Luke Skywalker

I'm a huge fan of the Star Wars Saga Edition RPG. In my opinion, it's the first version of the game to get all the key elements right - it handles space combat reasonably well, and it models the Jedi and their powers reasonably well also. It's certainly not perfect, but my view is that it is both the best Star Wars RPG to date and the best iteration of the d20 system ever done by WotC.

That said, there is something about it that has been bugging me. Actually, it's been bothering me for quite some time, but it really came to my attention when recently creating characters for a one-shot game featuring some 'famous faces'.

Luke Skywalker.

Here's the thing: if you sit down to play a Star Wars game with a bunch of new players, and ask them what sort of character they want to play, they'll most likely start talking about the movie characters: Han Solo, Boba Fett, or whoever. That's fair enough.

Of course, it's usually the case in RPGs that you don't portray the 'famous faces', but it's likely you'll have players who want to play a character like these characters. Certainly, they'll want to play characters comparable to the famous faces.

Except that you can't.

If you take a look at the stats given for practically any of the 'famous faces' from the films (or novels, or computer games), you'll see that they have high ability scores right across the board. Luke Skywalker has several exceptional ability scores, and absolutely none that are below average.

If you take the standard character creation methods for Organised Play (the ones the designers recommend), you'll find that it is impossible to recreate Luke Skywalker as he stands at the start of Star Wars - the stats are just too high. (It is possible using random rolls, but only in the event of freakish good luck.)

But surely Luke Skywalker, as he stands at the start of Star Wars, is precisely the sort of first level character the game should be supporting?

Of course, it's most notable with Star Wars, but a very similar issue crops up in many other places. If you look at the stats given for Drizzt in D&D 3e, or even the older stats for Conan, the Gray Mouser, and other 'famous faces' that D&D is supposed to emulate, you'll see that these are similarly a mass of impossibly high ability scores, and often made up of blatantly broken rules because the RAW just doesn't do the job.

But, again, D&D is designed to emulate the exploits of these characters - surely it should be doing a better job of modelling them?

I think what's going wrong is that when the designers come to stat up the 'famous faces' they're treating them with extreme reverence, which leads them to amplify the good and minimise the bad aspects of the characters. And, actually, you see the same with the Star Wars novels - where Han Solo has gone from being a cocky and competent smuggler to now being the guy who graduated top of his class at the Imperial academy, a legendary general, and all-around tech expert. Luke, meanwhile, has now become the ultimate Jedi Grand Master, with wisdom and power that Yoda could barely dream of.

(And, yeah, there are aspects of all of this in the films. But the characters there are hardly all-powerful. In RotJ, Han is shown to be rather poor at stealth and at tech skills, while his abilities as a general are sufficient that he needs bailed out by Ewoks. Luke, meanwhile, is only able to finally defeat Vader by calling on the Dark Side.)

I'm not trying to denigrate the 'famous faces' here. However, I'm inclined to think that they should not be put on a pedastal by the games designed to emulate their adventures. So, when presenting stats for these characters, the games really should present them in such a way that the PCs could eventually hope to grow to rival them. And that means you absolutely should be able to create a "first level version" of those characters without relying on freakish good luck to achieve it.

Thoughts?