On day 27 of RPGaDay, the question is what is my favourite idea for merging two games into one?
Although pretty much my whole gaming life has been spent merging ideas from different games together, the most recent one that has intrigued me the most was combining the tactical fun of the X-Wing Miniatures Game and a Star Wars RPG for the ground action and intrigue.
One of the most common disappointments with Star Wars RPGs and other Sci Fi games has typically been the starship battles systems. To have a dynamic and fun game like X-Wing used as the engine for dog-fighting in the RPG would be awesome.
The biggest problem with this is finding a game system that meshes well with X-Wing, since I’d like to leave that largely untouched.
This is an idea that many others have talked about, such as here, here and here.
I haven’t had a chance to run it yet, but put together a version that I think will work. I’ll post it sometime in the future, but some key design elements I went with:
- PCs are built off of existing pilots from X-Wing. (I could create my own, but decided to leave that for the future)
- A maximum of three players can play at once, preferring just two. (The X-Wing game becomes hard to play one GM vs more than three players, even three is pushing it)
- I ignore completely piloting ability for the RPG side, since that’s already encompassed in the X-Wing game.
- The adventure I wrote for the playtest purposely has mismatched point values for initial fights (higher points for PCs), only becoming balanced for the final battle.
- If PCs are killed in X-Wing, it doesn’t mean they’re dead, just their ship is disabled.
I wound up developing a custom Apocalypse World hack as the RPG game system to keep it fairly simple.
Once I run it a couple times and ensure that it works properly, I’ll post it for you to try out.
Justin Schmid
Justin started tabletop gaming in 1983 with Basic D&D (red box) and never looked back. He runs and plays in a wide variety of games, including Savage Worlds, Dungeon World, Trail of Cthulhu and many, many more.
He also writes professionally for role-playing games, including writing and creating Night's Edge an Alternate Reality Universe for Cyberpunk 2020. He went on to write eight more adventures and sourcebooks in the Night's Edge line, adding vampires and other supernatural perils to the already dangerous world of Cyberpunk.
As a freelance writer, he wrote The Bermuda Triangle for Call of Cthulhu, Shadows of the Mind, and Psi Wars for Conspiracy X and contributed to Last Unicorn's Star Trek RPG, as well as to Cybergeneration sourcebooks, and many other games.
When he's not creating imaginary worlds for his daughter, he's running games for his friends and writing new adventures or designing new game systems. He currently lives in Vancouver, B.C., Canada.