I cannot stress enough the mind-blowing revelation Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game was. I got my hands on this two years into my gaming career, and it had a profound effect on the way I game. It had simple, straightforward rules. It was less an attempt to simulate physics, like Top Secret or Traveller, and more an attempt to simulate the Star Wars films. I was used to counting encumbrance, every day of rations, every arrow, and here comes Star Wars telling me blaster ammo is only important when dramatically necessary. Everyone can try to do everything, save for Force powers, and Force points? Double all your die rolls so you can pull off hitting that two-meter thermal exhaust port.
And the character templates! You could be up and playing in ten minutes, with the kind of characters you knew from the movies. The Gambler, the Smuggler, the Brash Pilot. It was all there. X-Wings and TIE fighters and “If you can’t make decent Wookie noises, don’t play a Wookiee.” I ran this game with gusto, backed by my two-record vinyl Star Wars soundtrack.
Character Creation System:
Well… The default here is pick a template, allocate skills. Done. So let’s talk about templates to give an idea of how they balance. Star Wars has six Attributes, they are Dexterity, Knowledge, Mechanical (aptitude), Perception, Strength, and Technical (aptitude.) They are rated in dice and pips, for instance 3D+1. That means roll three dice, add one to the total. Pips come in +1 and +2, there is no +3 as that would just bump up one full die. Attributes and skills are rolled each time they are used, not static like D&D or almost any other game.
Skills fall under each Attribute. Everyone has every skill (in First Edition) under the Attribute at the Attribute level. So if your Perception is 3D, then your Con, Bargain, and Search are also 3D. Dice can be added to this to reflect a character who has learned more about a given Skill.
Templates are built on 18 dice. Each die can be broken into 3 pips. So, seven dice could be broken into 2D, 3D+1, and 1D+2. The 18 Attribute Dice spread across the six Attributes, so an even distribution would give 3D in everything. This is above the human average of 2D across the board. So templates are built to be heroic. Alien races are baked into the templates from First Edition, with rules in the Star Wars Sourcebook for other races, basically they give a minimum and maximum for each Attribute and sometimes an additional ability or two.
Now we come to The Force. If the template begins the game with Force skills, they pay Attribute dice for them. There are three Force skills, Control, Sense, and Alter, and only one template, the Alien Student of the Force, begins with all three. So, this is a big benefit, starting the game with Force skills, but it comes at the expense of the other Attributes. If a character learns Force skills during the course of the game, that is paid for with Skill Points. So all things being equal, it’s more beneficial from a pure rules standpoint to pick up Force skills later, as Attributes can’t be easily raised, if at all, depending on the edition. This means if you’re creating your own template from the 18 dice, you’re down to 15 if you want to have all three Force skills available.
Once Attributes and Force skills have been allocated, it’s time to do Skill dice. If you’re just choosing a template from the book, this is the next step. You have 7D of skills to add to the template, bearing in mind you may not add more than 2D to any one skill, and you can’t add to the Force skills at all unless you already have them at 1D. Dice may be broken up into pips, for example if I have a Mechanical Attribute of 3D+2, I can get Astrogateion, Gunnery, and Starship Shields at 4D each by breaking one die into three pips, then adding one pip to 3D+2 to roll it up to 4D.
So, I want to create a Rebel pilot on the Han Solo model- a scoundrel who is running from his past and ends up in the Rebellion. There is a Brash Pilot archetype, but since I’m going for Han, I choose the Smuggler template. Looking over the template, it’s pretty balanced, Dexterity is 3D+1, Knowledge 2D+1, Mechanical 3D+2, Perceptions 3D, Strength 3D, and Technical 2D+2. Remember, human average is 2D. It’s also useful to know a professional who makes a living with a given skill has a skill rating of 4D.
I’m going to add 2D each to my Starship Piloting and Gunnery skills to bring them to 5D+2 each. I’m going to put one die each into my Con and Gambling, bringing them to 4D each. Now I have one die left… I’ll break it up and put two pips into Dodge, giving me a 4D there, and the last pip into Starship Repair, bringing that up to 3D. And… that’s it. This character is ready to play. Equipment is already listed on the template, I get one Force Point and it’s time to play.
The Character:
Deak Windsailor was a smuggler with the storied Womprat Express before the Clone Wars, happy plying the family trade. With the outbreak of the wars, it became extremely difficult continue business as usual with armed combatants around every corner. The Windsailors went into the fray on the side of the Republic, with Deak becoming a Y-Wing pilot in the Republic Navy’s Outer Rim division, where recruits often replaced Clone losses so that Clones could be sent to the more active and vital fronts. Deak racked up a respectable number of victories by the war’s end, many of them with his daughter Linden flying his wing. Deak returned to the smuggling business, but Linden remained with the Republic - now Imperial - Navy and eventually rose to command her own Victory-class Star Destroyer.
Deak retired from being a line smuggler, instead running the family business as one by one the Windsailor family and the Womprat Express succumbed to the dangers of their profession. Deak was the only one left, and he settled down on Alderaan to enjoy retirement. At the behest of his old Clone Wars ally, Senator Bail Organa, Deak came out of retirement to train some Rebel recruits on the finer points of the Y-Wing, as the Rebellion had just gotten their hands on a few. Deak’s battered old Mon Calamari light freighter, “The Squid Trawler”, now serves as a barracks for a new generation of Rebel pilots learning a few things from this Clone Wars veteran.
My Thoughts:
It’s Star Wars! In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve been playing Deak on an off for over a decade. I just re-created him as a starting character because it felt right.
This game, Star Wars, the original 1987 edition, is still in my opinion the finest “gateway drug” into the hobby of any game ever published. It doesn’t use unusual dice, it is in a world most people already know and love, and characters are very, very quick to create. Star Wars is woven into our cultural fabric at this point, so it’s even more accessible than the fantasy of D&D.
If you don’t have this game, check Amazon for the 30th Anniversary Reprint from FFG. It’s still out there, and it’s very affordable at the time of this writing. Hardcover reprints of the Star Wars RPG and the Star Wars Sourcebook in a slipcase. It’s worth it.
I am currently preparing to run a campaign using this edition of Star Wars, along with the fighter combat game Star Warriors, which uses the same skills as this version of the RPG. It’s pretty neat, being able to jump into a tactical fighter game without any converting of stats. This is something I think FFG dropped the ball on big time, with their RPG series not being compatible in any way with X-Wing, Armada, or Imperial Assault.
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