How does hubris always sneak up on me? I'd been on such a hot streak in the month of July, I thought for sure I could keep the momentum going long enough to breeze through a chore I'd been dreading for years - making my way through Star Wars Revised Core Rulebook (Bill Slavicsek, Andy Collins, JD Wiker), a massive beast of a tome (~375 pages) that is, all things considered, the driest possible way to experience the Star Wars universe.
If we look at it as a matter of pages-per-day, it's not really that bad. I can hold my head up high reading an average of 20 pages of a d20 corebook every day for two weeks (and if you exclude the weekends where I kicked back and played video games instead of reading, it's actually more like 25). But oh man, between the attack of opportunity rules, the half-page skill descriptions, and back-to-back chapters on Vehicles and Starships, there were times when I was white-knuckling it.
Hardcore.
To the EXTREME!!!
Well, sarcasm aside, it's not as if I actually want the book to lose its dryness. Not entirely. Not even mostly. I just wish the dryness was deployed with greater precision. This is Star Wars, for crying out loud! How are you making me wish for the spectacle and excitement of an evening quietly browsing Wookiepedia? I'm not sure what exactly I want it to do differently, but it needs something. Interstitial fictions maybe? An editorial voice with a bit more pulp flair, as if we're having the text dictated to us by a 1940s news reel?
I guess it boils down to genre. Genre has always been something George Lucas has understood pretty well, to the degree that Lucas' genre fluency is the series greatest asset and most Star Wars media lives or dies by how much that it internalizes that (I think the prequels would have been much better received if someone could have gently reminded Lucas that the geopolitics stuff should have been pulp too).
The natural conclusion is that the best possible Star Wars game would be "Powered by the Apocalypse." But that's not going to be possible for several years. This book came out in 2002, to coincide with the release of Attack of the Clones, and so it is condemned to try and do genre with the d20 rules system. . .
I'd say it's actually a pretty valiant effort. It introduces a split between "vitality points," which are easily restored and represent near misses and cinematic superficial wounds and "wound points" which come back only slowly and represent serious injury to your physical body. The intended effect is to model Star Wars' pulp-inspired fights, where heroes and villains both make it through elaborate set-piece battles and only really get hurt with a final decisive blow. The implementation has a couple of problems, though. First, critical hits bypass vitality points and go directly to wound points. And humanoid characters only have wound points equal to their Constitution score. So imagine a crit-fishing build where 15 percent of the time, your character is rolling 3d8 or more damage against an average of 12 hit points. It's not even that strange an NPC build. You could stumble across it randomly. (Hilariously, Obi-Wan Kenobi not only falls into that trap with his stat block, but whoever wrote it used the busted D&D version of the Improved Critical feat, giving him a crit range of 17-20, meaning 20% of the time anyone who fights him just dies).
Don't get me wrong, this sense that someone pointing a gun at you is always a threat, regardless of your character level, is itself very genre . . . but the genre is noir, or possibly horror. It would be more pulp if wound points were lost only after vitality points ran out.
And just to rag on the mechanic some more, yeah, they come back relatively fast, but still only at a rate of one per level per hour, which means a high con character might not even top off after a night's rest (and that all characters will need at least a 3-4 hour rest to heal up). If you really want characters to move from one scrap to another, like they do in the movies, you gotta make vitality points even cheaper. Although the Professional classes, which get defenses, saves, attacks, and skill points, but no vitality points as they level up are a good idea. Players are going to be able to mow through whole hordes of thugs, but it will still be a level-appropriate challenge.
It almost feels churlish on my part to point out that Minion-type enemies would have worked even better.
But that's the Star Wars Revised Core Rulebook all over. It's almost where it needs to be. Ditch the last few lingering connections between vitality points and D&D hit points, let them restore according to the dramatic pace of the game instead of modeling "healing," get deeper into asymmetric NPC design, because in the source material, the main characters really do operate by a separate set of rules, be more generous with Force Points (metacurrency that can retroactively boost dice rolls when spent) and decouple them from the morality system to encourage bigger, more ambitious stunts. These are all things games learned subsequently to the publication of this book, so it's really unreasonable of me to ask for them . . . but if the best I can hope for is something inchoate and still kinda too-D&D, then what exactly am I supposed to gain by reading this book?
What indeed?
I guess in 2002, I was still pretty enamored with both the d20 system and the Star Wars prequels (and this book very conspicuously ties into Attack of the Clones, specifically - the "What's New" section of several of the book's chapters goes out of its way to mention added material from the new movie - bye-bye Jar Jar and Sebulba, hello Jango Fett and Count Dooku) so at the time I was just excited to have a Star Wars rpg, no matter how D&D it was under the hood (and to be fair, Star Wars is closer to D&D than most other licensed media would be). Maybe the real reason the book seemed like such a . . . chore to me is that it couldn't magically make me 20 years old again. If I'm being honest, at that age, I'm not sure I'd have known what to do with all the genre, even if the book delivered.
Let's call it an artifact and respect it for its historical context.
Ukss Contribution: So there's this group of aliens, the Yuuzahn Vong that I know only second-hand, through my two Star Wars rpgs. I've gathered that they're sort of the metaplot antagonists for Expanded Universe novels set 20 years after the end of Return of the Jedi and that like all sequel villains they try and escalate the threat by being ridiculously overpowered - they're somehow immune to the Force, despite that making absolutely no sense under the setting's metaphysics.
My choice is not the Yuuzhan Vong. Even after all this time, I couldn't so much as describe their appearance. That's how little charisma I think they have as a threat.
However, I was reminded of one really amusing fact about these guys. Their signature weapon is the ampistaff, "a serpentine creature that can become as rigid as stone and is generally employed as a quarterstaff."
What kind of berserk Flintsones nonsense is this?
I'm choosing to imagine it less like terrifying biotech and more like "pet snek does a halp!" That's right, buddy. Turn to stone so I can bonk bad guys on the head. There's treats in it for you when we get home.
