.

Inspiration Talent Tree
Oh boy... Hey look it starts out by reminding you you can't use these on yourself so fuck you.
Bolster Ally – Standard Action to heal 1 condition track on an ally. You know, in case they can't be assed healing themselves with the default and cheap recovery action. Oh and it gives out a shitty amount of bonus hit points, maybe, only if the target has already lost a rather a lot of them. But not enough we really care. This is a really shitty second rate heal action.
Ignite Fervour – When you stab or shoot someone successfully (remember nobles are crap at that) you can inspire others to gain modest damage bonus on their next attack. Nice enough I sup... no wait you can't take this without six fucking levels of noble because it fucking requires the shitty Bolster Ally AND another one which again is listed after the thing that requires it...
Inspire Confidence – The thing Ignite Fervour requires... is a standard action (so... not at the same time as Ignite fervor then, or bolster ally), Is basically Bless, only without the force point cost the jedi version has.
Inspire Haste – Spend your swift action to make other characters make standard action skill checks as move actions. I guess you bring along a noble concubine NPC with your Force User jedi and maybe you finagle move action force stuns or something, I'd have to check the force section. Nice enough if you get lots of fucking quick time events but is it really worth even 1 level of Noble?
Inspire Zeal – Take EVERYTHING ELSE from this fucking tree first, except inspire haste, be a minimum level 7 character, then you can finally get the ability to just make all your allies move targets an extra point along the condition track. Which is nice, nice enough any party wants someone like this around. But you had to take seven levels of gimped fucking noble and have your career made out of preselected non-synergistic shit from this talent tree. And that largely just lets you paint “kill me first I'm a party force multiplier with the lowest Hit Points possible and probably no armour proficiencies” onto your character. And even then the rest of the team probably needs to get with the picture and be condition track stackers (and hope no opponents bring all too common fuck you's vs such builds) for this to work. Still. It doesn't have stacking limitations so due to an oversight you just bring along as many Noble NPC concubine cheer squad members as you can behind your party and everyone gets to do one hit KOs until the end of time. Pretty sure that isn't intended.

Leadership Talent Tree
Yep, once again “fuck you it doesn't work on yourself”
Born Leader – Once per encounter throw out a swift action for another fucking incremental +1 Bless effect. We needed another one of these did we? It's insight typed so it won't stack with some of the other bless clones and other bonuses.
Coordinate – Holy...ITS A TRAP ITS A TRAP ITS A TRAP it's fucking Meta-Aid another. You spend YOUR action to ensure that other people spending THEIR action to aid another incrementally improve their aid another bonus. And you can take this up to FIVE fucking times to incrementally increase that incremental bonus! HOLY FUCK THIS IS BAD. You can actually be a level 9 character with NO TALENTS OTHER THAN THIS ONE.
Distant Command – Is fucking hilarious. So the bless on born leader is limited to the duration of “while they remain in LoS of you” which is hilarious enough because that means “whatever forever pretty much” for your party. Pretty sure they MEANT “up to encounter duration” on that otherwise the action cost is a bit redundant and this ability is fucking hilarious because now it keeps going OUT of line of sight. So as long as you remain conscious and alive ANYWHERE anyone you ever bless with this has it forever. So everyone asks for the kings fucking favor before going on every mission ever and actually BRINGING a noble with this ability into combat and letting them participate in the game is actively the wrong way to use this ability.
Fearless Leader – Requires born leader, but doesn't benefit from distant command and as a swift action you present a courageous example (by not needing to spend any actual resource we care about or interact with anything remotely dangerous directly), thus giving out a fat will defense bonus we rarely ever care about. Yeah, it's a trap, a boring one.
Rally – Rally your allies from defeat, as a swift action allies with half HP or less in line of sight get a negligible bonus to reflex and will defense and damage rolls. Requires Born Leader and Distant Command so you are a shitty 5th level noble with preselected abilities for this.
Trust – Again needs born leader and this time coordinate so you are a shitty 5th level noble with preselected abilities, but this one is actually pretty nice since you can give your standard action to a friend to use instead. Which is fucking awesome because you are a noble so your standard action fucking sucks and they are a jedi and their standard action kills people.The OTHER way you could have productive actions by a character who isn't a fucking noble? You could just have made a character who isn't a fucking noble. Much better, since then ALL your actions are used by a character that doesn't suck.

Lineage Talents
Connections – Lower black market shopping penalties. And sometimes ignore weapon license requirements. You have to be like level 8 before this applies to items as rare and valuable as fucking storm trooper armour. Yeah, so while clearly being a bad idea as a talent it sounds almost nice... but then it's a trap because the cost limits are stupid low.
Educated – Untrained Knowledge checks WOOOOOOOH. Holy shit someone actually wrote this talent?
Spontaneous Skill – Must first have educated, or in other words "fuck you!" Then once per day you get to make one action as if you were trained in a skill you are not trained in. Except Force Use because fuck you. Now, you are a noble so you actually have the largest base number of trained skills anyway, and your list is all the obscure shit you might check once a day. You ARE missing some things this talent could cover but all of them are combat things or perception stuff you would want to do ALL the time not just one action once a day so this is really a bit of a kick in the nuts while you are down. But never fear you can take this ability multiple times for one more use per day! And you don't because IT'S A FUCKING TRAP.. If you want to use actual combat skills instead of shitty knowledge skills you JUST DON'T ROLL AS A NOBLE.
Wealth – Give up one of your precious few talents for a cash allowance on levelling up. But the cash allowance ONLY scales if you keep taking fucking noble levels so it's “good money after bad, bitch”. Money for talents is a just plain shitty concept in general but the scaling is weird and punitive while the pay out I'm pretty sure is a value selected utterly at random. Your level 2 allowance would however net you a storm trooper armour AND a blaster rifle! Which you COULD just fucking nick, or buy with some portion of the money you presumably get from doing the fucking Kessel Run .

Bonus Feats
It's a completely random grab bag, you fish through it for Skill Training and the various proficiency feats so you can one day pretend to be like a functional combat character, but you aren't, not really. You are a Fucking Noble.

Skills
You get the most skills because nobles are skill monkeys? Whut? Whuttevar, who cares. Your skill list is the biggest, but consists of “all the shit ones”. As bad as your list is it still has initiative and perception on it.

Fucking Noble Dollars
You get four times the starting cash of the jedi (assuming you aren't asshole who stupidly took Wealth at level 1 trying to break the wealth system the GM can still make you his bitch over anyway). Which is enough for a padded flight suit and a blaster rifle, neither of which you are proficient with. If you took Wealth you have another 5000 cash and you can afford ceremonial armour and a fucking lightsaber neither of which you are even close to being proficient with.

What You Do With Fucking Nobles?
Having Nobles around is nice but having them take up PC sized holes in your party is not. Barring the (even then deeply shitty) 7th level Inspire Zeal character their force multiplication is more like addition and probably less valuable than just bringing another fucking Jedi/Soldier instead.

So if you can you net yourself the largest possible cheersquad of NPC nobles, but if you can't whatever. If you bring a noble they are that one shitty 7th level build with Inspire Zeal and they are mostly just a passive party buff bonus with a target painted on their forehead and not enough HP. (and before that they are a big pile of fucking suck).
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Post by PhoneLobster »

...and thats enough for now, I'll convert some more of the draft over when I next feel like it. Next up is Scoundrels, those poor poor bastards...
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Post by virgil »

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Post by Koumei »

For what it's worth, while I would never play a game with the Star Wars logo on it, I have friends in the real world who loved the d6 Star Wars game, and basically declared Saga to be anathema to them.

So that could just be a small sample size, or it could be nothing more than their hatred of anything being converted from X to d20 (they likewise hated the d20 conversions of L5R, Deadlands and BESM, though in the latter case I can guarantee that said conversion was pretty terrible). Or it could be because Saga, like d20 Modern and similar, sucks an astounding amount of dick.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Scoundrel
Hi, be a scoundrel it's cool, trust me, hehehehehe... Oh don't worry about the shittiest hit points and the shittiest base attack I'm sure it will be worth it!

Your starting feats are OK ish. You can use pistols at least and your extra bonus starting feat (Point Blank Shot) isn't conditional like the Fucking Noble's shitty Linguist feat and you are highly likely to actually use it.

Fortune Talents
Fool's Luck – Spend a force point for +1 attack OR for +5 to skill checks OR +1 to all defences for 1 whole combat only. You have to pick which, because giving you ALL those shitty bonuses would just be too good for the likes of you. Fool. Also too good for the likes of you? Apparently just spending a force point for a god damn +1d6 to mostly the same stuff like ANY character can.
Fortune's Favour – When you score a critical hit get a free standard action immediately and, lets face it, try to do it again. This is actually sorta nice, but 1 extra attack in 20 kinda rounds out to not all that much actual increase in damage output, at least it's marginally FUN while being mechanically underwhelming.
Gambler – Get a gambling bonus. There is a gambling side bar telling you the shitty exploitable way gambling works. It works like crap. Also notably while this talent tree is LABELLED fortune this is a WISDOM check bonus and DOES NOT apply to gambling in actual pure chance situations, which is hilariously dumb. You can take this talent multiple times like a REALLY dumb gambling addict, because, IT'S A TRAP.
Knack – Once per day reroll a skill check and take the better result. Take this ability multiple times if you are a chump, wait I mean if you want to use it mulitple times, you chump. It's stingy but you might take it IF you were making skill checks you care about, like maybe a Jedi, but not if you are a fucking scoundrel.
Lucky Shot – Once per day reroll an ATTACK roll and take the better result. I mean sure, but is it a 2 levels of class features thing? Once per day, oh wait you can invest in it multiple times for multiple uses which you would totally go an... NO WAIT IT'S A TRAP. Oh and it requires you to have first fallen into the more trappy Knack trap or this trap does not deign to let you fall into it.

Misfortune Talents
Dastardly Strike – Deals -1 condition track on hits against targets denied dex (basically just surprise attacks there, no, no flanking and no, not on beating someone on initiative). This is good enough that if you ARE a scoundrel you possibly take it. But it's not good enough that anyone would even take the hits on base attack, hit points and everything else for the whole 1 level dip into scoundrel that you would need in order to dip for this ability.
Disruptive – 2 swift actions? Really? Whatever, what's it give you, Oh you get to suppress all “enemy” morale and insight bonuses in your LoS. Yeah... it's a trap.
Skirmisher – Earn and incremental +1 attack bonus if you move an incremental 2 squares? How very exciting and important of you. I mean you take it, because you are a scoundrel and what else is there, but it's a sad little fiddly tiny bonus you may well forget about and not even notice missing.
Sneak Attack – Spend this talent up to 10 times for one rogue sneak attack dice each time. This would be good, for a shit Saga talent, if sneak attack hadn't been nerfed to surprise only and stealth being shitty nerfy later d20 era stealth. But if you spent any real time in this class you probably end up taking this one too. Maybe even more than once. A pity you can't have level appropriate Sneak Attack Dice AND any other fucking class features at all.
Walk the Line – Why the hell it even uses this shitty name I don't know, but you yell look over there as a standard action and “all opponents” in LoS get -2 on their defences for ONE WHOLE TURN!!!! I mean, not that YOU get to attack them in that time. And it's broken by LoS disruption for some reason, so if any of them can play peekaboo around some cover it's basically worthless. Well. More worthless. Also you have to have taken Disruptive first and no one is that fucking dumb so no one ever qualifies for this anyway.

Slicer Talents
Its a tiny Talent Shrub rather than a tree with less talents than usual.
Gimmick – Issue Routine Command to a computer as a swift action. Instead of a standard action. Sounds nice but if you actually go and read Computer Use it only works on Friendly or better computers, and the actual commands permitted aren't all that amazing. So if you feel the need to print out a hard copy of your birth certificate from your home computer mid combat without losing a standard action THIS TALENT IS FOR YOU.
Master Slicer – Take Gimmick first and suck for two levels until you are a level 3 sucky Scoundrel permitted to take this awesome power. You can reroll Computer checks. IT'S A TRAP!
Trace – Take just one sub par bullshit skill in the form of Computer Use and get the benefits of Gather Information rolled in for free. As long as you don't go to planets without a computer network to access, which you won't, especially since you can just bring your own since the skill doesn't really define or limit that in any clear way.

Spacer Talents
Hyperdriven – Once per day (large limitation this better be good) add your Scoundrel level (class level investment bitch requirement, this better be real good), is added as a bonus to basically any d20 roll you make, after you know the result. Huh. I mean you can take it as level 1. I guess. But the limitations, especially the class level one, suck. And why the hell is this a spacer fucking talent instead of a Fortune talent. No really what the hell? But mostly, anything that requires continued investment in Scoundrel Class levels is not something you want, and for a 1 roll a day benefit you REALLY don't need this.
Spacehound – Ignore Low G and Zero G attack penalties and sickness. And good thing too I mean star wars is RIFE with low G and zero G stuff, it's not like they have fucking ubiquitous artificial gravity going on. But at least you get to be proficient with star ship weapons and even if this ability is shit in general at least it's related to being a fucking spacer this time.
Starship Raider - +1 attack while on board a star ship, both with ship weapons and with your hand held weapons. When on planet you just shoot out the door at people and refuse to leave, only you don't because it's a fucking negligible +1. You can't take this at level 1 when you would most care because it wants you to take god damn space hound first for no good reason even though entry through this to that would be a better build for a sub par build on a sub par class anyway.
Stellar Warrior – Take space hound first, if you roll a natural 20 while attacking aboard a star ship (probably same “ship or hand weapons” requirement from raider, but doesn't actually say so who knows) Gain a force point. But it's temporary so use it now bitch! A jedi MIGHT take this, when they run out of Talents on the order of Block and Deflect to take, but a Jedi will NOT dip 3 levels of Scoundrel in order to take this. I Guess you might wrangle a sub par non-jedi force user Scoundrel build and use this, but it's not worth founding such a build on and builds like that pay through the fucking teeth for stuff Jedi get free at level 1. Oh and just in case it needed pointing out later on force users can get "free force points each combat" talents that totally shit on this highly conditional one.

SIDE BAR ATTACK!!! SIDE BAR ATTACK!!!!
Someone overly diligent has kindly inserted for me here "Saga Edition Web Enhancement 1" (were there even more of these at all?) THE TECH SPECIALIST.

The tech specialist was the most shitty class from the prior d20 star wars editions. It had been believed that taking that sickly little ewok to the vet to be put down was the one genuine act of mechanical mercy of this edition, BUT IT'S BACK as segregated content held aside to pretend WOTC provided some sort of internet service you should pay attention to.

It's not a shit class anymore though, now it's a fucking scoundrel talent tree and a feat.

The Outlaw Tech Talents
Fast Repairs – Does not increase the speed at which you repair things. Indeed it only effects the Jury rig ability which normally lets you fix broken things a bit (2 steps on the condition track) before they break horribly at the end of the “scene”. With this ability... you do exactly the same thing, it still breaks at the end of the scene it's condition and related penalties isn't any better but the item DOES get to have some temporary hit points rather than the apparently maybe even NO hit points it SOMEHOW normally gets away with because apparently the normal jury rig action was written by a fucking idiot. Oh and it requires you to train Mechanics skill. Yeah.
Quick Fix – “builds on fast repairs” though apparently doesn't do it in a strictly defined requirement manner. It ALSO doesn't speed up the rate that you repair things. I mean it PROMISES to, but it makes some vague motherhood mission statement and just flat out neglects to actually describe ANY FUCKING EFFECT AT ALL.
Hot Wire – Is “similar to other skill substitution talents” fluffity fluff fluff. Oh ALSO neglects to actually describe any fucking effect at all. Which is even worse because being “similar to other skill substitution talents” it was a fucking one sentence cut and paste job no larger than the text it actually has to fucking give us the actual fucking details.
Personalized Modifications – Oh fuck it. This also doesn't actually say what it fucking does. This ONE TALENT is supposed to, somehow make up for the Scoundrels shittest attack bonus progression and let them activate their special on hit abilities or something. But it just doesn't say how. Now at the start of this “Web Enhancement” it said that these abilities would be “expanded on with more talents and rules” in a future book, it didn't say "this is incomplete unusable fucking garbage until then" but apparently that is the case. I'm writing this whole talent tree off until then. It's not a fucking talent tree you can use it's a fucking laughably incomplete wish list of a talent tree they published and pretended was a fucking usable supplementary “enhancement”. And some kind fan boy somewhere decided that it should be inserted right here in the rule book with actual fucking rules because they CAN'T TELL THE FUCKING DIFFERENCE. What total crap.

The Tech Specialist Feat
But the web supplement DOES have rules for it's tech specialist feat. Anyone with training in the mechanics skill can take it. Throw too much money and time at an item to roll a skill check chance of adding one single bullshit incremental bonus to it ever. I mean you want items with these bonuses because there is no draw back, but you don't want a character with this feat on your team. So you try and buy them, and if you can't then fuck it, it was just a shitty incremental bonus and you are rolling in options for more of those anyway.

NOW BACK TO THE SCOUNDREL PROPER...

Bonus Feats
Can't decide what the fuck they want to do with your life. So they are a grab bag of random shit you might manage to squeeze into shooty or melee or skill monkey or, most likely, a horrible failed jack of all trades and master of none (which I think is the intended class direction).

Skills
You get not the best number of class skills, even though you seem to be a skill monkey class, in fact you get the worst number of them for any skill monkey class. Your skill list includes several trap options and enough of the actual good ones like Initiative and Perception that you CAN spend all your skill training on skills that aren't traps. Just watch out for the traps.

Scoundrel Dollars
You only get 2.5 times the cash that a Jedi gets. Which sort of sucks because you don't get the 3000 credit free awesome melee weapon that enables all those fucking deflection abilities. This will net you a “Sporting” Blaster Pistol (it costs more because it does less damage than standard!) you are actually proficient with and a Combat Jump Suit you aren't proficient with. And it leaves you enough to
splurge out and buy both a Videorecorder AND an Audiorecorder! (And yes those are both separate items and one made up word each according to the equipment lists)

What You Do With Scoundrels
If you do choose to be a scoundrel you build is actually probably a quick shot character with the sneak attack bonuses, but who relies on skill focusing the Initiative skill to basically guarantee you go first and get your sneak attack bonuses once per combat minimum (and probably sadly also once per combat maximum). Ideally with some means of multi-fire in the surprise round if you can wrangle it.

[Editors note (editor is still me): Due to a hidden away nerf to the flat footed state it turns out a quick draw sneak attack build is totally non-viable as you don't get to treat people as flat footed just because you win initiative in this edition, so yeah that leaves basically NO options if you are forced to roll with Scoundrel. ]

But that build DOES suck, it's just the thing you are likely to do with a fucking scoundrel. In reality you just don't take the fucking scoundrel class because... say it now... IT'S A TRAP!
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Scout
Does this class know what it is doing? I have no idea. I know that it's a skill monkey class, but unlike the other skill monkey classes while it gets the shit base attack (a big issue in this system) It gets almost good hit points. So it isn't AS badly off on the basics as the other skill monkey classes.

Your get some extra starting feats, so you actually get to be allowed to be proficient in rifles. You still don't get any armour proficiencies but star wars Saga edition basically hates those no matter how many times you try to dress up as storm troopers. IF you have 13 constitution you are allowed to have your other bonus starting feat, which is Shake It Off. It might be OK, but we need to cover more on the condition track later.

Awareness Talents
Acute Senses – Assuming you aren't already one of many races that reroll perception checks take this talent to reroll perception checks, if you have both what does that do? No mention.
Expert Tracker – Take the acute senses even if you already have that reroll and don't want another in order to qualify to be allowed to use your survival checks to track things at a marginally good speed without a notable penalty. For 3 levels of scout it isn't worth it you just cop the fucking -5 or move slowly, the investment in Survival as a skill for Tracking in the first place is enough of a questionable investment, throwing this after it is just plain dumb.
Improved Initiative – Again the game wants to MAKE you take that fucking reroll on perception, the game REALLY wants as many people as possible to reroll perception (its like the authors fucking hate stealth characters) so take that before you are allowed to take the one that rerolls your initiative. Man with initiative as a skill and a bunch of initiative rerolls the initiative phase will sometimes be a bit of an extended elaborate clusterfuck in this system.
Keen Shot – Again it insists you take the damn perception reroll first. Now you ignore concealment on attacks (but not full concealment and not concealment on say detecting people with perception). OK... but not OK enough for 3-4 levels of class feature.
Uncanny Dodge - You aren't allowed to have this until level 5 and must already have the damned perception reroll AND the initiative reroll. Then and only then may you be permitted to have the awesome power of dex when flat footed. Which again, is really rare due to nerfs to how often that even happens. Boooo.
Uncanny Dodge II - You are a minimum of a 7th level sucky Scout with sucky BAB and all that and all your talent options from level 1 preselected from this tree to be allowed to have this. Then you cannot be flanked. Which you care less about than in other d20 games anyway since flanking won't be achieving much more than the tiny base effect. Even if you jumped for Uncanny Dodge 1 this is basically a trap.

Camouflage Talents
This Talent “Tree” is more of a shrub because unlike most it has only three talents.
Hidden Movement – Requires a talent listed after this talent, I wish they would stop doing that and print their damned talent trees in order. But, no penalty to stealth for moving. This is pretty much what Scouts are supposed to live for. It's nice enough but is it worth a minimum of 3 levels of Scout?
Improved Stealth – Reroll Stealth Checks. If we had some harder description on how order of rerolls shake out we might have some idea if Stealth Reroll (forced to take new result) happens before or after opposed Perception roll. Right now we don't but assuming rerolls with the forced to take new result happen before resolution continues this is actually worth marginally less than a perception reroll because you don't know what you are rolling against when you commit to your potentially risky reroll decision. Still this is what scouts are supposed to live for.
Total Concealment – Take the rest of this talent shrub first then you are allowed to treat concealment as total concealment. It's nice, it would be nicer if you could just take this at level 1 because this has some basic combat as well as stealth implications and is easier to set up as reliably beneficial compared to Improved Stealth and so would make level 1 Camouflage Talent Shrub specialists more viable, but no, this is reserved for dedicated level 5 Camouflage Scouts who have had zero choices in their entire Talent career.

Fringer Talents
Barter – You may reroll Persuasion. For Haggle Checks only. Hm... you know I said Knack was a shit talent on Scoundrel because of it being a mere once per day skill reroll, but it's any skill,and how often do you roll a haggle? You know what else, Spontaneous skill, shit on a noble... and also better than this at haggling. You know what? This talent is just flat out shit among even other shit talents.
Fringe Savant – Roll a natural 20 on a skill check, get one temporary force point that expires at the end of the encounter. You know THIS might almost be worth a level dip (and inexplicably unlike the Scoundrel's inferior Stellar Warrior IS only a single level dip) into Scout for a Force Use Jedi or something. Maybe. But only almost, and probably not quite, and unless you are relying on a skill as an attack (which means you are basically a Jedi Force User) then this probably isn't a great option to have. And again... worth noting that force users get a much better free force point talent without the special random trigger conditionals later on.
Long Stride – Incremental speed bonus when in light or less armour. Increases natural speed for swimming, climbing and flying too, but fuck you no increase if you wear a jet pack because.... just fuck you ok. Apparently the designers think this would be just too good in medium or heavy armour despite the fact you would need to invest proficiency in them anyway so also fuck you.
Jury Rigger- Wait what? Wasn't this in the Tech Specialist web enhancement for Scoundrels? No not quite, this one is a mechanics reroll limited only to Jury Rig attempts (remember the repair action that doesn't repair hit points? Yeah) This could be a simple “reroll any mechanics check” and be shitty. As it is it is extra shitty once again making the sub par on even the sub par Scoundrel Knack talent look comparably awesome.

Survivor Talents -
Evasion – In proper d20modern this was one of the best talents out there, and everyone took it. In Saga edition it is a pretty nice talent no one ever takes because even though it is inexplicably the same now as Improved Evasion for only one talent you need to take a fucking Scout level for it so it's just not going to happen. Still if you ARE taking god damn Scout levels and you aren't taking this talent there may be something wrong with you.
Extreme Effort – Two Swift actions (action mechanics are going to be “interesting” when we get to them) for +5 on one strength check or strength based skill. Gee. Don't be so generous there designers are you sure two levels of class features are really worth a noticeable bonus on a negligible roll?
Sprint – Run marginally farther. Woooh.
Surefooted – No speed reduction for difficult terrain? Not exactly mind blowing for two levels of class features there.

Bonus Feats
For once you've got basically all the armour proficiency feats in here, so you are probably going to pick some or all of those at some point. Aside from that it's mostly shooty and some random shit so you are going to make use of it for that armour and the shooty and if you are lucky the random shit might coincide with what you want, but you probably shouldn't want linguist or vehicular combat anyway.

Skills
So you get the second most skills. With the usual important basics (Initiative, perception), and a number of other not too bad options like Stealth, well ok basically just stealth, and then the rest are sort of shitty skills. When allocating your 5+int skills you will run out of the good options.

Scout Dollars
You get the same shitty starting money as a Scoundrel. You can on average get a Blast Helmet and Vest you still are not proficient with, a Light Repeating Blaster Rifle that you are actually proficient with for once, and still leaves enough to net you a hip holster and some long term medical care.

What You Do With Scouts
Ideally nothing. All the low base attack classes are massively hurt JUST for the low base attack alone, the scout possibly comes closest to not sucking on basic principles with some better starting proficiencies, better hit points, and reasonable skills but you still remain behind the curve forever on base attack and you are a person who relies on it, and NOTHING you do makes up for that loss if anything you have some of the shittest talents in the lot.

Now what you are MEANT to do with scouts is... er... well most of it is shit filler they couldn't be assed putting elsewhere but as short as the bonsai skill tree is I'm pretty sure that Stealth is where the Scout is SUPPOSED to be at. But... you don't get much from just negating a few bonuses on Stealth without getting a hide in plain sight or I dunno any actual benefit for hiding such as actual sneak attack benefits. And you know where you get sneak attack benefits? Scoundrel, do scoundrels get stealth bonuses? Not especially. So what does a stealth dedicated character look like? Scoundrel/Scout/Probably Jedi for the ability to un-nerf the late d20 era style nerfed hiding skill. You know what sucks hard in this game? Multi-classing. And even if you did multiclass you do not make two separate 3-5 level dips into Scout and Scoundrel arguably the two worst base classes in the game for almost all the BAB loss you could potentially get short of adding in some fucking noble levels.

In practice if you MUST take scout levels you are probably an awareness tree character and your big thing is just not being surprised ever. You don't actually DO anything once you aren't surprised, everything you are about that is even slightly good is survivability with no offense and no utility. Which is odd, because as a survivability only type character you might kinda hope you'd get the good hit points base/progression, which you don't.

More so than almost any other class DO NOT PICK SCOUT, IT IS A TRAP.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Soldier
The soldier is the class you pick if A) You aren't allowed to pick Jedi, or B) You really like stun weapons, or guns, or indeed any weapons other than Lightsabers and Force Use.

They get good base attack, the best hit points, and the largest selection of starting feats invested in weapon and armour proficiencies, actually getting to start the game proficient in Pistols and Rifles, and Light and Medium Armour, They are easily two feats ahead of most other starting characters.

Armour Specialist Talents
After going over these I have to take the time to single this talent tree out as having talents which are simultaneously absolutely must have asshole tax requirements for certain builds at high levels while ALSO being nothing more than zero benefit gigantic traps for the entire actual level range most campaigns run for. I repeat, this talent tree is holy crap IT'S A TRAP territory while STILL being offensive “Fuck you you MUST take these talent taxes EVENTUALLY, bitch!” territory and I didn't even know it could be combined like that to this degree. I RATE THIS TREE AS SOME OF THE WORST WRITTEN TALENTS IN THE ENTIRE CORE RULE BOOK Which is saying A LOT.
Armour Mastery – Hey look I found it, I missed it last time I went looking, but there it is wedged in the top of a page it probably shouldn't be wedged into thanks to shitty page sizes and bad formatting. +1 max dex on armour you are using. OK this is the definition of a shitty incremental bonus talent. You might well take it, because that's Saga edition for you. But there are probably better options for a Soldier. And anyway you aren't allowed to have +1 more of your own dex score until at least level 3 because fuck you, take Armoured Defence First. And yes, once again, they printed the required talent AFTER the talent that requires it.
Armoured Defense – OK so Saga edition made that weird ass choice about applying your level OR your armour bonus to your reflex defence. Now because Saga is a stingy asshole the DEFAULT is that you MUST take the armour bonus if you have one, even if it is significantly more shit than your level. Meaning that when you disguise yourselves as storm troopers at higher levels that is a direct nerf to your character. THIS “Talent” has the audacity to permit you to have the mechanic work the way it probably should have in the first place and lets you pick your level bonus if it is better and still wear the armour. This is a monumentally terrible talent, to start with it gives you basically no mechanical bonus, you COULD have just not worn inferior armour and elected to have your better defense bonus anyway. If that weren't enough this is the ENTRY POINT talent for any other talent for a soldier specializing in the Armour Specialist tree, ALL the other Armour Specialist talents REQUIRE this one. So you take it at first level if you are being “Armour Guy” But that means you spent your starting/entry point talent on an ability that WON'T DO ANYTHING AT ALL for you for as many as EIGHT CHARACTER LEVELS, because you start the fucking game proficient with light and medium armour, medium armour even in core goes up to +8 armour bonus, so your level bonus to reflex doesn't exceed your worn armour and kick in this effect until you are fucking level 9! And if you are an armour specialist character you take Heavy Armour proficiency by then anyway and put back the level that this skill pays off until level 11! And in the end as a basic concept this talent is god damn disgusting, it's permission to look cool, it's permission to have armour with a jet pack on, it's permission to disguise yourself as a storm trooper, it's permission to be an armour wearing character at all past level 10, and without it you are fucking penalised, more so even than simply not being proficient and that's just fucking wrong. This talent is not just A TRAP, it's a TRAVESTY.
Improved Armoured Defence – If you did decide to be a shit armoured specialist and wasted your first talent on the entry point into this tree you don't take Armour Mastery next, you take THIS, well actually you don't but that's what you are meant to think, this is the reason you ever take this tree at all, and it lets you add (half of, round down because fuck you), of your Armour Bonus to defence AND still get your level bonus. This unlike Armoured defense gives you a measurable bonus before character level 11. But not as much before as you might think. It LOOKS like a free bonus, apply some armour bonus and don't lose your level bonus, that's all gain right? Wrong, the bonus you are losing is half your armour bonus, and until your level is actually greater than half your armour bonus actually applying this talent leaves you at a net loss on reflex defence. Which means you only start breaking so much as a +1 profit at level 5 (with the best core medium armour) or level 6 (with the best core heavy armour). Which means you basically take this ability at maybe level 7 at the earliest. Maybe. Once your level has completely eaten up the lost ground the bonus is huge but that doesn't really kick in to full value until level 10 or so. So if you don't do your math and take this too soon you get NO NET BONUS for using this talent. But ONE DAY it may indeed may give you a rather significant measurable bonus. If the campaign runs that long.
Juggernaut – Armour doesn't reduce movement or running distance. Huzzah. But you have to take fucking useless cock slap to the face Armoured Defence first.
Second Skin – Increase your armour bonus to Reflex (and equipment bonus to fort, presumably whether it gave one or not) by a whole... incremental shitty +1. You must first suck the flaccid cock of Armoured Defence to get this, and then this ability pushes the level at which Armoured Defence starts doing anything for you back one more to Character Level 12 as a reward! Also for added utility if you are an armoured character maxing out their armour bonus and using Improved Armoured defence your base armour bonus is infact an even number (because the best armour in each proficiency group grants even armour bonuses) and this puts you at odd, and Improved Armour bonus then halves that bonus and rounds down, this gives you an odd +1 to your armour bonus, so in other words it gives you NO BONUS AT ALL. For a talent tree full of talents that are TRAPS that don't give bonuses before various high level break even points THIS one is a TRAP that STOPS giving you any bonus around about the time that the better one of those starts paying off as it negates the reflex portion of this talent!

Brawler Talents
Well you took the class which actually got the basic ranged weapon proficiencies, time to hit things with sticks and your bare hands right?
Expert Grappler – Incremental bonus to grappling, but this is +2 instead of just +1 so... it's got that going for it (still don't go taking this though).
Gun Club – So... you took the class with the shooty proficiencies, you took shooty weapons, you decided to hit things, but didn't take any hitty things weapons, you decided to hit things with guns. The outcome mechanically is a talent as shitty as you could possibly imagine it would be.
Melee Smash - +1 damage with melee attacks. Fuck you too game FUCK YOU TOO. (Also Jedi get +2 with light sabers for a talent and laugh at you).
Stunning Strike – You need melee smash first (damnit game) then you can take this, which you might actually want to move targets 1 step extra along the condition track when you break their damage thresholds. It craps all over things like the Scoundrels surprise attack conditional version of this. It's probably a key part of any condition track build, but since only the most extreme condition track builds actually work...
Unbalance Opponent - You need grappler first this time (still damnit game), it has a conditional requirement that is worded badly enough to kinda rule out all bar targets one size smaller and one size larger, when it MEANS that and also the same size as you. And you can select one such target for free each turn and they don't get to add Strength to attack against you (but they still add it to damage because fuck you). Now technically it MEANS that lasts 1 turn each selection, but in practice the wording leaves it hanging out there forever so you just one by one nominate the universe in your spare time at home and no one you have ever heard of gets Strength bonus to attack against you. By that reading this is a marginally awesome talent, but the way they MEAN for it to work it is a shitty incremental conditional bonus you wouldn't take if the game offered anything actually good instead.

Commando Talents
Battle Analysis - “This Battle Has An Inferiority Complex”. Moderate “Waste a trained skill on Knowledge Tactics why don't you?” skill check in order to get vague hints about the amount of hit points remaining on targets under half HP, the vague hint is “they are under half hp remaining”. This ability is shit and reveals that the game wants you to fucking keep remaining hit points secret like a total asshole GM because fuck you guys you don't get to have mechanical knowledge of the status of your fucking actions in a game. This talent is a Trap, but it is mostly a fucking insult to modern gamers starting easily 10 years minimum before it was printed.
Cover Fire – Take the insulting battle analysis to further insult everyone at the table with this ability. Shoot at something with basic ranged weapon types only, and then you can add a conditional incremental +1 reflex only defence bonus to your allies for only 1 turn. Tracking this ability is more costly than it's impact on the game, actually taking this talent IS A TRAP.
Draw Fire – It's an MMO Taunt, it runs off a successful Persuasion check, because with your base 3 trained skills you totally have the spare skills to train persuasion, apparently, somehow. You cannot taunt one guy or even selective guys, you taunt ALL “opponents” in LoS when you use this. On the one hand, you are out of the base classes the second best at being shot, but I'm really not sure you want this talent which unlike some of the other IT'S A TRAP talents might actually be a trap in a more immediately direct fatality by lasers to the face when you use it sense.
Harm's War – Is the taunt/protective skill you might ACTUALLY take because it isn't shit, doesn't run off an unreliable skill check you need to invest in, and doesn't risk killing you from total focus fire for a round. You need to be trained in the initiative skill, which you are because it's awesome. And you just selectively jump in front of attacks targetting your friends when you feel like it with no roll. Making your Draw Fire peers feel like the chumps they are.
Indomitable – You were dropped in a cauldron of magic potion as a baby and as a result have eternal super strength. No wait, that's Indomitable Gaul, this just lets you once per day pretty much totally fucking ignore the condition track. You can take this multiple times for multiple uses if you want. And frankly pretty much any soldier should in order to laugh off and render useless any condition track build that can't do the whole track in one turn. Which if anything is sort of sad because condition track builds were one of the few new things this edition had going for it so kicking them in the “fuck you doesn't work unless you hit game breaking combo levels” nuts is sorta nasty.
Tough As Nails – Second Wind an extra time per day. We don't even know what that is yet, but lets take the time to point out second winds are a thing, you spend nothing more than a swift action if you are at half HP or less to get back, well, lets just go with most of your missing HP. So the whole “bullet Sponge” thing from the high starting hit points yeah, LOTS of bullet sponging going on here. And take this and the feat that lets you second wind yet again and you've got effectively close enough to 75% more HP as long as you aren't dropped in one round (though everyone has close enough to 25% more HP by default under similar conditions anyway, so its just +50% from standard, or +25% with this talent alone). Still, fuck you Toughness feat.

Weapon Specialist Talents
Hey it's one of those bonsai sized Talent trees with only three talents again.
Devastating Attack – Pick an exotic weapon or a standard group of weapons. Because fuck you for using exotic weapons what do you think this is? Bizarre space opera or something? Anyway. Successfully attack someone with it and treat their damage threshold as 5 points lower, and that is actually something you may want to do. You can take this multiple times for more weapons but don't, because doing THAT is a trap.
Penetrating Attack – Blah blah pick one exotic or group again (thanks game, so generous), ignore 5 points of damage reduction. It's nice IF DR is a thing, but it probably isn't unless you are attacking objects without using a light saber like a sucker, and the ubiquitous personal shield using droids from the sucky prequel era use “shields” rules that aren't DR so fuck you. So it's not as nice as Devastating attack was, and unlike devastating attack requires the shitty incremental investment in matching Weapon Focus just to kick you in the nuts and laugh at you.
Weapon Specialization – pick a group or one exotic, take weapon focus first, get +2 damage with it. Probably all up a better choice than Penetrating attack. But its the very definition of boring incremental trash bonuses.

Bonus Feats
You have a very long list of bonus feats, possibly the longest, it has all the bullshit D20modern versions of nerftastic incremental fighter feat trees which are uniformly recognised as being shitty, but they are the be all and end all of Saga and Soldiers, and you have both the melee options and the shooty options and basically all of them, also some skill training/focus as pretty much is par for the course if you need it. Also the weapon and armour proficiencies you don't have, if you even ever decide you want more, are here too, so that's nice.

Skills
You get few trained skills, but not as few as the Jedi, and since you don't need to/can't train Use The Force you are sort of an extra trained skill ahead again. The skills that matter are, as always here (Perception, Initiative) and a number of actual mechanically useful options along with a grab bag of the usually shitty options. You will almost certainly spend all your skill trainings on something you want and may be left wanting a bit more.

Soldier Dollars
You get the same mid range starting cash as a Scoundrel or Scout, but you can be fairly safely assured that actually spending it on stuff will result in you getting the most bang for your buck on armour and weaponry that you can afford WITHOUT having to worry if you are proficient in it, because you are, unless you buy a non-simple melee weapon.

What You Do With Soldiers
This is a class you actually take. Jedi are probably better, but the difference is relatively small outside of breaking the game. So you use soldiers to do whatever you might otherwise consider doing with Scoundrels, Scouts, and Nobles as well as all the things those guys would never get to consider doing, like being an effective heroic adventurer who survives combat and succeeds on attack rolls.

You don't even fucking TOUCH the Armour Specialist talent tree until minimum level 7ish, probably not until level 9 or 11, but after 11 you pretty much must have it. I mean, IF you were a soldier that long, you probably advance class out by then. In the mean time being an "armour specialist" just means you start the game investing just 1 feat in Heavy Armour Proficiency and within a level or so run around wearing a suit that grants you the defense of a 10th level character because why not that apparently should work fine according to the game designers right?

In the mean time you actually instead take Indomitable and Tough As Nails for your crazy defences as a raw HP condition track ignoring bullet sponge, take Harms Way to share that with friends, and take the Weapon Specialist Tree for minor attack boosting (probably focusing on standard ranged attacks, or at a stretch a condition track build). There's enough stuff there for some moderate choice as to which to take when, or in some cases ever.
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Post by Koumei »

Why do the Commando talents have nothing to do with not wearing pants? I mean, at least in theory the Brawler ones are related to brawling and the armour ones are related to the wearing of armour, and the weapon specialisation ones are related to specialising in weapons. Similarly, the leadership tree at least points at being a leader sort of, and so on.
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Post by Kaelik »

I get that this is Star Wars, so you want to make a reference to Ackbar, but... Can you figure out what a fucking trap is? You regularly label shit as a trap that no one would ever take, and even say that no one would ever take it.

Like, someone showing up on the white house lawn and calling the President out to duel isn't a trap when the Secret Service arrest/shoot them. It's a bad idea, sure, but not a trap.
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Post by Korwin »

Koumei wrote:For what it's worth, while I would never play a game with the Star Wars logo on it, I have friends in the real world who loved the d6 Star Wars game, and basically declared Saga to be anathema to them.

So that could just be a small sample size, or it could be nothing more than their hatred of anything being converted from X to d20 (they likewise hated the d20 conversions of L5R, Deadlands and BESM, though in the latter case I can guarantee that said conversion was pretty terrible). Or it could be because Saga, like d20 Modern and similar, sucks an astounding amount of dick.
Never played d6 SW, but from what I heard, the Problem of the one true class was even worse there...
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Post by Koumei »

It's a game about Star Wars, I don't see how that's a bug more than a feature. in all of the movies*, the main character is a MAGIC SPACE SAMURAI. With a supporting cast that includes dodgy gunslinger pirates, giant growly animals, princesses, derpy robots and very old MAGIC SPACE SAMURAI. If anything, a game based on Star Wars should probably just be like Arse Magica, where everyone has a Jedi character, and then there's a pool of supporting cast.

Yes, I am aware that many people consider Bobba Fett and Han Solo to actually be cooler and/or more interesting than Luke Skywalker. But Luke still accomplishes more and does better things than them (and I imagine most would choose Darth Vader over all three). And there really isn't a game mechanic for "being the cool kind of character that viewers like", that's just a matter of the player being able to pull it off.

So yeah, obviously in a SW game, everyone really should be playing as Jedi unless it's a weird game where you have a Main Character and everyone else wants to play "useful NPCs". I assume "teams of Jedi" are a thing in the non-film canon, right?

*that I actually watched
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

I can see a couple other ways to make the Jedi > You bit work:
  • Like the original trilogy, you go the D&D route. Jedi is a PrC that it takes an entire movie to get even the first level in, while "Princess", "Smuggler", "Protocol Droid" and even 'Everyman Hero" are all classes that start out with substantial abilities.
  • Like the prequel trilogy, there are a bunch of Jedi and they are presumed to be so badass that everyone plays one. Aside from like 1 or 2 specially snowflake classes. And even those classes are specced around Jedi being badass, like "Princess who commands Jedi" or "Droid specifically designed to neutralize Jedi in combat". Also, in this set up, Jedi have a code of conduct which includes a vow of obedience to truly despicable elders who are hidebound social conservatives and at least implicitly sexist and Calvinist.
  • You write your crunch so that "level" actually means something and then use the damn fluff to explain that Luke got to do more not specifically because he had the tag "Jedi" but because he was higher level.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Multi-Classing
So there is this insane claim floating around that this system “encourages Multi-classing”.

Now I wish it did. I mean as much as the Scoundrel, Noble, and Scout are incredibly shit, if you just sort of had a thing where people were bumbling incompetents like that but then discovered Jedi powers and stopped sucking or something that might be nice. 1 Noble/6 Jedi/some nice Jedi Advanced Class is a career that isn't a good idea in this system but certainly SHOULD be if at all possible in some way.

But the game is rife with the traditional d20 multiclassing flaws, like various bad break points for weak BAB progression. Scoundrel 1/Scout 1/Noble 1 is conceivably a thing and possibly should be a desirable thing but leaves you with NO attack bonus for three levels, mixing Scoundrel and Scout at all loses you a minimum of -2 base attack, -4 if you hit level 5 in both for a mere 3 talents from each, and is much more conceivable if someone who doesn't know better tries to build a star wars surprise attack stealth rogue.

Then it has some of it's own minor fuck yous to multiclassing your base classes. “Starting Defenses” don't stack, so you don't get that benefit, but you DO get the “best of” starting defense bonuses, but again there is really only a net +1 to a random defense type in that when you multiclass. So it's kinda incremental and unremarkable compared to just levelling up. And generally whatever base class multiclassing you do is rendered pretty much redundant if you ever take a prestige class because they get larger class bonuses to defence... that overide but do not stack with your smaller bonuses from your base class multi-classing.

The Big Fuck You to Multi-classers
The biggest fuck you to multiclassers comes in the form of "level 1 bonuses" or whatever you want to call them. Because there are some things you just get at level 1 only, and if you DON'T take the RIGHT class at level 1 then you are totally screwed.

Multiclassing skills is fucking bullshit you get your trained skills at level 1 and THAT IS IT. Multiclassing increases your class skill list but NEVER gives you more trained skills EVER. You can ONLY get new trained skills at the cost of feats or by permanently increasing your Intelligence bonus.

You also don't get all your starting feats when you multi-class, so no thinking you can “Just” start your sucky Ewok/Gamorean out as something else then take one level of Soldier to “fix” their crippling weapon proficiency deficits in a way that totally matches the fluff of the whole mess. You just get ONE of the new class starting feats. And so if you want lots of weapon/armour proficiencies without huge feat taxes it's level 1 soldier or GTFO. And Ewoks/Gamoreans can just go cry in a corner or opt to be Jedi.

Meanwhile if you want to be a Jedi or any form of force user ever (you do) then you are a complete fool not to take Jedi at level 1 for ITS starting feats and skills (and the free lightsaber, it's a very big deal for a very short while). Not to mention if you DON'T get your Jedi class features cheap at level 1 you will be paying through the nose to qualify for any of the force using prestige classes (and you will want to do that eventually).

This basically just leaves very little point to multi-classing. Talents generally suck, the best talents are on the best classes you should already be in since level 1 for the starting feats, and dipping out of those classes to the shit classes will ALWAYS slam you with BAB penalties, lower hit points, no new skills only 1 new feat and generally inferior talents.

The book repeats the multi-class fuckery several times in several ways, in case you didn't get that as it went over the effects of multi-classing point by point with a solid paragraph or two each covering all the details it then mentions it more vaguely at least two times over for another page. Because this tiny book totally has space for that.

And BTW Fuck You Arbitrary Class Availability and Training Limits Requiring you to suck the GM's cock
Because they cared enough to drop a line to suggest GMs can totally do that while they were there.
Last edited by PhoneLobster on Wed Nov 05, 2014 8:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Temporarily Skipping Ahead to Some Basic Rules
OK the class critiques were fun so I wanted to get right to them, but even then we had a lot of references to things we need to know about actual combat rules. So lets skip ahead to "chapter 9: Combat" and cover a bunch of important stuff before we go back and find some highlights from the other material.

The Surprise Nerfing Of Flat Footed
We aren't even through the basic combat sequence intro before we hit a tiny surprising little change that dramatically nerfs basic character concepts.

So in default d20 targets are flat footed and lose dex if they are unaware (and don't act in) the surprise round. But everyone REMAINS flat footed REGARDLESS of surprise round, even if there is no surprise round, in the first round of combat until they act, meaning you can get your sneak attack damage on flat footed opponents for at least one action JUST by winning initiative on the first turn. And if you get surprise AND initiative you get to sneak attack twice before your targets act. And that's good because it's cool quick draw/iajitsu shenanigans and rogues/sneak attackers need this sort of thing to be mechanically effective.

Since Saga edition has a raging hard on for destroying the very concept of the sneak attack/3.x edition rogue because apparently sneak attack dice are just TOO GOOD for the likes of us Saga edition now ONLY applies flat footed if there is a surprise round, and only to targets who are “unaware”. Stupidly it looks like you can still get the double round of sneak attacks IF you surprise people, but if there wasn't awareness issues and a surprise round, fuck you I don't care how much you win initiative by, your targets aren't flat footed before they act and NO SNEAK ATTACK FOR YOU.

So anyway that's the main thing I thought you might try and do with a scoundrel basically flushed down the fucking toilet isn't it.

You know shit like this is why you need to obsessively rummage through all the details of shitty change for the sake of change hack jobs like this, because lets face it, did anyone expect this, did even regular players of this system even know it was like this? Shit designers love to insert sneaky stealth nerfs (to sneak attackers apparently).

Actions
The game goes for Standard Action, Move Action, Swift Action, 1 each per turn, or 1 Full Round Action per turn. Standards can be converted to moves or swifts, moves to swifts. There are Free Actions and Reactions which inexplicably are different to just a free action in reaction to something even though that is what they are. If you are familiar with the 3.x family of games you know what these are.

It's not over all not a bad minor reform of the fairly standard action types in 3.x/d20 games, the thing where you can't Swift and Full Round Action is a bit annoying and will occasionally bite you on some talents, but otherwise this is just something that needs to be known to make sense of other stuff in the system better.

Initiative Is a Skill Now
So remember that and remember everyone burns 1 Skill training tax at level one on it and ideally squeezes in a skill focus as soon as possible for some very big initiative bonuses floating around. Also several initiative rerolls are out there. Initiative determination will sometimes take a while.

Critical Hits
Are just an auto hit and double damage on a 20 flat out. Simple enough and a “need to know” issue for this detailed review. So don't expect crit ranges for weapons and stuff, sort of.

Half Your Level Adds To Damage
In one of many WTF moments in this system they continue the trend of adding your fucking level to EVERYTHING by adding half your level to basically all weapons damage ever. It is worth noting however that while you add ½ your level to damage you add your full level to your Damage Threshold via your fortitude defense, so anyone relying on breaking damage thresholds to deal condition track reduction as their thing is increasingly falling behind at high levels on base numbers because, no reason, just fuck you I guess.

Double you strength!
Two handed weapons were not good enough, apparently, and now get 2x Strength bonus. I'm thinking you are a two handed stun weapon wookie soldier weapon specialist of some kind if you want to do the condition track thing. But then in later levels you increasingly suck.

Second Wind
Lets note again here in case you missed it, at half hit points or less 1 swift action once a day to get pretty much 25% percent or more at low levels of your HP back close enough to “for free”. Feat to do this again. This probably doesn't belong as a default in combat close enough to free action.

Zero hit point fatality!!!!
Holy crap! So hitting 0 at all just knocks you out with -5 unavoidable condition track damage. BUT if you hit zero AND if it exceeds your damage theshold then it insta kills you. Or instant destroys you if you are a droid or a space ship or something.

And lets note that actually damage dice tend to be pretty high and this will happen pretty regularly on average damage rolls, AND remember there are guys out there who's entire build will be about trying to exceed your damage threshold on EVERY hit,

No word on negative HP, they apparently aren't worth mentioning so persumably can't happen. Somehow. Presumably if at negative HP as long as attackers cannot exceed your damage threshold they can fucking pummel your unconscious body with light sabers all day and not kill you. Which is hilarious but sort of weird in a “arbitrarily fragile as an egg shell sometimes, invulnerable as a god others” sort of way.

Fuck You Dead Is Dead
There is a whole sub heading telling you that if you don't have revivify actions readily available through Treat Injury or something then fuck you man up your character is dead forever.

Or just spend a Force Point
Or you can just spend a force point and not die from that attack. Which means everyone is now encouraged to fucking hoard Force points for basic survivability which is the last fucking thing you want with an action point mechanic. And characters who actually use force points like they fucking should to be notably more effective stick giant “short life span disposable character permadeath me any time” targets on their backs because fuck it, you aren't actually allowed to be mechanically effective AND invested in your character's survival.

But then You Die Anyway 1 in 20 times.
So you died from HP damage that was over your threshold at 0 HP. You spent a force point to stop that happening. After 1 minute of unconsciousness, only 10 rounds, you have a relatively easy check to hop back up with some HP and start playing again. But if you roll a 1 it's fucking permadeath again and this time without a force point cop out. Why? Fuck knows. That's why.

The Condition Track
So HP aren't enough. This game simultaneously needs HP mark 2 running in parallel. Your condition track HP are fixed, you have 5 of them. They are a death spiral of defense, attack, and eventually even movement penalties. Because what else? Why not add an incremental scale of death spiral penalties to a d20 game? What could go wrong? Death spirals are cool right?

So enjoy tracking 5 increments of condition track penalties on each and every fucking character in battle from now to eternity and enjoy watching characters get knocked over tipping points into unavoidable death spirals all over the fucking place too.

Moving Down the Condition Track
“Special” things move you down on your 5 condition track HP. Like Poison, Disease, and abilities that just say so, like Jedi Consulars yelling at you about diplomacy and trade federation internal economic policy. And some of those, like poison and disease prevent you from getting better until they are fixed.

But the “main” way of moving down the condition track is taking more than your threshold in damage from a single attack.

Generally an “average” damage roll on a hit is likely to just barely beat out an average damage threshold of the same level.

But one of the first implication is that among other things, on average when you reach 0 HP you die. Unless you are hoarding force points. Which is sorta shit.

Or just ignore the Condition track and everybody moves less because that's an exciting combat mechanic
Aside from various “ah fuck it swift action to heal between 2-5 of those condition tracks” talents basically anyone can spend three swift actions over consecutive turns basically missing out on a move action every second turn to heal a condition track. What this means is that most swift action abilities aren't a thing unless they are awesome, and the condition track pretty much never advances and every second turn in combat nobody moves. Making for an over all less dynamic game with a bunch of circular book keeping as everyone pays their swift action tax to avoid the death spiral.

Fuck you no Disarming
So I don't know why but Disarming was too good or something. I'm going to guess they decided it just needed “simplifying” the general up shot is that it is different, does not provoke AoOs, does give a free attack against you if it fails (free attack, NOT a reaction, free action or AoO, just to be non standard) and there is an inexplicable +10 on the enemies defense instead of an opposed roll and the 2 handers get another -5 on your defense instead of the old 4.

All in all it's just flat out more difficult to make the roll, before any special equipment to resist disarming. And improved disarm doesn't actually make up the difference on the additional +11 difficulty as it only gives you +5 on the attempt and negates the free attack on failure.

I don't think they MEANT to nerf disarming, but they did.

Grapple, Now Only With Feat Taxes
You can grab things, and its just an undamaged unarmed attack at -5 that prevents movement and applies -2 to some attacks on the target, broken with an autosuccess standard action. It's sorta nerfy. It (probably) provokes an AoO for making an unarmed attack without right martial arts feat, but you wouldn't actually know that from reading the Grab/Grapple section as it never mentions it there. You pretty much need to go to the AoO rules to find that out.

Then there is sorta standard d20 grappling only not, used only if you have various wrestling move feats, and fuck you go look at feats because it will name them all here but not tell you what the fuck they do on a grapple roll success. So I guess we look at grappling when we cover feats. (as it turns out it COULD have just told you here, it's not THAT much text).

Weapon Juggling Nerfs
It's worth noting that there seems to be no mention of free weapon draws as parts of a standard move action, drawing a weapon is just flat out a move action, and dropping one is now a swift action. This is an over all a minor nerf on d20 core and the typical sort of minor WTF moment that will catch groups out.

Withdraw And Shoot
You can totally withdraw as a move action and shoot as your standard. If the people you are fighting aren't surrounding you in various ways or using some sort of reach shenanigans this is a risk free AoO negating freebie to shooting characters. It's kinda crazy really.

Kinda really crazy. I think I can flat out call this one a bad idea. Did shooty characters need an additional freee step up on melee characters? Really?

Fortunately it's only half speed movement. There is just about no way you move out of charge range. About all this does is let ranged attackers not full attack in order to make melee attackers not full attack thus making largely redundant in melee/ranged mash ups a bunch of really bad extra attack on full attack options I'm about to complain about.

No Extra Attacks
As far as I can tell, unless you are dual wielding or pulling other shenanigans probably with feats the standard full attack nets you nada in extra attacks and no one cares how high your BAB is. I'm pretty sure this reduction in extra attacks was trumpeted as some grand advancement/reform. And then it was immediately undermined by fucking dual weapon mastery and double/triple attack/auto/burst fire....

Two Weapon Fighting Is Nerfy In Odd Ways
So instead of the standard -6/-10 you get -10/10 … aaaaand -10 to ALL OTHER ATTACKS THAT ROUND, which is sort off, huh? Well fuck you I WON'T take extra attack in a round abilities then you assholes!

And if that weren't enough if you aren't proficient instead of just the normal -5 proficiency penalty you get ANOTHER -5 penalty from non-proficient double attacking. Probably maybe they didn't mean for it to stack but I'm pretty sure it works like that as written.

And feel free to take THREE INCREMENTAL FEATS (with huge requirements, and notably BAB requirements, so fuck you dual wielding scoundrels, scouts and nobles) to eventually negate these penalties (and maybe a proficiency feat you weirdo, no you don't get to avoid a fucking -10 and cop the standard -5 non-proficient penalty just because you sank 3 feats into it already, get fucking proficient or else).

Double Attack And Triple Attack
Are just fucking bizarre tom foolery. So yeah 1 feat for -5 to ALL attacks until the start of your next turn (yes DIFFERENT to the “this round” of two weapon fighting and very marginally worse in a stupid non-standard adjudication sort of way) and you get +1 attack on your full attack. Another feat and you can have two attacks for -10.

And there are high BAB requirements on those, so fuck you fast shooting scoundrels, scouts, and nobles.

Anyway you can just take all of these and all the dual weapon fighting stuff and suffer -10 or more to attack for your entire career and just miss with LOTS of attacks and wasted rolling time.

Oh and while I think maybe they didn't MEAN for double and triple attack to penalize the attacks before the extra attacks (maybe) so that in the end you take the feats and basically get your standard d20 fighter style extra attack steps at later levels, they didn't write it like that. So the penalty all stacks on all your attacks.

Autofire and Burst Fire
So this is d20 modern, so it needs like 5 ways to shoot things. Shooting things, shooting things with 2 guns, shooting things fast with double and triple attack, and now shooting them even faster with Autofire and shooting them even faster again with burst fire.

So autofire is a mode some guns have, you pick a tiny area, attack everyone at -5, miss, but still deal half damage. Unless they have evasion.

Burst fire does the same thing to one guy, ignores evasion for no fucking reason (fuck you the one good thing scouts thought the nearly had) and deals +2 dice of damage. Which you probably still miss with and half but its basically guaranteed.

So if you ARE a sucky scoundrel or scout or something and you know you are going to miss anyway you are just the right item selection away from saying screw it and dealing half damage all the time anyway.

Better yet it's -5 to hit, maybe you are a sucky not full BAB character, and maybe you are non-proficient, and hell I don't know a fucking Ewok, well Ewoks (and the others) get to just graduate straight to autofire blaster cannons because they don't understand technology and miss out on the feats that tell them how to use single fire guns. So their natural motivation is to spray the field with advanced heavy weaponry. They don't give a shit if they are -13 points or more down on attack compared to a trained expert with proficiency and a dex score, autofire just fucking hits for half anyway.

If they want to progress things a bit burst fire is just one proficiency, one feat and a marginal strength score away for almost full damage on a miss anyway. And presumably the thing strong melee characters do to compete on near or better footing to weak dexterous shooty characters at what shooty characters have specialized in during later game.

Oh and burst fire never explicitly states it deals damage like autofire does, but the rules don't say otherwise and very strongly implies it works like that, here in the combat chapter, not so much elsewhere, so good luck getting it right.

So I guess the standard ewok builds are “ewok stealth jedi” and “ewok noble with wealth who is little more than a vehicle for dealing guaranteed half damage with the biggest giant fucking rotary rapid fire blaster cannon money can buy them, and they still aren't particularly great, but logic says that's just how ewoks roll.

Aiming
Fuck it, two swift actions to ignore cover on your next shot. Take a shit feat to get incremental +1 attack when you do this, like a fucking sucker. Or take another marginally less shit incremental bonus feat to get +3-5 damage or so on that shot depending on the weapon. Because why not? I mean were there not enough reasons to not move and just shoot things in this god damn game? Well now there is this one, since despite being 2 swift actions makes that choice of cost pointless by requiring them to be spent in the same round, so it COULD have said “as a full round action make an Aimed Attack” but decided not to in case it made the option look too bad, and it WANTS you to aim. For some fucking reason. Presumably so everyone has a cheap option to entirely negate any point of using tactical cover, because man, we all hate people using tactical cover ever right?

Stunning Weapons
Are kinda dumb. They check damage threshold first, and do two steps of condition damage if they exceed it, but then half the damage before applying it to HP. Which sucks.

Stun weapons not killing you if they exceed your damage threshold and then reduce you to zero with their half HP damage is, technically explicit, but not written in a clear way that points out that exception or explicitly overrides the standard result of bringing a target to 0 HP while exceeding the damage threshold.

And then Ion damage is stun damage for droids and machines only. Whatev.

Not Much Else In Combat
I'm not sure there is much else to note other than to point out the unarmed attack section does not bother to point out that unarmed attacks provoke AoO's without the right feat. There are other bits, mostly just standard d20 business, occasionally things like “flanking still exists, it just won't give you sneak attacks now so whatever” and that's about it.
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PhoneLobster
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Taking a break again. Next up is The Vehicles Chapter, (it's pretty crazy in there).

And I totally promise there are like maybe only three or so remaining abuses of "It's a trap" in the entire draft document.
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momothefiddler
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Post by momothefiddler »

PhoneLobster wrote:Distant Command – Is fucking hilarious. So the bless on born leader is limited to the duration of “while they remain in LoS of you” which is hilarious enough because that means “whatever forever pretty much” for your party. Pretty sure they MEANT “up to encounter duration” on that otherwise the action cost is a bit redundant and this ability is fucking hilarious because now it keeps going OUT of line of sight. So as long as you remain conscious and alive ANYWHERE anyone you ever bless with this has it forever. So everyone asks for the kings fucking favor before going on every mission ever and actually BRINGING a noble with this ability into combat and letting them participate in the game is actively the wrong way to use this ability.
Does this stop when you sleep? Are there races that don't sleep? ...Can droids be Nobles? Can you keep one on your ship or on another planet and benefit from the shitty bonus? Can you whore out your Noble to Bless entire armies before you go slaughter Gungans?
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Post by TheFlatline »

Korwin wrote:
Koumei wrote:For what it's worth, while I would never play a game with the Star Wars logo on it, I have friends in the real world who loved the d6 Star Wars game, and basically declared Saga to be anathema to them.

So that could just be a small sample size, or it could be nothing more than their hatred of anything being converted from X to d20 (they likewise hated the d20 conversions of L5R, Deadlands and BESM, though in the latter case I can guarantee that said conversion was pretty terrible). Or it could be because Saga, like d20 Modern and similar, sucks an astounding amount of dick.
Never played d6 SW, but from what I heard, the Problem of the one true class was even worse there...
Sort of.

You had 3 force power groups- Control, Sense, and Alter. They all start at 1D each. You spent XP to raise it to 1D+1, 1D+2, 1D+3, then 2D and so on.

If memory serves to raise one pip for any standard skill it was like current dice x5, and then extra for the pips. So pretty expensive. Force skills cost twice as much, and you basically needed 2D to really stand a chance of doing much of anything with the difficulty tables being like they were.

So while a high-end jedi could be a god among men, his PC party will have basically capped out their skills fifteen sessions ago. And then the Jedi really is only a god at the force skills and probably the lightsaber (which to be fair was bullshit, there was a force power that boosted lightsaber damage through the roof).

If your GM made you start as a shitty-ass force user then you were never like out of control vs the rest of the party. You'd advance in your force schtick at the cost of everything else and about half as fast as everyone else.
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Post by Morat »

The biggest problem with d6 Star Wars is that the skill list is bullshit long and in half the books, they added more. So you can think that you are shit-hot at modifying droids, and then your GM picks up the droid book and says, "Ah, well, you only have droid programming and droid repair, and while in the base game that's all you need, now there's a new advanced skill of droid engineering that costs twice as much, and if you don't have it, you suck." The fun thing is that they never worked it out, so one book added an "engineering" skill that had specialties for droid or starship or weapon engineering, but other books added separate skills for those things. There are like three different cooking skills, for example.

But even the core book (for 2e, 1e is more restrained) has utter nonsense like "archaic guns" (because of all the arquebuses and flintlocks in fucking Star Wars), separates "vehicle blasters" from "blaster artillery" (so depending on the fucking mount, the same gun will use different skills), "bows" (which covers crossbows) and "bowcasters", and "thrown weapons" and "grenade" (with a different skill for grenade launchers). And that's just in dexterity skills. In the corebook.

Ultimately, nobody ever fucking used the difficulty examples, because they were stupid high.

I once went through the book, using the difficulty guides, trying to make a smuggler character. And you just can't. Even if you pare it down to the bare minimum, i.e. fly a ship, negotiate with the underworld, hide contraband, and lie to the customs inspectors...you just can't do it. There are too many skills and too few points.

That's not even getting into things you're almost certainly going to need to do, like knowing how to deal with the cops, deal with bureaucracy, accurately price goods, haggle (different skills!), navigate hyperspace, operate your shields, weapons, and sensors (three skills), drive a space car, shoot a gun, repair your stuff, remember that when you have a hull breach, you should maybe put on a spacesuit (yes, a real core example), or have enough knowledge about aliens and other planets so that you've actually ever seen one before. As a galactic traveler.

It's the weirdest thing, because it's fucking Star Wars. Nobody operates on narrow skills. Han is a good shot, not a "good shot with blasters but completely hopeless if you give him a firearm." And he's a good pilot, not a good space transport pilot. It doesn't matter if he's flying a starfighter or a ground car or a hovercraft or whatever. The characters go to Hoth and ride tauntauns, and there's just the occasional complaint about the cold. They don't say, "Shit, nobody bought up survival and beast riding, I guess we're all dead." Luke does not say, "Uh, hey, I've never fired turret mounted spaceship weapons," or "I don't know how to fly an X-wing."
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Post by Insomniac »

Honestly, I quite enjoyed SAGA edition and found it to be entirely superior to the prior WOTC incarnation of a d20 Star Wars Game.

I liked the Damage Threshold and Condition Track and found that while the Force was very strong, it was balanced in that it required a significant investment in Ability Scores, feats and talents to truly pay off and that its universe's version of magic was both accessible to all whilst being enough of a resource tax as to not make Force-Users nearly as dominant as full casters were over non-casts in Dungeons and Dragons.

The spaceship rules are FANTASTIC. The only knock is that Starships of the Galaxy had such a limited print run and therefore was difficult to acquire in physical form and prohibitively expense. Beyond that, it was a crunchy Tinkerer's Delight and a strong point of the system.

As the game went on, I felt the supplements got stronger with Galaxy of Intrigue, Scavenger's Guide to Droids and Scum and Villainy being high quality standouts.

The "Fucking Nobles" were one of the strongest and coolest classes, I thought.

The game is flawed in quite a few ways, but I don't understand ripping it to shreds and declaring it "the worst" or "anathema," like preferring this to d6 as I do is some profound religious heresy.
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Post by Insomniac »

Also, not only is this edition not Fuck You Multiclassing, it privileges it to such an insane degree that a very real grievance with the system was that if you solo-classed and your friends multi-classed, you'd be significantly down in power in comparison to them.

Burst-Fire and Autofire got substantial system support to where it became one of the most advantageous things to do in combat.

Stunning weapons are thematically appropriate and were also thoroughly supported to where stunning weapons forcing people down a Condition Track was one of the very best things to do with a weapon.

Martial arts was also beefed up over the system's lifetimes and some truly terrifying hand-to-hand combat builds exist.
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