Why did we use the Star Wars d20 system?

Hey there, I'm James Ohlen, Director of Design at BioWare and lead designer on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. I'm going to be talking about the rule system that we are using in the first Star Wars role playing game.

When we started the initial design on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic two years ago, one of the most important questions we had to answer was - do we use a pre-existing rule system, or do we create our own?? If we created our own rule system, we wouldn't be hampered by any difficult to implement pen and paper rules; however, we would have to invest a significant amount of time researching a new system that wouldn't be familiar to our fan base. If we decided to go with an existing system we would have a well balanced and play tested system available to us, but we'd also have to adhere to some difficult to implement pen and paper rules. After some discussion we felt that the drawbacks of a preexisting rule system weren't all that bad, as all of our programmers and designers were very familiar with the d20 rule set. After all, we'd been working on Neverwinter Nights for some time, and had invested a lot of time properly implementing the 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons rules (upon which the d20 Star Wars system is based).​