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Author Topic: D6 Star Wars vs. FFG  (Read 10804 times)

S'mon

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Re: D6 Star Wars vs. FFG
« Reply #15 on: October 21, 2020, 01:24:02 PM »
Edit: I realize that CoC isn't technically a licensed rpg, but still.

Didn't Chaosium buy rights from Arkham House? http://www.arkhamhouse.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=ABUS Possibly not rights that actually exist in Law. Or did Chaosium invent ownership of HPL ex nullius?

Bren

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Re: D6 Star Wars vs. FFG
« Reply #16 on: October 21, 2020, 01:39:26 PM »
This should have been a poll.

Definitely D6.
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Dimitrios

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Re: D6 Star Wars vs. FFG
« Reply #17 on: October 21, 2020, 01:40:10 PM »
Didn't Chaosium buy rights from Arkham House? http://www.arkhamhouse.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=ABUS Possibly not rights that actually exist in Law. Or did Chaosium invent ownership of HPL ex nullius?

I think you're right, Chaosium did pay something to Arkham House. It's unclear whether they actually needed to, since it's unclear whether AH ever actually owned the rights to HPL's work.

hedgehobbit

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Re: D6 Star Wars vs. FFG
« Reply #18 on: October 21, 2020, 01:54:41 PM »
I have a theory that licensed rpgs do best when the license if for something that isn't the hot property of the day.
You're probably right, but IP owner don't let their properties go fallow anymore. Even a show like Firefly, which didn't even make a single season, get's constantly milked 18 years later.

You can almost feel the corporate walls around FFG's Star Wars game. They made Han Solo:The RPG yet you can't play Han Solo nor can you fly the Millenium Falcon, just 2nd rate copies. Both WEG and d20 versions of the SW games included stats for the movie characters but the only one I remember in an FFG product was a "less experienced" Lando Calrissian.

I don't see any current day IP holders letting an RPG company expand the lore as freely as WEG was allowed to.

Bren

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Re: D6 Star Wars vs. FFG
« Reply #19 on: October 21, 2020, 02:11:42 PM »
To be fair, when WEG started publishing there wasn't much material to work with. As I recall there were only the first three movies and their novelizations, a radio play version of the movies, the Droids cartoon, that special of which George will not speak, and barely more than a handful of novels (Splinter of the Minds Eye and the Han Solo and Lando Calrissian trilogies). Now you could fill a large trunk with all the canon and EU material.
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Chris24601

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Re: D6 Star Wars vs. FFG
« Reply #20 on: October 21, 2020, 05:47:10 PM »
To be fair, when WEG started publishing there wasn't much material to work with.
To be further fair, the whole Expanded Universe owes a TON to the work WEG put into adding detail to the Star Wars Universe.

When Lucasfilm decided to greenlight writing the first novels, Timothy Zahn decided to pull from the WEG material whenever he needed a world or vehicle or species because it was work that had already been done. Timothy Zahn even released a campaign setting DarkStryder for WEG Star Wars, further tying the two together. The result was that WEG was literally the foundation from which all of the Expanded Universe was built upon.

In turn, the success of the Expanded Universe is, from accounts, part of the reason that George Lucas decided to do the prequels. There were other factors, like technology finally catching up to his vision, but the financial success of the EU was what convinced him that there was still enough interest in Star Wars to start working on the prequels.

Of course George completely ignored the EU other than a few choice names (ex. Coruscant and its "city-planet" nature came right from Timothy Zahn) and that was, honestly, the start of the problems for the EU as core elements of their established canon had to be thrown out and/or retconned to match the prequels. They also had to trash whole storylines because of edicts from above... Anakin Solo was killed off precisely because George felt it would cause confusion to have two characters in Star Wars named Anakin; so even though Anakin was set up to be the hero of the New Jedi Order trilogy who would redeem the name Anakin, he got unceremoniously ganked midway through and the entire rest of that series was a scramble to recover and further resulted in a cascade of other changes that resulted in such idiocy as "60 is the new 30" to explain why Luke, Han and Leia were still running around as the main protagonists because they'd killed off 90% of the younger generation due to one edict or another.

Frankly, Star Wars is largely the mess it is today in part because the success of WEG and Timothy Zahn enjoyed in reinvigorating what was then a mostly fondly remembered, but no longer anything like a cultural zeitgeist, film series and everyone and his uncle (including Uncle George himself) deciding to put their stamp on the Star Wars Universe (even The Mouse... which did started its stamping by stamping out everything except the actual films and The Clone Wars animated series).

Ratman_tf

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Re: D6 Star Wars vs. FFG
« Reply #21 on: October 21, 2020, 06:06:06 PM »
Of course George completely ignored the EU other than a few choice names (ex. Coruscant and its "city-planet" nature came right from Timothy Zahn)

Zahn likely nicked the idea of a city-planet from Foundation's Trantor. [/pedant]
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Bren

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Re: D6 Star Wars vs. FFG
« Reply #22 on: October 21, 2020, 06:20:59 PM »
To be further fair, the whole Expanded Universe owes a TON to the work WEG put into adding detail to the Star Wars Universe.

Yep.

My understanding was he was given WEG materials before he wrote the Heir to Empire trilogy and he incorporated a number of things into his novels.
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soundchaser

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Re: D6 Star Wars vs. FFG
« Reply #23 on: October 21, 2020, 07:42:43 PM »
Huge d6 fan

Didn’t like the walls of text in FFG. PLUS, the system seemed to cater to gear...

These days we use Cinematic Unisystem. Perfect in handling S/J viz non force users.

hedgehobbit

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Re: D6 Star Wars vs. FFG
« Reply #24 on: October 21, 2020, 11:48:16 PM »
To be further fair, the whole Expanded Universe owes a TON to the work WEG put into adding detail to the Star Wars Universe.

I'll never forgive WEG for inventing the "Backup Hyperdrive". I get angry just thinking about it.

VisionStorm

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Re: D6 Star Wars vs. FFG
« Reply #25 on: October 22, 2020, 12:13:22 AM »
To be fair, when WEG started publishing there wasn't much material to work with.
To be further fair, the whole Expanded Universe owes a TON to the work WEG put into adding detail to the Star Wars Universe.

When Lucasfilm decided to greenlight writing the first novels, Timothy Zahn decided to pull from the WEG material whenever he needed a world or vehicle or species because it was work that had already been done. Timothy Zahn even released a campaign setting DarkStryder for WEG Star Wars, further tying the two together. The result was that WEG was literally the foundation from which all of the Expanded Universe was built upon.

In turn, the success of the Expanded Universe is, from accounts, part of the reason that George Lucas decided to do the prequels. There were other factors, like technology finally catching up to his vision, but the financial success of the EU was what convinced him that there was still enough interest in Star Wars to start working on the prequels.

Of course George completely ignored the EU other than a few choice names (ex. Coruscant and its "city-planet" nature came right from Timothy Zahn) and that was, honestly, the start of the problems for the EU as core elements of their established canon had to be thrown out and/or retconned to match the prequels. They also had to trash whole storylines because of edicts from above... Anakin Solo was killed off precisely because George felt it would cause confusion to have two characters in Star Wars named Anakin; so even though Anakin was set up to be the hero of the New Jedi Order trilogy who would redeem the name Anakin, he got unceremoniously ganked midway through and the entire rest of that series was a scramble to recover and further resulted in a cascade of other changes that resulted in such idiocy as "60 is the new 30" to explain why Luke, Han and Leia were still running around as the main protagonists because they'd killed off 90% of the younger generation due to one edict or another.

Frankly, Star Wars is largely the mess it is today in part because the success of WEG and Timothy Zahn enjoyed in reinvigorating what was then a mostly fondly remembered, but no longer anything like a cultural zeitgeist, film series and everyone and his uncle (including Uncle George himself) deciding to put their stamp on the Star Wars Universe (even The Mouse... which did started its stamping by stamping out everything except the actual films and The Clone Wars animated series).

If WEG Star Wars hadn’t existed, George Lucas wouldn’t have made the prequels, invoke the wrath of the fanbase, become disenchanted with the franchise and ultimately sold it off to Disney, so they could make their crappy sequels and ruin what was left of the franchise.

Let that sink in.

WEG Star Wars RPG single handedly set off the chain of events that ultimately ruined Star Wars. And all so that a bunch of nerds could play the greatest movie franchise RPG ever created.

Mind = Blown  :o

Melan

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Re: D6 Star Wars vs. FFG
« Reply #26 on: October 22, 2020, 03:44:04 AM »
Still worth it!  ;D
Now with a Zine!
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S'mon

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Re: D6 Star Wars vs. FFG
« Reply #27 on: October 22, 2020, 03:56:29 AM »
To be further fair, the whole Expanded Universe owes a TON to the work WEG put into adding detail to the Star Wars Universe.

I'll never forgive WEG for inventing the "Backup Hyperdrive". I get angry just thinking about it.

They needed some way to explain how the Millennium Falcon with a broken hyperdrive could make it from Hoth to Bespin Cloud City. What's your alternative?

Opaopajr

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Re: D6 Star Wars vs. FFG
« Reply #28 on: October 22, 2020, 06:07:36 AM »
WEG D6.  8) L'Esprit de (mon) 'coeur'.
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hedgehobbit

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Re: D6 Star Wars vs. FFG
« Reply #29 on: October 22, 2020, 08:09:32 AM »
They needed some way to explain how the Millennium Falcon with a broken hyperdrive could make it from Hoth to Bespin Cloud City. What's your alternative?
That Bespin and Hoth are extremely close together. The backup hyperdrive creates an even bigger problem as the entire reason they needed to go to Bespin was because they couldn't escape the TIE fighters earlier in the movie. A feat they could have accomplished if a backup hyperdrive was available.

Second on WEG's big mistake list is their insistence that ships cannot change course while in hyperdrive despite the Tantive IV clearly doing so in the radio drama. This mistake, unfortunately, was transmitted to the EU and even to various other games (but was finally cleared up in The Force Awakens).