D20 STAR WARS RPG dying?

[Gry Sarth]

WHAT?

You play Star Wars D6 without the wild die?!!

Heretics!

That's like eating a pizza without... your tongue!
_________________
"He's Gry Sarth, of course he has the stats for them."

[Jedi Skyler]

Well, maybe not quite THAT bad.

But it'd be like going from New York to Philadelphia... in a horse drawn WAGON!!!

[Ejacobs]

I know! I know! I weep at the heresy, but he is the holder of the CP's. How can I make him see the light? Oh the anguish!

E

[Jedi Skyler]

Use the Force, Luke!



That, or bean him upside the head a couple times with his Game Master Guide. When he sees six-sided dice swimming around his head, tell him they're Wild Dice and they want to be a part of the game...

[hazardchris]

I started off with the d20 version, I'm young and have only been RP'ing for about 3 years now. I started with D&D played that and almost nothing else for a year. Then I found d10 played that for a while. Enter KOTOR into my life. Me and some friends got into the Star Wars spirit and got our hands on some of the d20 core rulebooks. Played it for about 8-9 months. Then while looking for some material for a game that I was running, I stumbled accross this site. I thought, humm... I'll give it a try. I downloaded the R&E Handbook, I read it cover-to-cover. I managed to grab a few hardcopies from some RPG stores that had used books and ebay. I convinced some of my d20 buddies to give it a go. So, we played the Priates of Preixar adventure. INSTANT hit. We've been playing nearly every week for 3 months now. In one night four lifelong d20'ers were converted to the D6 path.

Long live WEG and the D6.

[Ejacobs]

Welcome back to the Light Side.

Glad to have you.

E

[Jedi Skyler]

That's right. Glad to have you here!

[Gry Sarth]

Well, Wizards has just put another nail on the coffin of their SW RPG line. The website has been refurbished, and now it's almost all Miniatures. With pictures of the different boxes and all on the 1st page. The RPG is relegated to a secondary spot. In their latest Jedi Counseling they've reversed the order, and now the Miniatures questions are answered first, then the RPG ones.

If anyone had any doubt they'd abandoned the RPG, this should make it blatantly clear.


On the other hand, D6 is only becoming stronger, with lots of fan books on the way.
_________________
"He's Gry Sarth, of course he has the stats for them."

[Boomer]

Wizards of the Coast stock dropped to 2 cents. I was gonna get a loan and buy the company until I saw Hasbro had beat me to it... a couple years ago.

Anyway, they went back to printing crap this year. With their old un-bought items still collecting dust on the shelves they are printing new material.
I took a look at some of the new material. Further irrelevance. Brand new defense and attack bonus spells, whole book of them! Why? Who cares, they are just there!

And they keep making more Star Wars Miniatures, which most people buy simply to play with in other games or keep as collectibles, I have never heard of anyone playing it.
_________________
My backpack has jets!
I'm Boba the Fett!
And I bounty hunt for Jabba Hutt,
to finance my 'vette!

[Omega_Leader]

With regard to whether Wizards stops publishing Star Wars rpg stuff, I'm definitely in the "who cares?" camp. I started off with WEG Star Wars, went to D20 Star Wars for a while, and am now coming back to WEG Star Wars. It's just such a better fit with the genre and with me.

It reminds me of the old Alternity system that TSR published just before being bought out by Wizards of The Coast. As soon as TSR was bought out, Alternity was abandoned. But guess what? Alternity, in just the relatively short time it was around as an "in print" product, gained enough of a following that there are at least two major fan-based websites that are still going strong--alternityrpg.net (formerly alternity.net) and tequilastarrise.net (for the Star Drive setting of Alternity).

My point: If a game or system is well-received enough by its players, they will keep it alive--especially in today's internet society.

[Boomer]

And if a game system is bad, the players will KILL IT! Even if the company pbulishing the system is kept alive by more companies stepping in and paying them to repeat their mistakes, they are still mistakes and players will still refuse to buy the garbage.

...and than the publishers who lose money on Wizards of the Coast's garbage when they print it raise the prices of my college text-books to 150 bucks per book... DAMN YOU WotC!
_________________
My backpack has jets!
I'm Boba the Fett!
And I bounty hunt for Jabba Hutt,
to finance my 'vette!

[masque]

D6 Star Wars is what got me into RPG's back in the early 90's, and after finding a treasure trove of old supplements at my FLGS, I've just started running my first campaign in years. I have been buying some of the WOTC minis, but just as props for my WEG game. If the D20 game really is dying, wouldn't it be nice if WEG got their hands on the license again? I know it'll never happen, but I can dream...

[Sandokiri]

I do know that there is a *petition* to "save" SWRPG d20, and get WotC to produce new materials for it.

That said, I hung out over at the WotC forum for a while, and I do have a couple of the "heretical" d20 books. These are one hedgehog's opinons.

1. "Period" play. While the game claims to be usable in the Prequel Trilogy ("Rise of the Empire,") Original Trilogy ("Rebellion Era") and New Jedi Order (Yuuzhan Vong bantha-poodoo) periods, the game engines are clearly written for the PT period (Rebellion and NJO are sourcebooks.)

In fact, what's VERY interesting is that while the original core rules were written around TPM's release, the "revised" core rules take this bias further and pretty much sets the "default" game during AotC.

But then, what do you expect? Even with respect to Blizzards of the Toast's cash cow, Dungeons & Dragons 3.5, they can't present a generic setting that can be adapted (the default setting is Greyhawk, quickly recognisable by most D&D players, even though for the longest time Forgotten "For Munchkin" Realms has been their top seller.)

2. Classes... especially Force User classes. One would THINK, and wrongly, that the game mechanics would be able to distinguish Jensaarai, Ithorian Force priests, Ewok shamans, and Revwien Tyia adepts. But no, they're all shamanistic "Force adepts," to be distinguished from two classes of Jedi.

3. Prestige classes, and glaring omissions. Sorry to say it, but Gizzards in the Host dropped the ball when they assigned certain characters levels of SITH LORD and didn't include SITH LORD in the core prestige classes, preferring to just leave it in the splat book. C'mon... once again, EVEN D&D 3.5 ported 3.0 splat book Prestige Classes into the core system. You'd think... but no.

4. An on-board ruling that reducing the weight of an object is classified as a "personal-use" modification according to the Arms & Equipment Guide rules on equipment modifications.

In the name of...!

In spite of the clear logic that reducing a 2kg. Blaster Carbine to 1kg. (and not affecting anything else about the weapon!) is a mod that will affect EVERYONE... and in spite of the vaunted Jedi Counsellor KNOWING this, he went ahead and called it a personalisation.

5. Drain Energy is Dark Side, because of how Anderson described Kyp Durron using it against Luke.

6. Finally, some of the horrific repetition, both using wordings outta the D&D books and I could almost swear a few rips from WEG...

And then, worst of all, I don't know where they got those quotes from "Master Odan-Urr," but whoever wrote them adapted and in places ripped off Hagakure, as if the Jedi really needed to be MORE samurai-like.

(Hagakure is one of two major treatises on bushido; Musashi's Go rin no sho is the other, and older, work.)

I guess I just scratch the surface of the problems I've seen with Star Wars as a d20 game. Well, that, and "high level" characters can't fail at much, making the actual dice-roll-needed aspects of high-level play kinda boring.

After all, even someone rolling 11d can botch.

d6 has always been more fun... more dangerous to character health when the blaster bolts start flyin', but more fun.
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"Worry to lose is to lead to the evil augury."
*Find yer own truth.*

[Pel]

If WotC stops producing D20, then we'll probably get even more converts to D6. This is great!
I started with WEG when the SWRPG & Sourcebook were released and haven't looked back since. When they went bellyup I was crushed. Spent lots of afternoons drinking IBC rootbeer and wandering around playing my tuba.

Once I got over my rootbeer binge and the neighbors politely asked me to stop playing, I realized the world was not over. After all, I still had all my WEG books. My group was still intact.

Then I began to make extensive use of the internet and found a multitude of other diehard D6 gamers (like the esteemed assemblage here) and I was saved! All is well! Life is good! D6 forever!
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Aha!

[echo]

D20 is just a bad system. The rules are week, in many places, they make no sense, and there is no attempt to make the game world fit the Star Wars feel. As long as the fanboys get more kewl stuff d20 will have players. But at some point even the fanboys are going to get tired of playing Tizzit the 20th level Jedi Guardian dark elf.