Yes as a matter of fact they do. It's 150k so it's not a "starting ship", but it's totally doable.Corsair114 wrote:Saaay, do they happen to have specs/info on buying a Skipray Blastboat for gallivanting around the galaxy in?
Initial impressions of Edge of The Empire from FFG
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TheFlatline
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TheFlatline
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Boba Fett's story has gone through so many revisions it's particularly difficult to nail any one story down.name_here wrote: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?
But yes, the Firespray is available as a starting ship.
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Episode Three: Skills and Talents
Let's see if I can last long enough to get through both of these.
We know how skills work mechanically- when you have to do something, you compare your skill related attribute to your skill. The higher of the two is your base "green die" pool. The lower of the two upgrades, on a 1 to 1 basis, the green dice up to yellow dice. Then you assemble your dice pool and roll away. So INT 3 and computers 2 results in the same pool as Computers 3 INT 2.
Max ranks in a skill is 5 apparently, and max attributes are 6. So a maxed out character will roll 1 green die and 5 yellow dice.
You get a couple of skills in your career (the rest are classed skills so you buy them cheaper), one in your specialization, and most species give you racial skills for free because fucking racial stereotypes ROCK in Star Wars (oddly enough justifying the racism of the Empire, but that's an argument for a different day).
Note that this apparently is the big boost for droids- they get 4 of the 8 career skills at level 1 for free, and 2 of the 4 specialization skills for free. Apparently droids are jacks of all trades instead of hyper specialized robots that only do a handful of jobs. I've harped on droids too much, but yeah... you get my point.
You have a total of 33 skills- 2 of those are variants of piloting, three are variants of shooting shit. Your two "initiative" skills are "Cool" and "Vigilance" most often. There are six knowledge skills, so aside from piloting, shooting, and knowledges, and combat skills like brawl and melee, there are actually only like 18 skills. None of them are particularly interesting... And the relevant skills are generally attached to agility and intellect. The rest of the stats are kind of scattered among the other skills with 3 or 4 each. It's a definite bit of lopsidedness.
Here comes my huge, almost game-breaking bitch about skills. Remember how there's boons and banes that you can roll in addition to success and failure?
Well, each description of each skill not only tells you how to use it (specifically, difficulties to use the skills in their most common format), but they include several paragraphs on what boons and banes can do. And it's unique for every. single. skill. in. the. game. So essentially you have 20 different unique snowflake scenarios that you can spend advantages on.
This is shit. This isn't even good shit. It's bad shit. It's shit that has been re-shit out already. There is no chart, there is no reference, there is only zuul text. You can kind of half-ass guess what each advantage, or combination of advantages, can result in, but basically this is brute memorization of extremely systems with sometimes significantly varying rules. Sometimes advantage just makes a skill work better. Other times it adds dice to the next dice pool roll. How do you know? You fucking memorize. Or flip pages *constantly*.
I can already tell this is going to be one of those houserules by habit- nobody is going to fucking remember all the fringes of their skills.
Talents
There's a shit load of unique talents. Over a hundred. So it's going to be hard to get detailed. They're separated out into active and passive talents. Passive talents are just that- modifiers that are always on. Active ones require some kind of action, either free (called incidental), move action (maneuver), or a "full" action (Action). A lot of these talents are ranked as well, so as you spend XP you go up in ranks and get bigger bonuses. Also, named talents stack between talent trees, so you're encouraged to pick up other talent trees. Talents are also how you pick up active defenses like dodge or parry (no I'm not kidding), and they are also the only way you get to upgrade your attributes after the start of the game, and generally cost a *lot* of XP.
A lot of talents cost strain, which is basically mental HP. Dodge, for example, lets you take X number of strain and then upgrade that many difficulty dice to uber red dice, not to be exceeded by the ranks of dodge.
Strain recovers fairly quickly, but not quickly enough to be a limitless resource Some force powers help recover strain quickly, others burn strain as well. Strain is basically stun damage AND your mana pool.
Again, while most of these see direct uses, the biggest abilities at the highest tiers allow you to do stuff like reroll a skill once per session and stuff like that. Definitely on the lower end of the power scale.
Equipment
We launch straight into buying and selling and rarity at the beginning of the equipment section. Streetwise sets up an illegal barter, negotiation then kicks in for legal or illegal goods. Base cost on a successful negotiation is 1/4 the book price. Two successes is 1/2, three or more is 3/4 book price. This *can* be modified by how rare the item is potentially, especially on the black market.
The game also immediately reminds GMs and players alike that there are two motivations in the game: Credits and Obligation, and to fuck your players over and be stingy whenever you can. Pay in parts, or obligation, and don't go overboard on the credits. Go authors.
Encumbrance comes next, and the first rule is "don't fucking sweat over it too much". Which is nice. If you have to use encumbrance, it's 5 plus brawl, and each item has it's own rating. If you' exceed that limit, you get a black situational penalty die to all agility and brawl rolls for every point over the threshold you are. If you exceed the threshold by your brawn, you no longer get a free maneuver each turn- it costs you strain. So Luke with a brawn of 2 has an encumbrance of 7, and loses his free maneuver at 9.
Hiding stuff is not bad either. It's an opposed perception roll. For every point of encumbrance above 1, the searcher gets a blue bonus situational die. Kind of cool.
Next up is item qualities. There are active and passive abilities. Active ones usually cost advantages to turn on, passive always works. Not all qualities are good, but if you've played through Dark Heresy you're familiar with most of the weapon/item qualities out there, plus a few others like sunder (lightsabers routinely chop weapons into unusable bits- armor too) and pierce, which finally is an ability that lets you bypass natural soak, so you stand a chance of actually hurting the wookie wearing armor.
Weapons have a damage base and also have a crit rating. This is how many advantages you have to spend to crit. Rolling a triumph on the yellow die is an auto-crit though. Each weapon and many items also have hardpoints that let you install modifications on to the item.
Ammo is almost never tracked unless specially noted. Blaster packs are good for 100 shots or so usually, so keeping track of ammo is painful. Except- The GM can spend a despair on the uber-bad to make a character run out of ammo. If he doesn't have a spare ammo pack on his person, the weapon is useless until the end of the encounter. So yeah. Dramatic reloads. Although that fits.
So let's talk lightsabers, because many people are curious about this.
First, how much damage does it to? Base is 10. Is that a lot? Well... sort of. A light blaster deals 5 damage, a blaster rifle deals 9. So on the surface it doesn't seem like that much. Except... well... the crit rating of the Lightsaber is 1- the lowest in the game. For comparison, a blaster rifle's crit rating is 3. Meaning if you hit, you will almost always critical hit since it only costs one single advantage to crit. It also burns through 1 point of armor, destroys weapons and armor with it's sunder capability, and adds +20 onto the critical hit roll, making it more lethal than a normal crit. So you're going to be burning limbs off quite a bit if you're skilled with a lightsaber.
Except there is no lightsaber combat skill. By intention. They grudgingly say the GM *may* make one for you as a custom skill if you beg, but otherwise you'll always be using it unskilled. Even then, it's one hell of a nasty weapon. It also has the highest rarity level (10), and is restricted, and has a base cost of 10,000 credits. By the time you're done factoring in black market and rarity multipliers, you could easily buy a starfighter for the cost of a lightsaber.
Otherwise melee weapons deal brawn plus some amount of damage, and there's a bunch of blasters, a couple slugthrowers, and some exotic weapons like grenades, missiles, and thermal detonators.
For armor, all armor introduces soak points and defense (black) dice depending on the armor. Heavy Battle Armor is probably your best bet, with 1 defense and 2 soak, but it's rare and almost as expensive as a lightsaber. Storm Trooper armor has good defense but no soak, explaining why they're one hit wonders. Each armor has encumbrance and hard points for modification. No one armor really provides the "best" protection, you have to opt for either soak or defense or some middling middle ground. Even then, armor is fairly expensive.
There's actually a lot of cool toys in the gear section, and includes the rules for cybernetics. You can replace your limbs for +1 brawn or +1 agility (it's worded that legs come in a pair and only provide +1 overall, but that arms could provide up to +2, which seems... odd... and open to gaming). There's also the brain implant, armor implant, eye emplant (rather useful, it gives +1 vigilance AND perception), an immunity implant, and a few other cybernetics. Nothing on par with Shadowrun, but still, not a bad pick.
Gear is as you'd expect from Star Wars. Lots of gadgets and doodads. They do have restraining bolts though. It doesn't say how easy it is to affix to a droid (I quote: "A few seconds and a spot welder") so I guess that you can't slap one on in combat. IT does say that NPC droids auto-obey restraining bolts, but that PCs can make a 4 die discipline check to try to resist a restraining bolt. So there's that. I guess PC droids are fundamentally different than NPC droids.
Equipment also includes poisons and black market items, like Spice, drugs, and outlaw tech. It's appreciated.
Next up is weapons modifications. Each mod requires so many hardpoints off of the item, and has an associated cost. They can enhance damage, add item qualities, or do things like auto-cock wookie bowcasters. Armor can also be modified.
I anticipate many, many upgrade options in splat books in the future. They provide a way for characters to customize their gear, and thus themselves, to give themselves more of an identity.
So that does it for Gear. We're about halfway through the book now. Next up is Conflict & Combat, followed by starship rules, which are fairly complicated.
Let's see if I can last long enough to get through both of these.
We know how skills work mechanically- when you have to do something, you compare your skill related attribute to your skill. The higher of the two is your base "green die" pool. The lower of the two upgrades, on a 1 to 1 basis, the green dice up to yellow dice. Then you assemble your dice pool and roll away. So INT 3 and computers 2 results in the same pool as Computers 3 INT 2.
Max ranks in a skill is 5 apparently, and max attributes are 6. So a maxed out character will roll 1 green die and 5 yellow dice.
You get a couple of skills in your career (the rest are classed skills so you buy them cheaper), one in your specialization, and most species give you racial skills for free because fucking racial stereotypes ROCK in Star Wars (oddly enough justifying the racism of the Empire, but that's an argument for a different day).
Note that this apparently is the big boost for droids- they get 4 of the 8 career skills at level 1 for free, and 2 of the 4 specialization skills for free. Apparently droids are jacks of all trades instead of hyper specialized robots that only do a handful of jobs. I've harped on droids too much, but yeah... you get my point.
You have a total of 33 skills- 2 of those are variants of piloting, three are variants of shooting shit. Your two "initiative" skills are "Cool" and "Vigilance" most often. There are six knowledge skills, so aside from piloting, shooting, and knowledges, and combat skills like brawl and melee, there are actually only like 18 skills. None of them are particularly interesting... And the relevant skills are generally attached to agility and intellect. The rest of the stats are kind of scattered among the other skills with 3 or 4 each. It's a definite bit of lopsidedness.
Here comes my huge, almost game-breaking bitch about skills. Remember how there's boons and banes that you can roll in addition to success and failure?
Well, each description of each skill not only tells you how to use it (specifically, difficulties to use the skills in their most common format), but they include several paragraphs on what boons and banes can do. And it's unique for every. single. skill. in. the. game. So essentially you have 20 different unique snowflake scenarios that you can spend advantages on.
This is shit. This isn't even good shit. It's bad shit. It's shit that has been re-shit out already. There is no chart, there is no reference, there is only zuul text. You can kind of half-ass guess what each advantage, or combination of advantages, can result in, but basically this is brute memorization of extremely systems with sometimes significantly varying rules. Sometimes advantage just makes a skill work better. Other times it adds dice to the next dice pool roll. How do you know? You fucking memorize. Or flip pages *constantly*.
I can already tell this is going to be one of those houserules by habit- nobody is going to fucking remember all the fringes of their skills.
Talents
There's a shit load of unique talents. Over a hundred. So it's going to be hard to get detailed. They're separated out into active and passive talents. Passive talents are just that- modifiers that are always on. Active ones require some kind of action, either free (called incidental), move action (maneuver), or a "full" action (Action). A lot of these talents are ranked as well, so as you spend XP you go up in ranks and get bigger bonuses. Also, named talents stack between talent trees, so you're encouraged to pick up other talent trees. Talents are also how you pick up active defenses like dodge or parry (no I'm not kidding), and they are also the only way you get to upgrade your attributes after the start of the game, and generally cost a *lot* of XP.
A lot of talents cost strain, which is basically mental HP. Dodge, for example, lets you take X number of strain and then upgrade that many difficulty dice to uber red dice, not to be exceeded by the ranks of dodge.
Strain recovers fairly quickly, but not quickly enough to be a limitless resource Some force powers help recover strain quickly, others burn strain as well. Strain is basically stun damage AND your mana pool.
Again, while most of these see direct uses, the biggest abilities at the highest tiers allow you to do stuff like reroll a skill once per session and stuff like that. Definitely on the lower end of the power scale.
Equipment
We launch straight into buying and selling and rarity at the beginning of the equipment section. Streetwise sets up an illegal barter, negotiation then kicks in for legal or illegal goods. Base cost on a successful negotiation is 1/4 the book price. Two successes is 1/2, three or more is 3/4 book price. This *can* be modified by how rare the item is potentially, especially on the black market.
The game also immediately reminds GMs and players alike that there are two motivations in the game: Credits and Obligation, and to fuck your players over and be stingy whenever you can. Pay in parts, or obligation, and don't go overboard on the credits. Go authors.
Encumbrance comes next, and the first rule is "don't fucking sweat over it too much". Which is nice. If you have to use encumbrance, it's 5 plus brawl, and each item has it's own rating. If you' exceed that limit, you get a black situational penalty die to all agility and brawl rolls for every point over the threshold you are. If you exceed the threshold by your brawn, you no longer get a free maneuver each turn- it costs you strain. So Luke with a brawn of 2 has an encumbrance of 7, and loses his free maneuver at 9.
Hiding stuff is not bad either. It's an opposed perception roll. For every point of encumbrance above 1, the searcher gets a blue bonus situational die. Kind of cool.
Next up is item qualities. There are active and passive abilities. Active ones usually cost advantages to turn on, passive always works. Not all qualities are good, but if you've played through Dark Heresy you're familiar with most of the weapon/item qualities out there, plus a few others like sunder (lightsabers routinely chop weapons into unusable bits- armor too) and pierce, which finally is an ability that lets you bypass natural soak, so you stand a chance of actually hurting the wookie wearing armor.
Weapons have a damage base and also have a crit rating. This is how many advantages you have to spend to crit. Rolling a triumph on the yellow die is an auto-crit though. Each weapon and many items also have hardpoints that let you install modifications on to the item.
Ammo is almost never tracked unless specially noted. Blaster packs are good for 100 shots or so usually, so keeping track of ammo is painful. Except- The GM can spend a despair on the uber-bad to make a character run out of ammo. If he doesn't have a spare ammo pack on his person, the weapon is useless until the end of the encounter. So yeah. Dramatic reloads. Although that fits.
So let's talk lightsabers, because many people are curious about this.
First, how much damage does it to? Base is 10. Is that a lot? Well... sort of. A light blaster deals 5 damage, a blaster rifle deals 9. So on the surface it doesn't seem like that much. Except... well... the crit rating of the Lightsaber is 1- the lowest in the game. For comparison, a blaster rifle's crit rating is 3. Meaning if you hit, you will almost always critical hit since it only costs one single advantage to crit. It also burns through 1 point of armor, destroys weapons and armor with it's sunder capability, and adds +20 onto the critical hit roll, making it more lethal than a normal crit. So you're going to be burning limbs off quite a bit if you're skilled with a lightsaber.
Except there is no lightsaber combat skill. By intention. They grudgingly say the GM *may* make one for you as a custom skill if you beg, but otherwise you'll always be using it unskilled. Even then, it's one hell of a nasty weapon. It also has the highest rarity level (10), and is restricted, and has a base cost of 10,000 credits. By the time you're done factoring in black market and rarity multipliers, you could easily buy a starfighter for the cost of a lightsaber.
Otherwise melee weapons deal brawn plus some amount of damage, and there's a bunch of blasters, a couple slugthrowers, and some exotic weapons like grenades, missiles, and thermal detonators.
For armor, all armor introduces soak points and defense (black) dice depending on the armor. Heavy Battle Armor is probably your best bet, with 1 defense and 2 soak, but it's rare and almost as expensive as a lightsaber. Storm Trooper armor has good defense but no soak, explaining why they're one hit wonders. Each armor has encumbrance and hard points for modification. No one armor really provides the "best" protection, you have to opt for either soak or defense or some middling middle ground. Even then, armor is fairly expensive.
There's actually a lot of cool toys in the gear section, and includes the rules for cybernetics. You can replace your limbs for +1 brawn or +1 agility (it's worded that legs come in a pair and only provide +1 overall, but that arms could provide up to +2, which seems... odd... and open to gaming). There's also the brain implant, armor implant, eye emplant (rather useful, it gives +1 vigilance AND perception), an immunity implant, and a few other cybernetics. Nothing on par with Shadowrun, but still, not a bad pick.
Gear is as you'd expect from Star Wars. Lots of gadgets and doodads. They do have restraining bolts though. It doesn't say how easy it is to affix to a droid (I quote: "A few seconds and a spot welder") so I guess that you can't slap one on in combat. IT does say that NPC droids auto-obey restraining bolts, but that PCs can make a 4 die discipline check to try to resist a restraining bolt. So there's that. I guess PC droids are fundamentally different than NPC droids.
Equipment also includes poisons and black market items, like Spice, drugs, and outlaw tech. It's appreciated.
Next up is weapons modifications. Each mod requires so many hardpoints off of the item, and has an associated cost. They can enhance damage, add item qualities, or do things like auto-cock wookie bowcasters. Armor can also be modified.
I anticipate many, many upgrade options in splat books in the future. They provide a way for characters to customize their gear, and thus themselves, to give themselves more of an identity.
So that does it for Gear. We're about halfway through the book now. Next up is Conflict & Combat, followed by starship rules, which are fairly complicated.
That's my favorite ship too. Congratulation on your good taste fellow handsome genius.Corsair114 wrote:Saaay, do they happen to have specs/info on buying a Skipray Blastboat for gallivanting around the galaxy in?
DSMatticus wrote:Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. I am filled with an unfathomable hatred.
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Corsair114
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It's hard not to appreciate such a versatile platform. First encountered it in the first EGtV&V, and it's been a fave ever since.deanruel87 wrote:That's my favorite ship too. Congratulation on your good taste fellow handsome genius.Corsair114 wrote:Saaay, do they happen to have specs/info on buying a Skipray Blastboat for gallivanting around the galaxy in?
On the topic of the Lightsaber and using it unskilled, what are the penalties to doing so? That is, aside from if you're skilled you have a higher hit rate and do more damage.
The rules are the game, without them you're just playing cowboys and indians with a side of craps.
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TheFlatline
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There is no inherent penalty that I've seen so far. So you could be fairly proficient with it. Force powers though buff your defense and offense in EotE alone, and I'm assuming in the jedi book you'll have all kinds of powers that let you kick ass with the lightsaber.Corsair114 wrote:It's hard not to appreciate such a versatile platform. First encountered it in the first EGtV&V, and it's been a fave ever since.deanruel87 wrote:That's my favorite ship too. Congratulation on your good taste fellow handsome genius.Corsair114 wrote:Saaay, do they happen to have specs/info on buying a Skipray Blastboat for gallivanting around the galaxy in?
On the topic of the Lightsaber and using it unskilled, what are the penalties to doing so? That is, aside from if you're skilled you have a higher hit rate and do more damage.
However, your average schmoe could, in theory, use it to slice open a tauntaun or cut through a door or even slice a bitch. As a GM I might feel like throwing in some penalty dice, and on a critical fumble I'd say you were in danger of doing something really, really bad to yourself. I have to re-read the rules to make sure there isn't anything like that in the rules already.
That being said, the lightsaber, while associated with force users, isn't necessarily a force-centric weapon like it was in WEG where you used your force powers to buff attack and damage. Instead, your force awareness lets you use the saber more efficiently. It's still a fucking deadly weapon though.
The gist of it I suspect is the notion that Luke had zero ranks in lightsabers at least until he hit Dagobah, and even then Yoda didn't teach him any combat that we saw. So maybe, maybe he had lightsaber 1 (but probably zero) when he went to Bespin- but he was a damn good pilot so he probably had like agility 3 or 4. Meanwhile, Vader is a robotic cripple with an agility of probably 1, maybe 2, but easily has lightsabers of 4 or so I'd say (Yoda, Mace, and arguably Obi Wan were better swordsmen, though Anakin was stronger in the force). It's not until Jedi that Luke hits probably Lightsaber 2 and is actually a match for Vader statistically.
It's actually one of the few times that I look at the clusterfuck of a system and it actually mirrors and kind of makes sense what happens in the movies.
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TheFlatline
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Holy christ I just ran one of *the* most railroad-esque adventures I've ever seen.
I like running published adventures when I start playing a new system because I want to see the system work before I write for it. So for Edge of the Empire, I went with the system published in the DM screen booklet. It was this weird mashup of spooky atmosphere and goofy droid communism revolution.
But it had zero room for player creativity or going off the rails. No debugging, no room for variation. And the worst part? It was front-loaded with a shitload of empty rooms players went through. So about 45 minutes in my players had checked out mentally. Thankfully at that point they went totally off the rails of the game and I started having to make change-ups, which quickly brought the interest level back up to a buzzing level. The ending turned out completely different from the written adventure (in fact, they ended up cutting out about a third of the adventure by doing things weird and out of order), and ending up on a huge pile of credits. I dialed things back by the end in-character, but they still are sitting on a huge pile of credits, after stressing repeatedly how important it was to never dish out a lot of credits or obligation reduction, and this intro adventure does both.
*apply head repeatedly to wall*
On the up shot, the story that I have in mind won't suffer from them having a big nest egg.
So having run 2 sessions, I can safely say the following:
The dice pools are deceptive, since there's nearly a 1-in-2 chance of you *not* generating a success on the positive dice. The dice pool results were insanely swingy. There was no perceived trend like I used to have in Warhammer 3rd about expected success/failure. Instead, you tended to get either net of nothing (one success, two failures, an advantage and two disadvantages let's say) or severe outlier results (5 successes, which is way more desirable than 1 success and 4 advantages most of the time).
The number of things you could spend advantages on were so numerous that I basically had to offer options at the end of each dice roll, or GM fiat, both of which blow.
Combat moves moderately fast due to range abstractions and a lack of things to really do. Talents give you active skill options, but generally speaking, you maneuver and shoot, or double maneuver, or maneuver, spend strain to maneuver a second time, and then shoot. Also, without square/hex counting and dealing with terrain in in-depth manner, while you *can* describe things cinematically there's little point.
We had 4 players tonight, and among all 4, not one of them had computers as a classed skill. And that was probably the single most important non-combat skill of the game. So it's *really* easy for starting parties to be lopsided. The multiclassing rules help that somewhat by being easy to multiclass, but sheesh...
It took 2 sessions for players to figure out WTF was going on with dice pool construction. Not too bad I guess, but still a pain in the ass. They got caught up on the upgrade dice thing. They'd take like 2 green and then try to add a yellow die, instead of upgrading one of the 2 green to a yellow.
However, 2 sessions and I still have to figure out dice pool results for some folks. They're starting to get the symbols, but they forget successes and failures cancel each other out, and advantages and disadvantages do the same. It doesn't help that the more interesting symbols are for advantages and disadvantages and get confused for successes.
Also, the situational boon/bane dice suck. There's a 1 in three chance of success or failure respectively, and a 1 in 2 chance of advantage/disadvantage, and blank sides. They didn't shift the balance that much.
Overall the game was a decent training session. We'll see how it rolls when I run a real game and a real story and start pushing the system to it's limits.
I like running published adventures when I start playing a new system because I want to see the system work before I write for it. So for Edge of the Empire, I went with the system published in the DM screen booklet. It was this weird mashup of spooky atmosphere and goofy droid communism revolution.
But it had zero room for player creativity or going off the rails. No debugging, no room for variation. And the worst part? It was front-loaded with a shitload of empty rooms players went through. So about 45 minutes in my players had checked out mentally. Thankfully at that point they went totally off the rails of the game and I started having to make change-ups, which quickly brought the interest level back up to a buzzing level. The ending turned out completely different from the written adventure (in fact, they ended up cutting out about a third of the adventure by doing things weird and out of order), and ending up on a huge pile of credits. I dialed things back by the end in-character, but they still are sitting on a huge pile of credits, after stressing repeatedly how important it was to never dish out a lot of credits or obligation reduction, and this intro adventure does both.
*apply head repeatedly to wall*
On the up shot, the story that I have in mind won't suffer from them having a big nest egg.
So having run 2 sessions, I can safely say the following:
The dice pools are deceptive, since there's nearly a 1-in-2 chance of you *not* generating a success on the positive dice. The dice pool results were insanely swingy. There was no perceived trend like I used to have in Warhammer 3rd about expected success/failure. Instead, you tended to get either net of nothing (one success, two failures, an advantage and two disadvantages let's say) or severe outlier results (5 successes, which is way more desirable than 1 success and 4 advantages most of the time).
The number of things you could spend advantages on were so numerous that I basically had to offer options at the end of each dice roll, or GM fiat, both of which blow.
Combat moves moderately fast due to range abstractions and a lack of things to really do. Talents give you active skill options, but generally speaking, you maneuver and shoot, or double maneuver, or maneuver, spend strain to maneuver a second time, and then shoot. Also, without square/hex counting and dealing with terrain in in-depth manner, while you *can* describe things cinematically there's little point.
We had 4 players tonight, and among all 4, not one of them had computers as a classed skill. And that was probably the single most important non-combat skill of the game. So it's *really* easy for starting parties to be lopsided. The multiclassing rules help that somewhat by being easy to multiclass, but sheesh...
It took 2 sessions for players to figure out WTF was going on with dice pool construction. Not too bad I guess, but still a pain in the ass. They got caught up on the upgrade dice thing. They'd take like 2 green and then try to add a yellow die, instead of upgrading one of the 2 green to a yellow.
However, 2 sessions and I still have to figure out dice pool results for some folks. They're starting to get the symbols, but they forget successes and failures cancel each other out, and advantages and disadvantages do the same. It doesn't help that the more interesting symbols are for advantages and disadvantages and get confused for successes.
Also, the situational boon/bane dice suck. There's a 1 in three chance of success or failure respectively, and a 1 in 2 chance of advantage/disadvantage, and blank sides. They didn't shift the balance that much.
Overall the game was a decent training session. We'll see how it rolls when I run a real game and a real story and start pushing the system to it's limits.
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TheFlatline
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I'd say it's kind of a wash. WEG's Star Was contributed to a lot of pseudo-canon and thus has a huge history (a lot of which you could rip off and use in FFG's version).ckafrica wrote:So any reason not to just dust off my SWRPG d6 books instead of buying this thing to play a star wars game?
However I was always highly annoyed with the force rules. Yeah you had to spend massive amounts of xp on force abilities, but there was a force skill that fucking upped your lightsaber damage.
In fact, I kind of hate the system as is in hindsight, though I played a LOT of it. If you white-washed everything and revamped the system with, say, Shadowrun's dice pool system you'd have a WAY heavier system that I would say blows Edge of the Empire out of the water.
I hate to use the term "gritty", but this has a "grittier", lower power feeling to Star Wars while still using more modern tropes of RPGs.
And while I"ve yet to type it up, the vehicle rules are uninspired. They try, especially with the additional ship-based maneuvers that you can use, but really, the only RPG to get vehicle rules exciting and "right" is Spycraft so far. I will say that Edge of the Empire's space craft rules play better, if nothing else because everyone gets a ship to begin with, whereas if you managed to get a ship in WEG you were doing well indeed (or were a military character).
Hmm, about the only interesting idea to me here is the concept of Attributes and Skills "overlapping" to create a roll.
Seems to me that compared to a lot of systems that kind of thing POTENTIALLY can help encourage a wider variety of characters with less focus on min-maxing. If say a Strength of 5 and Melee of 5 is not that different from Strength 3, Melee 5, then that's not entirely a bad thing.
Granted, it does work by lowering the value of Attributes if you are skilled.
Hmm, branching off from that gives me some things to ponder for the system I am working on.
That said, the game itself doesn't interest me. Heck, when d20radio has people on their forum talking about how great it is that you can fail on easy stuff even at things you are really, really good at....that makes me a lot less interested. Failure at what should be pretty trivial tasks always makes me feel less invested in a game.
Seems to me that compared to a lot of systems that kind of thing POTENTIALLY can help encourage a wider variety of characters with less focus on min-maxing. If say a Strength of 5 and Melee of 5 is not that different from Strength 3, Melee 5, then that's not entirely a bad thing.
Granted, it does work by lowering the value of Attributes if you are skilled.
Hmm, branching off from that gives me some things to ponder for the system I am working on.
That said, the game itself doesn't interest me. Heck, when d20radio has people on their forum talking about how great it is that you can fail on easy stuff even at things you are really, really good at....that makes me a lot less interested. Failure at what should be pretty trivial tasks always makes me feel less invested in a game.
I look forward to hearing more more of this,seeing what boundaries get pushed here. As also found the note on needing computers skill a useful tip that we put in mind for our group. Should get to playing in a couple weeks or so, and try to share any useful experiences if applicable.TheFlatline wrote:We'll see how it rolls when I run a real game and a real story and start pushing the system to it's limits.
Also, in the interest of having accurate dice probabilities for this system, I suggest Frank & others interested, that they look at the dice system to this game. In helping with that, I found a couple links, one to a chart I hope is accurate (correct me if book shows otherwise).
This should be the Chart for regular Dice to Edge of Empires. As well as a link to better idea of what those Symbols are called, and mean.
Ability Dice (D8's), and Profiency Dice (D12's) are the good dice that you commonly use, with higher of attribute/skill being the D8's, and the lower of attribute/skill translating that many into D12's (So Attribute 4, Skill 2, have Dice Pool of 4 D8's, two of those D8's getting translated into D12's as the skill being the lower of the two). The Difficulty dice is what also commonly comes up and is presenting the challenge to you succeeding on your given roll, with Challenge Dice being rarer, and Boost/setback D6's being the "situational" modifiers essentially.
The Symbols, Success/Failure are obvious, while Advantage in combat is used to activate various abilities from swag, skills?, Talents, and if nothing else, some defined effects on a table. While Threat symbols have pre-defined combat functions to impede the player in some minor way. While usually need 2-3 Advantage for most of the above, only need one Triumph symbol to activate a given ability, with Despair being similar, but for bad stuff I've mostly only seen on some Combat effects table.
Given this game's narrative bent, seems it indicates for degree's of "Bears" like effects, with Despair/Triumph symbols, being reserved for some of most debilitating.
What I find wrong w/ 4th edition: "I want to stab dragons the size of a small keep with skin like supple adamantine and command over time and space to death with my longsword in head to head combat, but I want to be totally within realistic capabilities of a real human being!" --Caedrus mocking 4rries
"the thing about being Mister Cavern [DM], you don't blame players for how they play. That's like blaming the weather. Weather just is. You adapt to it. -Ancient History
"the thing about being Mister Cavern [DM], you don't blame players for how they play. That's like blaming the weather. Weather just is. You adapt to it. -Ancient History
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Avoraciopoctules
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Username17
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So... good dice are better than bad dice, but neither the ratio nor the absolute improvement is remotely the same at the different levell. The good d6 has one more Advantage, the d8 has one less advantage and one more success, and the d12 has one more success. Making the biggest jump... the d8, because you only care about successes vs. failures and an extra success on a d8 is more likely to come up than an extra success on a d12.Aryxbez wrote: Also, in the interest of having accurate dice probabilities for this system, I suggest Frank & others interested, that they look at the dice system to this game. In helping with that, I found a couple links, one to a chart I hope is accurate (correct me if book shows otherwise).
This should be the Chart for regular Dice to Edge of Empires. As well as a link to better idea of what those Symbols are called, and mean.
Ugh. This is fucked up.
Why is this dice pool system so bullshit?
-Username17
FFG has this really weird obsession with custom dice (see Descent) matched only by their obsession with using an entire fucking custom card deck in place of dice.
Neither of which really adds much to their design and in some cases (e.g. Starcraft and Horus Heresy) actually goes a long way to ruining the game.
Neither of which really adds much to their design and in some cases (e.g. Starcraft and Horus Heresy) actually goes a long way to ruining the game.
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TheFlatline
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Well, I guess the intent is to provide you with two pieces of information per roll: success/failure and good/bad luck.FrankTrollman wrote:So... good dice are better than bad dice, but neither the ratio nor the absolute improvement is remotely the same at the different levell. The good d6 has one more Advantage, the d8 has one less advantage and one more success, and the d12 has one more success. Making the biggest jump... the d8, because you only care about successes vs. failures and an extra success on a d8 is more likely to come up than an extra success on a d12.Aryxbez wrote: Also, in the interest of having accurate dice probabilities for this system, I suggest Frank & others interested, that they look at the dice system to this game. In helping with that, I found a couple links, one to a chart I hope is accurate (correct me if book shows otherwise).
This should be the Chart for regular Dice to Edge of Empires. As well as a link to better idea of what those Symbols are called, and mean.
Ugh. This is fucked up.
Why is this dice pool system so bullshit?
-Username17
Which is totally doable by using standard dice with like painted faces. If the die has a painted face or a different colored number, it's good luck, regardless of the success.
So a D6 would have TN 5
A D8 would have TN 4, with a critical on 8
A D12 would have TN 4, with criticals on 11 & 12, and a "triumph" on 10 which counts as a hit & good luck & a bonus.
But they wanted to incorporate adversary rolls as well, so that for example you don't do a dodge roll- you throw difficulty dice into the dice pool.
This would probably be fine again if the odds balanced out, but they don't- if we have the exact same stats and we do a contested roll/test, the advantage lays with the initiator of the test due to how the die faces are laid out. The difficulty dice would play out like this:
D6- TN 5 (less bad luck than the good D6)
D8- TN 6, crits on 8
D12- TN 5, critical on 11 & 12, "despair" on 10 which is a failure, bad luck, and a bad "bonus"
So luck aside, success and failure don't even have parity, which is where things are weird, and a lot in this game is based on contested rolls, which will inherently favor the initiator if all stats are equal.
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TheFlatline
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Simple reason why is that each set of custom engraved dice run about 12 bucks a set. And generally speaking, even in Descent, you're going to want 2 sets to get any real play, and probably more.Zinegata wrote:FFG has this really weird obsession with custom dice (see Descent) matched only by their obsession with using an entire fucking custom card deck in place of dice.
Neither of which really adds much to their design and in some cases (e.g. Starcraft and Horus Heresy) actually goes a long way to ruining the game.
So even though it uses the polyhedrons we're all used to, it's a way of squeezing more money out of us.
While that may be true for the RPGs, they still employ the stupid custom dice in standalone games. And it still doesn't explain the stupid card-based resolution.TheFlatline wrote:Simple reason why is that each set of custom engraved dice run about 12 bucks a set. And generally speaking, even in Descent, you're going to want 2 sets to get any real play, and probably more.Zinegata wrote:FFG has this really weird obsession with custom dice (see Descent) matched only by their obsession with using an entire fucking custom card deck in place of dice.
Neither of which really adds much to their design and in some cases (e.g. Starcraft and Horus Heresy) actually goes a long way to ruining the game.
So even though it uses the polyhedrons we're all used to, it's a way of squeezing more money out of us.
Really, I suspect that there's just one or two designers in FFG who have a really strong fetish for the thing. Most of their more solid designs (e.g. Erik Lang's Chaos in the Old World) don't use either custom dice or card resolution at all.
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Username17
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Favors the initiator more the more badass the two characters are. Because there's a proportional superiority of the acting die over the reacting die.So luck aside, success and failure don't even have parity, which is where things are weird, and a lot in this game is based on contested rolls, which will inherently favor the initiator if all stats are equal.
-Username17
Okay, so I was bored and decided to write up a monte carlo simulator (in Octave, which is free and open source) to calculate probabilities for these dice. Code in the spoiler:
Incidentally, to back up Frank's point, if you're rolling one good and one bad d8, you have about a 34% chance of success. Two and two, it's 43%; three and three, it's 47%, four and four, it's 50%; and five and five, it's 52%.
If you do the same calculation with all d12s, you get (about) 34%, 42%, 44%, 47%, 48%.
This code defines a function that takes four variables: the number of "good" d8s, the number of "good" d12s, the number of "bad" d8s, and the number of "bad" d12s. It outputs three things: the chance (out of a thousand) that you'll get at least as many successes as failures; the chance (out of a thousand) that you'll get more successes than failures; and the raw counts of how often you get each total of "successes minus failures," starting from the worst possible result (so the first number in the list is the number of times out of a thousand you'll get no successes on any good dice and two failures on each bad die).
So if you're contemplating a roll that would involve 3 good d8s, one good d12, two bad d8s, and two bad d12s, you'd plug in
and get output something like
which tells you you have about a 45% chance of at least one net success. And that the most likely result is that you get as many successes as failures, which happens about 20% of the time.
(very messily written) Octave code for the program:
So if you're contemplating a roll that would involve 3 good d8s, one good d12, two bad d8s, and two bad d12s, you'd plug in
Code: Select all
oddscalc(3,1,2,2) Code: Select all
nonneg = 649
success = 454
ans =
Columns 1 through 13:
0 0 5 5 25 56 111 148 195 183 137 80 45
Columns 14 through 17:
7 1 1 0
(very messily written) Octave code for the program:
Code: Select all
function [result, nonneg, success] = oddscalc( gd8, gd12, bd8, bd12 )
goodtotal = gd8 + gd12;
badtotal = bd8 + bd12;
rawcount = zeros(1, 2 * (goodtotal + badtotal) + 1 );
i = 1;
while i < 1000
i = i + 1;
gd8roll = unidrnd( 8, 1, gd8 );
gd12roll = unidrnd( 12, 1, gd12 );
bd8roll = unidrnd( 8, 1, bd8 );
bd12roll = unidrnd( 12, 1, bd12 );
total = 0;
if gd8 > 0
for roll = gd8roll,
if roll < 5
value = 0;
elseif roll < 8
value = 1;
else
value = 2;
endif
total = total + value;
end;
endif
if gd12 > 0
for roll = gd12roll,
if roll < 5
value = 0;
elseif roll < 11
value = 1;
else
value = 2;
endif
total = total + value;
end;
endif
if bd8 > 0
for roll = bd8roll,
if roll < 6
value = 0;
elseif roll < 8
value = -1;
else
value = -2;
endif
total = total + value;
end;
endif
if bd12 > 0,
for roll = bd12roll,
if roll < 6
value = 0;
elseif roll < 11
value = -1;
else
value = -2;
endif
total = total + value;
end;
endif
rawcount(total + 2 * badtotal + 1) = rawcount(total + 2 * badtotal + 1) + 1;
endwhile
result = rawcount;
nonnegmatrix = result( 2*badtotal +1: 2*(goodtotal + badtotal) + 1);
nonneg = sum( nonnegmatrix)
posmatrix = result(2*badtotal +2: 2 * (goodtotal + badtotal) +1);
success = sum(posmatrix)
endfunction
If you do the same calculation with all d12s, you get (about) 34%, 42%, 44%, 47%, 48%.
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TheFlatline
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So... We finally started tonight on a MC generated mission.
Really easy stuff. The PCs are hired to hijack a cargo container, load all the cargo into their freighter, and then run a blockade to a planet and deliver the cargo at a vastly inflated price.
Rules wise this should be a milk run. I plotted in some space combat and figured that'd be good.
First, one quick space skirmish took like 2 hours to complete. It took forever, and almost nobody actually had anything to do. Two players got to shoot, one player got to angle the deflector shields and try to repair shit, and one person flew. Only the pilot had anything interesting to do.
So let's count the problems here. First, the idea of turrets are pretty cool, but with the YT-1300, you have to worry about which side is up, which means that you have to now worry about 2 more fields of fire. The "abstract" nature of combat in this game completely and utterly breaks down in space because you have firing angles and speeds and shit that you simply don't have on foot, and the stuff has to matter or why bother.
By the end of the night none of us gave a shit about advantages or disadvantages. They give temporary boosts or penalties and that's about it because remembering the list of like 7 different things these goddamn "forward failure" states do is bullshit when you're trying to pay attention to the *game*. In Warhammer you'd roll 2 or 3 of them and could pick between like 4 different effects. Not too bad. Tonight at one point I saw 8 disadvantages roll in a total. I sighed and said "everyone picks you up on their sensors" instead of spending on 4 different effects. Soon enough even that went by the board.
Generally speaking, I'd rather pair the advantages disadvantages down to fulfilling three things: First would be to activate critical hits, which they already do. This is the main reason for them. Second would be to activate weapon qualities, like linked and autofire and shit. I'm fine with that too. Finally, I'd allow you to spend 2 or 3 advantages/disadvantages to give a penalty/boost to someone's roll that turn. And that's it. Fuck all the extra bullshit.
Critical hits are bullshit too- when you crit, you roll a percentile (because fuck unified dice systems that's why) to see what happens. Every time you suffer a further crit you add 10 points to your roll per crit suffered. You only die/blow up when you hit 140 or so. Every hit after you lose your hit points is a crit. I think extra damage advances crits too.
Anyway, that's not the thing that made me throw up my hands, even though it was a lot of fucking work for not much. To me, picking up a container and flying away with it is a "standard" operating procedure. It's so standard it's in every single goddamn TIE fighter or x-wing game, and is even in FFG's miniatures dogfighting rules. But not here. So I had to wing it.
Then, in the middle of a dogfight when things were getting exciting, the PCs wanted to jump to hyperspace. Well... how the fuck long does that take? Some amount of time, but the pilot has a talent that reduces the astrogation check time by 50%.
And that's when it hit me. There's no time frame for any of these motherfucking checks. So the time frame modifications are meaningless. Completely meaningless. Same for the hacking checks. How long does it take? 3 seconds? A minute? Who fucking knows. They don't tell you. I guess it's up to you to wing. And how long is combat? Who fucking knows that's left "abstract".
This shit went through a rather vigorous beta and looking at the beta and the published product, this kind of shit is still there.
As far as I'm concerned, I'm fucking done with Edge of the Empire as of tonight. I didn't have fun, half my players didn't have much fun or do anything (the pilot by definition is either going to dominate or have fuck-all to do), the system is clunky, and I found myself thinking repeatedly how much faster this would all go if I were using a dice pool system or even fucking Traveler's 2D6 vs TN7 system. We would have covered twice the game content tonight.
We're taking a week off and then I'm going to ask people if they seriously are engaged in the game or would prefer... something, anything else. I'd rather run nWOD than keep this abortion going.
The thing that pisses me off is that I'm sure a lot of these issues will be ironed out later on in 40 dollar splat books for the pilot and shit. In a year or so. In the meantime it's MTP in a system that is baroque and full of exceptions and little rules on adding dice here and there. The underlying system though is unfun and detracts from the narrative it feels like.
In Warhammer 3rd it actually feels like it fits as part of an overall metagame, that you're actually gaming the system as well as playing the game, and so the extra work has tangible rewards. Here, you just have a muddling mishmash of rules just because.
Maybe I'm just frustrated, but I couldn't concentrate on the story itself, I had to concentrate on all this baroque bullshit mechanics whirling around the story. Even shitty ass systems like Dark Heresy eventually faded into the background enough to get some good gaming done.
Really easy stuff. The PCs are hired to hijack a cargo container, load all the cargo into their freighter, and then run a blockade to a planet and deliver the cargo at a vastly inflated price.
Rules wise this should be a milk run. I plotted in some space combat and figured that'd be good.
First, one quick space skirmish took like 2 hours to complete. It took forever, and almost nobody actually had anything to do. Two players got to shoot, one player got to angle the deflector shields and try to repair shit, and one person flew. Only the pilot had anything interesting to do.
So let's count the problems here. First, the idea of turrets are pretty cool, but with the YT-1300, you have to worry about which side is up, which means that you have to now worry about 2 more fields of fire. The "abstract" nature of combat in this game completely and utterly breaks down in space because you have firing angles and speeds and shit that you simply don't have on foot, and the stuff has to matter or why bother.
By the end of the night none of us gave a shit about advantages or disadvantages. They give temporary boosts or penalties and that's about it because remembering the list of like 7 different things these goddamn "forward failure" states do is bullshit when you're trying to pay attention to the *game*. In Warhammer you'd roll 2 or 3 of them and could pick between like 4 different effects. Not too bad. Tonight at one point I saw 8 disadvantages roll in a total. I sighed and said "everyone picks you up on their sensors" instead of spending on 4 different effects. Soon enough even that went by the board.
Generally speaking, I'd rather pair the advantages disadvantages down to fulfilling three things: First would be to activate critical hits, which they already do. This is the main reason for them. Second would be to activate weapon qualities, like linked and autofire and shit. I'm fine with that too. Finally, I'd allow you to spend 2 or 3 advantages/disadvantages to give a penalty/boost to someone's roll that turn. And that's it. Fuck all the extra bullshit.
Critical hits are bullshit too- when you crit, you roll a percentile (because fuck unified dice systems that's why) to see what happens. Every time you suffer a further crit you add 10 points to your roll per crit suffered. You only die/blow up when you hit 140 or so. Every hit after you lose your hit points is a crit. I think extra damage advances crits too.
Anyway, that's not the thing that made me throw up my hands, even though it was a lot of fucking work for not much. To me, picking up a container and flying away with it is a "standard" operating procedure. It's so standard it's in every single goddamn TIE fighter or x-wing game, and is even in FFG's miniatures dogfighting rules. But not here. So I had to wing it.
Then, in the middle of a dogfight when things were getting exciting, the PCs wanted to jump to hyperspace. Well... how the fuck long does that take? Some amount of time, but the pilot has a talent that reduces the astrogation check time by 50%.
And that's when it hit me. There's no time frame for any of these motherfucking checks. So the time frame modifications are meaningless. Completely meaningless. Same for the hacking checks. How long does it take? 3 seconds? A minute? Who fucking knows. They don't tell you. I guess it's up to you to wing. And how long is combat? Who fucking knows that's left "abstract".
This shit went through a rather vigorous beta and looking at the beta and the published product, this kind of shit is still there.
As far as I'm concerned, I'm fucking done with Edge of the Empire as of tonight. I didn't have fun, half my players didn't have much fun or do anything (the pilot by definition is either going to dominate or have fuck-all to do), the system is clunky, and I found myself thinking repeatedly how much faster this would all go if I were using a dice pool system or even fucking Traveler's 2D6 vs TN7 system. We would have covered twice the game content tonight.
We're taking a week off and then I'm going to ask people if they seriously are engaged in the game or would prefer... something, anything else. I'd rather run nWOD than keep this abortion going.
The thing that pisses me off is that I'm sure a lot of these issues will be ironed out later on in 40 dollar splat books for the pilot and shit. In a year or so. In the meantime it's MTP in a system that is baroque and full of exceptions and little rules on adding dice here and there. The underlying system though is unfun and detracts from the narrative it feels like.
In Warhammer 3rd it actually feels like it fits as part of an overall metagame, that you're actually gaming the system as well as playing the game, and so the extra work has tangible rewards. Here, you just have a muddling mishmash of rules just because.
Maybe I'm just frustrated, but I couldn't concentrate on the story itself, I had to concentrate on all this baroque bullshit mechanics whirling around the story. Even shitty ass systems like Dark Heresy eventually faded into the background enough to get some good gaming done.
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Corsair114
- Master
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I seen the book for this on my last trip to B&N and when I was reaching for it I was suddenly overcome with a great sense of dread and loathing that led me to leave it nestled between a copy of the 3.5 DMG and Dark Heresy. Now I read this example of play and suddenly feel like I avoided a very unpleasant experience.
Thanks for the write-up, Flatline.
Thanks for the write-up, Flatline.
The rules are the game, without them you're just playing cowboys and indians with a side of craps.
It seems to me like FFG can't make decent mechanics to save their life. Like the Dark Heresy series, their books are fun to read, and with a talented DM its fun to play (by talented I mean he handles MTP's well) but its broken (nonfunctional) as hell.
I mean is it that hard to come up with decent mechanics? /rhetorical
I mean is it that hard to come up with decent mechanics? /rhetorical
Interesting. Its the exact "Failing Forward" concept that we´re discussing in the other thread.TheFlatline wrote:Here comes my huge, almost game-breaking bitch about skills. Remember how there's boons and banes that you can roll in addition to success and failure?
Well, each description of each skill not only tells you how to use it (specifically, difficulties to use the skills in their most common format), but they include several paragraphs on what boons and banes can do. And it's unique for every. single. skill. in. the. game. So essentially you have 20 different unique snowflake scenarios that you can spend advantages on.
This is shit. This isn't even good shit. It's bad shit. It's shit that has been re-shit out already. There is no chart, there is no reference, there is only zuul text. You can kind of half-ass guess what each advantage, or combination of advantages, can result in, but basically this is brute memorization of extremely systems with sometimes significantly varying rules. Sometimes advantage just makes a skill work better. Other times it adds dice to the next dice pool roll. How do you know? You fucking memorize. Or flip pages *constantly*.
Perhaps the description for each skill Boon and Bane serve as examples/suggestions on how the GM can use it at the table, instead of hardcoded results ? This sound more sensible to me.
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TheFlatline
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In FFG's defense, they didn't write Dark Heresy. Games Workshop did, and then after the first printing decided to end everything except their fiction. FFGs purchased the rights and republished DH. They decided to keep the system identical for the next several 40k games so that you could have crossovers.Ghremdal wrote:It seems to me like FFG can't make decent mechanics to save their life. Like the Dark Heresy series, their books are fun to read, and with a talented DM its fun to play (by talented I mean he handles MTP's well) but its broken (nonfunctional) as hell.
I mean is it that hard to come up with decent mechanics? /rhetorical
DH is getting a 2nd edition and it's out in beta right now. I can't afford to purchase it but that'll be the measuring stick I'd judge FFG and DH by.