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Didn't see a thread yet so I figured I'd make one. Star Wars: Edge of the Empire is Fantasy Flight Game's first book in their new Star Wars RPG line-up. This version seems to attempt to try to fit in more with the movie's style of storytelling and action, namely by removing almost all instances of number bloat and focusing on action, options, and more intuitive play. Also unlike the previous versions, this RPG will actually focus more on a single setting of the game: the Rebellion Era. Whereas previous editions have left it open, much of the content in this one will be tailored to the setting shown in episodes 4, 5, and 6. They're attempting to go with the feel of the movies by releasing multiple books. You could just think of them in 4e terms as PHBs 1 through 3. The first, Edge of the Empire, focuses on fringe exploration and more 'at-home' characters like explorers and more scum characters like smugglers. It should feel right for almost any Star Wars fan really. The second book, Age of the Rebellion, will focus more on the war and conflict, and will involve more career soldier characters such as soldiers (duh), pilots, and spies. The characters will deal more with the Empire than criminals and bounty hunters like they would in Edge of the Empire. The third and final book is Force and Destiny. As the name implies, characters in this will be dealing more with their own morality and surviving while being hunted by the Empire. More importantly, it will have Jedi characters and force adepts in it. The first two books of course have force powers and the ability to give your character force sensitivity, but no Jedi. FFG's Star Wars RPGs main feature is its dice.  Shown above are stickers that you use to convert existing dice (it's hard to see but there are also blank stickers, like 1 side of the green is left blank). Each color is a different type of die, and some are 'opposed' by other types of dice. Essentially, they are mirror opposites: when one is used against the other 1:1, the chances of success/failure are almost 50/50. Also worth noting is some of the dice are 'upgrades' to other dice. Meaning they're basically like the ones below them, but more powerful. Duh. White- Force Dice. These are used to generate the "Destiny pool", one of the RPG's gimmicks that are kind of like force points from older editions, and they are also used when manifesting force powers. Red- Challenge Dice. In particularly difficult checks, or when the GM 'upgrades' the difficulty of something (another feature of the system is upgrading, which I'll talk about later), challenge dice are used to oppose players. Challenge dice are the only dice that feature the player-devastating Despair symbol. Opposed by the Proficiency Dice, Upgrade from the Difficulty Dice. Yellow- Proficiency Dice. When a character is both skilled and naturally talented at something (ie, they possess the Skill and have points in the Characteristic governing that skill), they can use proficiency dice. Proficiency dice are basically what players want to be rolling as much as possible of when performing actions. Proficiency dice are the only dice that feature the GM-devastating Triumph dymbol. Opposed by the Challenge Dice, Upgrade from the Ability Dice. Green- Ability Dice. These dice are what players will likely be rolling most of early on when performing actions. They represent natural talent and ability, hence the name. They are the 'worst' dice alone you can roll to perform an action, but thankfully one is usually rolling 3-5 of them. Opposed by the Difficulty Dice, get Upgraded to Proficiency Dice. Purple- Difficulty Dice. The GM puts these dice into a player's dice pool when he makes a check. They represent the challenge of performing something. 2 dice is the "average" difficulty, much in the same way 2 dice is the "average" ability of a character. Opposed by the Ability Dice, get Upgraded to Challenge Dice. Blue- Boost Dice. Boost dice are thrown into a character's dice pool when there are favorable circumstances or other effects allow a character to add one or more. Think of them as SWRPG's version of a "+2 circumstance bonus". Opposed by the Setback Dice. Black- Setback Dice. These are thrown into a dice pool when unfavorable circumstances or other effects provide a penalty to a check. Opposed by the Boost Dice. D100s- Percentile. Not shown. These are used for critical effects, but that's about it. The icons are obviously not numbers. Circles on the Force Die. These are "Force Points". White-filled ones are light-side points, dark ones are, unsurprisingly, dark side points.    are "Successes". The more of these you roll on a check or attack, the better.   are "Failures". You want less failures than successes when you make a check.   are "Advantages". The more the better. They generally can be spent to do extra things, such as critically hit, or make your successes better (or your failures less devastating!).   are "Threats". These are the opposite of Advantages. They generally gently caress with you by giving complications, even if your roll actually succeeds. The fewer the better. The GM can spend them to do things like make you run out of ammo or fall down. is "Triumph". It only appears on the Proficiency die. They count as a success to start, and they also let you do spectacular things in addition to success or even in spite of failure! Think of them as rolling a 20. is "Despair". It's basically the exact opposite of Triumph, and as a result it counts as a Failure to start with. Various things can happen to you if you roll a Despair, but it is always Bad. Thankfully it only appears on the Challenge die, which isn't used often. Depending.Other than the symbols, the game is fairly easy to understand. You have a dice pool, you try to roll more successes than failures to get something done. The phrase "dice pool" might make you worry, but don't be alarmed: dice pools of one type never go above 6, barring extra effects. In fact, the average skill dice pool will be 3-5 dice. Difficulty pools range from 1-5, and to save rolling a ton of dice by one person, the GM can simply roll the difficulty dice himself. Difficulty is determined by GM, with "Average" difficulty being 2 difficulty dice. A quick look at the image of the dice above and you'll see that there is 1 more success on the Ability die than there are failures on the Difficulty die. Meaning a person with 2 in an ability (thus giving him 2 ability dice) doing an average task will more often than not succeed (ties result in failure though). However, there are more Threats on the difficulty die than Advantages on the Ability dice. How the RPG prevents dice pools from getting out of control is their concept of "upgrading". Rather than taking your skill and characteristic and adding them together, they instead make common points "upgrade" dice. In other words, if you possess points in a skill AND its key characteristic, you get better dice, not more dice. For example, say you want to find out your dice pool for hitting somebody with a sword. Your melee is 2, and your Brawn is 3. You first take the higher number, 3, and you add put number of ability dice to your attack pool. You then take the lower number, 2, and upgrade that many ability dice. So your pool would be 2 Proficiency, 1 Ability. One of the advantages of the dice system is also that in combat, your actions will rarely be wasted, even if you fail to hit somebody. For example, if you manage to get a good amount of Advantages on your dice, but completely fail to hit your opponent, you can spend your Advantages to give somebody else a Boost die on their next attack, or to disarm the enemy. The beginner set for the game is out at the moment. It includes a pre-made adventure, pre-made characters, a rulebook, and other stuff. Links below. In any case there's more to the rules but I'm kind of rambling now. I spent some time reading my friend's copy from GenCon but I don't possess my own yet. I really like Fantasy Flight, especially their 40k RPGs, and I'm happy to at least see a Star Wars RPG that isn't d20 again. Links Beginner Game this troper fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Jan 2, 2013 |
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Aug 27, 2012 23:51
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 04:46 |
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Oh they've said that they'll all be compatible with eachother, like I said it's basically like PHB1-3. Each will be standalone-capable as well. I'm fine with Jedi being last at least, I'm not a fan.
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Aug 28, 2012 01:51
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Unzip and Attack posted:I'm a huge fan of the Warhammer system that this one seems to emulate, so if any of you guys pick it up and have time, could you post a little review for me? I'm thinking of shelling out some bucks for this. I'm waiting for the full version to come out. The beginner game seems nice but it seems... incomplete. Plus it's kind of tailored to people new to RPGs in general so oh well. I'll definitely be purchasing the full version, and with Only War out of the way hopefully they can focus on finishing Edge of the Empire. If it's anything like WFRP (production-wise, we obviously know the dice system is similar), all the supplements will have really high value and production qualities, so I'm looking forward to it still.
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Dec 18, 2012 19:36
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TookyG posted:I agree. My wallet would prefer they did a core book for the system and have non-core classes, races, and time periods be separated out into various books. Though I'm sure their wallets very much like reprinting the same 300 pages and selling them to people 3 to 5 times. I'm surprised they aren't doing an approach like they did with WFRP 3e, where they had the core set, then they sold supplements in packs (like the warrior and military sourcebook came with the Khorne sourcebook too). It would make sense too. They could sell a Criminals/Fringers set, a Rebels/Imperials set, and a Light Side/Dark Side (and maybe some other stuff) set.
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Dec 18, 2012 20:17
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Some of the easier things to do with getting Advantage on failure seems to be the "+1 Boost Die to your or ally's next roll", since it's really tangible. Of course assuming you're not in combat or it's not going to help in some way you'd have to figure something else out, but it's a good catch-all for circumstances. Like if you're trying to force a door open and fail, obviously the Boost die to next roll represents you getting it up part of the way and getting it the rest of the way is a bit easier. I don't think I'll be getting the Beginner set because I'd rather just wait for the full thing but I might cave anyway since I'm loving WFRP, like Fantasy Flight, and am dying to get something close to a full version of this thing.
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Jan 2, 2013 18:33
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Mortanis posted:Setback/Boost die is more about Threat/Advantage that Fail/Success. If you think you're going to succeed, it's better to go for the Boost for the extra chance at Advantage since it doesn't greatly up your chance to complete the task. 6 months seems about right. Typically supplements for their games tend to come out every 4-6 months (at least from looking at Black Crusade) so yeah. For seeing what to do with advantages, you can just about always determine what to do by just looking at the other examples. Like if a player fails but gets 2 advantage, and doesn't want to just get one of the listed benefits and wants something else, just think to yourself "is this about equal to getting a free maneuver?" Also keep in mind that lots of bonuses given from excess advantage on a failure can already be represented in the +Boost die mechanic. If the guy fails to throw some boxes in front of a stormtrooper group, the +1 defense or +1 setback die to one of their next rolls could easily represent stumbling up the troopers without actually slowing them down much.
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Jan 3, 2013 17:45
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alg posted:The Darkstryder campaign was really neat for its time. Dawn of Defiance really suffers from a ton of railroading and dumb dungeon crawls and confusing space battles that don't go anywhere. I wasn't a fan personally, but then again maybe the GM running it was doing it poorly.
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Jan 7, 2013 22:41
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My favorite thing about the Force Sensitive specialization in this is that if you don't take any of the force powers but you do take the force sensitive spec, you can very easily play it off as a Force user that just doesn't know he is force sensitive, since all the stuff is just bonuses to things that your character could very well do without knowing (like being persuasive, lucky, etc.). Really captures the feeling of Han Solo and the like.
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Jan 17, 2013 03:30
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Talkc posted:So i looked over character creation tonight and something has me mystified. I think the game assumes people are going to take the extra "minor" obligation for the, what, 1k extra credits? Which I guess makes sense but they should just make all players have a bit higher starting obligation and just give them the 1k more credits right from the get go to prevent people from trapping themselves by not doing it, since otherwise players are going to kill the first person they see with a blaster and take it from them.
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Feb 4, 2013 13:33
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KillerQueen posted:Is melee still kind of poo poo? Last time I played this my character was this psychotic little rodian with a vibro-axe and force move powers, and nothing is more frustrating than being a melee character who isn't sticky at all. If I'm reading rightly just from a preview, a heavy blaster pistol does 7 damage which you can easily outdo with a melee weapon and decent brawn. Do keep in mind that Brawn directly lowers the amount of damage you take too, so even if you aren't dealing quite as much damage as somebody with a big gun, you'll very likely be taking less damage than they.
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Jul 4, 2013 14:21
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TheDemon posted:That's the same as the latest beta errata. All valid points, I actually forgot what the damage on the melee weapons was. All I have is the beta and haven't checked errata but odd that they lowered the damage on melee weapons so much, since the Vibro-Ax was like +6 damage which made it extremely competitive to guns. Maybe the complete version is better, but house ruling might be in order. On the other you might have to be careful. Since combat is gridless, there isn't a whole lot stopping somebody from directly getting in somebody's face with a melee weapon. Not that the enemy can't just back away, but giving a melee person tons of stickiness without much way for a ranged opponent to avoid could be exploitable. Though it'd probably be reasonable if melee is inherently as undamaging as people here are indicating. I'll have to wait and read the finished thing before I can comment further though.
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Jul 4, 2013 21:02
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Whoever was worried about melee weapons I'm not sure I would. Seems like the decent melee weapons wholesale have Vicious, Sunder, and very low (good) Crit rating. So even if you're doing less damage up front you're likely to pierce armor and lop off limbs much more easily.
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Jul 10, 2013 03:52
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 04:46 |
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Is there any reason to use a blaster pistol over a rifle/carbine?
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Jul 24, 2013 22:18
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