Rating: 
Summary: Sure it's a visual treat, but little more!
Review: They (Wizards of the Coast) have done some good work with the revision of classes, skills and feats. They even added a lot of pictures of equipment and weapons. It seems that WOTC has a problem understanding all the e-mails they have been getting on changing the star fighter and vehicle combat. The book is basically the same as the first print I bought over a year ago.
Unless you've got money to burn don't bother! WOTC has failed the Star Wars Role-playing fans again!
Rating: 
Summary: Great book, but teamed up with Demigods????
Review: This book is great. It comes with the original rules, plus some good changes. The new book now includes more races and prestige classes that were left out of the first printing. This is a great addition to any star wars roleplaying gamemaster or players collection. My question is...... Why is it matched up with a Dungeons and Dragons rule book. Dieties and Demigods is totally worthless for the star wars universe. My advice, buy the rulebook by itself.
Rating:
Summary: Usefull
Review: This rule book is quite usefull for those looking to enter the starwars gaming world. However those looking purchasing the item should hold off until the second edition is released, as it will make several of the rules in this current edition useless.
Rating: 
Summary: The revision WAS much needed
Review: I got the revised rulebook just so I could write this review. So, how has it changed? Armor is a lot cooler. It used to be only a dork would wear it. Now it allows you to reduce damage. This can be especially useful for reducing critical hit damage, since even high level characters can succumb to those. The force characters are a little bit improved, as are force powers. Using skills instead of "powers" works really well under the d20 rules. (Roll for success, subtract some vitality for the effort). Since I don't believe that the d20 system is very simple to begin with, I don't think vehicle rules are simple, either. Vehicle combat is now like character combat. Almost identical. That's not all bad. If you get used to the system, that's going to be a whole lot more convenient than the abstract system they had going in the original rulebook. The tech specialist was a good addition to the character class list. I don't like the mastercraft skill that drains xp, though. (If you make a really good item, you lose experience.) First off, it is just dumb to drain experience for that. You'd think it would make you better at what you do. I recommend you nix that rule and just make mastercraft items cost more to make. That's my updated $0.02.
----- I have played the WEG version of the game and liked it well enough. I have also played D&D and like it well enough. It really doesn't make any difference what system the game uses if the experience is good. That said, this book is not well done. Pretty pictures and "streamlining" are not enough. The WEG game system allowed seamless integration of scenes that jumped from starships to vehicles to your own two (or four) feet. In fact, in the games I played, we had space battles, or at least space threats, almost every game. I don't see how this could have been overlooked in this version of the game. This is an almost unforgivable oversight for a professional game designer. Baffling. Also, the force is somehow lacking in, well, force. For some reason the different races are also rather bland. I don't mind bland classes (you can always take a prestige class and bland classes tend to be customizable). The blandness in certain areas of the game is forgivable, I suppose, since WotC is trying so hard to make all classes/races equal. I found the WEG-load of dice easy to add up and quick to reconcile against a (single) target number. In this new game (at high level), you may need to roll 5 attack rolls (actually, maybe even 7) in a single round and apply each roll to a target number to determine success. THEN you roll damage. This is not a streamlined version of the game. It is slower going and, at least in some cases (like space or vehicle combat), impossible. The game is not all bad. The character classes allow some reasonable flexibility. (I actually like them bland.) Also, skills and feats work fine for SW, just like they do in D&D. Even force-based skills are fine. I won't say I like the force-based feats and the acquisition of them as a jedi-class character, but it is adequate...
Rating:
Summary: New players don't read this, advanced players should!
Review: First let me say that I am a die hard SW fan, even when they launched TFM I remained a fan, although they messed it up (some parts). I have played the WEG version for over 7 years, and I liked it. When I heard that WOTC had bought SW, I was doubtfull and didn't look into it. Well finally I did buy the Core Book, and my first glance was positive! The book itself looks great, the rules seem ok, but I'm missing something, the WEG game had a 1 shot 1 kill built into it. This I liked and so did my players, I don't like Vitality points & Wound Points it slows the game down. Also I don't like the armor rules, they suck (but there is a revised core book planned and that was altered). The one thing that annoys me is that they made so many mistakes, the errata file is large. But if you look past these failings then I can recommend the game, just try it for yourself. I changed some of the rules and addapted them to my vision of how it should be. For new gamers this book is perfect, for advanced players it will do.
Rating: 
Summary: It is Just a Great RPG!!!!
Review: Well, at first I was reluctant of trying this game, I had never played the West End Games version of it, but I did read the WEG's version. I thought this new WotC version is very complete and exact. Players and Gamemasters have a lot to get out of this book, it doesn't put limits to the characters to be created (being a Dark sider for example... in the WEG's version if your character gave into the dark side of the force, your character would pass to the hands of the Gamemaster, and thus you would have lost it, in this version that simply doesn't happen) so it is a great opportunity to experimenting new things that you have never tried with your characters. The Art Work is great, I loved it, the only one thing that bothered me was that the book was focused on Episode I a little too much!!! (there is a Rebellion Era Sourcebook I also bought) But then again, if you are a Die Hard fan of Star Wars and a Rolplaying Gamer, you WILL just LOVE this book, it was worth the price a million times!
Rating:
Summary: Great Game, Great Mechanic
Review: I've been a long time player of the Star Wars RPG by West End Games. I was worried when I heard that WOTC was producing a version of the game based on the D&D 3E rules. However, it has proven to be very much worth the money. One of the very good things so far is the consistency within the rules themselves. With a little work, you can convert almost everything from your old sourcebooks into the new system. Overall, a great game (if you discount the 10+ pages of errata so far).
Rating:
Summary: Good game, bad book binding job
Review: The kids love the book and the game but the pages are falling out after having the book only two weeks.
Rating:
Summary: Fast, furious and fun!
Review: I've had this game in my collection for a while and never got a real chance to play it- until recently. Up until then I mulled over the rules and rolled up a few characters, then one weekend my sometime-gaming group got together and decided to give it a shot. After a litle bit of a slow start (still trying to get adjusted to the rules) we figured out how to do things and things went off like a shot. Somehow we compressed what is usually a four hour gaming session into two hours. I credit the rules of this game to this. It lends itself to speed. Without a ton of tables to mull over you can just "let it all hang out" and have rollicking adventures just like the original (Episode IV) Star Wars movie. This game is a blast to play. I hear complaints about how the original SWRPG (by West End Games) was better than this one. The only area I can agree with that one is in the sourcebooks. I was always bogged down by the mechanics of the old game: too many dice to roll. WOTC's version in my opinion is a heck of a lot more streamlined. One die roll and you can pretty much figure out what to do from there. Others might complain, but I've rarely seen a game where one can just tear through a session at a breakneck pace and have fun. This game seems to lend itself to that. My only gripe right now is the sourcebooks. West End Games' sourcebooks were far more superior than the current batch. They seemed to have a grasp of the material, and they had pictures of everything (visual aids always boost the imagination.) WOTC's sourcebooks are pretty sparse in that respect. I hope they pay more attention to detail in future releases.
Rating:
Summary: Fun Gameplay!
Review: The game it self is really fun. The character creation is pretty much like that of Dungeons and Dragons' and the character sheets look almost identical (except it says Star Wars, not Dungeons and Dragons) A lot of the text was taken from the core rulebooks of D&D, modified for Star Wars. I thought they should have made it a 500 page book cuase the text was crammed pretty tightly in there, but all this is made up for by the game play, EXCELLENT!
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