Moving from d20 to GURPS

[Johnny Angel]

Aside from GURPS, I also play Edge of the Empire.

A while back, I did a GURPS game but incorporated the force tokens from Edge.

The Basic Idea: In Edge, the Force can influence events; there's always balance in the Force. Mechanically, this is done by rolling a d12 marked with black and white dots (to represent darkside and lightside) at the beginning of each game session. This sets the current state of the Force (how much dark/light). Players can use light for things that benefit them; the GM can use dark against the players. Using a light/dark flips it to being dark/light.

In GURPS: I allowed light/dark to be used as though they were CP for buying success and adding narrative parts to the scene, as described in Basic Set. I also allowed light/dark to substitute for FP to do things such as Heroic Charge and Feverish Defense. I think I also allowed a light/dark to treat a target number as being one higher (exampke: 3d6 vs 12 after using the Force instead of 3d6 vs 11,) but that use didn't make criticals easier. (At first, I allowed that, but it got out of hand.)

Even though it's already possible to do that in GURPS (and without the Force roll and light/dark tokens,) I found that players were more willing to use the tokens rather than CP. I also found that having some physical representation of what could be spent also encouraged use.

If you don't have one of the Force d12 from Edge, I think there's a free conversion chart online.

Why do this: I found that adding a little bit of the more-narrative approach from Edge combined with the somewhat more gritty nature of GURPS to hit a sweet spot of encouraging players to try stuff they've seen in movies while also having a seriousness of threat and consequences. It was a good balance for my group. It also served as a stepping stone for many of the D&D players who were still adjusting to HP being very different in a non-d20 game.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by maximara

In the long run the higher TL would win but in Endor there is no long run. It was a battle for "all the marbles" (protecting the second Death Star and wiping out of the Rebel faction).

You still run into a problem when making game mechanics, which need to be at least somewhat balanced and not dependent on every character (and the whims of fate) following the script.

1. Stormtrooper armor is overall pretty lousy, but is heavily specialized against blasters (Why doesn't anyone switch to a weapon that isn't so easily countered?)

2. Stormtrooper armor is just lousy (Why does the Empire use it at all?)

3. Stormtrooper armor is actually effective (Why aren't Endor's armor piercing rocks being strip mined?)

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by RyanW

Y

2. Stormtrooper armor is just lousy (Why does the Empire use it at all?)

This. I can't recall off hand ever seeing Stromtrooper armor stop anything. Even Clonetrooper armor is pretty useless.

As to "Why?" the answer is probably "The Emperor likes it that way".

[Keampe]

Originally Posted by RyanW

You still run into a problem when making game mechanics, which need to be at least somewhat balanced and not dependent on every character (and the whims of fate) following the script.

1. Stormtrooper armor is overall pretty lousy, but is heavily specialized against blasters (Why doesn't anyone switch to a weapon that isn't so easily countered?)

2. Stormtrooper armor is just lousy (Why does the Empire use it at all?)

3. Stormtrooper armor is actually effective (Why aren't Endor's armor piercing rocks being strip mined?)

Armour is designed to face the threats that it is most likely to come into contact with. It's like saying that a bullet-proof vest should be invulnerable to a knife or sword - I mean, those are ancient tech and bullets are far more dangerous. Armour is also designed to make getting hit survivable, not to make the wearer invulnerable. An NIJ level IV vest needs to be able to survive 6 hits from an armour piercing 30-06 round, but after the first you're likely out of the fight - just with survivable injuries.

We never see whether a Stormtrooper is actually dead or just knocked out. Maybe the armour just stops enough for you to put that clone in a Bakta tank and then deploy them for the next battle. Seems a waste of resources not to.

- Shane

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by Keampe

We never see whether a Stormtrooper is actually dead or just knocked out. Maybe the armour just stops enough for you to put that clone in a Bakta tank and then deploy them for the next battle. Seems a waste of resources not to.

We see the Bad Batch using stun against clone troopers, so presumably the full blaster setting is considered too lethal to use against their brethren.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Keampe

Armour is designed to face the threats that it is most likely to come into contact with. It's like saying that a bullet-proof vest should be invulnerable to a knife or sword - I mean, those are ancient tech and bullets are far more dangerous.

Surely the most frequent threat is blunt force trauma due to the near total lack of safety railing.

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by maximara

Besides if you want to talk about logic try and explain the nonsense that was The Rise of Skywalker. To paraphrase Yahtzee 'It's like every character, but the main one, put their retard hats on that morning by mistake'

Too tired to try to deal with the rest right now, but I would not make any attempt to justify the Sequel Trilogy. Disney chose to make bad movies (and compound it by having the director of the middle movie be someone who apparently hated the directing style of the director of the other two), and I'm annoyed by it.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

Too tired to try to deal with the rest right now, but I would not make any attempt to justify the Sequel Trilogy. Disney chose to make bad movies (and compound it by having the director of the middle movie be someone who apparently hated the directing style of the director of the other two), and I'm annoyed by it.

Granted but even the first trilogy has logical hiccups - largely because Lucas changed thing as he went along. Vader and Luke's father were original two separate people and Luke and Leia were not related. Ironically the one thing the stormtroopers get flack for, the inability to hit anything, is actually explained in the movie: their poor shooting was clearly intentional.

TARKIN: You're sure the homing beacon is secure aboard their ship? I'm taking an awful risk, Vader. This had better work.
LEIA: That doesn't sound too hard. Besides, they let us go. It's the only explanation for the ease of our escape.
HAN: Easy... you call that easy?
LEIA: They're tracking us!

[Stormcrow]

Why don't you all just accept that Stormtroopers wear armor that makes them look imposing to the audience, while the heroes can blast through their armor every time because it makes the heroes look heroic to the audience. Once you accept this, you can move on to the more important question: how effective do you want Stormtrooper armor to be in your game? If you want heroes to shoot through it, it's just part of a Stormtrooper's costume, and ignore any effects it fails to have. If you want it to be effective, decide how effective it is and assign it a DR.

Star Wars is full of decisions like this. Forget arguing about retconning explanations; just decide how you want it to be and make it so.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by maximara

Granted but even the first trilogy has logical hiccups - largely because Lucas changed thing as he went along. Vader and Luke's father were original two separate people and Luke and Leia were not related. Ironically the one thing the stormtroopers get flack for, the inability to hit anything, is actually explained in the movie: their poor shooting was clearly intentional.

TARKIN: You're sure the homing beacon is secure aboard their ship? I'm taking an awful risk, Vader. This had better work.
LEIA: That doesn't sound too hard. Besides, they let us go. It's the only explanation for the ease of our escape.
HAN: Easy... you call that easy?
LEIA: They're tracking us!

The first movie had a lot of cases where things happened one way (Han's parsec comment, the Stormtroopers' horrible aim) that were meant to be some sort of deception (Han was basically talking out his rear-end to try to impress/intimidate who he thought were backwater hicks, the Stormtroopers were purposefully missing and suffering casualties due to orders to that effect)... and that were later set as truth. Han's comment gets justified by some weird space hazards making it exceptional to do the Kessel Run with a short overall distance, and I don't think we ever see Stormtroopers demonstrating real skill in combat beyond the boarding action at the beginning of New Hope, not even while Lucas was still in control (with Disney, Stormtrooper inaccuracy is sometimes purposefully used for humor, as in a couple scenes in The Mandalorian).

Of course, for OP, you'll need to decide how to handle things like this in your campaign. Perhaps they got lucky against the sandcrawler, and when examining the wreckage Obi Wan was remembering the precision of the Clone Troopers he served alongside, falsely attributing the new Stormtroopers with the same ability. This would mean the latter have low skill and probably don't (or can't - recall Luke's complaint about not being able to see anything in the helmet*) Aim. Or maybe they actually are the elite soldiers claimed, and you need reasons why they demonstrably aren't in their appearances in the movies. One option I've seen floated around is that the best Stormtroopers - the true elites - were stationed on the Death Star. Their poor performance against our heroes was done on purpose and under orders... and then they all got vaporized when Luke took out the station they were on, so the ones encountered in later movies were basically the B-Team. This means most 'troopers are as above (low skill, don't aim, poor tactics, etc) but, at least prior to the Battle of Yavin, there's the risk of encountering their elites. Another option would be that the heroes (and we pretty much only see the Stormtroopers engaging the heroes) are protected by a combination of The Force and good old-fashioned Plot Armor, which the suggested Impulse Buys help a good deal with representing. Some Star Wars video games instead take an interesting middle ground - Stormtroopers are indeed well-trained, but their E11 Blaster Rifles have abysmal performance, at the very least having very poor Acc if not causing an outright penalty to hit (in Jedi Outcast, the individual shots of the E11 spread out roughly as much as the projectiles of the Flechette gun, which is basically that game's version of the shotgun**). Of course, there are other games that take a different approach - the Stormtrooper weapons are highly-accurate in Battlefront 2, and Stormtroopers in Jedi: Fallen Order, even those using the portable heavy repeating blasters, basically only miss if you dodge out of the way of or deflect their fire with your lightsaber.

*This wasn't a scripted line - it was actually Mark Hamill complaining to Harrison Ford about the poor visibility of the prop "hero" helmets, where the eyeholes didn't actually line up with the actors' eyes; presumably, it was left in due to Rule of Funny. I remember at least one edition of d20 Star Wars justifying this - Stormtrooper armor requires special training (Powered Armor Proficiency) to know how to wear and use it effectively, which Luke would have lacked. So that's another choice - are the helmets actually poorly designed, causing a vision penalty and perhaps an inability to Aim, or do they just need some degree of training to be used effectively... or would you prefer to just ignore that adlibbed line?

**Humorously, once you reconnect with The Force, the Flechette gun can basically be used as a sniper rifle - use Force Push immediately after firing it and the projectiles will stay closely grouped together, and once you've leveled up Force Push they'll automatically converge on the closest foe to your point of aim.