Initial impressions of Edge of The Empire from FFG

[Username17]

So about the FFG system, what is it good at? Where does it fall flat?

To the extent that it is like their Warhammer system, it's fiddly as hell, has baroque and hard to calculate probabilities, resolution of actions takes a long time, it requires 3 kilograms of physical materials to play the game, and the game requires physical objects to expand so you're basically playing a board game rather than an RPG in the traditional sense. Also it costs about a hundred dollars and only covers a narrow range of character power within the context of the world with other narrow power ranges requiring other boxes that will also cost about a hundred dollars.

-Username17

[Sigil]

At no point did they suggest the various games cross over. I hope.

As far as I know they didn't. Though, if I recall, a starting Rogue Trader character was given roughly the same amount of EXP to spend on abilities as a maxed out Dark Heresy character, so you could sort of view it as an unofficial wink and nod to just start taking RT classes with your DH character instead of rolling a new RT only one. Essentially they just made that easy to house rule.

I have no idea about going from RT to Sphesss Mohrine tier, never picked that one up.

[Corsair114]

At no point did they suggest the various games cross over. I hope.

As far as I know they didn't. Though, if I recall, a starting Rogue Trader character was given roughly the same amount of EXP to spend on abilities as a maxed out Dark Heresy character, so you could sort of view it as an unofficial wink and nod to just start taking RT classes with your DH character instead of rolling a new RT only one. Essentially they just made that easy to house rule.

I have no idea about going from RT to Sphesss Mohrine tier, never picked that one up.

Weeeeeell, there were a few add-ons to Dark Heresy, like moving up the food chain into full-on Inquisitors, but the winner was hands-down the splat with Grey Knight. See, a Grey Knight's a Space Marine, as in lifted whole-cloth from the Space Marine book, with a few extra psychic powers for good measure and powerful enough that it comes with (a giant, flashing neon) disclaimer that says, "If you let one of your players use this, it's pretty much going to single-handedly skullfuck any encounter you throw at your players and not even chaff."

[TheFlatline]

So about the FFG system, what is it good at? Where does it fall flat?

To the extent that it is like their Warhammer system, it's fiddly as hell, has baroque and hard to calculate probabilities, resolution of actions takes a long time, it requires 3 kilograms of physical materials to play the game, and the game requires physical objects to expand so you're basically playing a board game rather than an RPG in the traditional sense. Also it costs about a hundred dollars and only covers a narrow range of character power within the context of the world with other narrow power ranges requiring other boxes that will also cost about a hundred dollars.

-Username17

Almost none of that is accurate though.

It uses a streamlined WH3 dice system, which I described in detail in Chapter 1. You *can* calculate odds, but it's funky. Off hand I'd say you need 1.5 of the uber yellow dice to every 1 difficulty die, and 2 ability dice to every 1 difficulty die if you want to succeed 2/3 of the time. It's definitely not as easy as D20 or Shadowrun with static TNs however.

They've eliminated the giant box of shit that you got with WH3- this is just a book, character sheet, and dice. And yes, the dice suck and are a total racket. It's far, far, far closer to a normal RPG than WH3.

MSRP is 60 bucks, same as all the FFG RPG core books, but you can easily find it for about 40 bucks shopping around, so the 100 dollar entry point is mute too. More like 50 bucks real world for a pack of dice and the core book. Which, if you're getting started into RPGs, is about what you can figure to spend on a core book and a pack of dice.

As far as power ranges, you could easily play for a few hundred sessions, because you can always add more specializations for talent trees. There's like 12-15 talent trees, and each one costs a few hundred XP to fill out. So really, at 5-10 XP per game, you're looking at like 10,000 xp to seriously hit your "power level cap" in the core book alone.

I figure that mid-power characters from Edge will be able to move into the realm of the military core book, or might even be roughly on par. You're not looking at the same kind of differences as in WH40k, where you literally are looking at the difference between cyborg mutant demi-gods and normal guys. I have no idea how the power level of Jedi are going to be- I expect them to be bullshit and actually am looking forward to the jedi core book the least.

It's a significant improvement over WH3 as an RPG in almost every capacity except for the talent trees- they're pretty boring. Half of them are passive and useful, the other half are active but lack any real dazzle.

That's the overall impression I'm getting from the game in fact: an improvement over previous FFG games but lacks any real dazzle. Nothing's given me the "Holy shit!" moment that most games aim for.

I'll still rank it thus far higher than Star Wars D20.

And to comment on the WH40k trilogy of games (that's now up to 5 but whatever), epic level inquisitors are considered on par with beginning space marines, and level 5 inquisitors are roughly on par with starting rogue traders. So you *can* stack up PCs from different games, but even an epic level inquisitor pales in comparison in combat to a space marine. On the flip side, the Inquisitor can *buy* outright a squad of space marines to be his bitch forever, and ordering the extermination of an entire planet via exterminatus bombardment is a single die roll away. How you play a game where one side is combat gods and the other side is the combat god's boss is difficult, but it can, theoretically, be done.

I'll try to crank out the next section review tonight, which is chargen.

[TheFlatline]

If your own party is trying to memory wipe or put a restraining bolt on your character, you play with a bunch of cocksuckers.

If the world in general is trying to do it, they need to roll initiative and pin you down or disable you first. Flatline, you make it sound as if when this happens to droids success is automatic. As if the droid can't defend itself.

True, most types of droids can't harm sentients, but all of the droid PCs I've played or GMed for were assumed to have those protocols disabled.

Game On,
fbmf

Agreed on the PC cocksucker thing. But I've seen shit like that happen in-game. And the default for most droids is to have a restraining bolt on them. The entire point of a restraining bolt is to bring an uncooperative droid into line by any schmoe owner, so by definition it needs to be easy to install. I'd say it's probably in D&D terms it's basically the equivalent to a ranged touch attack to install.

I'm fine with droids as PCs, but I don't think of them as a "core" PC class. Even WEG devoted a separate "yeah but..." section to playing droids as PCs because of the social stigma and the in-game logistics of playing a free-willed droid and considered it an "advanced" option. If memory serves, D20 just skipped it entirely in the core.

It *should* be the equivalent of playing a free black pre-civil war in the south.

[Krusk]

It's a significant improvement over WH3 as an RPG in almost every capacity except for the talent trees- they're pretty boring. Half of them are passive and useful, the other half are active but lack any real dazzle.

I'll still rank it thus far higher than Star Wars D20.

Agreed on both counts.

My impressions were that it seemed solid enough for an RPG provided you ignore all the advice and mechanics that encourage or flat out mandate the DM screwing over the players. Most of the talents looked like crap, with the occasional gem you have to wade through crap to get. You might seriously be better off with characters who ignore them wholesale and invest in skills/stats instead.

My list of gripes after a first read through was significantly shorter than most RPGs. It also has some detailed setting stuff for people who don't care about the EU and just want to play some star wars. Tons of locations and brief descriptions. Not enough to run a game with or anything, but enough to get you to write your own stuff that will be close enough to the other guys who write their own stuff. I was impressed with that.

Art - Leaps and bounds better than most RPGs, probably near pathfinders and even above it in a lot of places.

I was pissed there was no lightsaber skill. I don't care that your setting is between 4 and 6 in the outer rim. I tell people we are playing star wars RPG, and they expect Jedi. Half have seen the movies once years ago, another has some how never seen it, and one guy is well versed. They hear star wars, they think Jedi. I don't want to explain to them that the setting is super grim and dark and they can't have nice things.

True Story - My wife asked me what to expect while we were picking it up. I said "Its fantasy flight, so it will be super grim and dark. Think early 90s spawn. Just try to ignore that, they are still into it for whatever reason." Opening lines to the book (ignoring the brochure) "The Edge of the Empire Roleplaying Game focuses on the grim and gritty portions of the Star Wars universe".

[Username17]

It uses a streamlined WH3 dice system, which I described in detail in Chapter 1. You *can* calculate odds, but it's funky. Off hand I'd say you need 1.5 of the uber yellow dice to every 1 difficulty die, and 2 ability dice to every 1 difficulty die if you want to succeed 2/3 of the time. It's definitely not as easy as D20 or Shadowrun with static TNs however.

I said probabilities are baroque and hard to calculate. And since I know for a fact that you just reported the odds incorrectly, I stand by that statement.

It is a universal fact of success counting dice pools that increasing the number of dice in a fixed proportion increases the average value by a fixed proportion but it does not keep the same chance of success or failure. A larger dice pool is more swingy by definition, and the most likely result is less likely.

I literally can't give you a demonstration with these dice, because I don't know what all their faces are or do. But I can give you an analogous example with Shadowrun dice:

Dice/Threshold	Percent chance of Success
3/1	70%
6/2	65%
9/3	62%
12/4	61%
15/5	60%
18/6	59%

The average of course remains "success" in all cases because the average result is keeping pace with the increased thresholds. But as dicepools and success thresholds increase together, the probability of succeeding instead of failing moves towards a coin flip.

Now, let's get into a simple positive and negative pool. Let's say each one is a coin flip, because that's easy.

Positive Coins	Negative Coins	Chance of Net Heads
2	1	50%
4	2	66%
6	3	75%

What the fuck just happened there? Well, when you increase the number of positive dice and negative dice proportionately from a point where you are already likely to succeed, your absolute expected margin of success rises, meaning that the increase in swinginess of the dicepool is fighting against your median point being pushed farther and farther into the likely success category. Rolling four shadowrun dice looking for one hit succeeds 80% of the time, but rolling twelve looking for three succeeds 82% of the time.

If you tell me that you gut feelinged out a stable odds relationship between fixed ratios of dice pools in a funky dicepool system with positive and negative dice that are more and less positive and negative with different numbers of faces and shit, I can tell you right now that you're almost certainly wrong. I can tell you that you're wrong without knowing what exactly is on the faces of these funky dice, because I know how dice pools work.

-Username17

[Aryxbez]

I'll be running a game in a few weeks to test out this game among 3 players. We'll see how it holds up.

Funnily enough, pretty much the same scenario happening for me soon as well, though we might have an occasional 4th player. If you have any suggestions for optimization through your playing/review, feel free to share (good to know Bounty Hunters are a sexy class).

At no point did they suggest the various games cross over. I hope.

Actually, in this video, they indicate how a "Force Sensitive" Character will be able to be built through the 3 books culminating into a True Jedi in the 3rd book. So I and the GM quite expect it to be unbalanced, unless the swag characters truly be able to keep up in both game world interaction and power. Otherwise, I'm thinking non-Jedi's will just be dudes with bigger numbers vs. spellcasting.

So far, from what I've ran into, other than piddly modifiers,difficulty of judging Dice probability/averages, the book repeats itself, alot. I've seen a portion where it repeats itself in one short paragraph, 2nd, and last sentence. In the beginning, there's a point it even refers you to rule concepts that they haven't even explicitly showed the actual rules to yet, thankfully they do so later, but still.

It also kinda sucks what races you choose determine XP and lock you into certain character more or less. Though I haven't looked at Droids much at all yet, they do sound like they offer the ultimate freedom to play what you want, Force sensitivity aside of course.

[TheFlatline]

@Frank:

My "gut feeling" was from witnessing about 30 sessions of WH3. But, I'm always willing to admit when I'm wrong, and I busted out the dice table and actually looked at them instead of just glancing at them.

Just talking strictly about successes, your basic ability die (D8) has 4 faces that have a success on them, for a 1 in 2 chance of some kind of success. One of those faces counts as 2 successes.

The difficulty die has 3 failure faces, 1 of which has 2 failures. So you're right, my numbers were way off and you get this weird state where you're more likely to roll successes on the basic ability die than failures, but if you roll a failure, you're more likely to see 2 failures per die than 2 successes per die, which is what I've seen in actual gameplay.

So you're right, I don't even know the fucking math to begin to figure out success % rates for the basic dice. The D12 ability/difficulty dice are identical except that one sice of the ability die has an extra success on it that the difficulty die doesn't.

Let's see if I can do the math quickly. You have a 50% chance of rolling a success, with a 12.5% chance of rolling 2 successes. If you roll a success, you have a 25% chance of that being a double success.

If you roll a challenge die, you have a 37% chance of rolling a failure, along with a 12.5% chance of rolling a double failure. However, 33% of your failures are going to be double failures.

Fuck it my head is hurting.

The number of variable dice that can go into a dice pool quickly plays cluster-fuck with the odds even better.

[Username17]

I can't figure out from your description how the d12s are supposed to work. But the good d8 is 4 blanks, 3 one hits, and 1 two hits, right? And the basic bad d8 is the opposite, with four zeroes, 3 minus ones, and 1 minus two, right?

In that case, any number of good and bad d8s will add up to an average value of zero (which as I understand it, is a failure), so the first approximation is whether you have more good dice than bad dice and how many more that you have. Of course, even then it's wonky as hell. Let's consider the simplest cases of having one and two extra good dice:

Bad Dice	+1 Good Die	+2 Good Dice
0	50%	75%
1	53%	70%

Yes. When you have 1 extra good die, adding 1 good and 1 bad die makes your chance of success converge up, and when you have 2 extra good dice, adding an extra of each makes your chance of success converge down.

Averages hits stay constant, but your chances of getting extra hits or extra failures both increase as more dice get added to the equation. Also, I'm pretty sure the +1 Good Die group starts converging down again as dice pools get larger and the swinginess factor starts overwhelming the fact that the average value is 1/8 higher than its average chance of providing at least one success.

I really have no idea why you'd want to have an RNG that complicated, or what it is supposed to add to the game other than obfuscation.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

I really have no idea why you'd want to have an RNG that complicated, or what it is supposed to add to the game other than obfuscation.

Because:


Most people aren't Dorothy's and will accept it without understanding what goes on behind the curtain. For many, the obfuscation enhances the immersion.

Also you make a bit more selling them dice.

[TheFlatline]

I can't figure out from your description how the d12s are supposed to work. But the good d8 is 4 blanks, 3 one hits, and 1 two hits, right? And the basic bad d8 is the opposite, with four zeroes, 3 minus ones, and 1 minus two, right?

In that case, any number of good and bad d8s will add up to an average value of zero (which as I understand it, is a failure), so the first approximation is whether you have more good dice than bad dice and how many more that you have. Of course, even then it's wonky as hell. Let's consider the simplest cases of having one and two extra good dice:

Bad Dice	+1 Good Die	+2 Good Dice
0	50%	75%
1	53%	70%

Yes. When you have 1 extra good die, adding 1 good and 1 bad die makes your chance of success converge up, and when you have 2 extra good dice, adding an extra of each makes your chance of success converge down.

Averages hits stay constant, but your chances of getting extra hits or extra failures both increase as more dice get added to the equation. Also, I'm pretty sure the +1 Good Die group starts converging down again as dice pools get larger and the swinginess factor starts overwhelming the fact that the average value is 1/8 higher than its average chance of providing at least one success.

I really have no idea why you'd want to have an RNG that complicated, or what it is supposed to add to the game other than obfuscation.

-Username17

Good D12's have 8 success sides, two of which are double successes. Bad D12's have 7 failure sides, two of which are double failures. So looking at that, going from basic good dice to advanced good dice is roughly a 25% bonus off the top of the board, but going from a difficulty d8 to d12 is a 50% "bonus" to failure generation rate. And again, you're more likely to roll double failures if you generate failures than generate double successes if you generate successes, this time by 12% or so.

So a step up to the good D12's is a good buff, but buffing the difficulty die up to the D12 is a *bigger* buff straight across the table because the fail rate doubles.

Then you have situational bonus dice. Buffs and setback dice have a 1 in 3 chance of generating successes or failures.

There's also advantages and disadvantages in addition to simple success/failure, but I haven't even touched that when calculating odds because those are incidental to "did I do it?"

And why would you have such a complicated odds system? Simple= so you can sell your own dice at 9 bucks a pack.

[Ghremdal]

To go a bit off track: how copyrighted are dice resolution systems? For example if I want to publish a game that uses shadowruns resolution method, and just rename the attributes/skills, how legal would that be?

Perhaps that is a reason for the (needlessly) complicated dice systems?


Also on another tangent, why the hell are people still assuming the Jedi's are the good guys? I mean the whole setting is about two fundamentalist groups duking it out while the rest of the galaxy suffers.

[Username17]

To go a bit off track: how copyrighted are dice resolution systems?

Not in the slightest. It is literally impossible to copyright game mechanics. Game mechanics can theoretically be patented, but Wizards of the Coast hasn't even been able to enforce their patent on turning cards 90 degrees to indicate that they are expended until next turn.

For example if I want to publish a game that uses shadowruns resolution method, and just rename the attributes/skills, how legal would that be?

Completely. I totally did that. And I'm legally totally in the clear.

Also on another tangent, why the hell are people still assuming the Jedi's are the good guys? I mean the whole setting is about two fundamentalist groups duking it out while the rest of the galaxy suffers.

Because the prequels are bullshit and the Jedi are the good guys in the original trilogy. The attempts to make things be subtler and more "shades of gray" in the prequels just brought to light the fact that Lucas thought that having a character named "Elan Sleazebaggano" selling "Death Sticks" was sufficiently subtle to work in an anti-drug message.

Good D12's have 8 success sides, two of which are double successes. Bad D12's have 7 failure sides, two of which are double failures. So looking at that, going from basic good dice to advanced good dice is roughly a 25% bonus off the top of the board, but going from a difficulty d8 to d12 is a 50% "bonus" to failure generation rate.

Wat?

I thought that Good d8s and Bad d8s were both 4 nothings, 3 one hit/miss, and 1 double hit/miss. So doesn't that mean that a good d12 is more better than a good d8 as compared to a bad d12 being worse than a bad d8?

And if Good d12s seriously have six +1 sides and two +2 sides, why the fucking fuck aren't they d6s with three +1 sides and a single +2 side?

-Username17

[name_here]

Just looking at the descriptions of this die system is making my head hurt. What the fuck is wrong with these people?

[MfA]

So FFG has released their first Star Wars RPG. They're basing the entire line off of the same format/structure that they used in their Warhammer 40k line: each core book increases the power level of starting characters and puts them in different settings. The first core book focuses on Han Solo and his ilk: smugglers, explorers, bounty hunters, all the myriad of common folk. This roughly feels like the same power level as Dark Heresy. Next up will focus on the Empire/Rebellion as a military core book, and finally they'll release a force-centric core book.

I don't think this will work very well commercially, the WH40K fanbase faps over the marine vs normals power gap ... I think Starwars fans would rather compromise the Jedi's superiority than make it impossible to make a group similar to the movies (or most of the books).

[TheFlatline]

Good D12's have 8 success sides, two of which are double successes. Bad D12's have 7 failure sides, two of which are double failures. So looking at that, going from basic good dice to advanced good dice is roughly a 25% bonus off the top of the board, but going from a difficulty d8 to d12 is a 50% "bonus" to failure generation rate.

Wat?

I thought that Good d8s and Bad d8s were both 4 nothings, 3 one hit/miss, and 1 double hit/miss. So doesn't that mean that a good d12 is more better than a good d8 as compared to a bad d12 being worse than a bad d8?

And if Good d12s seriously have six +1 sides and two +2 sides, why the fucking fuck aren't they d6s with three +1 sides and a single +2 side?

-Username17

There are normal attribute/difficulty dice, and then there are skilled dice & heightened difficulty/challenge dice. The reason for the D12 is that there are good luck/bad luck symbols in addition to the success symbols (which ironically means that you can never have 2 successes *plus* good luck symbols, the best you get is 1 success and 1 good luck per die, which means good luck is more likely to make you fail) and there are more good luck symbols on the D12s, plus there's the uber success triumph result (1 of the faces, which I counted as a success) which counts as 1 success and 1 good luck and will activate critical hits for free (normally you have to spend good luck points to activate crits, which means that if you can crit, your chance of successfully hitting goes down... Has your brain exploded yet?), and the uber-challenge die has despair, which counts as bad luck and a failure and a few other bad things occur.

As to why they just don't use a D6, the triumph/despair good luck/bad luck is part of it, but there are also situational modifier dice that are D6's.

Basically this all boils down to the idea that you can succeed and have good luck at the same time, fail yet have good luck that is tangentially beneficial, or fail and have bad luck. This is the "narrative" dice pool result concept.

So if you fail hacking the computer, you may not find what you're looking for, but if you roll enough good luck maybe the difficulty is lowered next time or maybe you find a different file that is interesting/worth money.

Or maybe you succeed but roll a crapload of bad luck, so you hack the system but set off intrusion alerts everywhere.

[TheFlatline]

So FFG has released their first Star Wars RPG. They're basing the entire line off of the same format/structure that they used in their Warhammer 40k line: each core book increases the power level of starting characters and puts them in different settings. The first core book focuses on Han Solo and his ilk: smugglers, explorers, bounty hunters, all the myriad of common folk. This roughly feels like the same power level as Dark Heresy. Next up will focus on the Empire/Rebellion as a military core book, and finally they'll release a force-centric core book.

I don't think this will work very well commercially, the WH40K fanbase faps over the marine vs normals power gap ... I think Starwars fans would rather compromise the Jedi's superiority than make it impossible to make a group similar to the movies (or most of the books).

Heh.

You're funny.

Star Wars Jedi fanboys are the original power-gaming wankers. Star Wars fans generally divide into three enthusiasms: One side loves Han Solo and Boba Fett, one side digs the space combat, and then there's the Jedi fanbois which think the Jedi are the end-all be-all and should *start* more powerful than a mundane character can ever hope to become because JEDI!!!!

At least, this is what I saw on the WOTC Star Wars D20 message boards.

[jadagul]

Good D12's have 8 success sides, two of which are double successes. Bad D12's have 7 failure sides, two of which are double failures. So looking at that, going from basic good dice to advanced good dice is roughly a 25% bonus off the top of the board, but going from a difficulty d8 to d12 is a 50% "bonus" to failure generation rate.

Wat?

I thought that Good d8s and Bad d8s were both 4 nothings, 3 one hit/miss, and 1 double hit/miss. So doesn't that mean that a good d12 is more better than a good d8 as compared to a bad d12 being worse than a bad d8?

And if Good d12s seriously have six +1 sides and two +2 sides, why the fucking fuck aren't they d6s with three +1 sides and a single +2 side?

-Username17

Frank, I think you misread. If I'm reading TheFlatline correctly, the good d8 has three +1 faces and one +2 face, while the bad d8 has two -1 faces and one -2 face. So they're not actually symmetric.

Good d12s have six +1 faces and two +2 faces, and bad d12s have five -1 faces and two -2 faces. So d12s add the same number of new faces whether good or bad, but they start out asymmetric--so the expected value of a good d8 is 5/8 and the expected value of a good d12 is 10/12, while the expected value of a bad d8 is -4/8 and of a bad d12 is -9/12.

Now, I don't have the rules so I could be misreading TheFlatline. But I think you are.

[TheFlatline]

Jadagul is right, the good dice have 1 success face more than the difficulty dice have 1 penalty. Apologies, it's difficult to describe without just posting the chart, but because the chart uses special symbols, it's useless without translation.

But it doesn't matter quite so much because 1 difficulty die has a 1 in 8 chance of *always* canceling out anything a good die can generate (two failures) and a 2 in 8 chance of canceling out a single success.

Well, at least now I understand why dice mechanics take up 30 pages of text.

[TheFlatline]

Chapter 2: Chargen

This is going to be a quicker review, since I'm actually prepping for a game Tuesday. I might include GM thoughts as I go along too if anything like that matters.

Okay so... Chargen.

This starts out as pretty normal stuff. Compe up with a concept and background before you gen your character. They give some basic examples of why you'd end up on the fringes of society as a lower middle, and upper class Star Wars citizen, which is pretty cool. They also give you some ideas on what actually pulled you into the underworld. It's only a few paragraphs, but it's enough to get you thinking.

Next up is the big chapter on Obligation. You either pick some obligation your character has or roll for it on a chart. There are 12 obligations, plus the "roll twice, keep em both" result. Some of them are interesting, like Addiction, obsession, and blackmail, some of them are what you'd expect, like criminal or bounty, and a weird number of "noble" relations back to the underworld, like Dutybound, Oath, and Responsibility. Not exactly things you'd associate with criminals. And this literally is your overwhelming connection to the underworld, the thing that, as Michael Corleone would say "every time I try to get out, they pull me back in!".

Then there's a chart showing what your starting obligation is supposed to be- it's based on how many players are in your group. 2 nets you 20 points of obligation per player, and it's generally aimed at being around 40 points of starting obligation. The problem? Adding players after you start. There is literally no rule to do this. They don't address it at all in this chapter. And your total obligation *does* matter, so this is a rule worth discussing.

You can also take 5 or 10 more points of obligation for extra starting XP for chargen, or extra credits (everyone took extra credits in my test game since you don't have enough for a blaster otherwise). It's repeatedly stated that obligation has no market value, so 5 points of obligation may be worth 1000 credits at chargen, but 10,000 during gameplay if that fits the GM's MTP whims. On one hand it's nice to have an "alternate" form of payment, but the MTP aspect sucks.

Anyway once everyone has obligation, the GM makes a chart of his own. So if there are 4 people playing, you set up 1-10 for player A's obligation, 11-20 for player B's obligation, etc etc... At the beginning of each session, you roll percentile to see if someone's obligation pops. If it does, they lose 2 mental hitpoints and everyone else loses 1. If it's doubles, double the penalty as the strain is really impacting everyone. Note though that at no time does the book say "the obligation must be dealt with this session", it's again up to the GM's whim. If there's no tangible requirements, it's just the PC worrying about where he's going to get his next fix and pissing off the rest of the party. Joy eh?

So the higher your obligation the more involved with the underworld, and the more headaches it causes. I guess a Hutt crimelord has splitting migraines from all his connections right?

If Obligation ever hits 100 or higher, the party is too stressed out by obligations- meaning you roll anyway as normal, but until you reduce obligation back under 100 nobody in the party can even spend experience.

And reducing Obligation? MTP all the way- either through roleplaying or through spending money flat out to make the problem go away. There's no rules there other than "GM's fiat", so a particularly sadistic GM is going to make this a pain in the ass.

Species

Now that you have an obligation, you have to pick a species. Each species has base stats of 1-3 in each attribute, a fist full of starting xp to spend, and some species bonuses. The problem here is that species starting stats basically funnel you into what kind of character you're going to be. It's way too expensive to play a really beefed up bothan for example- you're going to be playing a cunning one regardless.

You also have droids. Which along with humans are the blank canvas species. Droids have stats that all start at 1, but have the highest xp amount to spend (175). As if that weren't enough, they shit rank 1 skills. They get 50% more skills than any other starting character for free. Apparently in a universe of hyper-specialized intelligent robots, droid PCs are generalists. They never need to sleep, eat, or breathe. They heal on their own like humans "because reasons" but can't use a bacta tank or medicine (mechanics works like medicine though) and are immune to any mind-based force powers but can never be force users themselves.

In other words, they're pretty fucking powerful starting characters.

Other than that you have the sneaky/cunning Bothans (many of whom died to bring us this information), Gands who are a bi-species race that may or may not breathe, humans which are just gimped droids (seriously, their stats all start at 2, they get 110 xp to spend, which is less than a droid who raises all his stats to 2 has left over, and they get two bonus non-career skills at rank 1. And that's it. Aside from in-game racism, there's NO reason to play a human at all.), Rodians who get free survival and are naturally agile, Trandoshans who are strong and slow and regenerate and have natural weapons, Twi'leks who are the rogues/conmen of the game, and of course... Wookies who beat shit up, shit HP, and can go into a rage to inflict even MORE damage.

Overall, unless you want to be a hyper specialist, you're picking droid. The mechanical benefits of crapping out skills and the extra XP that you get to buff your character exactly how you want to basically makes it the most appealing choice in the game.

Next up you choose a career and specialization- A career is a major role- Bounty Hunter, Merc, Colonist, etc... Specilization is the talent tree within your career- Heavy weapons vs melee for the merc, tracking vs gadgets for the bounty hunter, etc... Each career has 3 or 4 talent trees. Buying additional talent trees within your career is cheaper than going to out of career talent trees, but you can buy any talent tree you wish once the game has started. Each career and specilization also has a list of skills that are considered class skills. Cheaper, easier to buy and so on.

There's a page on figuring out your role in the party, which is kind of nice, not many games bother with unit cohesion in any real way.

Then come the careers and specializations. I won't list the specialization trees because there's like 20 entries per and frankly I haven't gone through all of them yet.

Bounty Hunter- Career skills favor survival, travel, and combat. Specializations include Assassin, Gadgeteer, and Survivalist.

Colonist: Lots of knowledge and charisma stuff for career skills. Talent trees include Doctor, Politico, and Scholar.

Explorer: Survival and knowledge skills here. Talent trees include Fringer, who is a mix between a pilot and a negotiator, the Scout- excelling in planetary navigation and survival, and trader, who is a weird mix of face and some piloting

Hired Gun: pew pew pew skills. Talent Trees include the body guard who is an all around combat specialist with emphasis on defense, the Marauder who is a melee expert, and the Merc who is a ranged/leadership specialist.

Smuggler: Kind of a jack of all trades as far as career skills. Talent trees: Smuggler, Pilot, and Thief. Smugglers are faces, pilots are... well... pilots, and thiefs are hackers and cat burglars.

Technician: Mental and knowledge are the primary skills for this career. Talent trees include mechanic, outlaw tech (the guy who mods all your stuff), and slicer (hacker).

Talent trees have a lot of cross over to allow multiple levels but never have anything mind-blowing for abilities. For example, a top-tier ability for the Mechanic talent tree is "natural thinker". Once per session you may re-roll any 1 mechanics check.

That's some exciting shit!

And really that's my biggest complaint here. While all these talents are useful, none of them have a "cool factor" to them. That's all saved for force users. And it sucks.


Invest Experience Points

So now you have a talent tree and a species, starting stats, and some starting skills. Now it's time to point build!

You can buy skills, talents, or new talent trees, but really you'll want to spend xp on characteristics. See, there are some talents that let you buff an attribute, but spending XP won't let you ever up those attributes except at chargen. So really, you'll want to spend most of your XP on attributes right now. And they're expensive. Attributes are new rating x 10- so to go from 3 to 4 agility is 40 xp. Fortunately, attribute cap is 5 at chargen, and 6 overall. So while you have some choices to make, you're probably going to be spending your time in attributes.

And since you can't buy skills past rank 2 at character gen, you've probably gotten the skills you want for free as part of your career and talent tree. So really, why buy stuff now that you can quickly buy in-game?

After that are derived attributes: Your hit points (wound threshold) is some number plus brawl, the number depending on your species. Strain is some species related number plus willpower, defense is generally zero without some bonus, and soak is equal to brawn.

HP does not increase with brawn increases after chargen, but soak does. Making Brawn probably the most mechanically important attribute in the game. Surprise surprise.

Finally there's a motivation section where you can roll your motivation up if you really need to. Strangely enough, where obligation doesn't have to come into gameplay unless the GM is feeling evil, the GM is encouraged to bring motivation hooks into gameplay. Kind of weird but whatever.

After all that, you're given 500 credits, which isn't enough to do much of anything, and you're sent off to the equipment chapter. It's not much, and most people pick up obligation here to gain an extra 1000 credits or so.

Once everyone's done with their character (there's actually a section on personality and physical description, but it's standard boilerplate), your party gets to pick a ship. There are 3 default ships: The tramp freighter, the firespray system patrol craft to go pew pew pew, and the YT-1300 which is a balance between the two. Alternately, you're welcome to any ship that costs 120,000 credits or less.

Now, you probably owe money on this ship, but you start out with it.

Overall thoughts? Underwhelmed. The species selection is okay, aside from my issues with droids. In the beta the droids didn't get nearly as many buffs and was generally regarded as the shittiest race, and now they shit skills and XP, making them the blank slate that the humans were intended to be.

Careers are okay but unexciting, and the talent trees never do anything *really* cool. They're useful and you'll invest in them to be sure, but there's no real flash to any of your characters.

Obligation is a cool idea but just doesn't have enough mechanics behind it to make it interesting. Maybe the GM section expands on this, and it needs to, because it's an endless source of gaming sessions whenever it comes up, and provides plot cohesion for the group.

Generally, at this point, reading this makes me want to play traveler more. It's an easier system, includes a lifepath character gen system that helps create backgrounds, and is also missing all of the sexy over the top abilities other games have, but has a really, really solid trading ruleset to go with it.

While Han Solo is probably my favorite Star Wars character, I can't help but be underwhelmed at his level of gameplay so far.

Next up is skills, which should be brief, talents, which will be briefer, and equipment, which merits some commentary.

[name_here]

Wait a second, one of the starting ships is a Firespray? As in, Fett's ship there's explicitly only one of because he blew up all of the others when he stole it?

[Surgo]

I thought it was mentioned that they were solely going by the movies that people care about -- meaning that that rather stupid piece of information is thrown out.

[Chamomile]

At some point between the time when Jango blew up the other prototypes and the Yuuzhan Vong War, Kuat Systems Engineering started producing Firesprays again. They still had all the blueprints and stuff, it just wasn't profitable to make more prototypes after the losses they took when Jango blew up their first batch, but once Jango and Boba Fett conveniently gave them field tests and all kinds of free publicity, they started production again.

The real stupid part of this ship's story is that in the hundred years between the time when they were mass-produced and Delilah Blue's finding one, they somehow became legends. I don't mean in the sense that they were really famous for their capability, I mean that people actually thought they didn't exist.

[Corsair114]

Saaay, do they happen to have specs/info on buying a Skipray Blastboat for gallivanting around the galaxy in?