It's not like Star Wars hasn't been a roleplaying game before. But it was never popular.

Oh, it's not like people didn't scarf up the manuals that were out there when West End Games were the folks publishing the Official Star Wars Roleplaying; they did. In vast numbers. (Not vast enough to actually afford the backbreaking Lucasfilm licensing fee, of course, but large by roleplaying standards.) Star Wars fans bought the roleplaying core book, and the roleplaying planet guides, and the roleplaying technical guides, and marveled at all of the intricate details of the Star Wars roleplaying universe.

There was only one problem: They weren't roleplaying.

The books were mostly used as fodder for geek arguments, leading to conversations like, "It says quite clearly in the Landspeeder Technical Reference that the maximum landbound velocity of Luke's XP-39 Landspeeder is 30 kilometers per hour, and the Tattooine Planet Guide states explicitly that the distance between the Lars homestead and Ben Kenobi's home is 45 kilometers...."

It's not that West End's roleplaying game didn't try valiantly to get people to play it; it's just that, like many other fictional places that weren't created for roleplaying, the Star Wars universe isn't particularly fleshed out. People bought the books as collectible references, not to play with them.

"WHAT DO YOU MEAN?" I hear you saying. "THE STAR WARS UNIVERSE WAS INSPIRED BY GEORGE LUCAS AND HAS SOME OF THE BEST BACK STORY EVERYWHERE! YOU'RE AN IDIOT, SIR, AN IDIOT!"

Really. Don't believe me? Let me give you an example:

You're looking for a criminal on Tatooine. Where do you go?

You probably think, "Gee... I guess I'll hit a bar or something and ask around." Valid.

But does Tatooine have newspapers to look for people? Film doesn't say.

Does Tatooine have a phone system to call people? Film doesn't say.

Come to think of it, does Tatooine have any sort of government that tracks people's whereabouts besides the vague stranglehold of Jabba the Hutt?

Really, we have no idea.

We don't know whether Tatooine has police, or what their governmental systems are like, or how people make a living there, or even where they go to the bathroom.

In short, when you actually are pretending to be someone who lives or works on Tatooine, you the player don't know Thing One about Tatooine aside from:

1) It's sandy.

2) They hold races there.

3) Jabba the Hutt is a criminal, and there is at least one bar where criminals hang out.

4) There are Jawas and sand people if you go outside of town.

It's a large hurdle for any roleplaying system. In a medieval setting, like Dungeons and Dragons, you know that in any given town there's a bar, an inn, a church, some sort of sheriff, a couple of merchants -- in short, you have a rough idea of who does what and what to expect. You can fake things and act on your own if you have to.

In a Star Wars roleplaying game that doesn't take exquisite care to overcome this "You don't know" hurdle, you wind up either asking a lot of dumb questions and feeling stupid -- "So where would I go if I wanted to find a book?" -- and getting answers from the gamemaster that pretty much railroad you into the next scene -- "By gosh, you'd go to the old sage at the end of town to find a book!"

It makes you feel kind of idiotic, it limits the creativity of what you can do with your characters -- you're not going to come up with something new, let's put it that way -- and it feels like the GM is basically telling you what to do all the time.

It's one thing when Han Solo decides on his own to go to Cloud City. It's another thing when you're playing Han Solo, and the GM tells you that the only place you can think of to go to right now is Cloud City.

And after awhile, you just don't feel like playing.

So Star Wars roleplaying has a vast and richly-imagined universe, but it's all surface glitter. It's full of vast panorama and wide backdrops... But the very lack of concern with details that makes Star Wars so much fun to watch is what makes it very, veeeery tricky to make it work as a roleplaying game.

Part 2: So Does The Rebirth Of The Star Wars Roleplaying Game Make It, Well ... Star Wars?

So you remember that scene in the original Star Wars where Luke and Leia swung across the chasm -- and halfway through, Luke got shot and they fell into the pit and died?

Me neither.

For those of you not in the know, Wizards of the Coast took up the gauntlet and created their own Star Wars roleplaying game, using the d20 system as a base. The d20 system is the same mechanic that powers the granddaddy of all roleplaying games, Dungeons and Dragons -- so if you've played 3rd edition D&D, you won't have a problem picking up Star Wars.

The problem is that the mechanics of a game structure how characters play the game, as we shall see. A dark horror game like Call of Cthulhu actually has a mechanic where investigators can go stark raving mad if they so much as lay eyes upon a monster from Beyond The Void, thus encouraging players to be extremely cautious... Whereas in Champions, a superhero game, you have to pay extra to do something other than stunning damage, making it nigh-impossible to kill anyone and generating gleeful Superman-style slugfests.

The point is that how a roleplaying system handles the math is important. Change that, and you change the entire feel of the game. And as we shall see, Star Wars has a coupla major gaffes.

The game itself is almost a note-for-note transposition of Dungeons and Dragons, substituting lightsabers for swords and blaster pistols for crossbows -- and D&D's complex combat mechanics are just a tad too elaborate for Star Warsian roleplaying.

The one concession to the Star Wars mythos is that there is a factor in between hit points -- which, as any good geek knows, when you're out of hit points you're dying -- called vitality points. Vitality points simulate all the grazed wounds and near-misses that Star Wars characters seem to take all the time, and serve to make combat a little less deadly.

Aside from that, you have your basic classes -- but instead of your factory-standard fighters, clerics, thieves, and wizards, we have Soldiers (think fighters), Jedi Consulars and Guardians (clerics), Scoundrels (thieves), and Jedi (well... wizards again). There are also three new classes -- Fringers, jacks-of-all-trades from remote planets (think Luke); Nobles (think Leia); and Force Adepts (untrained force fighters, who are a lot like monks). As you play for longer periods of time, you gain levels in your profession, so you get to say neat things like, "I'm a sixth-level Noble!"

Now, some problems arise here -- namely, the wussification of the Jedi. In an effort to balance out the characters, a first-level Jedi is theoretically equal to a first-level thief.... Er, I mean Scoundrel. You can see why they did this; after all, if the Jedi were more powerful than any other character class, who would ever play a wimpy Noble? But it strains the logic of the movies a bit; after all, are you trying to tell me that a first-level soldier has a good chance of kicking a novice Jedi's butt?

Um... Yeah. In this game, absolutely.

And doesn't that sort of make the Force, well... wimpy?

Speaking of wimpy, some of the way the suggested characters have been created are, well... Strange. Let's put it this way: Qui-Gon Jinn is, according to this book, a 15th-level Jedi. Obi-Wan, his apprentice, is a 6th-level Jedi.

Darth Maul is a 12th-level Jedi.

In other words, according to the way the rules work and the stats are given, Qui-Gon Jinn should have mopped the floor with Darth Maul in Episode One... And he could have done it by himself. With Obi-Wan at his side, Darth Maul might have killed Obi-Wan, but Jinn would have survived to hold an Obi-Wan marshmallow roast.

If you're going to create a roleplaying system that mirrors the movies, you'd think that you'd at least try to create a combat system that recreates what happens in the movies, right?

But no. According to the book, Luke's not a very good pilot. And Stormtroopers are ridiculously strong -- yes, they're supposed to be phenomenally accurate shots according to Ben Kenobi, but in the rest of the films they miss all the time. In the Star Wars roleplaying game, a generic Stormtrooper is third level -- and if your DM plays it like the movie, he'll make sure that Stormtroopers come in packs of five and six.

In other words, if you're starting at first level, a single Stormtrooper has a damn good chance of killing you every time.

Furthermore, the Deadly Stormtrooper Syndrome ruins scenes like the delightful "Han runs into a nest of Stormtroopers on the Death Star, then runs away." It would never work. According to the stats that Wizards has provided, they'd all take a bead and cut poor Han to ribbons.

That's a big problem.

Fighting in the Star Wars movies has always been a freewheeling, chaotic system, filled with all sorts of strange maneuvers. They're the highlights of the film: Darth Vader smashing through a window, sucking Luke out onto the catwalk! Obi-Wan leaping out of the pit to catch Qui-Gon's lightsaber in one hand, slicing Darth Maul in two! Anakin soaring off the ramp in his podracer, then flying back down to take the lead!

These are the things that Star Wars is made of... But Star Wars the game makes ridiculously hard and difficult acts actually ridiculously hard and difficult. If you were actually roleplaying out the chasm scene, despite the fact that what Luke is doing is a brave and noble and dramatically-appropriate act, in the game at least one of the six Stormtroopers firing at them would have hit Luke and Leia when they swung across.

Combat in the Star Wars system is very rulebound, and it doesn't give inherent bonuses for weirdly dramatic acts -- meaning you're at the mercy of the gamemaster to play nice if you decide to be heroic. Making heroic tasks extremely difficult is realistic, but it discourages the near-psychotic acts of heroism that Star Wars is famous for -- and changes the entire tone of the game.

I mean, really -- shouldn't a good Star Wars game reward you for Solo-style stupid acts?

The saving grace of this system is that at least they kept the old "Force points" system in -- in vanilla Dungeons and Dragons, you're at the mercy of the dice, and sometimes you botch a roll when it's not heroically appropriate. ("The Emperor's down! As Vader, I pick him up and throw him into the gratuitously convenient pit!" "Oooh... Sorry, Fred, you rolled a 1 on your attack roll. The Emperor gets back up -- and boy, is he angry!")

In Star Wars: The Roleplaying game, accomplishing good (or evil) acts can give you special bonuses to be spent when you really, really need to pull a trick off. This is very Star Wars in feel, and it's nice to know that if you've been roleplaying your Jedi right that you're not going to botch catching that lightsaber in mid-air when Artoo hucks it at you.

Why am I focusing so much upon fighting, you ask? Well, because most of the book is about fighting, or how to fight, or recovering from fights. This is common -- and, in this case, entirely justified. Star Wars should be about leaping from setpiece to setpiece, and I don't have a problem with most of the book focusing on combat.

And the book seems to realize that it'll be introducing people to roleplaying -- it goes out of its way to go through the concepts of what roleplaying is and how to do it. (In traditional Dungeons and Dragons style, it does all of this after presenting the masses of math and stats that are the heart of the d20 system, which implies that all of this funky "personality" stuff isn't quite as important as having a good Strength stat... But hezmat, it's better than nothing.) It has a fairly extensive section on how to gamemaster, and dealing with common situations. It's not bad.

The sample adventure provided for GMs to run is also fairly good. It's surprisingly open-ended, at one point asking the heroes to plan an assault on a fortress, and involves more roleplaying than your generic starting module -- at one point they have to charm their way past a crusty captain. If the GM's even halfway decent, it's a good intro to what roleplaying should be.

However, the main fault with the Star Wars roleplaying book is....

Part 3: What Is It?

In the end, the Star Wars roleplaying book suffers from the fatal flaw discussed in Part 1: It provides lots of monsters and characters to throw players up against, and reels off lists of weapons until your eyes bleed.

What it does not do, however, is provide a Star Wars setting. It's just a bunch of rules.

Dungeons and Dragons works because it's a generic fantasy setting, and everyone can rip off a JRR Tolkien book and have some booga booga waiting in a cave. You don't really need a setting; it's archetypical, and the plots are of most fantasy novels are hackneyed enough that ripping them off is almost second nature.

But Star Wars, however, is a specific movie -- and creating an original Star Wars adventure that doesn't rip off Star Wars the movie is a tougher task than you think.

Star Wars as a concept is too large and frightening; what the roleplaying game should probably have done was to pick one part of the Star Wars universe, then give it everything it's got. An all-Jedi Knights campaign, for example, or a rogue's underground, or a Rebellion campaign. That would have left the space for an extensive description of what the Jedi home base is like, what Jedi are expected to do, what their method of investigating incidents are, and so on. As it is, the book throws a couple of stats at you about Jedi, then peels out in a cloud of midichlorians.

Narrowing the focus would negate some of the free-ranging wild backgrounds that you can get away with in Star Wars... But on the other hand, starting all the players off with similar backgrounds with would have focused a lot of campaigns and made it easier for newbies to roleplay.

In trying to cover everything, the book gives you rules that show you how to do anything... But it doesn't show you how to use those rules to create adventures that are compelling and intriguing. That's a flaw.

[Toryn comments: Actually, my main complaint with the Star Wars RPG is that there are no canned modules to buy, whereas with the new d20 AD&D there are tons of adventures already available. I don't have the time to make up all this crap on my own, I want somebody to write those little gray boxes for me.]

So will the Star Wars roleplaying game encourage people to play? Maybe. It's well written, it's open-ended, and it definitely tries to aim at newbies despite the logarithmic complexities of its core system. But I don't think those players will be playing for long, since inexperienced GMs will be flailing about trying to create adventures for disparate groups of players. Keeping a wandering Jedi, a greedy thief, a self-sacrificing Noble and a thrillseeking Fringer all together and interested in doing the same things can be the undoing of many a campaign.

Experienced GMs will find this an excellent book to start off with. Novices, however, might stall early.

So how do you keep a Jedi, a Noble, and a Fringer in suspense?

You give them a set of rules and tell 'em to wait for the sourcebooks.