I am currently reading through this delightful and cool RPG and I have a few questions.
1) Does anyone know where I can find character sheets for the game, especially fillable ones?
2) Are there any good resources out there for the game anywhere?
3) I read online that starting characters are woefully underpowered compared to even lesser characters on the shows. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to enhance the starting characters to make them a bit more heroic starting out?
4) I heard there was originally supposed to be a magic supplement that was going to be released for the game but never did get released, since WEG folded. I read that a fan created a system for it online. Does anyone have this and/or know where I can find it for download?
The game looks like amazing fun.
I really want to play this online.
The only real issue I'm having really is the geography since no supplements were released. The geography section in the GM book mentions all kinds of locations, which is great, but I have no idea where they are situated relative to each other since there is effectively no map.
Does anyone know of even a fan page for the show or anything that shows the geography?
Currently there is a topic on this exact subject happening on big purple and while i dont want to send you there, i will gleefully borrow information from it to reply to some of your questions.
1)There ya go, its a fillable character sheet made a good guy poster there called ORtrail: http://www.mediafire.com/file/yfdr1fmcaq28d9m/xenasheet_character_sheet-Partial_fillable.pdf/file
..after reading the rest of your questions i find they are the same as in that thread. Well, double threads are oke i guess, i also made a few way back in my time. Rekindling interest in old games is allright, games need that sometimes.
I watched the show, even the Young Hercules episode one where Ryan Gosling played young Kevin Sorbo who played old Hercules. And i liked Hercules more than Xena, i just liked the violence more i guess. Xenas violence always smacked of wushu to me, and i have a hard time taking that seriously in real combat.
If you want to play this online try gm'ing a group or finding one on roll20 or discord, reddit etc.. There are probably dedicated fansites. Not for everything sadly but they are out there. Good luck, keep the faith.
Quote from: Warder on October 14, 2020, 05:42:18 PM
And i liked Hercules more than Xena
Blasphemy!
Lucy Lawless could beat Kevin Sorbo with Gabriel's stick! And look sexy doing it as well!
Gabriel was also a better sidekick than whatshisname (Hercules' sidekick)? Been ages since I saw either show, though. And I never got the DVDs, so I never saw them half a dozen times, like I did Buffy and Angel.
Fite me! Thrown Chakrams at 20 paces, both blindfolded to show off the skills:)
Recently i tried do watch another Kevin Sorbo project Andromeda Ascndant but i coudnt get past episode 1. Maybe eventually ill get to it.
The sidekick was named Iolaos, he was oke if nothing special, he was just a normal level guy who tried his best. Gabrielle got all sorts of weird stuff tacked on to her powerlevel if i remember. But i digress, i really loved Angel tv show, even more than BuffyXD Well, some parts of it. Buffy is the Magnum Opus, the rpgs for both shows are nothing to scoff at either.
Btw Batjon, i dont have anything about the shows geography but the french rpg Antika is set in the same greek mythos type of verse so i can recommend this map:
https://www.deviantart.com/depassage/art/Antika-RPG-Greece-Color-Map-711109348
Andromeda is pulpy sci fi fun for the first two seasons, then the original showrunner got kicked out and the rest is not very good.
As for the Hercules & Xena RPG, I believe there was also a Dragonball Z RPG that used the same offshoot of WEG D6. Not sure if that game had any useful goodies you could borrow, I've never actually read it.
Quote from: Warder on October 14, 2020, 07:02:12 PM
Fite me! Thrown Chakrams at 20 paces, both blindfolded to show off the skills:)
Ordering some Chakrams as we speak...
Quote from: Warder on October 14, 2020, 07:02:12 PMRecently i tried do watch another Kevin Sorbo project Andromeda Ascndant but i coudnt get past episode 1. Maybe eventually ill get to it.
Quote from: Lurkndog on October 14, 2020, 07:07:08 PM
Andromeda is pulpy sci fi fun for the first two seasons, then the original showrunner got kicked out and the rest is not very good.
This^
I think it took me a bit to get into it as well, but once I did it was rather good for the first two seasons or so, then it went downhill. Fast! They crapped EVERYTHING, and I stopped watching at some point. Tyr Anasazi was my favorite character and they got rid of him at some point,
Spoiler
then came back and ingloriously died. All these subplots tied to him for nothing.
Quote from: Warder on October 14, 2020, 07:02:12 PMThe sidekick was named Iolaos, he was oke if nothing special, he was just a normal level guy who tried his best. Gabrielle got all sorts of weird stuff tacked on to her powerlevel if i remember. But i digress, i really loved Angel tv show, even more than BuffyXD Well, some parts of it. Buffy is the Magnum Opus, the rpgs for both shows are nothing to scoff at either.
I don't remember much about the show, but I vaguely recall something about Gabrielle turning more powerful at some point.
RE: Buff & Angel, I probably liked Buffy and Angel roughly equally, but Angel ended better than Buffy. They kinda messed up Buffy by ending it in season 5, then giving it two more seasons in another network (which I didn't get where I live, had to wait for DVD), which were kinda meh, then ending it again. Angel's series finale was better than either one of Buffy's IMO.
I like Hercules as a character better than Xena as well, sorry! LOL
However, Xena is hella fine!
Quote from: Batjon on October 14, 2020, 04:32:00 PM
3) I read online that starting characters are woefully underpowered compared to even lesser characters on the shows.
How is this possible using WEG D6 System? :-\
I see from the character sheet there are 8 stats and shedloads of skills.
In normal D6 you get 3 attribute dice per stat to assign as desired, plus 7 dice for skills, max +2D per skill. A normal person gets 2 dice per stat for attributes and not a lot of skills, making the PCs vastly more powerful even before Force Points/Hero Points come into play. It's designed for a Star Wars level of heroism with the PCs as the protagonists, and does that well.
Quote from: S'mon on October 16, 2020, 06:29:39 PM
How is this possible using WEG D6 System? :-\
I see from the character sheet there are 8 stats and shedloads of skills.
In normal D6 you get 3 attribute dice per stat to assign as desired, plus 7 dice for skills, max +2D per skill. A normal person gets 2 dice per stat for attributes and not a lot of skills, making the PCs vastly more powerful even before Force Points/Hero Points come into play. It's designed for a Star Wars level of heroism with the PCs as the protagonists, and does that well.
He meant that a PC is underpowered compared to the named NPCs. Star Wars was like that.
But underpowered compared to the generic mooks they aren't underpowered.
The person who made the original post was probably upset that Xena could beat up 8 mooks around and his could only beat up 3. I saw the same thing back in the day with pickup Star Wars sessions.
Quote from: moonsweeper on October 16, 2020, 07:07:47 PM
Quote from: S'mon on October 16, 2020, 06:29:39 PM
How is this possible using WEG D6 System? :-\
I see from the character sheet there are 8 stats and shedloads of skills.
In normal D6 you get 3 attribute dice per stat to assign as desired, plus 7 dice for skills, max +2D per skill. A normal person gets 2 dice per stat for attributes and not a lot of skills, making the PCs vastly more powerful even before Force Points/Hero Points come into play. It's designed for a Star Wars level of heroism with the PCs as the protagonists, and does that well.
He meant that a PC is underpowered compared to the named NPCs. Star Wars was like that.
But underpowered compared to the generic mooks they aren't underpowered.
The person who made the original post was probably upset that Xena could beat up 8 mooks around and his could only beat up 3. I saw the same thing back in the day with pickup Star Wars sessions.
Yeah I suspected it was this. Overstatting 'name' media characters is so common it's almost a universal rule. I can recall one exception - the abysmal 1st edition d20 Star Wars, where an Imperial officer could kick Luke Skywalker's butt.
Basically the trick with D6 licence properties is to ignore the fan-wank statting of the official characters, and just play the game.
Quote from: S'mon on October 16, 2020, 07:24:59 PMBasically the trick with D6 licence properties is to ignore the fan-wank statting of the official characters, and just play the game.
Yes and for Star Wars you also need to ignore (or extensively downgrade) the stats for most fictional named NPCs in the later WEG materials. There is considerable NPC stat inflation between materials designed in the 1980s and early 1990s and those published in the mid 1990s. Starting PCs work well for the early adventures whereas the same PCs will be seriously under powered for many of the later publications.
That said, if you want more powerful starting PCs that's trivially easy to do in D6.
Quote from: Bren on October 17, 2020, 12:18:55 PM
Quote from: S'mon on October 16, 2020, 07:24:59 PMBasically the trick with D6 licence properties is to ignore the fan-wank statting of the official characters, and just play the game.
Yes and for Star Wars you also need to ignore (or extensively downgrade) the stats for most fictional named NPCs in the later WEG materials. There is considerable NPC stat inflation between materials designed in the 1980s and early 1990s and those published in the mid 1990s. Starting PCs work well for the early adventures whereas the same PCs will be seriously under powered for many of the later publications.
That said, if you want more powerful starting PCs that's trivially easy to do in D6.
Even as early as GG1, we had Battle of Yavin Luke with Command of 5D. He had barely left Tatooine and already had > +2D over his Perception in Command. And Luke is by far the least skilled of the heroes.
Yes, it's well known that the main film characters always had much higher stats than a starting character in the WEG published material. That wasn't what I was referring to though. I meant the non-movie NPCs that designers created. In the early adventures and supplements most NPCs were inferior to starting PCs and the major villain or challenge might be at the PC level or a bit above. So a group of starting PCs had a good chance of being able to succeed in most tasks and (especially by using force points) they could defeat the NPCs in the adventure. Later supplements had multiple NPCs in the same stat ranges as Darth Vader or Han Solo so the casino owner, the bouncer in the cantina, the shock-boxer in the gym, or the leader of the swoop bike gang down the street had multiple skills at or above the max possible for a starting PC along with 10D or so in their best two or three skills.
"Xena" was a better show and better writing and acting.
There was a "Xena" episode that was practically a basic D&D premise - it was called "The Dirty Half Dozen".
Four Criminals or 'rogues' were recruited to help Xena an Gabrielle sneak into a fortress and steal something important.
- Ed C
The stat inflation may mirror the overall power inflation as the Star Wars movies go along.
In the original trilogy, and to some extent Rogue One, characters are regular mortals. There was probably some power inflation in the EU novels, though I don't have any good examples (I didn't read that many of the EU books, because most of them were trash).
The prequels and the sequel trilogy turned Jedi into superheroes and worse, but WEG was officially out of the picture by then. Fans have tried to add onto D6 to take it there, but IMHO the system breaks when you try to do that.
Quote from: Lurkndog on October 19, 2020, 10:32:30 AM
The stat inflation may mirror the overall power inflation as the Star Wars movies go along.
I don't think so; it was a mid-90s WEG thing and probably parrallel evolution to the inflation in the prequel trilogy and sequel trilogy. I don't recall a ton of power inflation in the '90s SW books I read.
In the original game the PCs are to the NPC mooks much as Luke/Han/Leia are to the mooks in the original trilogy; while Luke & co themselves are wildly over-statted in the official numbers. It sounds as if the mid-90s WEG book/magazine stat inflation means that PCs would need to be highly experienced, and starter PCs would be the mooks.
Quote from: S'mon on October 19, 2020, 10:44:13 AM
Quote from: Lurkndog on October 19, 2020, 10:32:30 AM
The stat inflation may mirror the overall power inflation as the Star Wars movies go along.
It sounds as if the mid-90s WEG book/magazine stat inflation means that PCs would need to be highly experienced, and starter PCs would be the mooks.
The assumption did seem to be that the PCs would be very highly experienced which would, in effect, make any starting PC equivalent to a mook. So, whereas the GM might need to increase the power of some NPCs in the early published adventures, in the materials published later the GM usually needed to decrease the power of the NPCs.
Neither was a difficult thing to do. (It's easy to adjust power and difficulties up or down in D6. Far easier than in 5E for example.) But the extremely high stats in some publications did make me think - WTF? Our campaign ran about 10 years playing an average of 8-10 hours per week for most of that time. And we had a couple of PCs that played through almost all 10 years, but none of them reached the stratospheric levels of the heroic movie stats or the very high statted NPCs. I guess as GMs we were just too stingy. ;D