Converting Star Wars to YZE, Part 1

First and foremost: this is more of a thought exercise. It is a personal challenge. It is not a statement of preference for one game setting or system being better than another. I love Star Wars. I’ve played Fantasy Flight Games’ (now Edge Studio’s) and West End Games’ RPGs a few times. However, I also love Free League’s Year Zero Engine games like Coriolis and Alien. While Alien I think speaks for itself, for those who are unaware, Coriolis is a sci-fi/fantasy game. It’s set in a distant cluster of stars in the far future. It has a middle-eastern flavour of mysticism, contrasting with more common atheistic or agnostic western sci-fi settings. It’s a d6 dice pool system so it already shares a certain feel with WEG’s Star Wars RPG.

A very brief history of the different systems

There are many finer points to convert that I won’t address explicitly here. Instead, I will share what I might do for converting talents, or equipment and vehicles. However, let’s take a quick look at the different RPGs I’m referring to.

West End Games’ Star Wars

In WEG Star Wars PC’s have 6 Attributes, and a set of skills for each. The attributes get a number of dice. Then, depending on your character, the skills will have a number given to them. These add to the total that you roll with your dice pool for the given attribute. You roll against a Target Number to determine success.

Wizards of the Coast’s Star Wars & Saga Edition

Star Wars with a D20, it’s a variation of a previous edition of D&D. ‘Nuff said? Was it proto-4e?

Fantasy Flight Games’ Star Wars

Some people love the Narrative Dice System, some people hate it. I like it on paper. However, I found it a touch too crunchy. It also requires narrative creativity to resolve roll results.

You have three separate core books for different flavours of Star Wars. There’s Edge of the Empire, which is the scum and villainy, bounty hunters, everyday frontiers people of Star Wars. Age of Rebellion, which is focused on being a Rebel cell and the fight against the Empire. Then you’ve got Force and Destiny which is about having Force sensitive heritage and exploring mysteries of the Force. Normally boiling down to Jedi versus Sith.

One thing about no matter which edition Of Star Wars you play. There are lots of supplements. There are many books on various topics. This IP is so massive that you’re not short of any inspiration anywhere. Decades of worldbuilding across many mediums. In fact, West End Games and their supplements provided original content. They only had the original movies as sources. Not even some of the books that were deemed essential were available. Thus, the West End game supplements were used as a sort of Bible at the time. These were given to authors for reference.

Free League’s Year Zero Engine

The Year Zero Engine started with Mutant Year Zero, a, Mutant-oriented hexcrawl game. The Dark Between The Stars and Darkness Points were introduced in Coriolis, YZE’s second iteration. The core mechanic of YZE is rolling a pool of d6. This differs with two of their later games, Twilight 2000 4e and Blade Runner, which use two stepped dice instead. The better your attribute + skill combination, the more dice you roll. You look for die face results of 6.

The Force and YZE’s “Push” Mechanic

“Kid, I’ve flown from one side of this galaxy to the other; I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff. But I’ve never seen anything to make me believe that there’s one all-powerful Force controlling everything. There’s no mystical energy field that controls my destiny.”

Han Solo, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope

In YZE games a Push is a reroll of a dice pool. Each YZE game has a setting flavour and a mechanical consequence of this push. There is a cost to rerolling in order to attempt success or greater success. “Darkness Points” in Coriolis are a give-and-take between the players and GM. The GM can use those points to activate additional challenges for the players. They can also use them to make NPCs more challenging, etc. The most straightforward change would be to rename Coriolis’ “Darkness Points” to “Force Points”.

There’s nuance lost in the mechanical exchange of FFG’s Light and Dark Side tokens. There is a set pool of 2-sided tokens that are flipped as they’re used. However, I think the give-and-take of Force Points in this adaptation of Darkness Points is just as effective. It can be just as effective in play. In fact, it might even be more effective. Neutralising the terminology of “light” and “dark” in this context also leans into my preferred way of viewing The Force. The Force is ever-present in Star Wars. It is much like the Dark Between the Stars in Coriolis. However, in the case of The Force it is neither bad nor good, it just is. You push yourself to do something. Maybe, like Han Solo, you consider it luck or skill. It is not some mystical energy field controlling your destiny. Alongside Pushing rolls, Force Points are also used to activate talents. So, the obvious “light vs dark” motif is reduced. A more interesting side of the setting, in my opinion, is presented.