West End Games - Star Wars Role Playing

 Happy Star Wars Day!  May the 4th Be With You etc. etc.

I was a member of the Bangor Wargames & Role Playing Society for the 3 years I was at university there.  Being a fairly small university in North Wales, BWRP (pronounced "burp") wasn't a huge club but there was always lots going on.  With my friends Steve, Simon C, Simon T, I spent much of the time playing the West End Games Star Wars Role Playing game.  We also had occasional special guest stars Fran, Martin, Nigel and Conall who came and went over the years.

WEG's SWRP was a system I'd come across before in their Ghostbusters RPG.  It uses the "action dice" system where you roll a number of dice (eg 3D means roll 3D6, 5D+2 means roll 5D6 and add 2 to the total) against a target difficulty number..  One of the dice is the "special die", rolling a 6 on this means you get to roll an extra die and add that on too.  Rolling a 1 measn you either remove that die plus the highest scoring other die... or perhaps a "comlication" has occurred instead.  (You blasted the stormtrooper successfully but he unfortunately he fell onto the alarm button for the fortress...)

All characters have a range of skills in several main areas, for instance:

• Dexterity (specific skills include blaster, dodge, firearms, melee combat)
• Perception (including hide, sneak, camouflage)
• Strength (lifting, jumping, brawling/unarmed combat)
• Intelligence (first aid, computer programming, droid repair)

The main area has a basic skill level.  Specific skills within that area can be enhanced, eg you may have Dexterity 3D but 4D+2 blaster skill.  During character creation, you have a number of extra skill points to allocate out amongst the specific skills listed for your character.

Difficulty targets could range from 1-3 (easy) up to 25+ (heroic).  Sometimes opposed rolls might be made, for instance if your character decides to try and dodge when a stormtrooper fires a blaster at them.

This was around the time that Star Wars was undergoing a revival thanks to the Timothy Zahn Heir to the Empire series featuring Grand Admiral Thrawn - a character who is at last about to make it to live action, having already appeared in the fantastic Rebels animated series.

We had many exciting adventures together, sometimes as Rebels fighting against the evil and oppresive Empire, other times as Imperial heroes standing up for law and order against those Rebel scum... we fought humans, aliens, clockwork robots, monsters.  For one game we included some Giger Aliens who predictably slaughtered all the Rebel Commandoes my lieutenant was leading, this occasion was noteworthy because we had some Star Wars figures and some of the then-new Aliens action figures to play with too.

Sometimes we had a Jedi in our party... I recall one unfortunate character who always rolled badly when trying to use his Force powers.  He became known as "crap Jedi" and during one game it was commented that he hadn't said what colour his lightsaber blade was.  He wasn't amused when I quickly suggested it was brown, to giggles from the other players.

We managed some truly epic adventures.  BWRP officially started at 2:00pm on a Sunday, a time which unfortunately clashed with the S4C (Welsh Channel 4) timeslot for Babylon 5.  We used to meet up down at the club, then decamp to someone's room (usually mine or Simon C's), often via Safeway to stock up on snacks.  We'd play until about 7 or 8pm, them head out for burgers, chinese or pizza before continiung the game until 1 or 2am on the Monday.  Some campaigns lasted for weeks and certain characters might subsequently reappear in a future campaign.  Sometimes, a whole new campaign might come from a tiny adventure seed in the backstory of a previous campaign's character.

Back in those days, the internet wasn't what it is today.  When one of us got a new sourcebook, we'd all head down to the library, load up our photocopy cards and copy all the interesting bits from each other's books.   These days you'd just look for a second hand edition on ebay or try and find some files online.

I loved those days of adventuring and I'll probably never manage anything like that again.  University is probably the only environment that lends itself to that sort of lengthy game session where there is no job pressure and no parent to tell you that you should have gone to bed 4 hours ago...

If you've never tried the SWRP from WEG, I'd suggets giving it a try.  WEG ceased to exist several years ago, but you can find all their books free to download on the Star Wars Timeline web site.