In a post about which game systems he'd love to own, my friend (and fellow Dire Paladin) Dr. Checkmate offered this throwaway line: "I would like to see more stuff in the square format of WotC’s Star Wars books and the smaller still format of SWEX. I’m not getting any younger and these books keep getting bigger. Yeesh."

At which point I looked over at my library game shelf, and thought "amen brother." And then I had an interesting thought: of all the games I've played in the last 3-4 years, the ones I've enjoyed most have had a non-standard form factor (non-standard being anything other than the typical 9x11" form factor we've come to associate with D&D).

One area where Star Wars: Saga Edition could use some help are its creatures. There are certainly a number of them out there, particularly the iconic ones from the movies, but the system tends to come up a little short with more mundane critters.

After my third session of Star Wars, I thought back our summer playing D&D 4th Edition, and got to wondering about converting monsters from that book with use in Star Wars. Now I should note that I think that at a fundemental level, Star Wars plays differently than D&D. It's less about dungeon crawls and more about relationships - relationships between characters, between master and apprentice, between organizations. Those were always the main drivers in the movies, and in almost every case the heroes only came up against monsters/creatures as a consequence of the story.

For example, the encounter with the trash compactor beast in A New Hope came into play because Han and Luke were rescuing the princess. Luke's random encounter with a wampa ice beast on Hoth led directly to his vision of Obi-Wan, and his training on Dagaboh with Yoda. Han and Luke were going to be fed to the sarlac because the crossed Jabba the Hutt. Because of this, Star Wars needs fewer monsters (and more NPCs) than D&D, but it's still nice to have choices.

One of the problems I’ve found with action points, bennies, plot points, and other similar mechanics is that unless they’re crucial to the game, players tend to forget about them. And even when they are important, keeping track of them can be a challenge as the light-weight chips or tokens get covered up, buried, or pushed out of the way.

Our solution has been to use plastic poker chips, which have the advantage of being large enough to seen and thus, remembered. They’re easy to toss around the table (important for games like Serenity or Spycraft where the points tend to fly fast and furious) and while they can make an annoying sound that grates on the nerves when ground together, mostly they get the job done. Except, of course, when the light plastic chips go rolling off the table, or bounce where you weren't expecting.

Our Star Wars: Saga Edition campaign kicked off on Friday with our first full-fledged Knights of the Old Republic session. Since my Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Annotated Playtest went over so well  I decided to do the same for this Saga Edition.

This one will work a little differently; instead of annotating a single combat ecounter, I’m going to offer my thoughts on the game session as a whole, discussing both combat and role-playing aspects of the game. If there's enough interest, I'll also do a round-by-round combat playtest for melee and starship combat. 

Dawn on Zebulon

The adventure began on the world of Zebulon Beta, part of the binary planetary system of Zebulon in the Vargis Tau system. We joined our three young padawans in the training yards of the Citadel of Kal-Kor, home to the Unified Force Academy, under the watchful eye of Jedi Knight Lornn Varri.