In the Star Wars universe, you should always be prepared for violence. From cantinas full of scum to hungry wampas looking for a snack, plenty of things in the galaxy are spoiling for a fight. Sometimes, the only thing you can do is fight back.
Dangerous Covenants is a rules supplement for Edge of the Empire that focuses on helping you fight. New specializations, talents, guns, armor, and vehicles provide a host of new options for players, while GMs are bound to find the advice on themes of cinematic combat and how to organize exciting combat-focused encounters and adventures very useful.
This book features new content for the Hired Gun career, including new Hired Gun centric Motivations, Obligations, and backgrounds. Just because a character is a fighter doesn’t mean he can’t have a deep and interesting backstory, and this book helps players create that for their characters. Meanwhile, Hired Gun characters (or any character, actually) can pick up one of three new specializations. Enforcers, Demolitionists, and Heavies offer three new choices that add a lot of variety to the Hired Gun career.
In addition, Dangerous Covenants also introduces two new, high level advancement opportunities in the form of the Hired Gun’s signature abilities. These abilities are career specific talents that a character can only access once they’ve spent a lot of time and experience investing in a specialization. In return, however, they offer Hired Guns some really potent abilities that can change the course of an entire battle.
Of course, no Hired Gun is going to head into battle without a trusty weapon of some sort. Whether you want to deal out destruction with a heavy weapon like a flechette launcher or a plasma missile, or if you’d prefer to dominate a back alley brawl with a pair of vibro-knucklers, Dangerous Covenants has you covered. In addition, the book introduces some new ships, ranging from small, single-seat starfighters to full-sized cruisers.
When it comes to GM advice and guidance, Dangerous Covenants has a whole range of suggestions. These range from practical details (if a Hired Gun is actually working as a Hired Gun, how much are jobs like protection, mercenary work, and sabotage going to pay?) to overarching campaign guidance, and everything in between.
Star Wars®: Edge of the Empire™ Specialization Decks, available through Print on Demand, provide GMs and players with a fun and easy way to manage character and NPC talents at the gaming table. New and experienced players alike will appreciate these handy reference cards, and GMs will love being able to keep the action moving. You’ll have the text of your talents at your fingertips, leaving you free to focus on the challenges at hand, while art for each talent immerses you even further into the Star Wars universe.
This first rules supplement for Edge of the Empire expands the Explorer career with specializations, new talents, and more. All players will find new character, vehicle, and equipment options, which will aid in their experiences at the Edge of the Empire. GMs will gain new tools to use in crafting exciting and memorable adventures.
The Core Rulebook contains all the information players and GMs need to create from scratch the memorable characters that will populate their campaigns. At the heart of character creation in Edge of the Empire is the idea that each character enters his or her first adventure with a history, and the baggage of some pre-existing obligations.
What caused your character to enter into the nebulous and dangerous world of Edge of the Empire? Was it a single, traumatic event? Was your character put into an untenable situation from which he had to flee? Is your character racing to pay off old debts before those debtors come calling? Your character’s obligations represent the debts he seeks to avoid or repay. They likely impacted your character’s original decision to seek out adventures and the fame and fortune they always seem to promise. And they can definitely shape the course of your character’s life.
Obligations in Edge of the Empire tie the game’s mechanics to a narrative core and help players to develop characters with rich backgrounds and deep investment in the campaign’s events.
Star Wars: Edge of the Empire is the first of three epic roleplaying game installments. Each will be a standalone core rulebook, but will complement the other two to form a single game system. Each of these three planned core rulebooks presents the Star Wars galaxy from a different point of view, and they all take place during the height of the Rebel Alliance’s struggle against the Galactic Empire.
Star Wars: Edge of the Empire is the first of these installments, focusing on the fringes of society, the scum and villainy of the galaxy, and the explorers and colonists of the Outer Rim. In this game, players take on the roles of hard-hearted bounty hunters, roguish scoundrels, charming smugglers, or fearless explorers trying to survive and thrive on the edges of civilization. In the second installment, Star Wars: Age of Rebellion, the players take the fight to the oppressive Galactic Empire as cunning spies, cocky pilots, and dedicated soldiers in the Rebel Alliance.
Finally, in Star Wars: Force and Destiny, the players become figures of legend: the last surviving Force users in the galaxy. Hunted by the Empire, they must stay alive, and more importantly, stay true to the ideals of their forebears—the fabled Jedi. Each of these independent game lines stands alone as a unique gaming experience while fully integrating with the others to form a single unified system. For more on Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, skip below to read our overview.
Definitively interested. Looks like they are using the d100 system I've grown to know and love from WFRP and their 40k games.
What makes me sceptical is the bit about the three main books being "independent but fully integrated" - which to me just sounds as if it would suffer from the same evolutionary differences and potential scope gaps as I see them between, say, Dark Heresy and Deathwatch.
Also not a fan of the "talent tree" stuff. Would have hoped they do it more like in Only War.
Good stuff and bad stuff. I'd at least give it a try before I cast final judgement though. The biggest stumbling block about mixing the books can easily be averted by simple campaign planning, after all - provided the differences actually are as big as they are in 40k.
Personally, I'm also hoping for post- rather than pre-Empire supplements. The Legacy era needs more love!
Is it the WH40K system? If so, I'm definitely not interested.
SAGA was awesome and has sourcebooks for everything I'd want to do. The WH40K system doesn't do anything for me, the only reason I play it at all is homebrewing it back to some d20 system is more work than its worth.
Lynata wrote: Looks like they are using the d100 system I've grown to know and love from WFRP and their 40k games.
It's my understanding that this is not d100 per the 40k line but rather custom-dice based a la the latest WHFRPG.
Poison wrote: It'd have to be amazingly good to beat SAGA for me.
I also love Saga Edition. I see it as the pinnacle of WotC's d20 products lines. That said, the era of d20 games is over and it hasn't been long enough for a resurgence. I have been intrigued by the 3rd ed. WHFRPG dice system but the put off by the rest of the boardgamey components. I'm hoping this line will scale back some of that but I'm excited about the dice. Like Lynata, I'm a little wary of the talent trees. It looks a little stifling on the page.
My complaint with the W40K system is the swingy nature of the dice. Its hard to tell a story when you have no idea whether your group has any chance of success.
I remember entire sessions of Dark Heresy where no one succeeded on a roll for the whole session.
Poison wrote: My complaint with the W40K system is the swingy nature of the dice. Its hard to tell a story when you have no idea whether your group has any chance of success.
I would think in a % based system it should be even easier to figure out the chance for characters to succeed. The target number is also the chance to succeed. Need a 25 or less on the dice? 25% chance.
Poison wrote: My complaint with the W40K system is the swingy nature of the dice. Its hard to tell a story when you have no idea whether your group has any chance of success.
I would think in a % based system it should be even easier to figure out the chance for characters to succeed. The target number is also the chance to succeed. Need a 25 or less on the dice? 25% chance.
The problem isnt figuring out the % chance to succeed, the issue is usually having a %30 unmodified chance for success. In Dark Heresy, everyone was always incompetent, it seemed. From what Manchu just showed, though, I have no clue what sort of difficulty that has, it doesnt look like WH40K.
This video talks very intelligently about WHFRPG 3E dice:
BTW, this guy is one of the smartest people posting about RPGs on YT. He has more than a few vids up on WHFRPG 3E if you want to know more on the subject. I can't wait to hear him weigh in on Edge of the Empire as his favorite RPG was the WEG Star Wars RPG.
As someone who has run and played FFG's d100 system through all the 40kRPGs, I have to say that I absolutely hate the system and not just because FFG's quality control went out the window when they rushed Deathwatch and Black Crusade.
The system uses some pretty fiddly calculations and systems, and has that really annoying low chance of success for everything.
However, the system they were using for WHFRP seemed silly to me at first with the custom dice, but after he explained it, sounds like a great system that keeps the numbers and crunch to a reasonable amount.
Sure, it takes time to understand, but the custom components drastically reduces the need for fiddly calculations, and adds a probability curve to the results.
It is very components heavy with the rest of the game it seems, but that's FFG.
So, I'm actually really looking forward to the new star wars rules.
Poison wrote:It'd have to be amazingly good to beat SAGA for me.
Do you like proprietary (ie. custom designed) dice and card systems that determine everything? Like this game.
Poison wrote:My complaint with the W40K system is the swingy nature of the dice. Its hard to tell a story when you have no idea whether your group has any chance of success.
As mentioned above, you should always know exactly how much of a chance any given roll (other than damage) has given that it's a percentile system. Damage rolls can be "swingy", as you put it, but some of that swingy nature is being bred out of damage rolls.
Poison wrote:The problem isnt figuring out the % chance to succeed
A moment ago the trouble was having no idea if you have a chance of success. Don't move the goal posts.
Poison wrote:...the issue is usually having a %30 unmodified chance for success. In Dark Heresy, everyone was always incompetent, it seemed.
Modifiers come fast and furious in a game like DH, and outside of a few early sessions I doubt people will sit there wiffing all their attacks for long. And if you're tired of missing everything you do (because your GM forgets that he sets the difficulty of any Test, and can rule something easier or harder than whatever your standard stats are), then play Deathwatch. You'll never miss in that game.
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Vertrucio wrote:...and not just because FFG's quality control went out the window when they rushed Deathwatch and Black Crusade.
If you think those games were rushed then you really have no clue.
Vertrucio wrote:The system uses some pretty fiddly calculations and systems, and has that really annoying low chance of success for everything.
Success and failure is often up to the GM to determine. Fiddly calculations? Most of the time it's adding units of 10 to things. +10, +20, +30 and so on. That's fiddly?
Manchu wrote: This video talks very intelligently about WHFRPG 3E dice:
*watches video*
Keeping in mind that my issues with WFRP3rd are more to do with my views on rules consistency and not the dice, but all of that just seems like a whole lotta busy work. From that explanation it seems like its an overly complicated system to achieve the same result that you'd get from just rolling a d100.
I have to agree with HBMC on this. If your GM is giving your rank one characters hard tests, it's kind of your GM's fault for designing a session where you would fail.
I know that my low-level Only War players have no problems passing most of my tests unless I WANT to challenge them.
For example, I made a willpower + 10 check to resist gaining corruption/insanity after they blew up a shokk attack gun [don't ask, it's a long story], which despite being +10 was actually a hard check because most non-psyker classes have a hard time getting willpower bonuses (Thus most of them were testing in the 30-40 range, which is not a favorable test). Most of them had to use a fate point, and one of them (our techie) still got his corruption points. But that was actually a better result than I intended.
If a GM isn't taking this kind of consideration when designing tests, they might be playing it wrong.
H.B.M.C. wrote: From that explanation it seems like its an overly complicated system to achieve the same result that you'd get from just rolling a d100.
I really disagree. Dice pool building is fundamentally different from modifying percentage rolls. With WHFRP 3E, the player and DM negotiate rolls at the level of mechanics as well as narrative whereas most of that negotiation in a d100 system is narrative. Now, I'm not saying one is better than the other. They have different implications and foster different tones, which will be more or less appropriate to different settings. But you cannot tuck all of the intricacy of building dice pools into d100 and call it "busy work" -- unless you simply don't understand one or the other or both.
Hmmm, new star Wars RP, I would be interested. The D&D based one was doing my head in a little, hell if it works, might convince me to give Warhammer a go.
I'm not gonna type up a big reply to you, HBMC, but I did not shift any goalposts. I said the results were swingy, and it was hard to know what the results would be.
What I meant by that was, you'd have 5 people with search or inquiry of 25 or so, making a challenging test. They might find something, statistically, I think there is a fair shot at success. On the other hand, a lot of 25% tests fail, because, you know, its a 1 in 4 chance to succeed. I certainly know the chance to succeed, its 25%, and 4 or 5 people can try it.
On the other hand, I saw whole sessions where we didnt have anyone succeed on those rolls. Yes, maybe the GM was bad, and it should have been easier, I dunno.
I also never mentioned combat, so I am not sure if that was a veiled shot at calling me a rollplayer or munchkin, or an assumption that all I cared about was combat, but it missed the mark.
Deathwatch is unappealing for other reasons, including I dislike space marines and half the group is women that likes to play women.
Manchu wrote: I really disagree. Dice pool building is fundamentally different from modifying percentage rolls. With WHFRP 3E, the player and DM negotiate rolls at the level of mechanics as well as narrative whereas most of that negotiation in a d100 system is narrative. Now, I'm not saying one is better than the other. They have different implications and foster different tones, which will be more or less appropriate to different settings. But you cannot tuck all of the intricacy of building dice pools into d100 and call it "busy work" -- unless you simply don't understand one or the other or both.
I dislike systems that add tons of additional rolls. It’s why I didn’t like the “scatter every blast marker” rules from 40K. They tend to slow things down for no real gain. I may adore the 2nd Ed 40K vehicle rules, but of all the things in there the thing I miss the least are the multi-dice penetration rolls. Now the reason I call this system ‘busy work’ is because it seems like a complicated solution to a simple problem. To elaborate:
I want to do Action X.
Percentile System (like DH): I look at the stat I’m rolling against, the GM lets me know how difficult the Test is, I roll my percentile dice, and then I compare the scores. How well or how badly I did are determined by how many 10’s above or below the target number I got (this could also apply to a D20 system... or hell even a D6 system!).
Custom Dice System (like WFRP3rd): I look at the stat I’m rolling against to work out how many of Dice Type A I can roll. I then also check my stance to see how many of Dice Type B I can roll. I negotiate with the GM to determine how many of Dice Types C and D I can add to the pool. I then roll those dice and look at the various symbols. I then cancel out the various conflicting symbols, checking then work out my final amount of successes or failures, how many boons or banes I have, whether I got success+, or twin-tailed comets or Chaos Stars or anything else. And then I compare them to my action and work out what it does.
In the first system I made a single dice roll and it told me everything I needed to know about my success or failure. In the second example I had to roll a bunch of dice, compare symbols, work out differences and cancel out results before finally arriving at the same result as the percentile rolls – was I successful, and if so how successful was I.
A complicated solution to a simple problem. Busy work.
Poison wrote:I'm not gonna type up a big reply to you, HBMC, but I did not shift any goalposts. I said the results were swingy, and it was hard to know what the results would be.
Which they aren’t (except in the case of damage results, something which I already covered) and which it isn’t. I don’t know why you think it’s hard to know what the results on a percentile-based system would be.
Poison wrote:What I meant by that was, you'd have 5 people with search or inquiry of 25 or so, making a challenging test. They might find something, statistically, I think there is a fair shot at success. On the other hand, a lot of 25% tests fail, because, you know, its a 1 in 4 chance to succeed. I certainly know the chance to succeed, its 25%, and 4 or 5 people can try it.
On the other hand, I saw whole sessions where we didnt have anyone succeed on those rolls. Yes, maybe the GM was bad, and it should have been easier, I dunno.
Why are they 25% chance tests? Why are they always Challenging? What modifiers did the GM apply, if any? As I (and Mel) said above, the GM determines difficulty. If your GM was just making you roll strait up stat checks with no modifiers due to circumstance then, quite simply, they were Doing it Wrong™.
Poison wrote:I also never mentioned combat, so I am not sure if that was a veiled shot at calling me a rollplayer or munchkin, or an assumption that all I cared about was combat, but it missed the mark.
It wasn’t a shot at anything. Calm down.
Poison wrote:Deathwatch is unappealing for other reasons, including I dislike space marines and half the group is women that likes to play women.
Neither of which are the fault of the game, but I doubt (hope?) you weren’t implying that.
I never said any of the 40k games was a bad game. I said I didnt prefer a Dark Heresy style system for Star Wars, as Star Wars is heroic, and Dark Heresies style doesnt fit.
On the other hand, since thats been cleared up, and it isnt using the WH40K system, I have no idea if it'll be good or not, but it has big shoes to fill, because I thought Saga was pretty close to perfect.
Others liked the West End Games D6 Star Wars, and never switched to Saga, so to each their own.
"If you don't think that Deathwatch and Black Crusade were rushed, or suffered from some pretty big quality control issues, then you really have no clue."
And that is how you sound HBMC. Read that back to yourself and tell me you're proud of being the typical RPG gamer stereotype.
All systems have upsides and downsides, and the 40Krpgs have serious downsides. But, I wouldn't have bothered running it for multiple campaigns if the system didn't work on some level. But don't try to tell me, or anyone, that it didn't have serious problems.
HBMC helped work on them, if memory serves. He would know if they were rushed or not.
And they really weren't rushed from my experience, from you know, actually playing the fething game and all that unimportant nonsense. Sure, I prefer Dark Heresy and Only War, but Deathwatch, Rogue Trader, and Black Crusade are perfectly valid systems. That they lend themselves to a roleplay style I don't enjoy as much doesn't mean that they're somehow "rushed".
Because by that definition, I find every d20 system ever made to be "rushed". And yeah, each core book is designed for a different campaign style, anywhere from DH's investigative, to DW's Hack'n'Slash, to Rogue Trader's space pirates... I don't really care for hack and slash, myself (I have video games if I want to do that), but plenty of others love it.
Just to clarify: I had nothing to do with Deathwatch’s development (The Achilus Assault was the first book I was involved in, both as a play-tester and proof-reader), but I did play-test Black Crusade and I am one of the writers for Only War.
Look, I'm not against proprietary dice systems. Super Dungeon Explore uses that and its simple enough to use. My issue is when you have to roll 4-6 dice to achieve roughly the same thing you’d do by rolling 2d6's/2d10’s/1d20. I just don’t see the point.
It truly is a strange day when Mel and I are coming down on the same side of an issue.
Now, if you said something like "I want to play superman, but Dark Heresy is designed for you to play Batman instead", I'd see your point.
But both are heroic.
More like, I want to play Batman, but Dark Heresy is designed for me to play a common thug, who works for the Riddler.
Thats not to say playing a common thug can't be fun, I've played, and had fun with Dark Heresy, but it'd be the last game that came to mind to try and build Luke, Han, Leia, and the gang.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Also, I agree with HBMC on the busy work dice thing, if its as he's described, I fail to see the point.
Poison wrote: More like, I want to play Batman, but Dark Heresy is designed for me to play a common thug, who works for the Riddler.
That is an incredibly ignorant statement.
One can EASILY be heroic in Dark Heresy. If your GM refuses to allow that, take it up with them.
If you really had to recreate "Luke, Han, and Leia" (I'll withhold comments about my opinions on this kind of roleplay), Han would use the Scum class, Leia would probably be either an adept or cleric with the noble born homeworld, and Luke would be a very martial psyker who focuses on telekinesis.
Hell, scum actually fits Han perfectly, as does the ascension class for scum, Desperado.
Yeah, the problem isnt in the classes, its in the scale. At rank 1, you can't succeed at anything, as your skill is always around 25%. But, I feel like I'm beating a dead horse, and clearly its your favorite game system, and we'll just continue arguing around the same topic.
I think Saga fits Star Wars best. You have a better than 50% chance to succeed most tasks at level 1, everything scales up fairly evenly, and I've seen Saga games succeed well, where I've seen DH games go for 2 sessions and all the players quit in frustration.
I fail to see where my statement is ignorant. You DO factually play a thug who works for an "Inquisitor". Its not an ignorant statement, its in fact a true fact.
Batman hasn't got anyone telling him what to do, not even Superman or the President. He does what he wants, its part of being Batman. He can flip off Superman if he likes.
Your little scum can flip off his inquisitor, too, if he wants to take a dirt nap.
Anyway, I'm done arguing about whether Dark Heresy is the be all and end all game system to run all games in. Obviously its fans think so, which makes sense, since its their favorite. I don't, for many of the reasons I've given in this thread. Nuff said.
Poison wrote: Yeah, the problem isnt in the classes, its in the scale. At rank 1, you can't succeed at anything, as your skill is always around 25%
Actually, on average it's ~31% (2d10+20 averages out at around 31).
Not a huge difference, but it does make a difference.
And again, because you aren't reading what I'm posting, I'll repeat myself:
Melissia wrote: I have to agree with HBMC on this. If your GM is giving your rank one characters hard tests, it's kind of your GM's fault for designing a session where you would fail.
I know that my low-level Only War players have no problems passing most of my tests unless I WANT to challenge them.
For example, I made a willpower + 10 check to resist gaining corruption/insanity after they blew up a shokk attack gun [don't ask, it's a long story], which despite being +10 was actually a hard check because most non-psyker classes have a hard time getting willpower bonuses (Thus most of them were testing in the 30-40 range, which is not a favorable test). Most of them had to use a fate point, and one of them (our techie) still got his corruption points. But that was actually a better result than I intended.
If a GM isn't taking this kind of consideration when designing tests, they might be playing it wrong.
Just because your GM is a complete incompetent and doesn't take in to account the level of the party in designing encounters doesn't mean that the game itself is bad. That can happen in ANY game system, including your beloved (ugh) Saga. Even if your GM refuses to adjust for level, they can always allow you to start out with more xp for a higher level game anyway (although a GM so inflexible as to refuse to adjust for character power levels isn't likely to be competent enough to allow characters to play at an XP level that matches what he wants to GM at)..
Also, the game doesn't actually require you to play as a member of the Inquisition, and I've run and played several games where we were not.
The d100 system gives you an axis of failure and success based on sheer intentionality. Did my character succeed or fail (and how badly of either) with regard to what s/he intended? A d100 roll can definitely tell me that. The WHFRP 3E system gives me that axis and another one, which involves secondary/unforseen/unintentional success and failure. It also lets me account for my character's own attitude toward the situation with something more interesting than a modifier. A d100 roll can't do either of those things. And in some games, you don't really want to do either of those things. In other games, you do.
It's pretty much the same to me, aside from the busywork aspect of needing more rolls of the dice. It's basically just an overly complicated version of White Wolf's OWoD system.
Manchu wrote: The d100 system gives you an axis of failure and success based on sheer intentionality. Did my character succeed or fail (and how badly of either) with regard to what s/he intended? A d100 roll can definitely tell me that. The WHFRP 3E system gives me that axis and another one, which involves secondary/unforseen/unintentional success and failure. It also lets me account for my character's own attitude toward the situation with something more interesting than a modifier. A d100 roll can't do either of those things. And in some games, you don't really want to do either of those things. In other games, you do.
Yeah and I've seen games do that without the need for fancy dice. DH might not have that, but I've seen various types of attacks that do different things on successes and failures, with different levels of success/failures as determined by the special rules/attack itself (D&D 4E has a number of these). That's still a d20 based system.
You're still not understanding but to be fair that is probably my fault. It comes down to this: a d100 system tracks nothing but failure and success (including degrees) but the WHFRP 3E system is designed to do other things simultaneously. The goal is to model plot development that hasn't happened yet not just to randomize the determination of success. Because the d100 system and this system have different goals, it does not make sense to characterize one as an overcomplicated version of the other.
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Poison wrote: If you get a better look at this, let us know, Manchu
I certainly will report here extensively. You can also browse the FFG forums although the EotE section is currently mired in the same kind of "I wanted the game to be X instead of Y" declarations rather than dialogue about the game that is coming out.
Well... yes, it's pretty much like a variation on WW's system. OWoD doesn't actually have traditional "static" modifiers, as you put it, but rather the ones you called "dynamic", IE rolling more or less dice. Every roll is a #d10 in fact, with the # depending on your stats, skills, and any situational/motivational bonuses and/or negatives, and going against a certain difficulty as set by the GM, and not all of the rolls necessarily have to be the same difficulty.
Melissia wrote: Well... yes, it's pretty much like a variation on WW's system. OWoD doesn't actually have traditional "static" modifiers, as you put it, but rather the ones you called "dynamic", IE rolling more or less dice. Every roll is a #d10 in fact, with the # depending on your stats, skills, and any situational/motivational bonuses and/or negatives, and going against a certain difficulty as set by the GM, and not all of the rolls necessarily have to be the same difficulty.
Also ones where botches which would remove successes, and tens, would mean critical success if botches didn't cancel them out, ones always took away tens first. You where generally looking for at least three successes to be doing anything of worth each time you rolled.
Although unless wounded, 90% of the time you rolls where based on static numbers, a mix of a Attribute stat pool and ability stat pool which equaled the dots you had in said attribute/ability.
Sorry my years of WoD gaming meant I had to toss that in there.
Melissia wrote: Technically it's a variation of d10 systems, rather than d20, as it uses two d10s per roll (one for tens, one for ones).
No, they are fundamentally different. Rolling 2d10 results in a completely different game because the resultant probability curve is non-linear. Different systems have different goals and so use different tools.
Tell me aboput it, I still have major White Wolf issues over nwod, its worst than most of this GW rage you see abouts... people just don't know how they hurt me. *sniff*
Yeah.. almost kept a straight face.
Regarding the game, the focus on the Empire era is the main positive thing for me at the mo. Don't get me wrong, I like the New Republic era, and Clones Wars cartoon, the prequels in general, but the Empire era seems a more interesting place to roleplay in.
Mind you, I'm also looking forward to this despite what I've said in this thread (I just happen to dislike FFG bashing). I couldn't stand the star wars d20 game.
Yes, bashing other games (including dice systems!) is generally non-productive. I'm very excited about this game because I think it will be a breath of fresh air into SW -- not because it will be the perfect RPG (there's no such thing), or totally replace Saga Edition, the d20 version, or WEG's d6 version(s) -- much less (somehow?) the FFG40k line. I have my concerns, too: as I mentioned earlier in the thread, the skill trees could be a little too burdensome for a world defined by freedom and ingenuity. We'll just have to see. But I really am excited about the prospect of building dice pools, which I think will make the experience feel very distinctive.
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Poison wrote: I'll be interested to see how they handle being a force user in the Empire Era.
So far, you can be a force sensitive fringer. You can do a few tricks but we're not talking Jedi level stuff according to those who have GenCon copies. Apparently, it's just a matter of taking a "Force Sensitive" skill tree.
It sounds like some people are going to be very happy with it. Not my speed, so much, but I am sure there will be a supplement for an era I do like down the road.
Hope the game system makes you guys happy, though.
It's hard to say whether there will be. With three years of product planned, we're talking only about the Rebellion era. Of course, the fringe in the fringe no matter what era you're in. And how hard is it to use Stormtrooper stats for Sith Troopers or Clone Troopers?
Is that a matter of canon or just the magic of cinema? Stormtroopers were just mooks in the OT. In the Clone Wars cartoon (and to a far lesser extent in the PT), clone troopers are protagonists. Also, the OT featured a farmboy fighting storm troopers. In the PT, clone troopers stood next to Jedi.
IIRC, it's canon-- while some of the stormtrooper regiments were still clone troopers at the time of the empire series, most of them were not any more, and were generally inferior to the clone troopers.
They did a lot of things in order to cut down on costs, such as cheaper armor, cheaper fighters, etc.
I'm not interested in the fringe. I'm interested in KOTOR style high fantasy, and LOTR style destruction of the Lord of the Sith.
My last game in Saga was a KOTOR era lightsabers on lightsabers game with our heroes trying to end the threat of the Emperor and the Sith Empire.
Again, not to say others shouldn't like the fringe, or any game system is inferior based on the subject it chooses to portray, or playing a bunch of piratey fringers is badwrongfun or anything else. Just its not the part of Star Wars that appeals to me.
In fact, I'd rather do a Dark Eldar based pirate game to explore fringers =P
@Melissia: Yeah, reading up on Wookiepedia it seems that Cody thought of recruits as crap compared to Jango Fett clones. If you go with that POV, you could certainly buff the storm trooper stats a bit to "convert" them into clone troopers.
This is actually near and dear to my heart. The Saga Edition Old Republic sourcebook is one of my most prized possessions! Even more than KotOR, the Tales of the Jedi comics are my favorites. All that being said, I also like the gritty elements of Star Wars. The thing to remember is that this isn't another version of "the SWRPG." This is a game called "Edge of the Empire." In three years time, FFG plans to produce another game called "Force and Destiny" which will be easier to convert to Old Republic era games. But even that game will not be about "being a Jedi" but rather be about "being a Jedi surviving under Palpatine's regime." It's not going to appeal to everyone. But after decade of suffering through the PT and a lot of not-so-hot EU developments, a return to emphasis on the OT is very welcome IMO.
Yeah, to each their own. I'm old now, and my gaming time is limited, you know? When I was younger, I could play lots more things, now I have to pick my spots, and I tend to choose stuff I really enjoy.
Also, it has to appeal to my girl, who has her own tastes. =)
Melissia wrote: IIRC, it's canon-- while some of the stormtrooper regiments were still clone troopers at the time of the empire series, most of them were not any more, and were generally inferior to the clone troopers.
They did a lot of things in order to cut down on costs, such as cheaper armor, cheaper fighters, etc.
IIRC the Fett clones had unforeseen flaws and the Kaminons became unco-operative after the clones wars, and as a result were purged and their work load handed over to several other companies who weren't as good but more co-operative, the only original Fett clones were the 501st (AKA Vader's Fist), but there were supposed to be the ones on the death star so go figure.......
Force Unleashed II begins on Kamino, with Vader using their cloning facilities to allegedly (I haven't finished the game yet so no one spoil it for me) recreate his secret apprentice, Starkiller.
Manchu wrote:Is that a matter of canon or just the magic of cinema?
A little bit of both, tbh. There are instances in the EU where stormtroopers are represented as quite capable compared to the average guy (with the planet Cadia often being mentioned as the elite academy churning out the galaxy's best soldiers), and I think their stats in the existing P&Ps matched that impression.
Stormtrooper as protagonist.
That said, it is also true that the legions changed, thus giving further explanation to the difference in capabilities, first by introducing new clone templates, then recruiting non-clones:
"After the Kamino Uprising, the Emperor decided that an army of genetically identical soldiers would be too susceptible to corruption. Future troopers would be cloned from a variety of templates. Though the 501st itself remained pure, the rest of the Imperial army gradually became more and more diverse.
We never really got used to the new guys." -- Star Wars Battlefront II : Journals of the 501st
In the Legacy era, set ~120 years after the movies, the Stormtrooper Corps has completely merged with the Imperial Army, so that Stormtroopers are even more common grunts (now being used both as front line infantry as well as shock troops), but still with remarkable training. In that time, they're basically the Empire's USMC.
Lol no worries. Also, in that pic with the femtrooper -- what is Luke doing dressed as a stormtrooper obsessed with a knife in the future? Legacy must be pretty far out!
In all seriousness, I cannot wait to play this game. I really hope FFG goes ahead and manufactures dice ahead of the launch so the beta meisters can roll sans stickers/conversion charts.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Also this is a good explanation of the way the custom dice system operates just with regard to the axes of "intentional" and "unforeseen" success/failure (taken from the FFG forum):
Rather than debating bonuses, or having to memorize a bible's worth of modifiers for lighting conditions, quality of gear, conditional modifiers, etc to a skill test…. You simply run down a list of conditions on the spot. Let's say you want to do an Astrogation check because the Hutt's gangsters are ON your behind. What the heck was in that crate?!
We'll set the base difficulty at 3 Challenge.
Do you have training in Astrogation? Expertise + Characteristic Dice.
Do you have a nav computer? Advantage.
Are you crunched for time? Disadvantage.
Are you traveling a well known trade route? Advantage.
Are you trying to shake pursuit with non-standard micro jumps? Disadvantage.
Are you being assisted by Chewbacca? Advantage
Roll the pile
You succeeded! But you rolled a *critical bad symbol*.
The good news is that you arrived safely 3AU from Ord Mantel's star and the gangsters don't appear to be following you. The bad news is that there seems to be a fire in the hyperdrive chamber and the ships computer has initiated an auto-pilot lockout and your credentials don't seem to work to unlock it.
Sure you could wade through charts (or memorize modifiers if that is your want). But the above can be completed by the seat of a GM's pants without any concern over applying the wrong modifier or arguing with a rules' lawyer over minutiae. Dice pool games are not for everyone, but this is an intuitive system that makes interpreting the dice part of the game instead of just that thing you have to do to move on.
Manchu wrote:Also, in that pic with the femtrooper -- what is Luke doing dressed as a stormtrooper obsessed with a knife in the future? Legacy must be pretty far out!
Manchu wrote:I really hope FFG goes ahead and manufactures dice ahead of the launch so the beta meisters can roll sans stickers/conversion charts.
Hmm, did they announce they were going to produce special dice for it? Will it be a real box, like the Dragon Age RPG?
I'm still somewhat split on the mechanics. I really like d100, but I'm also intrigued by the concept of dice pools. Guess I'll just have to give it a try and then see what "feels" better to me.
Thanks for posting that example, btw!
What I really like about that example is you can easily contrast the static modifier approach and the dice pool approach. With the former, that scenario boils down to (using d20 as our example context) 2 - 2 + 2 - 2 + 2 = 2. All of those plot elements and you just add 2 to your ability bonus-modified d20 roll. That is way boring. but what if each of those +2's and -2's is a die roll instead? In that way, each circumstantial aspect of the situation is "in controversy." The nav computer, for example, is certainly hypothetically advantageous to have in that situation but there is also a chance that it doesn't help -- and in that sense, the players are encouraged by the outcome on the dice to think about all those circumstances that go into building the dice pool: if I fail my roll despite have more advantages than disadvantages, then what happened to my nav computer? Isn't this a well-known route? Chewie, I thought you were on this! Simultaneously, the players will narrate plot based on this failed roll, emphasizing the complexity of micro-jump calculations and the urgency and anxiety fostered by being short on time. And that's just what we get looking at the intentional success/failure determination! To me, that's dice doing a lot of work.
Which is something that any GM in dark heresy can easily do if they want to, and frequently something that my GMs (and myself) do. The GM decides what modifiers there are, after all. Including if the modifier is good or bad, or if it's random. If you want a random modifier, you can tell your players to roll a d10, and then have 1-5 be a negative modifier, and 6-10 be a positive one. It's actually something I've done to see who gets corruption and insanity points.
FFG's d100 system gives a lot of free reign to the GM, for good reason.
Sounds like Manchu's point is because the different modifiers are on different types of dice, if the roll fails because the Nav computer blew up, you can see it right there on the dice, not because the GM randomly decided to tell you you're Nav computer blew up.
For other games, you'd need a lookup table, instead of using the dice result. Thats what I take from it, anyway. Not sure I care for that level of dice complexity, but its interesting.
Not sure why Dark Heresy is being brought into it again, the system being used isn't Dark Heresy, so it doesn't really matter what can be done by Dark Heresy.
But that's not what I want or what I am talking about. I am talking about a situational modifier, something that reflects the circumstances. The issue is not randomly determining whether you get +2 or -2 (or whatever the number is) but rather whether a circumstantial advantage pays off or not -- and, moreover, the mechanic making that result "stand out" as a discrete aspect of the action instead of folding it into a monolithic calculation (like how those five different circumstances above end up as just "+2").
@Poison: I think the complexity of the system is front-loaded. Once you get used to thinking about the dice as more central to the game (and get used to the symbols) I don't think it will feel complex so much as intuitive.
Manchu wrote: It seems to me that you're just randomly determining whether to modify the result with a positive or negative static number.
Yes, just as you explained it here in this sentence:
Manchu wrote: The nav computer, for example, is certainly hypothetically advantageous to have in that situation but there is also a chance that it doesn't help
A random chance. And this one:
Manchu wrote: but what if each of those +2's and -2's is a die roll instead?
Dice roll = random chance. And this one:
Manchu wrote: The issue is [...] whether a circumstantial advantage pays off or not
Having it pay off or not = random chance. And several others.
Meanwhile, arguments such as this one:
Manchu wrote: if I fail my roll despite have more advantages than disadvantages, then what happened to my nav computer? Isn't this a well-known route? Chewie, I thought you were on this! Simultaneously, the players will narrate plot based on this failed roll, emphasizing the complexity of micro-jump calculations and the urgency and anxiety fostered by being short on time.
Are rather silly, because that is based on the players and the GM, not the dice. We do this kind of roleplaying all the time in our Rogue Trader game. And it's not only likely that many player groups will not play the way you envision it, it's a 100% probability.
If a group doesn't care enough, is led by a less than competent GM, or is inexperienced, it's very easy for them to miss cues like that.
An advantage die tracks whether and to what extent a favorable circumstance actually lends an advantage in resolving action and has nothing to do with randomizing between a negative and positive modifier. You also misunderstand my argument about dice and narrative. The issue is not that dice generate narrative but rather that dice can prompt narrative. This particular system lends itself to more particular prompts because -- at least at a most basic level -- dice are more heavily involved. In d20 and d100 systems, dice don't matter as much. What is important in those games is the effect of static modifiers on rolls. Finally, we need to look at systems separately from the characteristics of any particular group of hypothetical players.
I received a copy at GenCon. I have not had an opportunity to read much of it, and probably won't until Sunday. Maybe. I also want to read Fear to Tread and the Games Day anthology book I got at GenCon.
Our group is wanting to try this out, and it will possibly replace our Battle Tech RPG to fill our Sci-Fi RPG needs.
I'm very excited by this. At GenCon, I went to one of the dice booths to buy the dice I need for the stickers (Manchu showed a picture in the first page of this thread). I might put them on this weekend. It seems pretty abstract, though. I'm so used to 3rd edition D&D, BattleTech/MechWarrior, and Pathfinder RPG's where movement is covered in painstaking detail and this book seems very "free flowing". The GM needs to be very detailed about his description of rooms and such or risk pissing off players. "Nuh-uh! I'm at least 20' away from that thermal detonator!"
Manchu wrote: The issue is not that dice generate narrative but rather that dice can prompt narrative.
I full well know that's what you're talking about.
But I have to ask you, what makes you think that this is not the case with d100 games? Because what you described is exactly what happens in our rogue trader game, without needing some busywork extra dice. You're not really making a good argument for why this kind of game system does it better than the d100 system.
kronk wrote: The GM needs to be very detailed about his description of rooms and such or risk pissing off players.
I think the key is to err towards players being able to do more rather than less. I have been playing a lot of Basic D&D from 1979 (or more precisely, the retroclone called Labyrinth Lord) and so far we haven't encountered any of the problems that 3.5/Pathfinder "solve for" by making things like movement more explicit.
Melissia wrote: But I have to ask you, what makes you think that this is not the case with d100 games? Because what you described is exactly what happens in our rogue trader game, without needing some busywork extra dice. You're not really making a good argument for why this kind of game system does it better than the d100 system.
Well, I'm not actually trying to argue that this game is better than a game using the d100 system as I have painstakingly pointed out throughout the thread. What I have said time and again is that this game does it differently. The emphasis is on dice rolls prompting narrative instead of the modification of dice rolls prompting narrative. I've tried to illustrate the difference by contrasting a net static modifier against rolling advantage and disadvantage dice.
I attended the IN-Flight Report for Fantasy Flight Games at GenCon. Here is some information you might like.
Chris Peterson, CEO presented. Chris Gullimer (sp?), a Lucas Arts rep, was in the front row to answer a few questions about the license. There were also a handful of FFG employees and game developers to answer game specific questions.
Edge of the Empire * Covers Smugglers, fringe planets. There are force attuned characters, Imperials, and Rebels, too.
* Has star ships, but not large capital ships.
* Imagine Rogue Trader but for Star Wars...or something.
* Early 2013 release. You can buy the Beta book now for $30.
*The game uses special narrative dice. D6s, D8's, and D12's with special marks and gak.
*All of these games will be 100% Cross Compatible.
Age of Rebellion * 2014
* Large Capital Ships. Space Warfare. Stuff like that
Sadly I don't think either of you is going to convince the other that you're right... but from what little exposure I've had to the WFRP 3 dice pools and think it will fit the Star Wars universe nicely as it does seem to offer a more storytelling feel than simple +2, -4 modifiers ever can to me.
I look forward to hearing more about how the new Star Wars system runs as I've a small group that might well be up for trying this
The Only War beta gives people the money they paid for the beta pdf off the price of the full version once it is released. Have they said anything about this for this one? I'm assuming not given that it's a printed book
There is some rumor that folks who buy the beta can later get errata, although in what form I have no idea. LucasFilm nixed having a pdf version of the rules so I am wondering how that will affect supplemental material like errata/FAQs. But no, buying the beta paperback is not a coupon against the eventual hardcover final release.
I can imagine that the weekly updates will be done in the same manner as the Only War Beta (which finishes on Friday - get your final submissions in quick!).
Manchu wrote: Force Unleashed II begins on Kamino, with Vader using their cloning facilities to allegedly (I haven't finished the game yet so no one spoil it for me) recreate his secret apprentice, Starkiller.
Oh, I was wondering how they managed a sequel after the light side ending to the first game.
I dunno about this Edge of the Empire. I'm not a big fan of special dice, and this might be another component heavy game like WFRP 3E. Not good! That's why I'm avoiding 3E and hoarding my 2E books.
I would say deciding to not sell a PDF means even those who would choose to pay for a pdf version will pirate it, because they want a PDF.
Sell PDF - Those who are honest will buy it. Dishonest people will pirate it.
Don't Sell PDF - Honest people who want or need a pdf and would be willing to pay for it will pirate it. Dishonest people of course will still pirate it.
One of these options makes the company money. Neither option prevents piracy.
One of these options makes the company money. Neither option prevents piracy.
As Manchu said, in this particular case, FFG would have to get a separate license or an addendum to their current license with Lucas Arts to do a pdf, so it's a moot point I think.
Poison wrote: Honest people who want or need a pdf and would be willing to pay for it will pirate it.
I guess they're not so honest after all ... If you have purchased a print copy of the game, I don't see any moral objection to scanning a pdf that you strictly keep to yourself. (There are certainly ethical and legal objections, of course!) But as soon as you release it to others, you're putting it into the hands of thieves.
@Kronk: That's the rumor anyway. I can't point to a statement from FFG or even a Gen Con video of a FFG employee saying as much.
At the In-Flight report, there were questions about a board game and even minis for the RPG.
The CEO said that their license was VERY specific about what they can and can't do. He said no to the board game, but didn't answer the minis question. I would imagine that the license would include yes/no concerning electronic media, but I'm neither an expert on licenses nor familiar with their specific license.
There is going to be an iOS and Android application for the X-Wing game dice rolling and this RPG dice rolling, though, according to the In-Flight report.
That genuinely shocks me. I get that LucasFilm wants to do Star Wars-themed Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit (as well as a cute version of Operation with Artoo and Threepio) but not allowing FFG to do board games is a serious miscalculation on the part of LucasFilm. I guess that dashes my plans to mock up a high level design for a Battle of Hoth "tactics" game (a la DUST Tactics) that could expand into a Star Wars miniatures game. It might also explain why X-Wing doesn't include a starfield poster mat.
I'm not doubting your word, I'm doubting the wisdom of LucasFilm. Hasbro reaches wide but not deep. FFG has been working on the former without sacrificing the latter. The Star Wars license is obviously a major part of widening the appeal of their products -- just like going after and nabbing Lord of the Rings, Battlestar Galactica, and Game of Thrones. FFG is a rising star while Hasbro is status quo and, with regard to the adult market outside of Magic players, not exactly a healthy status quo.
Not sure why, except that Hasbro has had it for years. How long has FFG been a "big" player?
They showed a graph of their growth since 2000, and it's pretty amazing. I'm assuming that Hasbro has had the license for some time now and is probably paying extra for that "exclusive" part.
We'll see what shakes out when they come to renew their license, I guess.
I'd say that Arkham Horror is what really put FFG on the map.
Hasbro owns WotC and WotC lost some kind of license regarding Star Wars -- clearly, it lost the license to do RPGs and I would think it'd also be clear that it lost the license to for miniatures. So I'm a bit puzzled that Chris Petersen didn't answer the question about minis.
This also makes me wonder what a "board game" really is, getting back to the idea that X-Wing does include a play mat. That could provide some real insight into why EotE has special dice but not cards or chits. Looking down the line, that would mean we'd only likely see books and a GM screen for EotE and the other two SWRPGs.
So WotC thought the license was not valuable any more? Seems doubtful. I guess they could have wanted to focus elsewhere but the lack of movement on D&D in that time period suggests otherwise. To put a finer point on it, WotC was moving into high quality board games at the time in clear competition with FFG over games like Descent. Since their parent had and has the board game license, it seems they could have moved Star Wars in that direction as well, which neither they nor FFG seem to be able to do at the moment.
Manchu wrote: I'd say that Arkham Horror is what really put FFG on the map.
I would say you're correct. Chis said at the In-Flight report that it remains their #1 selling game. Not sure if he meant "of all time" or "units sold per month, including right now" or both or what, though.
As for Hasbro letting the Star Wars RPG license go, I would guess that the core rule books and module sales were slumping and it was no longer worth the license investment, nor the staff to push them out. Similar to them letting go of the SW card license (which had previously belonged to Decipher Games) AND which FFG now ALSO has in addition to the RPG license.
Manchu wrote: So WotC thought the license was not valuable any more? Seems doubtful. I guess they could have wanted to focus elsewhere but the lack of movement on D&D in that time period suggests otherwise. To put a finer point on it, WotC was moving into high quality board games at the time in clear competition with FFG over games like Descent. Since their parent had and has the board game license, it seems they could have moved Star Wars in that direction as well, which neither they nor FFG seem to be able to do at the moment.
The company line was they did not plan to produce any more supplements for SAGA, as they felt they'd put out all the relevant sourcebooks/campaign guides.
I do not work for WoTC or have inside sources, so that is information gleaned from press releases and twitter (WoTC twitter, not random dudes on twitter) WoTC has been dropping the ball on a lot of things for quite some time, I'd personally argue their last decent product was The Dark Sun Players Guide a couple years back, but it is what it is.
I think they have been focused on 5th edition D&D for some time, possibly since the release of the aforementioned DSPG, cuz they sure didnt do anything with their 4th edition game line for months after. Hard to say.
(Edited to add: When I say last decent product, I am excluding MTG from the discussion, focusing solely on the RPG stuff, their MTG stuff has been consistently good for over a decade. (Second edit: In my opinion)
Balance wrote: Which, sadly, means there will be a free PDF release anyway, that is probably slightly poorer quality. FFG (and Lucasfilm) get nothing.
Can you demonstrate a positive correlation between a company not selling a pdf and IP piracy? I think that is far from self-evident.
It's more that there will be piracy either way. At least if there's a legal option a few people will take it. Especially if it's got some added value like updates.
Balance wrote: It's more that there will be piracy either way. At least if there's a legal option a few people will take it. Especially if it's got some added value like updates.
See, that is what I got out of his statement, not that it would only be pirated it if there is just a book and no official PDF.
Ahtman wrote: See, that is what I got out of his statement, not that it would only be pirated it if there is just a book and no official PDF.
Even I didn't take Balance to mean that a PDF would only be pirated if there was no official one. But he did quote HBMC wondering aloud why LucasFilm might have nixed a PDF and concluded that move "means" there would be a "free PDF release anyway." It seems to me that piracy will occur either way. However the decision was made to not do a PDF release, I don't believe that decision will factor into eventual theft of this product. As I pointed out to Poison, the so-called honest people who pirate the book are still thieves regardless of whether they would hypothetically buy a PDF.
Got my beta book over the weekend and have been spending a lot of time with it.
I think my worry about talent trees was unfounded. As far as I can tell, the talents are not usually exclusive to a given tree. There are two tiers of "class": career and specialization. Each career entails three specializations. You can take specializations outside of your career. What career really does is gives you cheaper access to a suite of skills over the course of your character's life. The talent trees, meanwhile, are tied to specializations. So there is a lot of room for "synergy" and diversity.
Regarding the miniatures aspect: Until recently Knightmodels, a Spanish miniatures company had been producing miniatures under License from Lucasfilms. I'd say the line was doing quite well, until it suddenly stopped!
At the time I thought this was a strange move, as there was clearly a lot of milage in a venture of this nature. The stop couldn't have been due to quality, as both their 75 and 30mm range were spectaculary good.
Maybe, the reason for the license being pulled was because Lucasfilm wanted to grant it to another party (FFG anyone). It makes sense, as Knightmodels never had a secondary motive for the sale of their minis, they were always marketed to collectors and painters, in this case (with FFG) the motive would be stronger with a game attached, even if "only" an RPG!
Might be a good time to consider picking up some of those Knightmodel miniatures, as they WILL be far superior to anything FFG puts out....erm, guaranteed, I think.
It would have been nice if one of the books was about playing as Imperials. Combine Dark Heresy with Black Crusade, but, you know, Star Wars. Huntin' Jedi, enforcin tha law, sharing good times with friends while bringing the galaxy in line with the will of da Emprah.
I'm a bit conflicted about this. The Imperials are Space Nazis. Even setting aside the way that assuming that role entails rehabilitating it, you have to ask how fun it would be to play a Space Nazi. "Roll to see how efficiently you obey orders!" "Make a check to see how severely your superiors beat you for making a small mistake!" As an enemy, the Empire can be terrifying. But from "the inside" it's probably boring, absurd, and thankless. What you'd probably want to do is play some kind of commando irregular or a Jedi-hunting Force Adept but neither make much sense for Edge of the Empire.
Manchu wrote: you have to ask how fun it would be to play a Space Nazi.
Depends on the character. What if said PC has some desire that's outside of the acceptable norm? What if his/her ideology fell just outaide the lines of the mainstream? Not full bore Rebel but slightly skewed? A character that, for the most part, agreed with the main political statement but then had a few deviations. Might be interesting to role-play how such an individual would reconcile that.
Failing that, Imperial Crimelord Liason. Your duty to the Emperor requires you to stay up drinking all night and cavort with aliens! Sounds like a bucket full of win to me!
There have been other stories told about Imperial characters that weren't quite portrayed quite as evil Space Nazis. Even then it isn't like there have never been RPG's that had people play morally ambiguous characters. Even in KOTOR you could be a Dark Side character. In SWTOR you can play as Sith, Bounty Hunters, and Imperial Agents. There was a book on doing it for the other game systems as well, so I don't think it is exactly unprecedented.
And why does space nazi sound so familiar? Oh yeah.
A character that doesn't really agree with the Empire but goes along anyway? I think you just described Office Space without the humor.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Ahtman wrote: There have been other stories told about Imperial characters that weren't quite portrayed quite as evil Space Nazis.
That's the problem I'm referring to. If the Empire isn't the antagonist, it's just lame. Playing evil characters has it's own giant set of pitfalls but it can be interesting. Playing the bad guys as good guys is teetering on the edge of the black hole of Mary Suism, IMO. Call it "Thrawn Syndrome" when applied specifically to Star Wars. Dark Heresy works because evil is everyone, everywhere, all the time in 40k.
Manchu wrote:As an enemy, the Empire can be terrifying. But from "the inside" it's probably boring, absurd, and thankless.
As someone who played Imperial characters in the past, I can say with certainty that this isn't true - at least it wasn't for us.
I suppose it depends on how you want to portray the Empire, but movies aside, we're talking about a professional military that (mostly) isn't evil for evil's sake but consists of normal humans recruited into service. Are you aware how many Rebel characters actually were Imperials once? General Madine, Biggs Darklighter, Han Solo ... hell, even Luke Skywalker wanted to "go to the Academy"!
The Empire isn't actually Space Nazis, it's the Space Wehrmacht. They work for Space Nazis, and some of their divisions are closely connected to them. Subtle but important difference. Keep in mind that this is actually the direct successor to the Republic forces from the prequels. Palpatine didn't just flip a switch that had them turn from true patriots and scared conscripts into robotic villains overnight.
The large number of RPG supplements that were published for Imperial characters include entire paragraphs on this subject.
Manchu wrote:That's the problem I'm referring to. If the Empire isn't the antagonist, it's just lame. Playing evil characters has it's own giant set of pitfalls but it can be interesting. Playing the bad guys as good guys is teetering on the edge of the black hole of Mary Suism, IMO. Call it "Thrawn Syndrome" when applied specifically to Star Wars.
You don't have to play them as "good guys" or as "bad guys". Get away from these clichés. Just play them as "guys".
Lynata wrote: The Empire isn't actually Space Nazis, it's the Space Wehrmacht. They work for Space Nazis
Nope. They're Space Nazis. Since Zahn, there has been a massive program to rehabilitate them as "just regular people doing their jobs" but IMO it's totally lame. Also, Star Wars is not a good milieu from which to snipe at cliches. It is in fact made of cliches. As usual, some cliches can be used to interesting effect: the knight of medieval romance given a Zen outlook and a laser sword. Other cliches are tired out or just have a sinister ring: the evil Nazis were actually just a minority and all the other Germans were regular, industrious, noble, sympathetic people who knew NOSSING! about ze campz.
If you prefer that, your call. I just think that it's a rather unrealistic and biased view on the setting. I like to feel the world as being "alive" and having an existence of its own rather than just rotating around the big damn heroes™ all the time, with tricks like obscuring the TIE pilots' faces with a full helmet just like in WW2 movies, where all Axis pilots were wearing air masks to dehumanise them, whereas the Allies didn't. Meh.
I for one find it far more interesting to play a character blinded by propaganda like most Imperials, and/or walking the morally grey line with stuff like "evil deeds in the name of the greater good" a la Scarlet Crusade.
"The officer in command is the worst sort of Imperial - the one who actually believes that they're doing the right thing." -- from a Republic mission briefing in TOR
I can do actual villains too (had a lot of fun playing a drow once), and certainly the Empire offers ample opportunity for this as well. But at the end of the day, normal human beings can be "evil" enough just by being humans and thus prone to emotions such as pride, arrogance, disgust, jealousy, vengeance, ... There's really no need to demonise them "just because", without even a motif and turning them into cliché bad dudes who kick little puppies and steal a baby's lolly to stress that they are oh-so-evil.
To me, playing an Imperial doesn't mean going around terrorising people because it's fun. It means enforcing the Emperor's vision of galactic peace with a blaster.
The difference is subtle, but important.
Oh, and of course you can also play a sadist who actually enjoys terrorising people. Just like you can play the noble who thinks about maybe defecting because his conscience bothers him. That's the whole idea - giving characters more of a persona rather than just "rawr I'm a bad dude!". At the end of the day, an Imperial officer is a human being with hobbies, fears, dreams, pastimes, and possibly a family. Doesn't necessarily make them better people, but it makes them people, not just clichés.
Who do you envision as the agent of demonization here? Are you really saying that the Empire being evil is a matter of my preference or perspective? The Empire is an organization of pallid, backstabbing bureaucrats and cowardly thugs. Vader and Palaptine aside, it embodies the banal sort of evil Hannah Arendt talked about in reaction to Adolf Eichmann's trial -- no faceless thieves of babies' candy but, in contrast to the mookish Stormtrooper, clean-shaven white men with the ordinary faces of middle-class sobriety. Lucas's vision of the Empire is explicitly connected to Third Reich-style everyday evil. I find the desire to rehabilitate these obviously bad men, just like talk about the Wehrmacht in contrast to the SS or one SS division in contrast to another, to be morally repugnant. You yourself brought up how many rebels defected from the Empire -- can't you see the point of that story-wise? Good people, even if they are rather naive, simply cannot tolerate being part of the Empire.
I've also played Imperial characters, back in WEG's d6 game. In fact, my group in those days ONLY played Imperial characters. It could be fun when we were agents of evil operating on the periphery of the monolithic bureaucracy. And in those instances we played villains -- at the best of times, villains who were tortured and full of doubt, yes, but villains nonetheless. But when we tried playing the "Good Nazi" Imperial officers ... well, it just ends up being a "the Nazis would've been okay without Hitler" sort of thing. So I think you could have fun playing low-level Imperials in a in media res combat situation but it would be hard to see any characters who were truly good not going over to the Alliance. For the sake of not roleplaying endless filings of operations reports and jackboot shining, I'd hope that the bad characters were Force-sensitive.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Oh yeah, the Relentless -- that is the absolute epitome of what I am talking about when it comes to "Thrawn Syndrome" (outside of Grand Admiral Perfect himself).
Is all that *chzzp* You are go, roger. *chzzrp* military procedural stuff really fun for you in RPGs? To me, it would about as interesting as roleplaying an interaction with my microwave.
A: How'd your game session go last night? B: It went late, we deployed to a planet where the Rebels were hiding out. A: Awesome, did you guys kill those Rebel scum? B: I said we deployed. We might get to fighting next week. A: Wow, that's long winded. B: I know, but then the week after is when we finally get to draft our mission debriefings! A: Er ...
Having Optimus Prime narrate was a brilliant propagandist touch that Goebbels himself could be proud of.
Manchu wrote:Are you really saying that the Empire being evil is a matter of my preference or perspective?
No, but every single Imperial supposedly being evil obviously is.
Manchu wrote:You yourself brought up how many rebels defected from the Empire -- can't you see the point of that story-wise? Good people, even if they are rather naive, simply cannot tolerate being part of the Empire.
Can't you see the point of that? This means that "good people" can get caught up in the Empire's military machinery, and just like not even the Nazis were all about killing innocent people 24/7 everywhere, the Empire too can actually maintain the facade of being a harsh but benevolent government (a direction it actually develops towards after less corrupt people take over leadership), simply by not exposing all its people to the full scale of atrocities committed in its name. This is the power of propaganda, and the answer to how so many people can blindly follow a vision like that - both for the Star Wars setting as well as in our real world.
The way you sound like it's as if people are putting on the uniform and immediately realise what they signed up for, instantly being forced to decide between their conscience or their oaths. This is not how reality works.
Manchu wrote:I find the desire to rehabilitate these obviously bad men, just like talk about the Wehrmacht in contrast to the SS or one SS division in contrast to another, to be morally repugnant.
It is equally repugnant to judge people not by their actions (or lack of action) but by their nationality. When you say "obviously bad men" and apply it to every single person in the Imperial military, or the German Wehrmacht, you are going the easy way and throw people into premade categories without actually looking at them as persons.
I too am very critical of the current trend to just differentiate the Wehrmacht from the SS, because the Wehrmacht has been engaged in numerous atrocities as well. That still doesn't mean every single soldier did, though. It taints the faction as an entity, but you can still have good people working for an evil regime, just like you can have evil people work for a good regime. How do you think the US military is currently portrayed in various Arab countries, especially after certain incidents like murder, rape and torture? Does that mean any US soldier is like the guys who committed these acts? Real life simply isn't as easy as that. You can perfectly have an RPG where things just are that easy, but they don't have to be. Numerous novels, comics and even computer games about "moderate" Imperials are proof that you can tell a good story that fits into the setting without any cliché bad dudes just so that the players can feel "more good". I guess that for some it may be important that their characters are the good guys rather than just pursueing a different agenda - like in, y'know, the majority of modern day conflicts. Human history is rarely as easy as "good vs evil", and even the WW2 Allies committed their share of atrocities, or gave immunity to those who did.
Manchu wrote:Having Optimus Prime narrate was a brilliant propagandist touch that Goebbels himself could be proud of.
H.B.M.C. wrote:None of you ever played TIE Fighter?
That's exactly what I was thinking of as I typed "computer games" in that list about products with moderate Imperials. One of the first PC games I purchased! It was the huge box version with 7(?) disks ... and a big manual that came with a fluffy short story about Maarek Stele, how he volunteered to join the Imperial Navy after it forcefully ended the civil war in his home system (something the Republic failed to do), and how he became a fighter pilot after only serving as a deck technician first. Good stuff.
And I still want a sequel to that game so badly ...
Manchu wrote:Are you really saying that the Empire being evil is a matter of my preference or perspective?
No, but every single Imperial supposedly being evil obviously is.
I don't think you're talking to my point. My point is the Empire is an evil thing. Cooperating with it is evil. There is no good way to be an Imperial, except maybe as a saboteur. Yes, people get sucked into the Imperial machine because it is so monolithic rather than joining because they themselves start out bad. But the good ones can't stay in. Staying in would, over time, make them evil.
Lynata wrote:the Empire too can actually maintain the facade of being a harsh but benevolent government
The Empire clearly does not exist to govern the galaxy. It takes little interest in governance aside from the exercise of power for its own sake, including the massive and inefficient exploitation of galactic resources it takes to fund that exercise of power. The Empire does nothing good for the galaxy.
Lynata wrote:The way you sound like it's as if people are putting on the uniform and immediately realise what they signed up for, instantly being forced to decide between their conscience or their oaths. This is not how reality works.
First, no one is talking about reality. We're talking about a world in which people fight with laser guns and laser swords. That's not how reality, works, either. But it's not important; the point is that we're using something that isn't real to talk about things that are real. In real life, there is no Rebel Alliance for good people to join. In Star Wars, there is -- and people who don't join it, people who go along with the Empire instead, fall into several categories: prisoners who can't leave, cowards who know they should leave but don't, petty ones who don't care as long as they're safe, and the murderous ones who love the Empire because it affords them the opportunity to bully, steal, rape, and murder. Real life is tough. "Maybe we should have stood up to the Nazis, even if they did kill us." In Star Wars, the choices are more clear. "The Empire must fall."
Lynata wrote:I too am very critical of the current trend to just differentiate the Wehrmacht from the SS, because the Wehrmacht has been engaged in numerous atrocities as well. That still doesn't mean every single soldier did, though.
Talking about the Wehrmacht, I'm not talking about every individual -- I'm talking about the Wehrmacht. You can't rehabilitate it. You can say that not every man committed atrocities but the atrocities were too frequent, too wide in scale, too readily accomplished to analyze the Wehrmacht by looking at individual soldiers. The repugnant thing is this argument that some soldiers didn't commit atrocities, therefore the Wehrmacht is good and noble but just with a few diabolical men. No -- the institution is beyond pardon, regardless of which individual participants did what. That is how the Wehrmacht is similar to the Empire. White-uniformed Thrawn cannot make the Empire a good thing. But the Wehrmacht is also different in the sense that it was a real thing and not the antogonist element of a fictional story about the struggle of good to overcome evil. The Empire is that antagonist. It is objectively evil in a way that we can never say about even the Wehrmacht. And the fictional people who go along with this fictional institution cannot help but become evil or in some other way morally debilitated themselves over time. And that is why the good guys are REBELS.
I think playing Imperials who end up being confronted by the evil of the Empire and have to decide what to do, whether to join the Rebels, or become pirates, or foment mutiny would make for a fine story, myself.
Again, it isn't what I care for, personally, in Star Wars. I want my laser sword, but I can see the appeal.
Manchu wrote:Yes, people get sucked into the Imperial machine because it is so monolithic rather than joining because they themselves start out bad. But the good ones can't stay in. Staying in would, over time, make them evil.
I'd dispute that. It really depends on what the individual gets to know and see. Hell, even if he is a witness (or even a semi-willing participant) to an atrocity, he could still believe that it's not the Empire's fault but that of a corrupt superior, or even believe that this is still better than the alternative of anarchy. There are rebels who blow up hospitals, how do you think their underlings would feel?
Manchu wrote:The Empire clearly does not exist to govern the galaxy. It takes little interest in governance aside from the exercise of power for its own sake, including the massive and inefficient exploitation of galactic resources it takes to fund that exercise of power. The Empire does nothing good for the galaxy.
But that's a question of propaganda, innit?
"We are an Empire ruled by the majority! An Empire ruled by a new Constitution! An Empire of laws, not of politicians! An Empire devoted to the preservation of a just society. Of a safe and secure society! We are an Empire that will stand for ten thousand years!" -- Declaration of a New Order
I don't know what you think of the Imperial forces, but the military didn't spend every hour of the day cracking down on innocent civilians. Just like its Old Republic Judicial Fleet predecessor, it was engaged more in fighting pirates and smugglers and securing spacelanes for commercial traffic than actually fighting rebel forces (at least until Endor), simply because there were a lot more criminals in the galaxy than rebels. And even then, Imperial propaganda took great care to paint rebel "terrorist" activities in the worst possible light whilst glorifying (or omitting) Imperial efforts. Imperial Intelligence even conducted "false flag" operations to affect public opinion.
And yes, the Empire had lots of interest in governance, actually. Don't you remember ANH with Tarkin's line about how regional governors now take direct control as the Senate is disbanded? That's half the deal of the entire change from Republic to Empire - Palpatine's efforts to eliminate political infighting and securing his direct control by replacing the various elected or hereditary representatives with his military Moffs, making the Empire function a lot more efficient than the corrupt Old Republic whose response to various crisis situations was often slow or non-existent due to the Senate being unable to agree on anything. The Naboo blockade is a perfect example for how ineffective the Republic has become in its final days.
Manchu wrote:First, no one is talking about reality. We're talking about a world in which people fight with laser guns and laser swords. That's not how reality, works, either.
Doesn't mean your RPG cannot be played as if the setting was a living world rather than the backdrop for a fairytale. As I said, if you prefer the latter because it makes the heroes shine more, that'd be your personal preference. But as I said, there's lots of stories from the Imperial perspective, too, and some of them (like "To the Last Man", which is basically a Star Wars version of the movie "Zulu") are pretty good.
Manchu wrote:Talking about the Wehrmacht, I'm not talking about every individual -- I'm talking about the Wehrmacht.
And I'm talking about characters in an RPG. Because (usually) you don't play an entire faction but individual people in it.
Manchu wrote:The Empire is that antagonist. It is objectively evil in a way that we can never say about even the Wehrmacht. And the fictional people who go along with this fictional institution cannot help but become evil or in some other way morally debilitated themselves over time. And that is why the good guys are REBELS.
If you want it to be a simple "good vs evil" thing in your campaign - as I said, that'd be your choice. I like it a little more complicated and morally ambiguous, not in the least because I'm fed with all the simplified "all <Communists/Americans/Atheists/Christians/Democrats/Republicans/etc> are evil!" BS that gets spouted these days by propaganda machines tending to people who all have a number of skeletons in their own closet. I always had a weak spot for morally ambiguous characters, though, be it Imperial career officers in Star Wars or Templars in Dragon Age or the Scarlet Crusade in Warcraft, or the Sisters of Battle in 40k. I can play full-on good (Chessentan Lathander paladin) or full-on evil (Drow) as well, but it's just not as fun for me. Anyways, arguably, the Expanded Universe and its detailed background have sufficient potential for a less one-sided approach than the movies, and I can only recommend you at least try and pick up one of those books or comics or games that show things "from the other side". It's less of a space opera fairytale, but you might still like it!
The point of the Republic was not to "rule" the galaxy but to provide a forum for high-level, voluntary cooperation. You find Leia talking about this a lot in the New Republic era but you have to think a little bit about it. The question people like Leia had to ask was: Why did the Old Republic fall? The typical answer is "corruption" but it makes more sense to consider the absurdity of one authority governing an entire galaxy. The Republic could not resolve local trade disputes like Naboo because it was never the function of the Republic to do so and it never had that function because it is unreasonable to expect that a central authority could efficiently solve every little local problem.
Of course, many people did expect that in the era preceding the Clone Wars. Palpatine fomented these fantasies and became Supreme Chancellor as a direct result. Later, he engineered the Senate granting him extraordinary powers and then emperorship (and thereby their own demise) via the same method. Although senators like Padme opposed overt centralization in the form of the Military Creation Act, even they believed at a basic level that the Republic itself rather than its constituent cultures would solve the problems of galactic politics. As a political phenomenon, the Empire was an attempt to realize those beliefs in an absolute way by imposing rule directly from the center. As you point out, this is why Palpatine used the moffs to bypass local governments. The result, however, was not more efficient governance.
Politics is about give and take. The center and periphery have to support one another in order that the system can serve the interests of both. For this to work, each party needs to be both independent as well as cooperative. Even in the dwindling days of the Old Republic, this is how the system worked -- as can be seen in the Separatist movement. It is no coincidence that Palpatine employed that very movement to establish his New Order, which consisted in shattering the autonomy of the periphery in total favor of the center. The center would no longer in any sense serve the needs of the periphery and the periphery would be shackled to the increasingly callous demands of the center. That is what the dissolution of the Senate really meant.
This is a bad system in more than the moral sense. The center only cares about the periphery to the extent that the periphery contains resources demanded by the center. This is why even at the highest levels the Empire was comfortable working with organized crime as long as it could maintain its dominant position in that relationship (see Prince Xizor). In effect, the Empire had no interest in the galaxy beyond the Empire's own self-preservation. This is not a matter of propaganda but of the franchise itself. Consider the Death Star: how many planetary economies' worth of credits do you think it took to build that? And what for? To scare everyone else into line. They destroyed an entire planet just to make a point to the rest. That is not a rational calculation of resource management. That is an act premised upon the desire to exercise power purely as its own end.
This is the culture of the Empire from Palpatine to the lowliest Stormtrooper. It permeates every aspect of the institution because it was designed by Palpatine to do exactly that. The "ineffective" and "corrupt" Old Republic didn't fall to a pure and efficient New Order. Rather, the Empire is comprised of the worst characteristics of the ancient system in their most concentrated forms. At the festering heart of the dying Republic was Palpatine, killing it from within. A system with him in charge is supposed to be better? It is most certainly not and every shot of the Original Trilogy involving the Empire is a testament to that.
Star Wars is about the struggle of good against evil both deep within the human heart and writ large across the galaxy. Because it is a story about struggle there will certainly be a gray area. That's what struggle is, the space where black and white bleed into each other. Consider the central question of the Orignal Trilogy: can there be redemption for an evil man? The question cannot be answered by dismissing the evil that this man has done. Similarly, we can't pretend that the Empire is good or that good people can tolerate its evil. Perhaps you do not think good and evil are relevant categories in the real world. But there is no question that they truly, objectively exist in the world of Star Wars.
Manchu wrote:The point of the Republic was not to "rule" the galaxy but to provide a forum for high-level, voluntary cooperation. [...] The Republic could not resolve local trade disputes like Naboo because it was never the function of the Republic to do so and it never had that function because it is unreasonable to expect that a central authority could efficiently solve every little local problem.
An entire world being held hostage isn't exactly what I would classify as "a little local problem", even though to the Senators of all those other worlds it may appear as such. Membership in the Republic should have guaranteed assistance, if necessary in military form, to member worlds in need. This is what the Republic was meant for, and why Amidala trusted in democracy to solve the issue in the first place.
Ported over into the real world, it would be like a drug cartel-manipulated South-American country invading Texas and overpowering its police and National Guard, and the U.S. Army fails to respond because the Republicans block deployment via Congress (I'm not sure this is how it works, but you get the idea).
And this is by far not the only example. Since the TIE-Fighter game was already mentioned, the situation of the civil war of Kuan versus Bordal was not dissimilar. The truth is that even in the Old Republic, power was already centralised in the Core and shared by the few most wealthy worlds and their minions - it's not how things were supposed to run as per the founders and the idealists (like Amidala), but galactic economy and politics just made it so and the majority of people just gave a gundark's ass about what happened in the Outer Rim. Or on Naboo.
Conversely, the Emperor could at least guarantee that your world won't be forgotten. It would only be occupied.
Manchu wrote:As you point out, this is why Palpatine used the moffs to bypass local governments. The result, however, was not more efficient governance.
How was it not more efficient? You may argue that some governors may have administrated to the worlds in a worse way than their democratically elected predecessors, but in the end they would implement any policy that the central authority would wish them to implement. Unlike the Republic, where member worlds had far more free reign.
Even in the New Republic, this degree of freedom continued to cause issues as various worlds pulled the ships they volunteered to the Republic's defence back to protect their own worlds, leaving poorer planets - most notably the Rim worlds - completely defenseless and the military unable to act because they couldn't put a fleet together. "Divide and conquer." This is a military issue, but it is a valid example of the potential drawbacks of such liberties.
Manchu wrote:Politics is about give and take. The center and periphery have to support one another in order that the system can serve the interests of both. For this to work, each party needs to be both independent as well as cooperative. Even in the dwindling days of the Old Republic, this is how the system worked -- as can be seen in the Separatist movement.
How is the birth of a separatist movement whose sole origin is its members being fed up with Coruscant a shining example of "give and take" having worked nicely for the Old Republic? That's like, the total opposite!
Manchu wrote:This is why even at the highest levels the Empire was comfortable working with organized crime as long as it could maintain its dominant position in that relationship (see Prince Xizor).
Actually, I'd point out that it is (with various corrupt exceptions) solely the (equally corrupt) highest levels that are comfortable working with organized crime. The military was just as proud and full of principles as it was in the days of the Old Republic.
"Bounty hunters... We don't need their scum." -- Admiral Piett
Manchu wrote:In effect, the Empire had no interest in the galaxy beyond the Empire's own self-preservation. This is not a matter of propaganda but of the franchise itself. Consider the Death Star: how many planetary economies' worth of credits do you think it took to build that? And what for? To scare everyone else into line. They destroyed an entire planet just to make a point to the rest. That is not a rational calculation of resource management. That is an act premised upon the desire to exercise power purely as its own end.
Well, duh. This is not what the average Imperial citizen or soldier learns and thinks, though. Palpatine's thoughts are his own, and what you are referring to is unfiltered meta-knowledge that is surely presented in a much different light in propaganda.
And as a character in an RPG, I'd always determine his or her actions by what they know, not what I as the player know. The ability to take a step back and differentiate between IC/OOC is one of the most critical things in roleplaying games.
Manchu wrote:Star Wars is about the struggle of good against evil both deep within the human heart and writ large across the galaxy.
It is to you. For me, the franchise Star Wars is an amazing setting that offers lots of opportunities away from the cliché good guys. If I feel in the right mood for a "good vs evil" campaign like we saw it in the movies, then I'll play that. But I will not limit myself to this when the universe can offer me so much more.
Currently it looks like my next character is going to be a Sector Ranger in the Legacy era, though, and we're going to take much inspiration from this old gem.
Well, unless "Edge of the Empire" releases really soon. It might "force" us to change plans.
Lynata wrote: Membership in the Republic should have guaranteed assistance, if necessary in military form, to member worlds in need. This is what the Republic was meant for, and why Amidala trusted in democracy to solve the issue in the first place.
Totally incorrect. Remember how there was no military to enforce the Senate's rulings? Padme trusted in the Senate because she believed in the power of moral suasion over coercive force. She was right: the Senate was only supposed to exercise moral suasion. But she was also wrong: coercive force is still necessary. The people of Naboo forgot that and so they suffered under a boycott. The Senate had no real capacity to enforce its conclusion one way or the other about the Trade Federation blockade. The most they could do is send a Jedi -- which they already did without even voting on the issue. So that's the important lesson of Naboo: not that the Republic didn't work; but that even people like Padme no longer understood the Republic.
Lynata wrote:How was it not more efficient? You may argue that some governors may have administrated to the worlds in a worse way than their democratically elected predecessors, but in the end they would implement any policy that the central authority would wish them to implement. Unlike the Republic, where member worlds had far more free reign.
Efficiency is the opposite of freedom and capacity to act at "lower" levels (i.e., subsidiarity)? I think not. I think you should watch the OT and prequels more carefully. In A New Hope Leia assesses the "efficiency" of Imperial rule: "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
Lynata wrote:How is the birth of a separatist movement whose sole origin is its members being fed up with Coruscant a shining example of "give and take" having worked nicely for the Old Republic? That's like, the total opposite!
The fact that a Separatist movement could develop at that scale and, in the formal sense, with that rapidity proves that the culture of the galaxy during even the twilight of the Republic was far less centralized than members of the Galactic Senate seemed to think. They broke away because they were convinced the center was all take and no give. It turned out to be a tremendously ironic mistake!
Lynata wrote:Actually, I'd point out that it is (with various corrupt exceptions) solely the (equally corrupt) highest levels that are comfortable working with organized crime.
You have a bizarre way of talking about corruption. How is the Emperor "corrupt" in the context of the Empire. The entire Empire was set up for his direct benefit. He's only corrupt relative to a political system not explicitly designed to further his personal goals. Once again, the problem is that you want to envision the Empire as something separate from its inherent malignancy when it simply is not.
Lynata wrote:This is not what the average Imperial citizen or soldier learns and thinks, though. Palpatine's thoughts are his own, and what you are referring to is unfiltered meta-knowledge that is surely presented in a much different light in propaganda.
Only someone with no experience with the Empire would buy into any aspect of Imperial propaganda -- except the part about giving you the chance to bully and murder. Even teenaged farmboys in the Outer Rim know the Empire is bad, regardless of whether they feel they can do anything to stop it.
Lynata wrote:
Manchu wrote:Star Wars is about the struggle of good against evil both deep within the human heart and writ large across the galaxy.
It is to you. For me, the franchise Star Wars is an amazing setting that offers lots of opportunities away from the cliché good guys.
For you, Star Wars could be about unicorns jumping on rainbow trampolines. Who the hell cares? The ability to have a thought doesn't make it relevant. While I agree that Star Wars is not all about cliche good guys (like Grand Admiral Thrawn), it's still about good and evil. Once you leave aside this key aspect, you've left the shared experience of the franchise behind and gone into your own little world of opinions. I'm not saying you can't do that, I'm just saying it's not relevant to Star Wars.
Manchu wrote:Totally incorrect. Remember how there was no military to enforce the Senate's rulings? Padme trusted in the Senate because she believed in the power of moral suasion over coercive force. She was right: the Senate was only supposed to exercise moral suasion. But she was also wrong: coercive force is still necessary. The people of Naboo forgot that and so they suffered under a boycott. The Senate had no real capacity to enforce its conclusion one way or the other about the Trade Federation blockade. The most they could do is send a Jedi -- which they already did without even voting on the issue.
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Judicial_Forces
What, did you really think that any thug with a dozen star cruisers hold the entire Galactic Republic hostage?
Manchu wrote:Efficiency is the opposite of freedom and capacity to act at "lower" levels (i.e., subsidiarity)? I think not. I think you should watch the OT and prequels more carefully. In A New Hope Leia assesses the "efficiency" of Imperial rule: "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
Efficiency is all parts of the machine working towards a common goal instead of every planet going its own way.
And arguably, Tarkin's way allowed less planets to slip through his fingers than the Old Republic's. At least until the rebels got their hands on a friggin' Jedi and a ton of luck.
Manchu wrote:They broke away because they were convinced the center was all take and no give.
So it's not "a shining example". Glad we cleared that up.
I'd also like to point out that the Separatist worlds themselves weren't actually a bunch of democracies.
Manchu wrote:You have a bizarre way of talking about corruption. How is the Emperor "corrupt" in the context of the Empire. The entire Empire was set up for his direct benefit. He's only corrupt relative to a political system not explicitly designed to further his personal goals. Once again, the problem is that you want to envision the Empire as something separate from its inherent malignancy when it simply is not.
No, the problem is your inability to separate official Imperial Ideology from your meta-knowledge. There's a reason why a lot of people believed in the concept of the New Order and how it'd save the galaxy, and this was not embracing the fact that Palpatine is a sadistic tyrant. And fact is that Palpatine preached differently to the masses than what he actually wanted. He didn't want peace and prosperity - but that's what he told his people. And no amount of you trying to twist it all into the Emperor turning everyone into a mindless demonic minion is going to change this.
Also, if we fast forward a hundred years, Palpatine being dead yet those idealists surviving actually does result in a more benevolent Galactic Empire - one that is still a centralised dictatorship, but without the xenophobia, sexism and merciless exploitation that had tainted its origins.
Manchu wrote:Only someone with no experience with the Empire would buy into any aspect of Imperial propaganda -- except the part about giving you the chance to bully and murder. Even teenaged farmboys in the Outer Rim know the Empire is bad, regardless of whether they feel they can do anything to stop it.
You really need to stop making things up.
Manchu wrote:For you, Star Wars could be about unicorns jumping on rainbow trampolines. Who the hell cares? The ability to have a thought doesn't make it relevant. While I agree that Star Wars is not all about cliche good guys (like Grand Admiral Thrawn), it's still about good and evil. Once you leave aside this key aspect, you've left the shared experience of the franchise behind and gone into your own little world of opinions. I'm not saying you can't do that, I'm just saying it's not relevant to Star Wars.
It's not relevant for your Star Wars. If you're going at me like that, why should *I* care?
It's obvious that you are completely disregarding the Expanded Universe and apparently prefer limiting your perspective to the movies with its cliché Evil Imperials who are nothing but faceless targets you can shoot at without feeling bad that you just killed a human being. As I said: Your choice. But it thus seems we have no common ground to continue the discussion.
Okay. They had cops. I'm not sure what your point is.
Lynata wrote:And arguably, Tarkin's way allowed less planets to slip through his fingers than the Old Republic's.
Another non-sequitur. The Empire, which survived as the Emperor envisioned it for a bare couple of decades compared to 10,000 years of the Republic, was under existential attack even before Palpatine dissolved the Senate
Lynata wrote:So it's not "a shining example". Glad we cleared that up. I'd also like to point out that the Separatist worlds themselves weren't actually a bunch of democracies.
Third strike. I have no idea what you mean by "shining example" and whether or not the break-away systems were themselves democracies has nothing to do with anything I said. What I actually said was the Separatist movement shows that local power was still preeminent even at the eve of the Empire's inception.
Lynata wrote:No, the problem is your inability to separate official Imperial Ideology from your meta-knowledge.
Meta-knowledge has nothing to do with the issue. The Empire is bad on its face at every single level of operation. "It's not that I like the Empire; I hate it, but there's nothing I can do about it right now." -- some ignorant farmboy.
Lynata wrote:
Manchu wrote:Even teenaged farmboys in the Outer Rim know the Empire is bad, regardless of whether they feel they can do anything to stop it.
You really need to stop making things up.
See above. And please go watch the Star Wars movies sometime.
Lynata wrote:It's obvious that you are completely disregarding the Expanded Universe and apparently prefer limiting your perspective to the movies with its cliché Evil Imperials who are nothing but faceless targets you can shoot at without feeling bad that you just killed a human being. As I said: Your choice. But it thus seems we have no common ground to continue the discussion.
The idea that I am limiting my view to the movies is totally false. But they are the source of every other scrap of Star Wars merchandising so pretending novels, comics, etc, are just as important is absurd. You can't even say "it's all canon" because it's really not. When something in the EU got in the way of what he wanted in his movies, Lucas totally disregarded the EU. You keep characterizing my view as narrow, telling me that I'm not considering the sources and that in contrast to me you prefer a more sophisticated and nuanced Star Wars. But your view does not strike me as sophisticated. It strikes me as out-of-touch with the themes of the franchise. You seem to see Star Wars as Battlestar Galactica (new version) with Star Destroyers but that ain't it.
I have some suspicion that we're just fighting on rhetorical terms because you're not really debating with me on the points I'm making. Maybe the dialog needs to open in a fresh way to clarify where we can agree. For example, do you acknowledge that there is a Dark Side of the Force and that the dominance of that aspect of the Force in the galaxy (the "imbalance" the Jedi talked about in the prequels) was manifest in the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Empire?
Manchu wrote:Okay. They had cops. I'm not sure what your point is.
Sector Rangers are cops.
The Judicial Forces are more like the National Guard in that they can actually fight battles like, for example, this one. Not to mention that the Senate could also rule to create makeshift fleets of the defence forces of its various members.
Manchu wrote:Another non-sequitur. The Empire, which survived as the Emperor envisioned it for a bare couple of decades compared to 10,000 years of the Republic, was under existential attack even before Palpatine dissolved the Senate
"Existential" sounds a bit delusional.
Manchu wrote:Third strike. I have no idea what you mean by "shining example" and whether or not the break-away systems were themselves democracies has nothing to do with anything I said. What I actually said was the Separatist movement shows that local power was still preeminent even at the eve of the Empire's inception.
And what I actually said was that this is a perfect example of the Republic's inefficiency and inability to keep its gak together.
Manchu wrote:Meta-knowledge has nothing to do with the issue. The Empire is bad on its face at every single level of operation.
Yeah, sure. It's not like the Empire actually bothered much with propaganda or black ops, right?
Also, Hitler actually had hooves and all Wehrmacht soldiers had red eyes and smelled of sulphur.
Manchu wrote:See above. And please go watch the Star Wars movies sometime.
Please expand your horizon beyond the few movies that clearly focus on a black vs white fairytale without portraying the Empire in any other light than as the cliché villain.
Manchu wrote:The idea that I am limiting my view to the movies is totally false. But they are the source of every other scrap of Star Wars merchandising so pretending novels, comics, etc, are just as important is absurd. You can't even say "it's all canon" because it's really not.
Unlike 40k, the Star Wars canon actually does work like this. You can either limit your perception to the movies, or you expand it to the EU which is wrapped around the movies. Both settings are internally consistent, but depending on what you choose you'll end up with a vastly different image in each - one is an idealised fairytale, the other is a realistic world with living, breathing people on both sides of the conflict.
Manchu wrote:You keep characterizing my view as narrow, telling me that I'm not considering the sources and that in contrast to me you prefer a more sophisticated and nuanced Star Wars. But your view does not strike me as sophisticated. It strikes me as out-of-touch with the themes of the franchise. You seem to see Star Wars as Battlestar Galactica (new version) with Star Destroyers but that ain't it.
How am *I* out of touch with the setting when it's you who keeps ignoring facts of the EU such as the existence of the Judicial Forces (which by the way later became the Imperial Navy), the Empire's many propaganda efforts, or how well it hides its atrocities from the galactic populace and its own people? I've posted the proof, you simply chose to disregard it as it doesn't fit in with your simplified movie vision.
Manchu wrote:I have some suspicion that we're just fighting on rhetorical terms because you're not really debating with me on the points I'm making. Maybe the dialog needs to open in a fresh way to clarify where we can agree. For example, do you acknowledge that there is a Dark Side of the Force and that the dominance of that aspect of the Force in the galaxy (the "imbalance" the Jedi talked about in the prequels) was manifest in the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Empire?
Also, I believe I am debating on the points you make. The problem is that we both seem to go by different sources (movies vs EU), hence we lack a common ground to agree upon or even have a chance at convincing the other.
kronk wrote: Adding anything else means you're thinking too hard.
If people didn't take it at least somewhat seriously the series wouldn't still be as popular as it is. If poeple didn't take it at least somewhat seriously we wouldn't be gearing up for three new core rulebooks from a third iteration of Star Wars RPG's: West End Games, OGL, and now FFG.
I privilege the themes and tone of the movies because they are privileged. No novel or comic book can override them but they can obviously override novels and comics books. It's a simple and self-evident proposition that no rational person should have trouble understanding and accepting.
The "black versus white" line you keep taking is a strawman argument and even if it wasn't, it's not compelling. Good and evil are absolutely, unquestionably present in the Star Wars universe. (And if some comic book misses that point then something is wrong with that comic book.) It doesn't mean the conflict between them is simple. I alluded to it before but I guess I'll explain it a bit more: in the OT, Obi-Wan and Yoda are presented as good and wise yet they tell Luke the only way to defeat evil is to kill Vader. Their viewpoint is the "black and white" thing you're talking about but it is NOT the viewpoint of the Star Wars story. Luke rejects their idea and believes there is good in his father. The prequels show us that the rigidity of the Jedi mindset is what allowed Palpatine to hunt them to extinction and establish the Empire. Star Wars explicitly criticizes a simple "black and white" moral universe -- but that doesn't mean good and evil are not present as definitive elements.
Saying the Empire and everything about it is wrong is not a overly simplistic "black and white" appraisal. It's an accurate statement that does not at all limit the sophistication of moral conflict in the story. The ambiguity of moral responsibility is the original dynamic of Luke's character development -- he knows the Empire is bad but feels unable to do anything about it. And then the world of the Rebellion and his own Jedi legacy open up to him. Goodness does exist in the universe. People can do something about the evil of the Empire, if they're willing to take huge risks. Those who don't are bad people. They're not necessarily moustache-twirling villains but they are morally lazy at the very least.
In real life, morally lazy people can appeal to their own ignorance and the presumptive badness of the world itself as excuses. In Star Wars, it's just self-delusion. In Star Wars, good has a chance of triumphing over evil -- and I'm talking about the struggle inside an individual's heart as well as a conflict that stretches across the galaxy because in Star Wars those two "scales" are one and the same. That chance of triumph means there is also a responsibility, a duty to struggle on the side of good. People who work for the Empire and don't realize the Empire is bad are lying to themselves and in that lie they are fighting on the side of evil.
I have read much of the EU, and still, to me Star Wars is entirely about Good vs Evil, and more specifically, Good Dudes with Lightsabers vs Evil Dudes with Lightsabers.
This is why Edge of the Empire misses the mark to me. Its not about Good Dudes with Lightsabers.
Not to say enjoying what is there is Badwrongfun or anything, but I don't get it =P
kronk wrote: Adding anything else means you're thinking too hard.
If people didn't take it at least somewhat seriously the series wouldn't still be as popular as it is. If poeple didn't take it at least somewhat seriously we wouldn't be gearing up for three new core rulebooks from a third iteration of Star Wars RPG's: West End Games, OGL, and now FFG.
100% disagreement.
My group enjoys the Star Wars universe. We've been to Star Wars celebration, played the hell out of Star Wars Galaxies, played SW:CCG until it died. We only stopped playing the OGL version because the rules were "wonky' to say the least. We don't take it seriously beyond Han Shot First.
We're just fans. But if your enjoyment is to take it seriously, then don't let me stop you.
@Poison: Like I said, the aesthetic touchstone of the franchise is that the dramas of the heart are writ large across the stars. Where does this epic begin?
"If there's a bright center to the universe, you're on the planet that it's farthest from."
The seedy underbelly of this marvelous and fantastical world is one of its key aspect. The Mos Eisley Cantina is just as intriguing as the Death Star. The plight of a golden-hearted smuggler is as fraught with nobility as that of a Jedi Knight.
I only agree with you if the Mos Eisley Cantina is leading you to the Death Star.
If its leading you to raid air processing units for spare parts (as one of the games described on FFG's beta forums) I am out.
Han Solo was clearly a smuggler and ne'er do well, at least until Greedo shot first, and fits this core, but in the movies he shoots down Vader in the very first movie, it isn't like he spent 25 sessions trying to scrape up enough cash to even get off planet.
I'm following its development with an eyebrow raised but at least some interest, but I wouldn't have any actual interest in a game of it unless the GM had an extremely interesting premise.
kronk wrote: Adding anything else means you're thinking too hard.
If people didn't take it at least somewhat seriously the series wouldn't still be as popular as it is. If poeple didn't take it at least somewhat seriously we wouldn't be gearing up for three new core rulebooks from a third iteration of Star Wars RPG's: West End Games, OGL, and now FFG.
100% disagreement.
My group enjoys the Star Wars universe. We've been to Star Wars celebration, played the hell out of Star Wars Galaxies, played SW:CCG until it died. We only stopped playing the OGL version because the rules were "wonky' to say the least. We don't take it seriously beyond Han Shot First.
We're just fans. But if your enjoyment is to take it seriously, then don't let me stop you.
You do understand that taking something seriously doesn't mean being humorless and dour right? If you treated it so lightly or didn't care at all you wouldn't spend time playing characters in the setting. In this sense taking it seriously refers to recognizing value in it and spending time reading on it or creating things involving it; to not dismiss it as just a silly childrens movie, but something with a little more substance. The guys who build their own Stormtrooper armor do it for fun as well, but that doesn't mean it is done on a lark.
@Poison: Star Wars has room for the stories of villains and not just villains who once were or become heroes. The thing I object to is pretending the villains are heroes. Yeah, you can do that with EotE and I would agree that those campaigns won't resonate with Star Wars even if the people involved enjoy them. But EotE itself isn't set up to be a counter-setting. It's doing its best to capture a world in which not everyone is an Imperial or a Rebel. I mean, do you think Boba Fett is not authentically Star Wars?
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Ahtman wrote: The guys who build their own Stormtrooper armor do it for fun as well, but that doesn't mean it is done on a lark.
The 501st is a really good example of this as those guys obviously take their fun seriously. Not just being prop-accurate, either, but doing charity work and such.
The races in the book are Bothan, Droid, Gand, Human, Trandoshan, Wookie, Twi'lek, and Rodian. It works more like old school D&D than newer games. The emphasis is not really on abilities and the few that are there (like Wookies doing +1 damage when they are at low hit points, or something like that) are made more for the sake of flavor than to be balanced off the special abilities of other races. I'd be happy to answer any specific questions about the published races. I'll say this, they're simple enough that you can easily make your own. So, for example, I wrote up this one:
Bad Batchers
From the earliest days of the Empire, powerful figures opposed using clone troopers. The Emperor himself distrusted the clones and the demands of the New Order for cheaper military materiel bred hostility down the bureaucratic ranks. The loss of the original genetic template combined with the pressures of increasing demands and declining investment resulted in higher defect rates, which in turn bolstered the arguments against using clones. In order to maintain revenues, the Kaminoans turned to clandestine trade in these "Bad Batchers" to rich warlords and gangsters beyond the Outer Rim. Some of the Bad Batchers escaped this life of slavery to make their own way as fugitives in the wider galaxy.
Although some suffer physical deformity, most Bad Batchers look exactly like their prototype Jango Fett. The longing for individuality, however, means that many Bad Batchers have turned to unique hair-styling, tattoos, piercings, and other cosmetic scarfication to "be themselves." These physical idiosyncrasies, although sometimes quite distinctive, also serve as a disguise. The Empire has no interest in the freedom of clones, defective or otherwise.
Species Abilities
Wound Threshold: 10 + Brawn
Strain Threshold: 10 + Willpower
Starting Experience: 80 XP
Special Abilities
Bad Batchers begin play with an additional rank in any three of their starting skills. They still may not train any of these three skills above rank 2 during character creation.
Kamino Conditioning: Bad Batchers begin the game with the Hired Gun career by default. They also begin with either the Bodyguard or Mercenary Soldier specialization. Either specialization counts against the three-specialization limit. Bad Batchers must choose all starting skills from this career and one of these specializations.
Flawed Copy: Bad Batchers must choose one of their starting skills and always add a disadvantage die to rolls with that skill.
Gand do they start as a Findsman or just a Gand, My only experience of them is the Gand from Rogue Squadron series Ooryl Qrygg. I know their society is based heavily
on importance of a individual's achievements and have completely different biology to most other species in Star wars, how did they translate it in the game?
Twi'lek, do have a language for their Lekku (head tails) I know from past material they have let them be used like kinda sign language between Twi'leks.
Droids, what kind of droids, Assassin droids like IG-88, battle droids or iconic droids like the astromech droids.
Manchu wrote: @Poison: Star Wars has room for the stories of villains and not just villains who once were or become heroes. The thing I object to is pretending the villains are heroes. Yeah, you can do that with EotE and I would agree that those campaigns won't resonate with Star Wars even if the people involved enjoy them. But EotE itself isn't set up to be a counter-setting. It's doing its best to capture a world in which not everyone is an Imperial or a Rebel. I mean, do you think Boba Fett is not authentically Star Wars?.
I am not saying its not "A true story that could authentically happen in the Star Wars universe"
I mean, you could be playing Anakin's mom, right, she really existed, she was a slave on Tattooine, owned by a store owner, acted as some sort of shopkeep, and eventually married a moisture farmer.
I am not saying it shouldn't exist in Star Wars, or even that it shouldn't have a game with rules to represent playing it, just that its not why I'd turn to Star Wars.
I say this with the full knowledge that I am a hypocrite, as my last SAGA character was a Mandalorian Soldier. (But, the party was 3 Jedi, my bounty hunter, and a twi'lek scoundrel who were up against the Emperor in the Old Republic) so it is mostly my objection to the focus of the game, not necessarily constituent parts.
I want the ability to play a Scoundrel or a Bounty Hunter in any Star Wars game, I just don't like them BEING the game.
The book mentions that most Gand who leave Gand are findsmen so the stats reflect that.
Ravenblade666 wrote:Twi'lek, do have a language for their Lekku (head tails) I know from past material they have let them be used like kinda sign language between Twi'leks.
No, it's not a special ability they get but this is a game where you could just throw it in, a la OSR D&D. I know I would give it to you as a GM, no problem.
Ravenblade666 wrote:Droids, what kind of droids, Assassin droids like IG-88, battle droids or iconic droids like the astromech droids.
They're explicitly military/combat droids but they don't come with any of those skills. I think they call them "type 4," which apparently means "bad ass droid" in the Star Wars brand.
FFG forums have a 5 page thread adding Togruta, Duros, Jawas, Ewoks, Gamorreans and more. It seems pretty straightforward. I actually strongly prefer that race is mostly window dressing and not a big optimization path.
Man, that box looks tasty. Twi'lek bounty hunter ftw!
The only thing I'm not fond of is what looks like a focus on maps and character tokens. I can already see FFG selling future adventures with more maps and more tokens, but I feel like having this as an important part of the rules actually hinders people inventing their own stories and campaigns. Hopefully I'm wrong and it just looks that way - the page doesn't really explain if the tokens are just there as an aid (like hastly drawn maps at the table) or whether we're talking miniature combat rules here...
Oh, and it appears someone at FFG may have missed that the Falcon's sensor dish is not standard equipment for the YT-1300. (granted, anyone could install that upgrade, but I'm guessing someone just said "let's take a ship like Han's" - would've been more characterful if it was a stock YT, or maybe one with a different modification ... [/nitpick])
The beta does not support miniatures-required tactical combat. Also, I don't see that as connected to whether or not people can make their own stories ... I think you got separate points tied up together there, maybe as a result of distaste for games like D&D4E? I often hear people who are critical minature-heavy RPGs say there is "no roleplaying" although I'd be shocked to hear that from you.
And YES that twi'lek looks so hot. I also think the droid looks awesome. Playing pre-made characters can have a real charm to it. Not something I always want to do but spice of life and all that.
Manchu wrote:The beta does not support miniatures-required tactical combat. Also, I don't see that as connected to whether or not people can make their own stories ...
Oh, it wouldn't be impossible, of course - they'd just have to make all those maps or tokens/miniatures themselves or buy them elsewhere, and/or it may not look as fancy as what they got out of the box and what might be included in future "official" adventures.
Glad to hear I was mistaken, though. I agree that these maps and tokens are a cool idea if used just as an optional visual aid.
Manchu wrote:I think you got separate points tied up together there, maybe as a result of distaste for games like D&D4E? I often hear people who are critical minature-heavy RPGs say there is "no roleplaying" although I'd be shocked to hear that from you.
I actually do not like 4E ... but I'd say that has more to do with what I heard/read about its rules. I had lots of fun playing with miniatures in SW Saga Edition!
I guess I'm somewhat torn on the role of miniatures. They help with the visualising, but at the same time they make it more difficult to deviate from what you are provided. Be it location maps, or the looks of your character.
Fortunately, the colleague who GM'd for us had tons of figures, so everyone was able to pick something relatively close to what they had in mind.
Seeing all his minis actually made me want to play a wargame with them ... I eventually ended up purchasing a bunch of Stormtroopers on ebay just to decorate my room with.
Manchu wrote:And YES that twi'lek looks so hot. I also think the droid looks awesome. Playing pre-made characters can have a real charm to it. Not something I always want to do but spice of life and all that.
Mhmm, I dunno. A character I play has to be my character, this includes their background, their stats (as resulting from their background), and their appearance.
Personal preference, tho. I've got a general aversion playing "canon" characters just because I'll always feel limited in what they can and what they cannot do, and that I may not be able to portray them correctly (playing canon characters is a huge responsibility imho, regardless of whether it's the GM or a player).
It obviously wouldn't be as bad with premade characters who consist of nothing but some numbers and a picture, but even then there's some risk that I may not like a piece of their equipment or the clothes they wear...
The only exception to this personal rule was when I volunteered to portray the self-styled pirate queen Leonia Tavira a couple times for a campaign in my group, at first just for a short appearance that involved stuff like a tense meeting with the PCs and trying to make a deal with them. We ended up having so much fun that I basically "adopted" her as an NPC that I got to play a couple times more. Fortunately, being a pirate and just a minor character in the EU whose "current" (relative to our campaign's timeline) status is completely blank, I had some room to maneuver and customise her to what I thought was cool about this character.
So ... okay, maybe I could play a premade character, but I guess it really depends on the first impression I get. I would say it's somewhat unlikely that I like everything about him or her, but I wouldn't rule it out either.
And yeah, the droid fits in nicely with the bunch!
Lynata wrote: I would say it's somewhat unlikely that I like everything about him or her
I've been thinking about this one and it strikes me as really odd. Can you give some hypothetical examples? I guess, I get what you mean when there is something fundamental about the character that makes them not interesting to play -- but those are usually what I would call "core" traits and that doesn't sound like what you mean (with your reference to not liking some particular item of clothing they were pictured in).
I guess I am just extremely picky when it comes to a character's traits - any traits, be them personality, background or visual appearance. Even the name. Whenever I develop a character from scratch, I can literally spend weeks looking for a proper name, going through databases and doing countless modifications until I finally get something that inspires me.
When I roleplay a character, I like to immerse myself in them, and this necessitates a certain amount of appeal to me. It's easier when you come up with something all by yourself, but with a premade character, I suppose they must be close to whatever I would've come up with? I'm a stickler for detail, so I spend lots of time fleshing out miniscule and unimportant stuff. Depending on my mood and my existing preferences, I will have a strong tendency to stuff like very specific species, skin/hair/eye colours, profession, equipment and clothing style. The latter even extends into MMOs - you can't believe how much time I spent looking for "appropriate" gear in TOR (and by now, just about all my characters are decked out with customisable/upgradeable equipment for greater consistency).
Sometimes, there are characters from various movies, novels or games that inspire me. When I get tossed a premade character evoking a similar reaction, I suppose I would have little problem using it right away, too.
Of course I could generally play just about anything (I've often helped out playing various NPCs), but the amount of fun I could get out of the experience depends greatly on how I perceive any given character in my head.
as a WEGs GM, so far I'm lovin the system. Don't like the custom dice concept (means all players will have to want to buy dice JUST to play star wars, not exactly conducive to sales IMO.) but so far seems to be a great compromise between the old and the D20 system I despised so much. I like how the dice not only determine success or failure, but also if something extra good/bad can happen. This reminds me of the luck dice from the old D6 system. Unfortunately for WEG's that stupid luck die could get rediculously powerful. Here it looks like it will balance out pretty well. And its easy enough my 6yr old can figure out what to roll looking at the pregen characters and seeing that the green dimond dice are what he wants to roll (if he cant count to three, well i simply failed as a father). The difficulty dice sometimes makes me a little happy, as a gm I get to throw "fail" dice into the dice pool and let them choose their own fate from there. but throwing one dice(easy difficulty) into three tells the player they have a good chance of success.
I'm curious as to how much freedom will truly be in the final cut. This will probably be my determining factor of keeping the old WEG system alive or moving on to greener pastures. I've seen discussions on their forums about how the current class/career system really doesn't do much compared to WHFRPG. If it plays fast and loose with character building, even with a class system but allowing for a lot of variation, I will be happy.
Edit: looks like i found a section on their forums where you can use standard dice instead of custom dice in the full version when it releases (will be a section in the book) That will pretty much sell the system for me right there!
Its a mixed bag for my group. Yes they like to buy new dice, but at the same time they like to justify the purchase (yeah im only buying D10s for L5R, but I can use them in WW tabletop or just more for DnD so its ok.) Getting dice that can ONLY be used for star wars means they have to keep track. And yes they will want their own dice, No one wants cheeto hands reaching for the dice pool....
So far I like the dice and how they act, But I'm loving how they are giving us the option, that means my group wont shy away from the action just because the dice look scary to them. We'll see how they react on sunday when I put this on the table for them.
When I think of the conversion chart in the Beta book, I want to say "that's a great short term solution" but it's actually not. Having to translate rolling a handful dice through multiple tables is the sort of the thing that is at its hardest when you first do it. So if anything, using the tables would be better in the long term than the short term. But if there's going to be a long term then there is no reason not to get FFG's dice.
So the conversion table to me seems like an unecessary necessary evil. If you don't include it, people will bitch like crazy about having to buy proprietary dice. Trouble is, they will still bitch about this even if you do have it. And, what's more, because it will be necessarily clunky, that will give them something additional to bitch about. So instead of noticing how cool the mechanic might be, they're going to be reviewing the game on the basis of the clunky conversion system that stands between them and that cool mechanic.
My point is, if the players in your group want to play SW and they can take your word that this is a good system to do it with, then that should be enough to get them to shell out a few bucks on FFG's dice. What this really comes down to, IMO, is that special brand of cynicism we gamers seem to share where we're not going to be gouged by the companies -- bearing in mind that we think we're so smart as we shell out hundred if not thousands of dollars on miniatures, paints, rulebooks, etc, etc.
Not an easy of a sale as one would think. I still have my D6 books (a massive library of them) plus conversions from the D20 (there are a lot of well balanced free sources availible), allowing me to play an era plus access to a crapton of concepts from playing pirates to an entire array of starships and frieghters.
So selling my group on the system based on the rules and dice are merely the starting point. The real question will be how much future support the book will get.
Having the dice conversions in the back of the book allows for some flexibility. If they like the rules but hate the dice, its there for them. If they like the rules and the dice but not ready to go out and buy their own (or contribute to a dice pool) its there. If the conversions are clunky, they will WANT the dice if the system is good. I own the starter box and will be using it to demo this weekend, so they will not suffer "clunky" dice mechanics to start.
The biggest question for me is not the dice, Its how much they love the game. Tabletop games do not suffer age issues all that much and the D6 love is just as much alive in many circles as the D20. Mechanics wont be as much of a problem as how much they will like one system over another. Everything else is a matter of converting forwards and backwards.
I think what you are really selling is not SW but this particular approach to it, which entails dice as much as a rulebook.
If the non-GMs in your group regularly object to buying rulebooks, then it would be hard to expect them to buy dice.
That "GM buys all" dynamic is its own problem, of course.
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Paitryn wrote: If the conversions are clunky, they will WANT the dice if the system is good.
What I'm saying is, it will take a great deal of objectivity to realize the system is good if one is constantly prevented from enjoying it by a clunky conversion.
I'm not sure if I like the abstract custom dice part of it. It seems to make it much harder on the GM to gauge how hard something is when you design it when you have to memorize the probability of custom symbols, especially when some of which show up alongside multiple others on a single face. If this is the mechinic with WHFB, experienced GMs might chime in to assure me, though.
The benefit of standard numbers is that I can quickly and easily compare what the players can do with what I want the difficulty to be. For instance in Savage worlds, with it's 'exploding' dice mechanism, if it's going to take beating an "8" to hit a main bad guy, and most of my players are rolling D6 for their fighting or shooting rolls, they are first going to have to roll a "6" just to even have a chance of rolling the next die as a 3+ to hit the guy, and that may be too tough for them.
Seems like this is just a gimmick, when some sort of normal die system could have sufficed.
It's easy. Some dice represent having a better chance to do something. Some dice represent having a slimmer chance to do that thing. If you want the chance to be slimmer, add a die from the second category. I understand that you're saying that you want to know exactly how much harder adding that die will make things. That's not such a hard question, considering it is only one die. The other dice don't directly bear on the success/failure axis so it's not really a matter of using a bunch of dice to generate one axis of result -- which is the same confusion others had earlier ITT. I'd say, it's best to read up on the system before criticizing it -- make sure that your criticisms apply.
As to whether something simpler could have been done -- sure! That's just the same as asking whether simpler resolution mechanisms exist. If it exists, all other things being equal, it could have been applied to this product -- but at the expense of some of the interesting things that can't be done with those simpler systems. And that's the key: these dice do something different. Whether it is different enough, or enjoyable enough, is a separate matter.
Well thanks to Manchu and others continuing to push this game with good info and notes on the system, it looks like I'll be tracking down the beginners game.
Aura and myself have decided to give it a go, partially to test the new FFG dice system for ourselves and to head back to a Star Wars RPG.
Poison wrote: It'd have to be amazingly good to beat SAGA for me.
It's a piece of gak compared to SAGAS. Don't waste your time with this. It's basically a crappy version of Dark Heresy (Which is crappy) ported to Star Wars.
It's nothing at all like Dark Heresy. And it's nothing like Saga Edition. DH is a percentile-based system. Saga is based on d20. This game is a "multi-axis" result game, like WFRP 3E.
It's nothing at all like Dark Heresy. And it's nothing like Saga Edition. DH is a percentile-based system. Saga is based on d20. This game is a "multi-axis" result game, like WFRP 3E.
Please do post your thoughts and experiences, MDS!
You misunderstood what I meant. I am saying FFG makes garbage RPGs. Ergo, it is a crappy version of Dark Heresy and Dark Heresy is gak. FFG should avoid RPGs.
Manchu wrote: Please do post your thoughts and experiences, MDS!
Oh aye, will have a game once it gets here and share my thoughts, I am hoping it turns out to be good, if it is Warhammer 3rd might become a consideration, just not willing to spend £80 to try a system I might hate.
I do not think this, I know this. I own a copy of Edge of the Empire, or rather I did. I gave it away. I'll be sticking my SAGAS books. Hell, WEG D6 is better then this piece of gak.
My group has played 2 sessions of this so far (2 of us got free copies of the Beta Rules at GenCon last year). So far, we like it. Resolving the dice are a bit wonky at times, but the book does a good job of guidelines for when you roll 2 successes, but 3 misfortunes, as an example.
As a departure from our "roll playing" Pathfinder campaigns, which is certainly rules heavy, I feel that we've been doing more actual role playing. That is a good thing.
I do not think this, I know this. I own a copy of Edge of the Empire, or rather I did. I gave it away. I'll be sticking my SAGAS books. Hell, WEG D6 is better then this piece of gak.
funny, I felt saga was a complete piece of gak and stuck with my D6. even found all the saga equipment and npc stats converted nicely online. (you still can)
I test ran the system with a couple of vets and my kids. the kids loved it, and the vets were pretty happy with the system. As a GM I felt constricted by the out of book adventure (but I always do.) The game advertises itself to opening the box and playing as you learn, but really as a GM your stuck flipping pages trying to find answers you don't quite understand (and the beginner book doesn't completely clarify) Especially with advantages and threats. First game we stored them, but found that was too useful, second we spent them within the round, but that was a bit weak.
Not satisfied, I hunted down a copy of the beta version to try and expand my knowledge of the system. I will most likely be buying it, but I'm dissappointed at the direction the game is going in design. Instead of sourcebooks that can easily be bought and added to the game, it looks like we will be getting multiple game systems instead that may/may not be compatible with the others. Right now I will have to tell the player who wants to be an x-wing pilot that he has to wait till that game system arrives. Plus equipment is pretty dismal compared to other editions so Its going to be a lot of confusing conversions for me (they dont quite carry over easily. in d6 a stormtrooper rifle does 5D in damage, but in EotE its 9 base damage plus successes, theres no math conversion I know of to make this work across the board.)
The advantage/threat/triumph/etc. Dice are a bit cumbersome for a vet GM. not because they are unhelpful, but they are TOO helpful as players are ALWAYS rolling them EVERY SINGLE TIME. In the old D6 a lucky roll on the wild die could easily be interpreted as it resulted in the overall score total this means you could narrate the awesome one in a million blaster shot, but also the epic fail trip that jammed the blaster pack further into the gun jamming it permanately. But this happened a lot LOT less than it does in EotE. The result is now is more benny hill than cinematic play, so you resort to tables that dry things out into a rather bland narrative. Most of the time my players rolled far more advantages/threats than they did any successes. Often that was all they rolled on the die.
The basic success/fail part of the dice work beautifully. no problems there!
The boost/setback die do pretty much little. mostly there to cancel out each other. Since you can aim in the same turn you shoot, you can cancel out the setback die made from opponents in cover.
Combat is fast. if a bit too fast. Minion rules seem pretty great, but wait till you get a bounty hunter that crits and does massive wounds to the enemy. oh, and my vets were smart enough to go looting stormtrooper rifles to get that bigger 9 damage ( wouldn't let them have the armor), so everything is getting pumped full o blaster. The poor opposing bounty hunter nearly died in one round of combat because his initiative was too low and the players went gun ho on his butt and shot without so much as a dialogue exchange. On the flip side, when a player got hit they got hit hard. Lot of weapons do good damage and soak values remain pretty low. Healing is a big factor to keep track of for players. I do like this in a way. D6 it wasn't hard to soak butloads of firepower. Now players aren't frail, but in no way can soak all the wounds delt (unless its of weaker damage) Note: reading the beta book reveals a single crit can kill and a D100 roll of 151 or higher. Crits are somewhat hard to pull off however. (as long as your not a twi'lek bounty hunter)
I dont agree with the fluff text at all. Its like they just made crap up. An Ion gun shoots a restraining bolts halt command? Then WTF does an Ion cannon do to a starship? They also say that armor is effectively useless, but just in case you should have some. Armor in this game is Incredibly weak (I know I said I like players getting wounded and having to fear dying, but they may as well stand naked to blaster fire sometimes) The best soak value you can get from armor is 2. A player can be naked with a soak of 4. a blaster rifle does 7-9 damage. No more heroic rushing the enemy boys and girls, your dead before you get there (or at least incapacitated with your 12 wounds) Taking cover is the new mandalorian battle armor. The fluff is so pulled out of someones butt, they could have just used wookieepedia FFS. It seems in an effort to explain why there system has a bit of a balance to it, they forget canon altogether. We've known stormtroopers die like flies. They do so in the movies. Doesn't mean their armor is crap, just means they are minion fodder. (they aren't too bad in game, though not all that tough when focused down on either)
Talent trees are fun. Experience gains are what you would expect. Mostly the game works pretty well mechanically. Career choices IMO are pretty bogus, One of the main reasons I loathed D20. SW characters are never any one thing to an exclusion. But careers here reflect that notion pretty well. just because you are a pilot, doesnt mean you are bad at something else, just that you had to work on it. But I enjoyed the D6 freedom of skills much better. There were no In class/career skills. just skills with the option to specialize further.
While I currently lean more to bad than good about the game, I still want to keep trying it out. I can ignore the crappy fluff text and stick with the stats if they work well. People have been begging me to run another SWRPG for over a year now, but I felt run aground with D6 as players eventually creep into godhood too easily with the right focus. And D20 is for DnDIMO, I couldn't stand any application it made elsewhere as I felt it simply didn't belong. (I hate class systems outside DnDTBH) So hopefully the beta book will provide me with enough insight into the system to run a small adventure on my own.
Paitryn: I think the first thing everyone needs to remember about EotE is it is not the new SWRPG. It is a new game set in the Star Wars universe about life on the fringe. So I don't think it's trying to just emulate the movies. The beta release was a cool first step but if you're not the kind of GM who is comfortable with house rules, or maybe your group isn't, you might want to just wait for the core book release -- which I believe is coming up.
Set just after the destruction of the first Death Star, the Edge of the Empire Roleplaying Game focuses on the grim and gritty portions of the Star Wars universe. Characters exist in places where morality is gray and nothing is certain, and the game’s focus is on those that live on the fringes of both the galaxy and its society.
In thousands of locations across the galaxy, the Core Worlds’ laws and regulations are barely enforced. Such shady locations attract shady characters, but they also lure those independent thinkers and insurgents who seek to break free of Imperial law. In an Edge of the Empire campaign, bounty hunters, smugglers, mercenaries, and explorers may find themselves working alongside doctors, politicians, and scholars. Ply your trade as a smuggler in the Outer Rim, collect bounties on the scum that live in the shadows of Coruscant, or try to establish a new colony on a planet beneath the Empire’s notice!
The Setback and Boost dice are six-sided dice that thematically mirror each other. They are generally added to a dice pool to represent minor situational modifiers or influences. For example, if a character was attempting to slice a security terminal, the GM could grant him an advantage and a Boost die for having the right tools for a task. Likewise, the task may be made more complicated by disadvantages – like trying to slice the computer under a hail of blaster fire – and the GM would add a Setback die to the dice pool.
The Ability and Difficulty dice are eight-sided dice that are paired off against each other. These represent the innate qualities of a challenge. The Ability dice are a reflection of a character’s attributes and characteristics, such as how strong, smart, or willful the hero is. The Difficulty dice set the inherent difficulty of a task – slicing an outdated security terminal would likely feature fewer Difficulty dice than slicing a high-end security terminal.
The Proficiency and Challenge dice are twelve-sided dice that oppose each other. These represent significant improvements to Ability and Difficulty dice. The Proficiency dice are “upgraded” versions of Ability dice, reflecting a character’s level of skill or specialized training applied to a task. The Challenge dice are “upgraded” versions of Difficulty dice, indicating that a task has greater risks involved or is being actively opposed by another character.
Whoops! Someone forgot to read the source (and the thread apparently) -- but don't worry, I'll give you the tl;dr: the narrative mechanic determines more than success or failure.
Of course, I would recommend actually knowing about a thing before you criticize it ...
It arrived, had a brief read through before trying a game, not a big fan of the premade characters, but that's always been a bugbear, but I think I have enough info to make up an alternative if need be.
Reading the dice rules, I can see why Mel compared it to WoD on one hand. Its not quite that simple, there is more to it as a system, but there at the very heart is a similar mechanic with the adding and reduction of successes.
Overall from my initial read, I think I will actually like the system, even more so if the Core system, or add on books add other ideas variations on what the Triumph results might bring during a combat/results.
In general it is a nice idea, it certainly has potential and makes things interesting without removing any control. Which was my initial fear of the system, or that it would be overly 'newbie' in feel and not appealing to veteran roleplayers.
I'm glad that feeling was misplaced, as 'depending' on how the test game goes down, it will mean Warhammer 3rd might become an option in the future. Where before this arrived it was not even a consideration.
The "core mechanic" is pretty tidy. Whatever you want to do corresponds to a certain skill and that skill is based on a characteristic. The higher of the characteristic or skill values determines how many ability dice (d8s) you add to the pool and the lower value determines how many of those ability dice are upgraded to skill dice (d12s).
Difficulty is added to the pool by the GM, who basically rates the difficulty on a scale of 1-5. The GM then adds Boosts to account for PC advantages and Setbacks to account for PC disadvantages. As a result, you know the usual success/failure + magnitude outcome but you also get incidental outcomes.
Manchu wrote: Whoops! Someone forgot to read the source (and the thread apparently) -- but don't worry, I'll give you the tl;dr: the narrative mechanic determines more than success or failure.
Of course, I would recommend actually knowing about a thing before you criticize it ...
I do know about it and it's not as simplistic as I made it out to be, I know that. I've read about how they work from multiple sources, watched videos about and seen it in action. End result? I still don't like it.
It's still busywork to be all to achieve an end result that I can do with a standard dice roll and with my own narrative aspects (and that of the group and GM). I don't feel I need the dice to tell me more than success or failure, I'll let the game and the interaction between the players, GM and their respective characters and NPC's do that.
I'd actually take it as a good way to keep the GM on his toes, brings things into the game slightly unexpectedly which could make things exciting for the GM. It also seems a great system for when you want to take a break and just roll the game without doing overly detailed combats, letting the dice do some of the work for you, and might help on the odd 'off' day all GMs suffer now and then.
Okay on saying that I would not implement the system on my own setting, but its great as a pick and play title.
I think you missed my point. The game has you dealing with Threat and advantages WAAAYYY more often than you deal with success or failure right now. In short, the dice suck in a way. As a GM you either have to deal with these things narratively, or with the charts. You fall back on the charts often as the threat and advantages roll ALL THE TIME. but success or fail not neccessarily so. TBH, We found ourselves going dead even on successes but every player rolled a threat or advantage every single round makes cinematic narrative very drug out when the players simply just want to finish killing that mob and moving on.
It would be a very cool tool if the threat/advantage rolls came along a bit fewer (like by half as much as they do) But my tabletop group felt like the game went the way of Benny Hill way easily and thats even looking for a balance between charts and narratives.
I did get a copy of the beta rules and its not much better. Character creation looks good, new and inventive, but overall looking at this upcoming release and the fact that the only other releases are just more core rulebooks, it wont have the same kind of setting, ships, and equipment supplements to really kick off a star wars setting like the WEG edition ended up being supported. For now I'm holding my purchase of the book release until I see some supplements published to help further the setting. If not, oh well. Got tons of SW books from ages past and Kraps.fr Has any other supplements I would need to run any era.
Oh yeah, and ST armor is currently the best armor in the game with a +2. A bit sad....(no the corebook does not improve this)
Killing mobs? I don't think this game is set up for that. My experience is, combat is very dangerous at all levels. That's kind of the point of threat/advantage dice in the first place -- the little stuff matters because you are anything but invincible. If you want to just mow down minions on the table top, I think you should try Deathwatch. EotE and Deathwatch are both "cinematic" experiences but you have to remember there are different genres of movies. EotE is noir-esque. You get something closer to 80s action flicks with Deathwatch.
Manchu wrote: Killing mobs? I don't think this game is set up for that. My experience is, combat is very dangerous at all levels. That's kind of the point of threat/advantage dice in the first place -- the little stuff matters because you are anything but invincible. If you want to just mow down minions on the table top, I think you should try Deathwatch. EotE and Deathwatch are both "cinematic" experiences but you have to remember there are different genres of movies. EotE is noir-esque. You get something closer to 80s action flicks with Deathwatch.
well going from the only mob rule units in EotE, it doesn't feel cinematic so much as...clumsiness. I just think the D6 luck die felt a little better as I just interpreted this myself and it sometimes let the crits just speak for themselves. The really good ones I gave descriptions to and everything else just fell into fun gaming. I think I'll stick to a wait and see approach to how this system will be supported with sourcebooks (if any at all) if not I still have my library of d6 to entertain with.
WEG's system is great, IMO. When it comes to playing a game, the most important thing is having fun. That said, you can't pretend games are interchangeable and try to force Y to work like X.
As for sourcebooks, two thoughts on that: (1) the EotE core book is not even out yet and (2) EotE is a first in a trilogy of SWRPGs from FFG. The second installment will be about Galactic Civil War and the third installment will be about the Force. So you shouldn't expect EotE sourcebooks on those topics.
Hey guys,
I would like to hear any feedback on the Free RPG Day adventure from those who picked it up. I wrote the adventure and I am curious what you guys thought of it!
Jeff
JHall wrote: Hey guys,
I would like to hear any feedback on the Free RPG Day adventure from those who picked it up. I wrote the adventure and I am curious what you guys thought of it!
Jeff
From what I read, and going back to look at it later? I like the feel of the story, but the game is going to take some getting used to.
Minions are the most common adversaries encountered in the Star Wars universe. These are nameless individuals who provide muscle to flesh out encounters. Their only real threat is in numbers, and a minion is not expected to stand toe-to-toe with a Player Character.
Rivals are more dangerous than minions but still inferior to most Player Characters. Rivals are very similar to Player Characters in many respects, being generally more innately gifted and well trained than minions. They operate individually rather than in groups, but they are generally less skilled than the PCs, seldom possessing more than two ranks in any one skill.
The nemesis is the opposite of the Player Character. They are identical to them in virtually every respect and frequently possess a number of talents, high characteristics, and skills. Additionally, their equipment can often rival that of even the most well supplied parties.
You see, I want to avoid getting sucked in to this after spending too much on 3 different SWRPGs down the years, but then they go and make it look all cool....
I think I'll hold out for the military book though, that's always been my favourite part.
I don't know, I'm still using all my stuff. I'm getting ready to run a SWD6 game over skype and it's handy to have a few different takes on certain elements of the SW universe. That said, I didn't go in for SWd20; just D6, Saga Edition, and now EotE.
The galaxy is rife with opportunity for those who are willing to seek it out. From the hostile wilderness of uninhabited worlds to the dangerous shadows of unexplored hyperspace lanes, chances for adventure and profit can be found everywhere.
Enter the Unknown is the first rules supplement for Edge of the Empire, featuring new content for the Explorer career, as well as hosts of new options for any player or game master. It provides tools for making stronger, deeper, and more diversified characters. New gear, droids, and vehicle options will enhance play for any group. Meanwhile, GMs can find advice on incorporating the themes of exploration, trade, and hunting into their campaigns.
Enter the Unknown covers the Explorer career, and gives it some exciting new options. Because of Edge of the Empire’s flexible character advancement system, these options are useful for nearly any character. First and foremost, the career gains three new specializations: the Archeologist, Big Game Hunter, and Driver. Each of these specializations gives new or existing Explorer characters additional choices including several brand-new talents. On top of that, this book adds new options for backgrounds, Obligations, and Motivations, all based on the themes of exploration, hunting, and trade.
Additionally, Enter the Unknown introduces new, powerful advancement opportunities for characters in the form of signature abilities. Signature abilities are career-specific, elite talents only available to experienced characters. They permit tremendous feats that are only made possible with the skill and ability gained over a long and successful career. Signature abilities add new talents to the bottom of one of the character’s existing talent trees, granting further advancement deeper into that character’s area of expertise.
In addition to these character options, this book contains new equipment and vehicles necessary for any character braving the wilder parts of the galaxy. Vehicles such as the the KV swoop help characters journey into the unexplored, while weapons such as the E-11s sniper rifle and the huntsman vibrospear help them survive it. Along with this, a whole suite of gear for any situation makes Enter the Unknown an extremely useful part of any adventurer's collection.
Lastly, Enter the Unknown gives Game Masters a powerful tool to craft exciting and engaging adventures for their players. Whether they are looking to work with themes of exploration in their adventures, better involve Explorer characters in their narrative, or run an entire campaign around the themes of exploration, this book gives them to the tools to do so.
Manchu wrote: I don't know, I'm still using all my stuff. I'm getting ready to run a SWD6 game over skype and it's handy to have a few different takes on certain elements of the SW universe. That said, I didn't go in for SWd20; just D6, Saga Edition, and now EotE.
Hmm, where do we sign up for this? I still have all my WEG books that I loved so much (Rebel SpecForce Handbook, Imperial Sourcebook, Black Sands of Socorro...etc). I WANNA SIGN UP!
I played through both the open beta phase and two campaigns with the beginner box and the Long Arm of the Hutt adventure. I really enjoy the narrative dice mechanic. I would invite anyone who is against it without trying it to play a full session on the system. I had two skeptics really enjoy their time.
The only difficult thing about the system as a DM early on was trying to interpret large levels of advantage into the narrative beyond 2x success.
The system is really solid, plays well, diminishes player passivity, and it just a damn lotta fun.
I wonder how space combat works in the new system. I have yet to find a Star Wars RPG that captured the space system with any kind of solid rules, certainly not enough to immerse me into the 'world' of Star Wars.
All the systems had a clunky 'You rolled better, you are behind them' system that wasn't dynamic at all nor easy to illustrate to players for dramatic feel. We went so far in WEG D6 to employ the space miniature game Silent Death to generate SW ships to make players feel more connected.
My rulebook just arrived. While I can appreciate a good solid hardcover, I wasn't expecting it to be over an inch thick - especially after the surprisingly small, pamphlet-y nature of the "Beginner" RPG.
And I have to agree. The size of the book is intimidating, I generally don't have the time to get through books that size, what with having a job and other hobbies.
Star Wars®: Edge of the Empire™ Specialization Decks, available through Print on Demand, provide GMs and players with a fun and easy way to manage character and NPC talents at the gaming table. New and experienced players alike will appreciate these handy reference cards, and GMs will love being able to keep the action moving. You’ll have the text of your talents at your fingertips, leaving you free to focus on the challenges at hand, while art for each talent immerses you even further into the Star Wars universe.
Suns of Fortune is your ticket to a Core World full of action, adventure, and opportunity. Known as the home of fast ships and the daredevils who pilot them, Corellia has long maintained a reputation as the birthplace of the most talented smugglers, scoundrels, and jockeys ever to fly a snubfighter or ride a tricked-out swoop.
While this reputation may be slightly—but only slightly—exaggerated, Corellia is nonetheless bursting with opportunities for excitement and adventure. Despite being located among the ancient worlds and civilizations of the galactic Core, Corellia is neither stuffy nor overly constrained with laws and regulations. Instead, its spirit of adventure thrives, drawing thrill-seekers from all over the galaxy.
Moreover, throughout the 144 pages of Suns of Fortune, GMs will find extensive details on the Corellian Sector that can help establish a rich and vibrant setting for their Edge of the Empire campaigns. Give your players the chance to win it big on Treasure Ship Row, make a fortune smuggling to Selonia, purchase one of Nubia’s amazing ships, or even pull off the art heist of the century on Aurea. The Corellion Sector is full of opportunities for your heroes to prove themselves.
You’ll also find nine modular encounters, each of which can either serve as part of nearly any adventure. These are the kinds of scenes and challenges that can crop up almost at any time, while you’re trying your hand at a game of Sabacc or stopping for a drink at the local cantina. Players may even trigger them with the specific choices they make, and they give the GM an effective response to an unplanned turn of events.
I've played through one session (got 2/3 of the way through the one in the rulebook), and have read through most of the basic rulebook.
Overall impression is good, I eased into the custom dice mechanic fairly easily, as I own, and have experience playing and GMing their WFRPG 3rd ed. game.
For those not familiar with how the dice work, it has 8 sided difficulty and ability dice (which oppose each other). The harder a task is, the more difficulty dice (which generate varying numbers of failures) you roll...the ability dice generate varying numbers of successes and are based on the base ability characteristic (like Agility - average for a basic human is 2 across the board) for a given skill (ie. ranged - heavy). If a skill is trained one level, you upgrade an ability die to a 'proficiency' die (d12) which has a higher chance of generating a success. Difficulty dice can be 'upgraded' (or downgraded - depending on how you look at it) to a red 'challenge' die (also a d12) which can be added by the GM to represent a difficult opposed check against a skilled adversary. There are also 'Boost' dice and the opposing 'Setback' dice (D6) to represent positive/negative environmental effects like an ally pointing out a weakness in your target's defense, or the effects of cover or fog. These can generate advantages and disadvantages (and in rare cases a success/failure) respectively. Advantages can be used to trigger things like critical damage, or adding a boost die to fellow PCs for their next skill check, etc. There is also a force die (D12) used by Force-sensitive characters that generates Force points they can use to trigger special abilities...but we haven't used this yet, not having any force sensitives in our party.
I have my next session tomorrow night, and I think we're going to get to try out the space combat rules (as we ended last session acquiring a cargo ship from some unsavory smugglers) which use pretty much the same mechanic as the normal encounter rules with subtle differences.
Let me know if you guys have any specific questions and I'll do my best to answer.
Edit* I posted before reading the entire thread and see the dice mechanic has been thoroughly discussed, I'll leave it there in case it adds anything, but disregard if you already know whats going on. Offer still stands for questions, if you want a different perspective/point of view.
Suns of Fortune is your ticket to a Core World full of action, adventure, and opportunity. Known as the home of fast ships and the daredevils who pilot them, Corellia has long maintained a reputation as the birthplace of the most talented smugglers, scoundrels, and jockeys ever to fly a snubfighter or ride a tricked-out swoop.
While this reputation may be slightly—but only slightly—exaggerated, Corellia is nonetheless bursting with opportunities for excitement and adventure. Despite being located among the ancient worlds and civilizations of the galactic Core, Corellia is neither stuffy nor overly constrained with laws and regulations. Instead, its spirit of adventure thrives, drawing thrill-seekers from all over the galaxy.
Moreover, throughout the 144 pages of Suns of Fortune, GMs will find extensive details on the Corellian Sector that can help establish a rich and vibrant setting for their Edge of the Empire campaigns. Give your players the chance to win it big on Treasure Ship Row, make a fortune smuggling to Selonia, purchase one of Nubia’s amazing ships, or even pull off the art heist of the century on Aurea. The Corellion Sector is full of opportunities for your heroes to prove themselves.
You’ll also find nine modular encounters, each of which can either serve as part of nearly any adventure. These are the kinds of scenes and challenges that can crop up almost at any time, while you’re trying your hand at a game of Sabacc or stopping for a drink at the local cantina. Players may even trigger them with the specific choices they make, and they give the GM an effective response to an unplanned turn of events.
It's the "modular encounters" bit I'm interested in the most. I think I'd buy entire RPG supplements that were nothing but drop-in encounters.
Got the Beyond the Rim adventure module over the weekend and have been reading through it. I really like how it is laid out, the graphic design and artwork is superb as always. I'm getting excited to run this for our group.
In the Star Wars universe, you should always be prepared for violence. From cantinas full of scum to hungry wampas looking for a snack, plenty of things in the galaxy are spoiling for a fight. Sometimes, the only thing you can do is fight back.
Dangerous Covenants is a rules supplement for Edge of the Empire that focuses on helping you fight. New specializations, talents, guns, armor, and vehicles provide a host of new options for players, while GMs are bound to find the advice on themes of cinematic combat and how to organize exciting combat-focused encounters and adventures very useful.
This book features new content for the Hired Gun career, including new Hired Gun centric Motivations, Obligations, and backgrounds. Just because a character is a fighter doesn’t mean he can’t have a deep and interesting backstory, and this book helps players create that for their characters. Meanwhile, Hired Gun characters (or any character, actually) can pick up one of three new specializations. Enforcers, Demolitionists, and Heavies offer three new choices that add a lot of variety to the Hired Gun career.
In addition, Dangerous Covenants also introduces two new, high level advancement opportunities in the form of the Hired Gun’s signature abilities. These abilities are career specific talents that a character can only access once they’ve spent a lot of time and experience investing in a specialization. In return, however, they offer Hired Guns some really potent abilities that can change the course of an entire battle.
Of course, no Hired Gun is going to head into battle without a trusty weapon of some sort. Whether you want to deal out destruction with a heavy weapon like a flechette launcher or a plasma missile, or if you’d prefer to dominate a back alley brawl with a pair of vibro-knucklers, Dangerous Covenants has you covered. In addition, the book introduces some new ships, ranging from small, single-seat starfighters to full-sized cruisers.
When it comes to GM advice and guidance, Dangerous Covenants has a whole range of suggestions. These range from practical details (if a Hired Gun is actually working as a Hired Gun, how much are jobs like protection, mercenary work, and sabotage going to pay?) to overarching campaign guidance, and everything in between.
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