Editing Star Wars d20 (section)

===Criticisms===

Star Wars d20 Revised had a relatively short lifespan so it never accrued some of the insane combinatorial explosion of brokeness that characterised late D&D3.5. That said the game had its flaws, some of them can be considered quite serious.

One common criticism is that the game is very "vanilla". Many classes gain all of their class abilities by roughly level 6, everything else was nothing more than a numerical improvement. Aside from the Jedi classes, classes tended to have only a small handful of class abilities and some of those abilities were highly situational. This extended to the prestige classes; the Bounty Hunter PrC for example got the Ranger's Favoured Enemy which extended to his current bounty target (which was nice) but only to his current bounty target (not so nice) and the rogue's sneak attack. That's it, that's all you get as a bounty hunter in way of class abilities. Basically you took a PrC to get access to class abilities D&D characters got at level 1. Equipment too was basically a numerical improvement as opposed to the huge expansion of capabilities enchanted gear could offer to players more used to fantasy RPGs. Most classes were also very "samey" with situational bonuses and a small list of bonus feats differentiating some of them. The feats tended to fall into the "+2 to that skill and +2 to another skill" type aside from the feats found in the core d20 system. In a way think of it as a prototype to d20 Modern, even though that came first.

As such overall, the game can get quite boring over time. Any non-Jedi character slowly grows in powers they already have while a new feat can give Jedi a whole bag of tricks to unleash. Even their core abilities rise more quickly; as most Force powers are skills they gain +1 per level. BAB for a combat character rise at half that rate. As most enemies simply lack the crazy amount of special abilities that characterize core D&D's monsters it becomes all too routine. Just Stormtroopers with even better aim, droids with more weapons, etc. Even fielding Sith simply means that the party will focus fire and gun that sucker down.

This leads to a major problem when parties get together. Everyone is pretty fragile but Jedi are so much more powerful than everyone else. Mixed parties tend to have many other characters overshadowed by the Force Users. All Force Users tends to have lots of overlap and can be hard to fit into the timeline if you use canonical Star Wars (ie the Old Republic or the New Jedi Order; even worse if you intend to have plenty of Sith to fight at the same time). All non-Force Users and you might as well be playing D20 Future. Movie conventions that protect major NPCs also do not exist; if Darth Vader shows up, there is every chance that the party will try to shoot him with proton torpedos from their vehicles if they can.

Mundane skills are worse than baseline 3E. D20 took 3E's already too large skill list and made it ''bigger''. While nobody has the dreaded 2 skill points a level, many things you could go without in 3E are now basic life skills. You need to be a master hacker to gather information on the internet. All but the most basic vehicle operations also require training. In-fact even basic operations require training because astrogate is trained only. 

This is further turned into a mess by making force skills the unholy combination of of the [[Truenamer]] and [[Book of Nine Swords|Martial Adepts]]: Force skills require a skill check to function, but there are literally dozens of them. Unlike Martial Adepts these aren't mundane skills you've learned to an extent you can use them in combat (Wax on, wax off), they have no consistent or rational attribute dependencies (akin to the [[MAD]] of [[Psionics Handbook|3.0 Psionics]]) and they can ''only'' be used to burn vitality and turn it into an effect. It gets worse still as, despite the system having only enough books with more than a couple sidebars of crunch they can be counted on your fingers, the only one that doesn't introduce a new force skill is ''Arms and Equipment Guide''. In its short run it literally introduced more skills than 3.X did in its 70+ books and countless web articles with new content. Worse still precisely ''1'' (''[[Oriental Adventures]]'''s Iaijutsu Focus) of 3E's new skills was not tied to a sub-system, 2 if autohypnosis (which is tied to Psionics and only given to them as class skills, but technically usable by anyone) is counted.

All classes are locked into their class skills entirely until the feat Cosmopolitan in the Hero's Guide. Even with this feat you only got one extra skill. This had a nasty way of hard locking characters into certain roles. While this was always the case in 3E's skill system (until [[Pathfinder]]), it really stings after d20 Modern's starting occupation made it the one variant with an exception in the core rulebook. Diplomatic skills were particularly locked down with Nobles and Jedi Consulars being the only people capable of ''asking nicely for things'' (contrast 3rd edition where Bard, Cleric, Druid, Monk, Paladin and Rogue, over half the classes, were).