I really need to cover a game out of my collection that I outright hate… but this is not that game!
“Star Wars 2nd Edition, Revised and Expanded” from West End Games (WEG) is easily one of my top five tabletop roleplaying games of all time. Considering I own roughly 300 games, and have played most of them, as well as many that I don’t own, that is indeed saying something. But let’s get into why this game is so damn good, shall we?
SW2E is great, from the ground up. First of all, the d6 system it uses is so good, that when WEG lost the “Star Wars” license, they ripped out everything related to that intellectual property, and released it as the rock-solid “d6 System”. That game then received multiple genre sourcebooks, such as “d6 Space”, “d6 Fantasy”, and so on, fleshing it all out quite well.
In fact, this system was remembered so fondly that Gallant Knight Games obtained permission to release a second edition of the “d6 System”, including multiple sourcebooks in that Kickstarter campaign. And yes, I backed it, and eagerly await the books arriving at my door.
Anyway, I digress.
“Star Wars 2nd Edition” is in my opinion the only “Star Wars”-based TTRPG that really feels like “Star Wars”. The core rulebook is chock full of SW lore, the archetypes really feel like they belong in the setting, and the system just flows in the background, allowing both GameMaster and the Players to focus on the game. That might seem like I’m heaping a bit too much praise upon this title, but trust me, it is just that good!
A few decades ago, my wife and I used to play a weekly game of SW2E with some friends, and – other than the 3+ year campaign of D&D my family played when I was in high school – this was likely the longest campaign I’ve ever played with a single game. We had a phenomenal time, exploring the SW canon (now Legacy works, for the most part… Thanks, Disney!), and creating our own stories therein. Yes, you can do that with any of the many “Star Wars” TTRPGs that have been released, but none of them worked so flawlessly as SW2E did.
Maybe I’m just a sucker for d6 dice pool games (I am), but unlike many other dice pool games, SW2E just does it better. It keeps the number of dice manageable, which is refreshing for a veteran of “Shadowrun”, where I recall dropping 18d6 to compute the damage for my character’s weapon, for example. But you still get the thrill of rolling a fistful of dice as you increase in power over time, and that’s just plain fun.
In the end, that’s what SW2E was: Pure Fun. I know it is long out of print, but if you can find a used copy somewhere, you absolutely should pick up a copy for yourself. I have two copies of the core rulebook myself, and no, I won’t be parting with either!
