I haqven’t played most of the games that Rockjaw has mentioned here. Sure, I’ve played some of them. But not all. And none have come close to comparing with the excitement and fun I’ve had with D&D (in its various guises) over the years… with one exception.

Star Wars

Even now, just thinking about it, reading the novels, glancing at my bookshelf… I get that John Williams soundtrack playing in my head, and I just WANT to be adventuring, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…

I picked up the original WEG Star Wars RPG when I was about 12 years old. I fell totally in love with it, and my gaming group at the time (friends from school, obviously) who were all Star Wars fans like me, dove into a series of adventures the likes of which the galaxy has never seen – culminating, I remember clearly, in a fantastic piece of misdirection as they flew a purloined Imperial Star Destroyer into a battle that they simply could not hope to win… just to help the assault against the second Death Star succeed.

When I was 16 my parents took us on holiday to Florida, and I was lucky enough to actually pick up a few rules expansions for the game while I was there, which improved the game system quite a bit (I’m a rules monkey – I may have mentioned that before), and clarrified some stuff.

When SW:RPG 2nd Edition came out, I got my hands on it pretty darn sharpish, and my (slightly more mature) RP group began a (slightly) more mature and gritty campaign set post-Endor (my favourite era, actually, because there’s still massive chunks of the Imperial military around, and the Rebellion/New Republic are fighting a billion battles at once, but without the ever-present oppression and fear of the Empire and the civil war hanging over everything).

Star Wars has always had a very simple, cut-and-dried morality: The good guys are good, the bad guys are bad, and the ones in the middle are either entirely in it for themselves (selfish buggers) – and fall into the bad-guy category – or have hearts of gold, and will secretly help the good guys as long as they can save face with it. As a GM you can build on the particular characters however you want – and it’s really good fun to have a rogue ex-Imperial Admiral in charge of a fleet of warships, who is ACTUALLY a golden-hearted rogue (not that anyone knows that), chasing the PCs from one end of the galaxy to the other.

When WotC got the Star Wars license and produced d20 Star Wars, I was pleasantly surprised. They didn’t break the setting by squeezing it into the existing d20 ruleset created for 3e D&D – they adapted d20 and made it work for Star Wars. The revised version was even better than that, and the recent release of the Saga Rules Edition has actually stepped it up to the next level, creating a much more fluid feel to the game system.

But I prefer the old d6 one.

I bought the revised second edition, with an eye towards running the game, but I got tripped up by the setting. The existing eras seemed too constraining, and the alternative, a Traveller-like “pocket empire” seemed to be missing part of the point of playing Star Wars in the first place. So it never happened, which was a shame, but I suspect I would have enjoyed running it less than I did playing it.

Two particular parts of the system stand out for me. The first is how the basic rules scaled up to encompass vehicle, then starships, with little modification or increase in complexity. The second thing was the “alignment” system; I recall a short essay in the core rules about the Dark Side, and how even if a Force user was using Dark powers purely for good, it was still Dark, and thus still evil. While it’s simplistic, it does cut through any arguments, and it occurred to me that it’s a perfectly acceptable approach when dealing with a fictional setting. If I were to ever run a D&D game, I think I might do something similar, setting out guidelines for what counts as Evil in this world, what counts as Chaotic in this world, and so on. When you’ve got a constructed fictional world, in which gods (or vague moral entities like the Force) are real and palpable, I see no contradiction is setting the associated morality in stone too.