Last year marked the 30th anniversary of the publication of the very first Star Wars RPG. To mark that occasion, FFG (the current holders of the license) decided to republish two of the key books from that game: the core rulebook and the "Star Wars Sourcebook". Due to a bit of a cock up on their part, those books barely made it out before the 31st anniversary. Still, I got them, and they're pretty glorious!
Thus far, I've only read through the rulebook, and so this review will be limited to that book. As will become apparent, the decision to reprint both was very wise...
Reading this book, it's quite shocking to what extent the state of the art in RPG design has changed. (I would say "moved on", but not everything that has changed is for the better.) This is a 148-page hardcover that is mostly in black and white, with only a few colour inserts throughout. The book is mostly a wall of text, with relatively few pictures and illustrations. Even the rules tables are not found in the main text, but instead grouped together at the end! (This makes for a somewhat frustrating read-through, but would show its value during play, with all the tables gathered in one place.)
The rules text is bright and breezy, with an emphasis on getting down to actually playing. It is presented with a minimum of fuss, but with plenty of examples to explain what is intended in most cases.
To my mind, this first edition is actually the very best set of RPG rules for Star Wars published - and there have been a lot. The second and third (ahem, "revised and expanded") rules added a bunch of complexity that was mostly counter-productive, while the first two d20 versions were pretty bad, and the FFG versions are saddled with custom dice. The only one that competes with this version of the game is Saga edition - IMO, that one does a better job of handling the prequel trilogy (and the Clone Wars series), while this one is better for everything else... and since "everything else" is better than "the prequel trilogy", this one wins.
(This game also benefits from a strong focus - it is very definitely set between "Star Wars" and "The Empire Strikes Back". From 2nd Edition onwards, they start looking towards the post-RotJ era, and with the advent of the d20 version they start supporting several eras of play, with the consequent mess of stuff to support. That's fine, insofar as there's a lot of good adventure to be had in other time periods, but it means having much more ground to cover, leading to breadth of coverage at the expense of depth.)
That said, this game has a couple of really big flaws. Firstly, the rules for dodging (and also melee parry) make it absurdly easy to dodge blaster bolts - because the dodge roll adds to the base difficulty, and because the defender's dodge skill is likely to be about as good as the attacker's blaster skill (which may have a hard time reaching even the base difficulty anyway!), there's a problem.
The other really big flaw is largely fixed by the the Sourcebook, and it is that this book is very good on the rules but fairly lacking in the stat-blocks to make it work - there are stats for about four ships, four key NPC types, and not a lot else. The Sourcebook vastly expands the set, with further books in the line adding a great deal more, but without that this book is quite lacking.
A lesser flaw concerns dice-pool systems in general - a single combat attack likely requires four rolls (one to hit, a potential dodge, a damage roll, and a soak roll). That's at least two too many. It would probably be better to pre-calculate two of these to base numbers, and thus eliminate the dodge and soak rolls (in most cases). It's also worth noting that SW uses a roll-and-add dice pool system, rather than a success-based pool mechanism (as in Vampire or Shadowrun). The latter tends to be quicker - all that time doing addition quickly adds up.
So...
I can't recommend this book in isolation. However, packaged with the Sourcebook, as it is, I can indeed recommend it - the weakness surrounding dodge isn't exactly insurmoutable, and once fixed that leaves a very elegant, quick-flowing system. As I said, it's probably the best iteration of Star Wars roleplaying that has been published (which is both a glowing endorsement and a pretty damning indictment of the rest - in 30 years, nobody has managed to do better?)
And if you can get your hands on some of the other first edition supplements (all now long out of print, of course, and so increasingly difficult to find), then even better - look for the books on the Rebel Alliance and the Empire in particular.
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