Star Wars Saga Condition Track and D&D

I think ultimately it just trades one type of tracking for another and won’t necessarily speed things up. I’ve put some long time into SWSE as a player and I don’t think that it honestly came out much different in terms of time than my D&D4e time in terms of tracking conditions. Once you have a character hit about level 3 on the condition monitor, they’re having to spend actions just to get into position so that they have a chance to succeed at something. That slows down combat at least some and negates any faster play that was gained from abstracting in the first place.

My group also uses the action stands from dark platypus and they make it easy to remember, and obvious what’s on you at all times. You still need to keep track of when conditions end, however, but there’s only 3 ending conditions start of next turn, end of next turn, and save.

Players just need to know the condition and some shorthand for the ending criteria (me-SoT, skeleton-E0T, or SV). Then do a fast mental checklist at the start and end of turns for SoT and EoT effects to remove.

People probably wont like this comment, but it helps to think of 4E combat as Magic the Gathering. On your turn there’s a bunch of steps to walk through (untap, upkeep, draw, declare attackers, declare defenders, assess damage, end combat, end main phase, clean up). Seems like a lot, but since it’s a formal order eventually it becomes second nature and magic games can play very quickly.

D&D has the same structure. Start of turn, end effects, regen, ongoing damage, main turn standard/move/minor, end of turn, end effects, saving throws, etc. If you write one of the 3 ending conditions with the condition, you just learn to look for them and they can pop on and off of players without slowing anything down.

newbiedm, you are aware that WOTC has dropped the Star Wars Saga RPG? The Star Wars d20 game is now a dead game. Three different times WOTC created a d20 Star Wars game, and none of the three versions sold well enough to keep it going.

I wouldn’t port SWSE over to 4e. The simplified conditions work well for the blaster-centric combat of SWSE, but the various conditions in 4e seem to be better suited to magical/melee combat.

I’ve been running Star Wars: Saga Edition for a year and half, accounting for something like 40+ game sessions. Our PCs just hit level 8, and overall I’ve found combats run a lot smoother and faster than 3E and 4E, mostly because of all those conditional modifiers that have been thrown out the airlock.

I don’t miss tracking things like “daze” or “sickened” or all the other states that 3E/4E maintain — while I think there are some that might be appropriate as results from magical attacks (e.g. slowed, petrified, etc) I think you could replace half the existing conditions from 3E/4E with a flat -2 penalty and be done with it. That’s actually what I did when I ran a recent 3E The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, and it helped considerably.

I think 3E is worse in this regard than 4E, because 4E has fewer conditions that cause you to miss combat turns outright and at this point anything that would normally disable a character for around (like nauseated) I replaced with a simple -4 penalty.

We also ran a 4E one-shot recently, and I agree that it ran better once you switched to more of a “Magic the Gathering” mindset — unlike our first 4E run through, where we treated our characters as traditional D&D characters, the second time through everyone had power cards, and people were playing from their “hands”. It was much more efficient. Condition tracking was less of an issue in the one-shot, perhaps because we were fighting elementals and giants, which had fewer condition-imposing powers. We also had fewer classes with mark mechanics.

As far as Saga Edition’s condition track goes, the thing I like best about it is that it provides you with an alternative to hit points for taking down a character. There are a number of Force powers and talents that allow you to knock someone down the condition track two or more notches at a time. It can really shift the course of the battle, and allows you to introduce some of those dramatic “will they escape!?” moments without killing the heroes outright. IMHO Hitting higher level PCs is only a problem if your mooks aren’t using tactics. I typically have mine use aid another actions to help each other or their leader, but honestly, it doesn’t bother me that much. Stormtroopers have a hard time standing up to your average hero in the movie as well and I’d rather have the part blast through the encounter than get into the sort of slugfests we see at the end of most 4E fights. Actually, I don’t think we’ve had a single “slugfest” in the time we’ve been playing Saga.

Force powers and skills have worked well in my game — yes, they can be powerful, but at least at my table they’ve matched the cinematic feel we’re going for in Star Wars. It may help that we’re playing in the Knights of the Old Republic era, and we have the video games as one of our primary frames of reference, but IMHO we do work hard to make sure things have a cinematic feel to them. The high skill bonuses can take some getting used to, but I think they feed into the idea that these are heroes, they *should* be good at what they do. I make extensive use of Skill Challenges in Star Wars, and I’ve found the DC charts from Scum & Villainy (reprinted in Galaxy at War and Galaxy of Intrigue as well) worked well for those purposes. That said, we’re just now heading into higher levels, so we’ll see how things hold up.

My biggest problem with the prepared statbocks is that the talents and feats don’t have any page numbers associated with them, so you do need to do a bit of research before a game to make sure you know what they all do (as opposed to 4E, which is far, far easier on the GM). That said, my game prep time in Star Wars is considerably less than it was for 3E, and maybe 30 minutes more than what I was spending on 4E.

We’ll see how things hold up going forward. We’re about to jump the campaign ahead to 10th level, and once that happens we may leave the sweet spot of lower-level combat and we may start to see some of the problems that others have mentioned. I suspect it will still run better than high level 3E, if for no other reason than iterative attacks are gone. 🙂