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I had such high hopes for this. I really did. I very much enjoy the new D&D system, and thought that the new Star Wars system might be equally good.
I suppose my first warning should have been that they dropped Attacks of Opportunity. Instead, when a character would make a movement that would draw an attack of opportunity that character simply cannot move. Again, that character simply cannot move.
What kind of oversimplifying garbage is this?
My next clue was something I expected, but still disappointed me: they worshipped the "new" technology of the Phantom Menace. Did you know that the droid starfighters are better than TIE fighters? How about that the Naboo fighters are practically X-Wings when they shouldn't even be as good as Y-Wings?
The stormtrooper issue I cover elsewhere.
Instead of basing starship combat on the final version of the old WEG system, which worked quite well in my own opinion, they returned, for some obscure reason, to a version of the first edition WEG system. That system was abandoned for a good reason. No matter how good a pilot he is, Han Solo should not be able to fly a Z-95 Headhunter faster than an A-Wing, but in that system he can.
But my biggest complaint about the system is less about the system than it is about the book itself. The editing is poor, lots of space is wasted and while some rules are repeated several times others are buried in obscure places. Worse, often the phrasing and organization is vague, leading to disputes about what it meant.
My Star Wars game is no more than a dozen or so sessions old and I've already had to come up with several handouts of house rules, some of which are posted on this site.
So far the supporting products haven't been much better. I got angry when I opened up my GM's screen. The entire outside half is illustration, rather than two panels or illustration and two of data, which is two wasted panels in my opinion. Worse yet, they made poor use of the four panels they gave us by providing a seemingly random selection of tables from the rulebook. A full panel does nothing more than provide a table of autofire and multi-shot data. I would have happily sacrificed that table, to which I have not yet had to refer, for a table of the Force skills and feats, their DCs and Vitality costs.
Now I have to make it myself.
I'm going to buy that Dark Side Sourcebook, because I am giving them one last chance. If it sucks, I won't buy any more at all.
I may still use the system, when I'm done making it functional, if it seems that it works well for balancing Force-users. The jury is still out on that. . . .
Four Winds Bar