Eating Crow: FFG Star Wars

 

I have never pretended that any opinion of mine is correct. I have considered writing things that will get more than a dozen reads on this blog and experimented with branding. I have always decided not to, coz I ultimately don’t want this blog to be a brand. I just want people to find someone saying exactly what he thinks, no matter how flawed and sometimes outright outrageous it is. Over the years I’ve occasionally written Eating Crow posts coz I changed my mind on something and think it’s good people read about that on the internet, where everyone is right all the time!

I was wrong about FFG Star Wars. Here's why.

The basics of the game revolve around a set of six dice: the ability, proficiency, boost, difficulty, challenge, and setback dice, pictured below:

Each of these dice share a number of symbols on them that help generate differing types of results. There's a lot of openness in interpretation. While there's a general slowdown from having to sort through the dice, I've found that the amount of richness that can come out of a single roll more than makes up for it. Could you go and have normal dice do this? You can! The core books actually include a conversion chart... and it's a nightmare to use. I wouldn't do it.

The problem?

The dice are about 20 bucks for a package, and in typical FFG fashion there's not enough. You'll need at least two sets of these at the beginning, and you will probably want to just keep getting them until you've got six or seven packs. That's 140 bucks, all told. On just dice.

The core books are also a bit of a money sink. There's three of them, covering the three "types" of Star Wars stories: criminals, military, and Jedi. There's a lot of overlap between them of course, but there's just as much that's unique to that particular book. And they're fun to read! They really are! The FFG folks did a good job making them coffee table books.

About ten years ago I bought all the core books and two sets of dice, over the course of about a year or two, and then went on deployment, got a group together… and hated the game. I was playing with former DnD min maxers in a game that resembled DnD in format… and didn’t play anything like it. Please understand I’d sunk quite a bit of money into this game, was in a place where adapting to a new system was a bad idea (and I didn't really know that) and was criminally short on sleep. I was pretty bummed out, came home, put the books up on my shelf, lost the dice... and then forgot about the game.

The years went by, and then a buddy of mine told me that he really liked the Genesys system and was more than willing to defend it against detractors. I just sorta sat and watched as people came at him about the absurd cost of the system and even its practicality. My buddy went and defended the practicality of the system but made no efforts to defend its cost. I jurst sorta filed it away, while making my own complaints about a system I'd seen not work too terribly well. I respected him for standing up for his beliefs, and resolved to eventually give the games another chance.

Yanno.

Whenever that was gonna be!

And then my kids watched The Skywalker Saga. 

And found those books. And started begging to play. I shrugged, told them sure, and made characters with them. They went acrost the three books, grabbing options and gear relatively evenly. I've not really thought about gear lists in a long time, but boy did I get a new appreciation for them as I watched my kids. For them the gear lists were a direct portal into the setting of Star Wars itself, one that they did everything they could to leverage for their own enjoyment. They just wanted me to read every last item and asked how it worked. And the long prose really helped there, let me tell you! It was actually a lot more fun than I expected, overriding my experiences with the former DnD-heads bitching about they wanted more gear, coz they wanted more options to blow people up with.

But character creation being fun is a nice bonus. I want the game to be good. So I got a set of dice and we went to planet Ord Mantell, where a gigantic kaiju had dropped from the orbiting moon to attack the Imperial base there. And every. Single. Second. Of that session was sheer gold. The kids leaned into the dice, oohing and ahhing over them, asking how they could get more yellows and blues, changing narration accordingly. They understood what the dice were for: crafting an exciting narrative. And they leveraged them as thoroughly as they could.

You really need more than one set of dice to run this game. I'm sorry, but you do. That's about 35 to 40 bucks, just right there. Buy yourself a book and that's a hundred bucks. That. Is. A. Problem. And it's pretty ubiquitous to FFG's money decisions. So, if you don't like FFG, this isn't going to change your mind, and I can hardly blame you.

But.

But.

These two sets of dice solve more problems than most RPG books of the same price. They just do. I'm not gonna pretend to you they don't. And if I can just pick up a set of dice instead of reading yet another blowhard telling me how to fix RPGs I'm gonna do it. Maybe you won't. That's cool. That's on you.The book is really secondary to the dice. All the systems they present work, and they work well, and the books themselves are worth the money you spend on them. 

Together?

Yeah, that smarts.

But honestly, folks have spent hundreds of dollars trying to do what FFG is offering for a fraction of that. And I find that worth my time. And cash.