I'm mostly familiar with the first edition of WEG Star Wars. I actually do have 2nd "revised and expanded edition" and D6 Space but I've not made much use of them.
My question is what are the bits from SW 2e or D6 Space I should consider borrowing?
From what I can see the changes include:
- Wound Levels changed from 1st to 2nd editions from wound thresholds being a ratio between damage and strength rolls to being the margin between the two rolls. I'm not sure why this was changed and what the benefits are.
- Some movement rules changed, I can't imagine this matters much.
- Scale rules also changed, but again I don't feel this is that big a deal.
- 2e contains minors skills changes and specialisations added which personally just seems like an additional complication.
- The Wild die on which the jury is still out.
- Also D6 Space has Strength damage = 1/2 STR + weapon (rather than STR + weapon) which seems very sensible.
Any thoughts?
I have 1st edition, and scanned through the second one once, but that was a long time ago, so take this with a pinch of salt:
QuoteWound Levels changed from 1st to 2nd editions from wound thresholds being a ratio between damage and strength rolls to being the margin between the two rolls. I'm not sure why this was changed and what the benefits are.
I'd imagine it was done to make Wookies and other high-Strength characters less invulnerable.
QuoteScale rules also changed, but again I don't feel this is that big a deal.
I guess it would largely depend on the sorts of adventures you run. If you have lots of vehicular combat (spacebound or planetary), it might make things more consistent and playable. If you don't, kind of moot.
IIRC, one thing they changed around quite a bit was Force powers. In 1E if you had Force skills, you could attempt any Force power requiring those skills. Simple, easy. 2E, as far as I recall, changed that and it became some ugly spellcasting system where each and every Jedi would be first taught power X, then power Y, then power Z etc.. Or maybe that was just the Alien Student of the Force PC template that had to conform to some silly order of aquisition, but whatever. The idea was 'meh'.
Oh, and if memory serves, they totally overhauled the Command skill and how it could be used in battle. Don't know if it was good, but the 1st edition Command skill was kind of redundant next to Con, so it was probably a good thing.
Quote from: Premier;378044IIRC, one thing they changed around quite a bit was Force powers. In 1E if you had Force skills, you could attempt any Force power requiring those skills. Simple, easy. 2E, as far as I recall, changed that and it became some ugly spellcasting system where each and every Jedi would be first taught power X, then power Y, then power Z etc.. Or maybe that was just the Alien Student of the Force PC template that had to conform to some silly order of aquisition, but whatever. The idea was 'meh'.
Hm.
Did the 1st edition version make Jedi uber powerful or not?
I mean, I'll probably only ever play Saga Edition from here on out, but I hadn't seen 1st Edition, and that sounds like much less of a pain in the butt than the 2eR&E system for Jedi powers.
Well the first edition is about 1/2 the size 2nd.
Force characters start pretty puny (which kind of makes sense as they are not actually proper Jedi templates) but they can rapidly become very powerful depending how generous the GM is will skill points. But that is an issue with the D6 system in general, it doesn't do high level very well.
Yeah...I made a trade for the complete set of the WEG DC Universe RPG (yeah, I already had an idea what I was getting into), and my goodness playing most anything that's not a street level super just seems to be more trouble than its worth.
I still think 1e Star Wars was the better implementation; if nothing else, because the rules were a lot simpler which I thought fit the source material better.
2e tried too hard to RPG-ize the rules to make them more consistent with the RPG market in general. So you suddenly had tons of skills instead of a few ones, advancement got slowed down, etc. 1e also had a much stronger focus on the movies whereas 2e kept including more and more shit from the expanded universe as well as WEG's own creations.
The biggest rule difference I remember is that in 1e, by RAW, PCs had "script immunity" from being killed. At least, IIRC. Unfortunately, I no longer own a copy of the 1e rules - I just remember reading the paragraph on script immunity.
Yup, it does explicitly mention script immunity. WEG Star Wars was never intended to be the kind of game you don't bother naming your character till level 3 so it makes sense in its context.The game also provides a whole list of penalties that can be applied in place of death to make failure meaningful.