Never played it buy that does seem good for the setting.

I tend to agree the weakest parts are the force & vehicular combat, but I gotta say I haven’t had any real issues with the specialization trees. The fact that you can easily mix & match abilities between them prevents the feeling of being locked into a tree IMO.

The BITD mechanic of being able to bump a failure up to a success reflects that perfectly

Isn’t this exactly how the force power rolls work? You can accept a failed force power roll if you choose not to use the dark side, but the option to use the points is almost always there which will lower your morality score. Plus, since light side & dark side have the same number of pips on the force die with DS pips spread over more faces, using DS points is almost always an “easier” way to accomplish your goal since the dice will come up DS more often. Eventually, you are able to use the DS points with no “detriment” but only after crossing a certain low morality threshold which has its own gameplay and narrative implications - the path does lead to easier power as one continues to use the dark side. Some powers & abilities are locked to dark side or generate negative morality points on their own, and those tend to be the absolute most powerful.

That being said, I’ve mostly run it for parties of scummy villains or rebel special agents - the force & morality systems don’t tend to factor in much. Maybe it’s just a difference in GM & player philosophy but I’ve never felt boxed in by the system mechanics and we’ve had tons of incredibly different characters at the table.

edit: as for the shipbuilding, I figure that stuff, the specific character of the vessels, probably shouldn’t be the purview of strict game mechanics; I created ships that were part of the party “family” by working with my players, adding narrative details and quirks to the ships themselves. I’ve done this sort of thing across a number of systems (sailing ships in pathfinder, carriers in lancer etc.) and maybe aside from a suggestion from the rulebook I think this really depends on the creativity and fun generated between players & GM

And another thing! The shipbuilding is weird and not oriented enough he specialness of a.group’s ship. Ships are basically characters in star wars which shape the narrative around the sorts if stories being told. Shipbuilding shpuld tell the GM what sort.of stories the players are after, and should make available some sort of unique traits.

Millenium Falcon: It’s well faster and more maneuverable than most ships its size and its really good.at hiding shit. It breaks down at the worst possible times. Those are all story hooks. “It’s a corellian so-and-so with this specific engine” is tactical fluff that doesnt fit the melodramatic tone of SW

The ship from Rebels: Has an inobvious mini ship that lets the crew be in two places at once. That’s good for the sprt.of storytelling in that show.

The ship.from Andor: Is full of surprises. Is literally a character.in that it has a droid built right into it. Can bust tractor beams easily and apparently fight melee.

Managing systems and modules is star trek shit, but there.it is in FFSW

It’s very popular

Who is out there playing FATAL? Do people actually roll for anal circumference?

I’ll admit my experience with 5e is very cursory relative to a bunch of the 90s/00s systems, but Xander’s Guide definitely has crafting rules, including item cost and time to competition, based on the designated item rarity (ranging from 50gp / 1 week for Common to 100k / 50 weeks for Legendary).

5e also definitely has social skills, feats, and powers. And the 5e implementation of Kingmaker didn’t need to work any harder to incorporate exploration/kingdom building mechanics than they did with PF.

Why shouldn’t they just play almost any other game, that will already have those rules, instead?

The primary reason people like 5e is just networking effect. People play it cause people play it. I’ve never had a problem finding people familiar with D&D. Meanwhile, good luck finding anyone who is familiar with Rollmaster or Rifts.

But secondly, the d20 system - particularly in the latest incarnation - is fairly easy to pick up and reasonably well balanced. Nobody feels like they screwed up halfway through the game because they decided to play a Conan style barbarian instead of a Merlin-esque wizard. Nobody has to learn an entire subset of rules to pay a Shadowrun Decker or Vampire Tremere.

Thirdly, there is a TON of content. I love Exalted to death, but good luck finding any modules to run for new players/STs. You’re really coming at it from scratch.

5e is drowning in them - both in updates to classics and new releases. I did a one shot of 5e set in MtG’s Dominiara and had a ton of fun playing straight out of the book.

A lot of that is just compounded returns. D&D has tons of money and manpower for development in a way Lancer and Fate don’t. Lots of old head players keep churning out derivative content in the setting.

But that’s the nut of it.

Never tried it heard of Delta Green

You and I probably have fun doing similar things, but a decent number of people just want to vibe with their friends. Some want to practice improv. Some want to write fuck fics.

I wound up being part of a group that has a rather hipster-ish approach to games. We haven’t touched D&D since around 2008, and mostly spend our mutual time playing a friend’s system. Rarely two systems in a row, rarely the same system twice unless its a substantial update and there’s no other game running. Even when we did play D&D, I don’t think anyone actually ran in the official D&D setting, though things like spell names and magic items carried through. We’d invent our own kingdoms and characters etc. I have my own critiques of how many of these systems were just “other system, but slightly different”, and the stories were generally pretty derivative as well, but I wouldn’t say that we leant into the sprawling nature of these settings.

I guess I’d compare, say… D&D and Shadowrun as these old games with vast sprawling splat book collections, different editions you can pull “lore” from, to like…

Blades in the Dark, where most of the rules content is on the characters sheets, the dice rolls are pretty simple to build up and down, and going further down the chain

Hillfolk, where there’s only nominal gameplay and settings are a single page with some character archetypes to get you started in a sort of free form theater activity.

There’s also games like GURPS or Hero System that nominally have a setting and rules for those settings, but actively encourage you to use the rules to make your own. These also tend to be older.

It is kind of in the name that role playing games involve some level of role playing, but that isn’t the history of these games. They largely evolved out of war games that are at least partially competitive, which requires large sprawling systems to cover all the edge cases.

I also don’t think “simplicity” per se is better, but consistency of rules generally is. If you have spent the entire rulebook talking about certain sorts of tests, and then you have a splat book later that offers very powerful rewards if you successfully play the drums (instead of rolling dice), you’re going to have a contingent of power gaming nerds annoying everyone with the drums constantly.

But having the “more powerful stuff” hidden in a sprawling array of splat books is… Well, it’s profitable, but its also annoying game design. The number of times I came across something in Shadowrun 5e where something was technically playable in the core rules but you had to have the Street Grimoire book was extremely annoying and made it inaccessible for someone that wasn’t scraping the internet to “play better” or voraciously reading every sourcebook for a thing.

Not that there isn’t enjoyment to be had in voraciously consuming every splat book and rule and comparing that with friends. Just not everyone enjoys doing that. I’d even say most people don’t enjoy that. And also a portion of the people that do enjoy that do it to have power over their friends in a leisure activity, reifying the hierarchy and so on (you can tell because they’re the sort of person who immediately loses interest if they can’t do it, and they have zero suggestions on how balance could be improved)