Muddling through WEG d6 Star Wars

Two days ago, Dean asked who was up for an impromptu game. Jeremy pitched a Marvel Superheroes game based on occult investigations, but it didn't really grab us. So I suggested (being all in on The Mandalorian and having now seen The Rise of Skywalker - review pending) a game of d6 Star Wars.

The rules have had a fan edit/remaster done recently, that includes lots of material from the more modern SW properties. And it's free. It's a long PDF, though, around 500 pages. And it's poorly organized. And I hadn't played WEG Star Wars since around 1990 or so, and we never played it that much back then. And I was never the game master.

But anyway, I gave myself a crash course in the rules, and came up with a scenario. I'd had the idea that the plot of Shaft (1971) would make for a good RPG adventure. And it worked out really well.

The characters:
Y'lenik, Caamasi Student of the Force (Dean)
Simon SBD-4, modified superbattle droid (Jeremy)
Oink the Hunter, Gammorean bounty hunter (Claytonian)
Teeto, Ewok (Parker)

On a Hutt planet, the Imperials are encroaching but there's also a Rebel resistance forming. The Hutt's daughter is kidnapped, and he demands/hires the PCs to rescue her.

The game didn't follow exactly along the lines of the plot of Shaft, although in a few ways it did mirror it. By the end of the session, the PCs had the Rebels leading a diversion attack on the Imperial garrison while they broke in the back to rescue the Hutt Princess, while gangsters waited with speeders outside for the getaway. More or less like the final act of Shaft.

For the players, it was pretty easy. The templates allowed them to get into the game quickly. One guy joined the game about 45 minutes in, grabbed the Ewok template, assigned points to skills, and he was in within 10 minutes.

There were only two small skirmishes against stormtroopers at the end during the rescue. Everything else was investigation, negotiation, and scouting. Which is just as well, because when the fights broke out, I realized after the session, I ran the system wrong. It still worked, but it wasn't quite right. None of the players had more experience with the system than I did, so no one noticed.

After the game ended, Jeremy suggested I check out Mini6, which is a cut-down version of the WEG d6 system. I may do that. The SW fan book has, as I said above, too much information. There are a lot of helpful explanations and examples given, and it's got all kinds of reference information. But it's all over the place. The game rules are scattered here and there, you'll read a section on character skills then there's a sample adventure, then back to game mechanics, then fluff about the SW universe, then more game mechanics, then another sample adventure, then...

Anyway, long story short, I'll try to put together another session or three of Star Wars in the coming months. It was a lot of fun.