Star Wars RPG: Campaign Start

We are in the middle of running a joint three-book campaign with the Star Wars RPG, and things are going along well. We are building out our characters, running through a sample plot, and the larger plot is just starting to form up.

Despite the voluminous system and the large amount of character archetypes, character customization feels a little soft and many character feel and play like each other. As experience points come in, this is improving, but some of our characters feel a little too samey for our liking.

I am not a real big fan of the character generation system, which puts a premium on getting your starting ability scores as high as possible at the cost of skills and other customization. Your ability scores are very difficult to change, and the difference between starting with a 2 or a 3, or even a 4 is huge. You end up min-maxing in a few key scores and forgoing the cool things that make your character special. I would rather place a rack of preset scores (4, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2) and then be given 20-30 points to customize the character rather than have to make a choice between good scores and a unique character. Yes, this would make starting characters a bit more powerful, but I would rather have that and knock down XP rewards by 5 points than what we have currently (which feels like it is being gamed in favor of ability scores).

Less rolls doing more is the way to play this! I ran into a situation where one character tried to open a storage box with an electronic lock, and I ruled "only one try per skill" on the attempt, and it worked beautifully. We have been so trained by the "then I do something slightly different and re-roll" sort of soft-ruled gaming that we immediately fell into that, trying a rock to bang it open, a prybar, and a this and a that. Nope - all of those attempts were part of the same "force it open" roll, and you failed - try another skill. Mechanical, perhaps? Another character with skulduggery skill was able to save the day, and we avoided having a player buffalo their way through a task by throwing the dice so many times they just succeed.

If this was a d20 player I would expect to hear "I take a Triumph" and then I would begin to rub my temples in a mock headache.

I swear letting players "try something slightly different" and reroll the same task is some sort of dice-rolling tantrum. In Star Wars, it doesn't work that way. I am not going to sit here and adjudicate fifteen borderline horrible rolls of random selections of threats, despairs, and advantages until you get the roll you want. The dramatic situation happened when you tried to bang the lock open, it didn't work, and it is time to move on. There is no "let's do a second take" here. Maybe in Hollywood, but in this world you get one shot and then you need to change your tactics.

That said, things are going well, and we are capturing that Star Wars feeling. We are getting a wonderful low-level game as well with very relatable characters, including the bad guys, so I expect the fights and conflicts coming up to get very gritty and personal. This does not feel as light and flippant as the d6 and d20 versions of the game, there is a lower-level grit and realism here that I love. Things are broken, the galaxy itself is broken, and every item, vehicle, character, and societal structure is coated with a level of dirt and grime. I plan on keeping things that way, and forcing some hard choices on the character's behalf.

There are no heroic and clean decisions in this world, there are just bad choices, and worse. Only sacrifice and heroism can turn the tide.