Reviewer: Mark Hills from Minneapolis, Minnesota
Almost Perfect (4½ Stars).
First off the new Star Wars role playing games by Wizards of the Coast is a complete departure from West End Game's earlier version. The d6 system used by West End had to be one of the least heroic game engines I have ever seen, forcing players to horde their experience points in order to focus on the most important skills. Instead, the new Star Wars system uses a modified version of the 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons core rules to make it work. Which is does to a certain extend-I still have major issues with 3rd Edition D&D, which unfortunately have crept into this game. And I have to agree with Jim Jenkins comments that the core rule book pays too much attention to Episode 1: there just isn't enough of anything good to focus the book on.
Players familiar with 3rd Edition D&D will find that much of the rules are pretty straight forward from the core stats of the character Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, etc. to saving throws and movement. They even imported the concept of Prestige Classes in from the 3rd Edition. Character generation is easy, with only minor glitches such as who gets which Class Skills and who doesn't- for some reason they decided that Piloting is a Cross-Class skill for Jedi, meaning it costs double the skill points to purchase over a Class Skill, when most of the Jedi we have seen in the books or movies have been pilots and good ones at that. Forcing a character to multi-class in order to be a good pilot is extreme, even paying double the cost is too much.
AD&D has always been at its best with only minor tweaks here and there in order to make it a fun, exciting game to play-at least in the genre of super heroic fantasy is concerned. Thus using these rules for Star Wars makes a certain amount of sense since they are very close in relation to one and other. AD&D has magic, Star Wars has the Force, both have weird creatures and monsters and a strong sense of mysticism and epic history. Both genres possess a lot of what I like in a role playing game, so using the same rules is not just efficiency and economy, it makes good sense. The test characters I have worked out are well balanced, but only time will tell how they work in an actual game environment.
Book layout is clear and concise, the text is easy to read and the rules are actually better explained than there were in the 3rd Edition D&D rules. Speaking of rules there are only two that I dislike and are carryovers from 3rd Edition. First is the flat footed rule: starting a combat flat footed (even if surprised), especially for low level characters can mean death and should be ignored. Second is the static initiative rule for combat rounds-let players roll their initiatives each round. Beyond that everything else is simple, seamless and meant to enhanced and accelerate play. And while there may be rules that need to be tweaked in-game, they are not worth mentioning.
The art is so-so, (I generally prefer the art from the Invasion of Theed boxed set) and the sample characters are a good way to show new players how PCs and NPCs increase in ability as they gain levels. I tended to wince every time they had a Phantom Menace character who was better than an old trilogy character, i.e. Queen Amidala having a higher charisma score than Princess Leia or Darth Maul just having so much better stats than Darth Vader-it just smacked of favoritism to me. However, the spread of characters goes from Episode 1 to the New Jedi Order and even has stats for Yuuzhan Vong-their equipment and coralskipper fighter.
All in all a well done book. I still recommend using West End Game's books as source material. Much like Fasa (good source material, lousy game systems), WEG produced a lot of good supplements for the old Star Wars game-adventures and source books, that can be used for the new system and converting between them won't prove to be that difficult. So finally a game system worthy of Star Wars has finally been produced. It isn't perfect, but it comes very, very close. Go for it!
May the Force be with you.
