Star Wars RPG

I couldn't resist.

West End Games' Star Wars RPG is a fun, easy-to-learn system. Because of this, people hate it and avoid it like the plague.

There were a lot of supplements and modules made for the system; you can see them all here. As some of the earliest Expanded Universe works that weren't in the "technically happened but so shit you shouldn't remind people they exist" bin, some of the concepts and characters introduced have become fairly widespread. Timothy Zahn was actually given copies of this game and the supplements available at the time as reference books for use when writing the Thrawn trilogy (Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, and The Last Command).

Star Wars D6 is also infamous for failing utterly at the metric system. Someone went and worked out the size of all the ship models used in the movies in feet, then someone printed these directly but changed the unit to meters without doing any math (not even converting it to yards first). This resulted in some fantastically fucked up measurements the EU would often repeat without question.

Fantasy Flight Games has acquired the rights to the Star Wars RPG and will be reprinting both the core rulebook and the Star Wars Sourcebook as a limited-edition 30th anniversary set.

The system:

Every character has six attributes: Strength (punchin' and liftin'), Dexterity (shootin' and dodgin'), Perception (lookin'), Knowledge (knowin'), Mechanical (drivin', bantha ridin'), and Technical (droid fixin'). These are rated by how many dice are in them; an average human character has a Strength of 3D, which means he rolls 3d6 every time he makes a Strength check.

Skills fall under attributes, and their dice are added to the attribute when making skill checks. For example, if you have a Dex of 4D and you put one point into Blasters, your Blasters skill starts at 5D.

NPC characters get 12D to divide between their attributes, and PCs (or important NPCs) get 18D. The minimum attribute rating for a human is 2D, and the max for a human is 4D.

One attribute die can be split up into bonuses applied to other attributes. You can split it up into three +1s or a +1 and a +2. The bonus is then applied to another attribute (so your Strength 4D becomes 4D+2, and all skills under it gain a +2). You can't put all three points into one attribute.

Skills are rated the same way as attributes, but the cap on a skill is 13D. Characters get 7D to put into skills at character creation. No more than 2 points can be put into a skill at creation.

You can take one point from your 7 starting skill points and use it to make 3 specializations for other skills. If you had Blaster Pistols 5D and used one of the specializations on it, you could have Blaster Pistols 5D (Heavy Blaster Pistols 6D).

In a little twist, they added the Wild Die in 2E to spice up the rolls, witch meant that one of the dice rolled was replaced with an Exploding die.

Different Editions

The game has various iterations which are all pretty interchangeable:

• Star Wars (1987)(Simplest, least options, but still some people's favourite)
• Star Wars 2nd Edition (1992)
• Star Wars 2nd Edition, Revised & Expanded (RE) (1996)

And finally:

• Star Wars Revised, Expanded & Updated (REUP) (2015)(free, massive new fan created version, top choice for most people)
• Star Wars 30th Anniversary Edition (2018) (reprint of 1E)

Example

If you have a bounty hunter character with a blaster skill of 5D, you roll 5d6 every time you shoot at something. If the GM decides that you rolled high enough to hit (usually 10-15 is good enough), the other character rolls a Strength check (and adds on any dice they get for wearing armor). If their roll's total is higher, they shrug it off; if the attacker's roll is higher, the victim gets hurt (and depending on how crappy they rolled, they might die).

Halagad Ventor

Halagad Ventor was a minor character for the module Domain of Evil. He's a Jedi that gets tortured into the Dark Side by Vader and escapes, hides on a swamp planet and creates a creepy swamp filled with with partially real Force illusions. The horror setting made the module popular and well remembered so Halagad Ventor is referenced everywhere. He's even co-star of a book.

D20 Star Wars

West End Games (RIP) lost the Star Wars license to Wizards of the Coast, who then made Star Wars D20. As its name implies, it uses the D20 Modern system as its basic engine. The three editions of SW D20 (the first, which was not given an edition name; the second, called Revised Edition; and the third, called Saga Edition) differ in several ways, some significant and some minor.

Saga Edition is like 4th Edition of D&D (but was around before 4E and is better not afflicted with stupefying amounts of Skub). Revised Edition plays like D&D 3.5.

Graveyard

The simplicity and straightforwardness of the system inspired loads of MUDs based on this, but most are dead or small.