 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy and today it's time to jump into the greatest space opera of all time and one of the greatest love letters to fans in the world, Star Wars Saga Edition. I'm gonna talk about the RPG, go over what makes it special, compare it to D&D for all of you cowards who need dumb things like accessibility to try out new things, and teach you how to make a character in a galaxy far far away. As always, keep in mind that a lot of this is just my opinion, so if you like the sequel trilogy is bad, but overshadowed by the sheer unwatchability of the prequels, hey, you're right, but you can't say that out loud. But with that out of the way, let's begin. So if you've spent any amount of time talking to me on either my Discord fan server or my weekly Twitch streams, then you'll know how much of a huge Star Wars nerd I am or used to be. When I was growing up, I spent every hour memorizing everything from Wikipedia, playing Jedi outcast, ad nauseam, and forcing my father to take me to see Episode 3 in theaters six times. Fun fact, that is one of my earliest memories. It is a core memory. And since I spent most of my life being such an easily marketable child, when I started getting into D&D, one of my first questions was, Is there a Star Wars version of this? And the answer overloaded my angsty teenage heart. Star Wars Saga Edition is a game that plays a lot like the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons, but with updated rules and a new shiny coat of armor. And that only makes sense given that Saga Edition was created by Wizards of the Coast, the very same people who make D&D. Because of that, old D&D players can slip right into the action without a second thought, and even people who only have 5e as a reference will have an easy time getting the hang of things. Although the culture shock will probably bother anybody who goes in thinking, I've played 5e, 3e can't be that different, because yes, yes it is. For starters, Saga Edition is the exact opposite of 5e in terms of character creation. Like I said, it's like third edition, but with a huge emphasis on multi-classing and customization. Instead of picking a race and writing down its features, then picking a class, writing down all of its features, then a subclass and writing down all of its features until you got a finished character after barely any input, making a character in Saga Edition is as follows. You pick one of the five general classes, which are the Scout, the Scoundrel, the Soldier, the Noble, and the Jedi. You wrap the starting proficiencies for that class, and then every single level alternates between a talent from a huge list specific to that class, almost all of which are a part of a skill tree, so that you slowly get better at those talents as you play, or grabbing a feat from a massive list that isn't unique to your class, but each class only gives a specific list of feats that you're allowed to take. You also get a free feat every few levels that has no restriction whatsoever, and while they aren't anywhere near as strong as 5e feats, you get a bazillion of them, and a lot of them lead into other stronger feats, so it evens out. Much like the Warlock and 5e, you can have two characters who both stuck to the same class for all 20 levels, and with the exception of three or four starting proficiencies at the beginning of the game, they could have absolutely nothing in common. Completely unique skills, feats, talents, everything. The classes are just formalities to help you contextualize how the talent trees work, and the game wants you not to think of yourself as just a class, but as a collection of the skills that you obtain from those classes, which is why multi-classing is treated so seriously. Multi-classing is as simple as saying, I want to take a level in this class now, and as long as you meet the pre-rex, you just get a free proficiency in talent from that class, along with rolling that class's health die. There's a zero fuss, and the game actually encourages you to pick from different classes so that you can have a more well-rounded character. If you look at their stat blocks, Anakin is mostly a Jedi, with some scoundrel thrown in to make him a good pilot. Boba Fett bounces around between scoundrel, scout, and soldiers so that he can get those sick killing skills, and Obi-Wan is a pure and untouchable Jedi, because he will never fall into temptation, lest he lose the high ground. You may also notice that these characters have classes outside of the main five, and those are called prestige classes. Classes that you can only take levels in once you've gotten certain skills or feats, or levels in a certain base class. There's like a million prestige classes, and most of them encourage you to multi-class, although some, like the Jedi Knight and the Jedi Master, reward you for sticking with one class, so you can really do whatever you want with your character, and somehow you will be rewarded. And it helps that there are over a dozen different expansion books that'll cover every inch of the Star Wars universe, because the customization in this game is wild. In playing this game, I've seen concepts big and small, including a straight Jedi, a Jedi killing Mandalorian-style bounty hunter, a pilot who specifically piloted a wheelchair X-wing, a genius millionaire playboy philanthropist, a gay Jedi, a dude who pretended to be a droid, but was secretly a dude hiding inside of a droid, a writhing mass of tentacles with teleporting powers, and the most terrifying creature ever, a man who punches people he doesn't like. If you have a concept, any concept at all, for what you want to do with your character, I find it hard to believe that there aren't rules for facilitating that need, because your options are as large as the galaxy. What's more, if you're into crafting, there are entire books dedicated to crafting your own starship, modding out your guns, armor, items, building your own droids, lightsabers, people. It's endless. I once played a senator who moonlighted as a techie, and I took the rich's fuck talent from the noble class that just gives me an unfair amount of money. Then I used that money to buy modified gadgets like a utility belt, a grappling hook, a fully automatic pistol that I could rig to explode with a switch, and a million other things. I was a charismatic Batman, and I have never had so much fun as pulling gizmos out of my ass to save the party at the last minute. Of course, given that this game is largely a D&D game, with a sci-fi skin layered over it, it stands to reason that combat would be important. Turns and Saga Edition play out similarly to third edition D&D, which may result in culture shock for all of you 5e nerds that don't understand why you can't use the force as a bonus action. Every action is thrown into one of three categories. Your full actions take a whole turn to do, normal actions that you'll walk around afterwards, and swift actions are simple enough that you can think of them like 5e's bonus action, but they're nowhere near as impactful, and you can also give up your movement and or your action to get another swift action, like pressing a button as a swift action, however squeezing the trigger of your gun is a normal action. Movement also makes an interesting display here, as it can be taken before or after another action, but not during, so you can't just pop out of a set of trash cans, shoot somebody in the face, and then run around the corner like some cheeky breechy. Once you make a commitment, you're stuck there, like a bad relationship. But also like a bad relationship, you can cheat and ignore the rules if you take a feat that lets you do it. And if you get caught out, you have three defensive stats that'll keep you alive that all behave like armor class. They just protect against different things. Your reflex is your traditional AC, allowing you to avoid most attacks. Your fortitude protects you from physically debilitating abilities, like poisons, and your will protects you from mind-effecting powers. Armor can theoretically boost any of these three stats, but it usually only helps with reflex and fortitude. Also, rules as written, armor overrides your normal defensive stats, regardless of whether or not that helps you or not, so I would personally homebrew it so that you can just use whichever one is higher, otherwise armor quickly becomes useless. Overall, combat is usually fast-paced, and due to the rules saying that a critical hit passing your quote-unquote to damage threshold is an instant death, you're always pressed to get out of the fight as quickly as possible, or otherwise, go the way of Greedo. Now, that's ground combat, but as far as space combat goes, it's... it's dumb. I would just ignore it if you can. Enemies know what they're doing, and they're built for either ground or space battles specifically, so you're either gonna make a character that's an ace pilot and has to spend all their time on planetoids tea-posing and making engine sounds, or you make a normal character that forgoes space combat, and at that point, your best option is to launch an escape pod at the enemy ship so that you can hit it with your laser sword. And speaking of laser swords, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the most glaring flaw in the game. Saga Edition in all of its greatness stays true to the world of Star Wars as much as is possible for an RPG. Unfortunately, if you've seen Star Wars, then you know that the Jedi are a bunch of overpowered wizard people who mind control other people and crush them with their big brains. Saga Edition does not stray away from this, and while any class is capable of using the Force and gaining Force powers, the Jedi get talents to make those even stronger, and even then, anybody with Force powers, be they a Jedi Knight or just Kyle Katarn with a gun, is gonna be leagues above all the versions who just want to play normal people without the merit of being magic. I remember when I was playing the Star Wars RPG as a kid, I got so sick of all of the Jedi and Sith characters that would just come in and own the place that I spent days pouring through all dozen sourcebooks just so that I could construct a character capable of fighting the Jedi. And even then, I still had problems dealing with Jedi. If you're gonna have a Jedi in your game, I would really recommend that you either prevent them from taking skill focus, use the Force, until they're like level 10, and or you talk to them out of game and say, yo, you are playing an overpowered character. I'm gonna let you do it because this is Star Wars, but you need to be a responsible player and not Force the other players to revolve around you. But aside from the power of the Force and also the fact that having so many sourcebooks for one game turns tracking down a specific ability into Where's Waldo, Star Wars Saga Edition is a very good jumping off point for both fans of the series and D&D players looking for something similar yet different. And since the game has been out for so long, there are tons of sites to help you out with specific questions and plenty of online repositories for all of the feats and talents so that you don't need to hunt down each and every PDF of every expansion book. You can just click one link and have every feat listed in alphabetical order. And if you're still worried about the scope of the game or you just can't find a group to play it with, then I would suggest playing the video game Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. It is a self-contained RPG that literally uses Saga Edition's D&D mechanics as the mechanics for the game. It has a really engaging story where your choices make you feel like you're actually playing D&D and it even has a sequel and also a Soso MML. Ignore that one. But hopefully with all of this new information at your fingertips, you are finally ready to take the plunge and try something other than 5e. Search your feelings. You know it to be true. Buuuut that'll about do it! I hope you enjoyed this video. Be sure to leave a like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell, check out all my social media in the description below and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can afford to buy a lightsaber from Ultrasabers because God, I want one, but holy damn are they expensive. But yeah, Davi out.