Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?

[Staffan]

It's a pity that the old WEG Star wars game doesn't seem to be available anywhere, anymore. It was a relatively simple D6 system that included rules for how to handle multiple actions. Damage was scaled based on 'scale' of the weapon. Personal weapons were very unlikely to damage vehicles, whose weapons were unlikely to damage starships. The reverse would make a mess of the smaller scale target. All in all a very fast and relatively easy game to play, if you're used to the greater complexity of something like Pathfinder/D&D3.5e.

FFG released a facsimile of the original version of WEG Star Wars a few years back, but I don't know if it's still available. I believe that version was before the proper scale rules were added though – as I recall, they just had vehicle-scale weapons deal triple damage against personal targets, and the only personal-scale weapons that did more than 1D against vehicle-scale targets were things like E-Web heavy blasters (you know, that thing the Storm Troopers assemble to shoot at the Falcon as it departs Mos Eisley) that did 2D.

Edit: When they did add scale rules however, I believe they made them sort of symmetrical. A starship firing on a person would absolutely splatter them, but they'd have a really hard time hitting them in the first place.

 

[Retreater]

FFG released a facsimile of the original version of WEG Star Wars a few years back, but I don't know if it's still available. I believe that version was before the proper scale rules were added though – as I recall, they just had vehicle-scale weapons deal triple damage against personal targets, and the only personal-scale weapons that did more than 1D against vehicle-scale targets were things like E-Web heavy blasters (you know, that thing the Storm Troopers assemble to shoot at the Falcon as it departs Mos Eisley) that did 2D.

Edit: When they did add scale rules however, I believe they made them sort of symmetrical. A starship firing on a person would absolutely splatter them, but they'd have a really hard time hitting them in the first place.

I think it's OOP (and fairly expensive on the secondary market). Luckily, I did pick up the set and have it in my library.
In fact, I ran a one-shot of it on May 4th at my friend's wedding party. I themed it as Spaceballs. There was much laughter.

 

[Ryujin]

FFG released a facsimile of the original version of WEG Star Wars a few years back, but I don't know if it's still available. I believe that version was before the proper scale rules were added though – as I recall, they just had vehicle-scale weapons deal triple damage against personal targets, and the only personal-scale weapons that did more than 1D against vehicle-scale targets were things like E-Web heavy blasters (you know, that thing the Storm Troopers assemble to shoot at the Falcon as it departs Mos Eisley) that did 2D.

Edit: When they did add scale rules however, I believe they made them sort of symmetrical. A starship firing on a person would absolutely splatter them, but they'd have a really hard time hitting them in the first place.

It's been a couple of decades since I last ran a WEG Star Wars campaign but from what I remember the attacker rolled their damage and the defender rolled their toughness (or whatever stat it was). You compared the results. Resist with more than the damage roll and no damage received. The "scale" capped the maximum that you could get on the die to resist, or damage. If a person was fired on by a vehicular weapon then I think the max on the die was 4. For ship to person was 2. So if you were an insanely tough 5D Wookie in Stormtrooper Armour (+2D), the most you could roll was something like 14 against a ship, which would be rolling perhaps 4D with no cap, for a max of 24.

EDIT - I should really dig that game out again, for a re-read. I've got most of the books and it was a great game to play.

 

[Thomas Shey]

As a possible variant take--especially if you're like me and don't feel like trying to learn to run a VTT--you can see if you can find players who are TRPGing with a GM with a webcam pointed at a battlemat. It's not a perfect solution, but depending on how much you have invested in tabletop stuff, it might be a worthwhile compromise.

Well, I think I'd argue that's just an extremely primitive expression of a VTT.

(There are some amusing border conditions between VTT and FTF play; I was actually using Maptool locally well before I was using it for remote play because I could project the map and tokens on the big screen TV where we played easier than everyone could manipulate miniatures on the physical table because of the room layout).

But I do have to note its possible to run some VTTs in a fairly simple fashion without having to get into all the bells and whistles. For years, I used Maptool as just a place to host maps and move tokens around, and that wasn't painful to learn (I use some macros for die rolling and a couple ancillary things these days, but that's only occurred for around 10% of my VTT usage). I'm sure you can do similar things with a lot of the others (and there's a few that I think only do that at all).

Now, you may run into players who expect all the bells and whistles, but that's a different problem.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Edit: When they did add scale rules however, I believe they made them sort of symmetrical. A starship firing on a person would absolutely splatter them, but they'd have a really hard time hitting them in the first place.

Yup. You added dice for scale up for damage and reduced them for to hit and vice versa. It was why larger ships would have point defense guns; they operated at a smaller scale. It was pretty clever in its way and worked better with a dice pool system than it would have with other forms of resolution.

 

[Ryujin]

Well, I think I'd argue that's just an extremely primitive expression of a VTT.

(There are some amusing border conditions between VTT and FTF play; I was actually using Maptool locally well before I was using it for remote play because I could project the map and tokens on the big screen TV where we played easier than everyone could manipulate miniatures on the physical table because of the room layout).

But I do have to note its possible to run some VTTs in a fairly simple fashion without having to get into all the bells and whistles. For years, I used Maptool as just a place to host maps and move tokens around, and that wasn't painful to learn (I use some macros for die rolling and a couple ancillary things these days, but that's only occurred for around 10% of my VTT usage). I'm sure you can do similar things with a lot of the others (and there's a few that I think only do that at all).

Now, you may run into players who expect all the bells and whistles, but that's a different problem.

I did the same thing using Maptool for a 4e campaign that I ran, but used a DLP projector, a big 45 degree mirror, and a table that I build with plexiglass, window privacy film, and Ikea table legs to make a projection table. I still used minis but had the players use Maptool for their movement, because it removed any ambiguity. Sight lines and fog of war were really handy for revealing what was present, without having to redraw or partially cover a physical map.

 

[Scribe]

Well, the OT seems to be felt at this point, as I've deleted more of my posts than I've submit. Therefore.

 

[prabe]

I did the same thing using Maptool for a 4e campaign that I ran, but used a DLP projector, a big 45 degree mirror, and a table that I build with plexiglass, window privacy film, and Ikea table legs to make a projection table. I still used minis but had the players use Maptool for their movement, because it removed any ambiguity. Sight lines and fog of war were really handy for revealing what was present, without having to redraw or partially cover a physical map.

Part of it is that I know what I'm doing with the physical things, part of it is that I never really enjoyed the VTT parts of the games I was in where we used VTTs. I use a chopstick as a pointer, dice as tokens, squares cut from a beer case as plus-size bases ...

 

[Thomas Shey]

I did the same thing using Maptool for a 4e campaign that I ran, but used a DLP projector, a big 45 degree mirror, and a table that I build with plexiglass, window privacy film, and Ikea table legs to make a projection table. I still used minis but had the players use Maptool for their movement, because it removed any ambiguity. Sight lines and fog of war were really handy for revealing what was present, without having to redraw or partially cover a physical map.

I'd forgotten that I used FoW relatively early too (though I never bothered with light and visibility functions, I just did it manually).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Part of it is that I know what I'm doing with the physical things, part of it is that I never really enjoyed the VTT parts of the games I was in where we used VTTs. I use a chopstick as a pointer, dice as tokens, squares cut from a beer case as plus-size bases ...

If you just don't like the VTT experience, you don't; I'll never claim they're identical. All I'll say is that on the whole I thought the things that I gained were greater than those I lost, and some of the resistance I see sometimes to VTT is based on the feeling the poster seems to have that they were compelled to do a bunch of work that they're really not (again, people expecting them to is a different problem). But if you find the VTT experience itself offputting, you do.