New Game: Star Wars Edge of the Empire

[Dean]

So Fantasy Flight has the Star Wars license now and they're pumping out product like it's new coke. But like, a new cocaine and not a shitty soda. One of their new babies is the new Star Wars RPG dujour and I happen to have a beta copy. So I figured I'd give you guys a quick run down and a quick review and answer any questions you might have. So lets get started.

Core Mechanic
Alright lets get started here. The core mechanic is made of clown nightmares and insanity. It is fucking madness. It uses d6's, d8's, d12's and rarely d100's (2d10's) but..... not as they are. You construct the dice yourself by taking stickers from a sheet in the back of the book and sticking them on all your die's faces as they instruct until you have a set of shitty Star Wars dice. The stickers give the die a bunch of symbols but there's basically only two that matter success symbols and advantage symbols. "Good dice" have success and advantage symbols (which do good things) and "Bad dice" have their polar opposites of failure and disadvantage symbols which cancel out their positive brethren on a 1 for 1 basis. For any given action you assemble a pool of dice, roll them, and count up your net successes and advantages to see how well an action went. If you have at least 1 net success you succeeded on that action. How much advantage and disadvantage you get can make good or bad things happen to you as a result of your action based on a combination of the rules and total MTP.

Character Creation
So you can be a Human or a Rodian or a Chewbacca plus some other things that are terrible. You can also be a shitty droid if you want to be terrible and you hate yourself because your so fat. Your race gives you your starting stats which are Agility, Brawn, Willpower, Cunning, Intellect, and Presence. The first two are basically the only ones that matter because Agility and Brawn are the combat stats and combat is the only thing in this game that isn't entirely MTP.

You then pick a Career. Your first option is Motherfucking Bounty Hunter, the other options are Colonist, Explorer, Technician, Smuggler, or Hired Gun Which Is Also A Pretty Good Idea. Each Career is a talent tree of feats that you work your way up by buying things with XP. It's not great but it's simple and friendly to new players so that's fine. Every character will have their own set of feats and most of the options are very low powered but some are pretty alright so basically this whole section gets an enthusiastic shrug.

Skills
Basically every skill that doesn't shoot someone is like....95% magical tea party. So you buy combat skills and then you dick around with other things basically just as RP. Unfortunately this game is an experience based system where every point of Xenology you buy is less points that you can put into being tougher, faster, or a better shot. There are also like....35 skills when there probably should be.....I dunno....12. The fact that the game has absolutely no rules for social minigames other than telling you to MTP it is hard to reconcile with the fact that it has Charm, Coerce, Cool, Deceit, Discipline, Leadership, Negotiate, and Streetwise as entirely seperate skills. So..... that's a thing. The Negotiate skill actually does have a listed use. It can let you sell items for 5% more than normal selling price for each success you get on a negotiate check. FUN FACT: There are no listed normal selling prices for any item. DOUBLE FUN FACT: When I suggested the rules include normal selling prices for items people LOST THEIR MINDS. You may see that if you'd like HERE

Gear
The gear is pretty good in this game. Guns are pretty intensely lethal but that's a flavor of Star Wars people could like. There is a pretty sweet encumbrance system that I actually really like which does a good job of making people choose which half a dozen items they think define them that they want to bring on mission. Weapons and Armor can all be modded in a way that I like with like....power modulators and grenade launchers and shit. This section gets my biggest thumbs up in the book.

Combat
You shoot people with lasers, they shoot back at you with lasers. Ask questions if you want to know more.

Spaceships and Shit
The ships are pretty good and function with many of the same rules (like modding) that the gear system does so that's a plus. Unfortunately the thing that determines how good you are in space combat is really your ship and not the pilot particularly. But....whatever.

The Fucking Force
The Force powers are like the last chapter in the book. Which I think is actually quite clever. It does a good job of psychologically preparing people for a no-to-low jedi game that the book tells you it is trying to create. There is one class presented: Jedi Exile. And it gets access to the classic light side force powers. Woot.

Overall my impression the system is....tepid. It is the emotion of the stepfather at the soccer game. This isn't mine, I'm not impressed, and I don't care how it turns out. Everything is passable but ultimately there's nothing I can get excited about. I would play in a Star Wars EoTE game with friends but not acquaintances. And ultimately I doubt anything noteworthy will come out of the end product. I also think there are more exciting rulebooks coming out right now; like the new Iron Kingdoms RPG which I also have a copy of and will be making a review of next.

[Lago PARANOIA]

You construct the dice yourself by taking stickers from a sheet in the back of the book and sticking them on all your die's faces as they instruct until you have a set of shitty Star Wars dice.

So you can be a Human or a Rodian or a Chewbacca plus some other things that are terrible. You can also be a shitty droid if you want to be terrible and you hate yourself because your so fat.

You pretty much lost me right there.

Now, the second one needn't necessarily be bad. A small racial list can be beneficial if it comes with a level of pontification to give the races more depth. Indeed, that's pretty much the only reason to have a small racial list. But Star Wars races are intensely shallow. Even series like Star Trek and Stargate: Atlantis have nothing on them.

[echoVanguard]

Core Mechanic
Alright lets get started here. The core mechanic is made of clown nightmares and insanity. It is fucking madness[...]You construct the dice yourself by taking stickers from a sheet in the back of the book and sticking them on all your die's faces as they instruct until you have a set of shitty Star Wars dice.

That is definitely one of the most bonkers things I have ever heard. "Buy this book and ruin your dice" is quite possibly the worst sales pitch I have ever heard. It actively makes me want to not try the game. Even "you must buy special dice to play" would have been more appealing.

Enjoyable review. Would read again.

echo

[K]

That thread is hilarious.

I liked the part where dean gets accused of being a "conversational rapist." I think they meant that he raped conversations, but it instead it was taken as if he was a chatty sex predator.

That being said, the standard for RPG beta-testing is what I'd call the Paizo Doctrine: they just want to generate buzz and don't give a fuck about feedback, criticism, playtesting notes, suggestions for better rules, or building a community of contributors.

[John Magnum]

That shit's fucking baffling. Something as simple as "By default you sell at 1/4 price, but the GM is free to change that as zie sees fit" would be perfectly fine. And honestly, it is really not remotely implausible that this is just an honest omission on FFG's part. There have been comparable omissions to their finished products that they had to errata in! So it's highly unlikely that they intend for there to be no concrete rules for selling stuff.

I wonder if people think that FFG should refuse to list HP and stats for enemies, since a real flexible GM should just assign stuff on the fly?

[echoVanguard]

That thread is hilarious.

I liked the part where dean gets accused of being a "conversational rapist." I think they meant that he raped conversations, but it instead it was taken as if he was a chatty sex predator.

His response to that guy at the end of page 2 was solid gold. I actually laughed out loud.

echo

[sake]

It does a good job of psychologically preparing people for a no-to-low jedi game that the book tells you it is trying to create.

But it's fucking Star Wars! It's a setting that has exactly two things going for it.

1) Awesome space combat that ignores all laws of physics for the sake of having The Battle of Midway.... In Sppaaaccccce!

2) Magic Ninjas with Laser Swords

The first one never really works well in a tabletop game so that's a wash; and trying to skip the second will just lead to, at best, everyone wondering why aren't they using a much better sci-fi game system if they're not using the iconic elements of the setting, and at worst, be the sci fi equivalency of those god awful WoD or superhero games where the dm wants everyone to play as mortals or the super hero's girlfriend/best friend/cheerleaders. "Okay, everyone, roll to see if Captain TheDMHasAHugePenis' arch nemesis, DM'sCreepyFetishes-Man is going to just rape and mutilate you to Prove a Point About The True Chaotic Nature of Society, or if this time he's going to travel back in time and punch your pregnant mother in the stomach so she'll miscarriage causing you to have never been born, in the hopes of retroactively turning Captain TheDMHasAHugePenis evil."

"Low Magic Game" almost never fails to be a synonym for "The Big Bad will be a High Level Caster" why in god's name would a rule book actually encourage that sort of bullshit?

That is definitely one of the most bonkers things I have ever heard. "Buy this book and ruin your dice" is quite possibly the worst sales pitch I have ever heard. It actively makes me want to not try the game. Even "you must buy special dice to play" would have been more appealing.

I'd be willing to bet quite a bit of money that the whole point is to sell special dice, and that the release copy will completely lack any such little sticker thing to modify the dice you already might have with.

[K]

I'm also confused at the resistance to trade rules when there is a fucking character class called Trader and entire groups of rules that incompletely handle trade-type stuff.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So, in summary, here are the things that I think that the Star Wars universe does very well -- either potentially or what has been shown in big properties. I have mostly the six movies and big name spinoff properties (KotOR, SWU, Shadows of the Empire, etc.) in mind. I'm willing to expand this to the EU for relatively famous books like the Thrawn trilogy if the audience for them gets into the mid hundreds of thousands.

[*] Low-level personal combat action hero combat. Regardless of how you feel about Jedi, there's no denying that Star Wars combat is not unsuited for a team of mundane plucky young heroes to take on a squadron of Bad Guys of the Week and win without too much sacrifice.
[*] Personal vehicles. I said that Star Wars does vehicles 'worse' than WH40K or Star Fox but that's only in a massed or strategic sense. If you're looking at the perspective of a handful of dudes jacking landspeeders and taking potshots at Sand People or a dude flying an X-Wing into a Death Star trench then Star Wars kicks the ass of competition.
[*] Personal equipment. You're totally spoiled for choice with Star Wars stuff. I could totally see people doing a 200-page hardcover book with nothing in it but non-vehicle, non-droid technology available for Star Wars people.
[*] The Used Future aesthetic. It's really hard to be gritty without being grimdark, but Star Wars does deliver on this point.
[*] Emphasis on personal badassery. Like many (hough certainly not all or even most space opera settings, you can outright have a single gun or lightsaber battle and save the damn galaxy. Unlike most space opera settings, you can do this without having phlebtonium in your corner pocket.
[*] Space Kung Fu monomyth and culture. This isn't the only selling point of the Star Wars-verse but as I've said it's the selling point of the entire franchise and is why the OT will be a permanent cultural touchstone for as long as we can see.

Those are huge selling points for a Star Wars game. However, to leverage all of that into a TTRPG is a beast of a task.

There are also some downsides that aren't just inversions of the above points in the Star Wars franchise, too. Enough downsides so that if you aren't doing the Space Kung Fu monomyth I think that you have to do some deep soul-searching to figure out why and if you want to do a Star Wars TTRPG (assuming you just don't want to do a cash-in) at all. but that will be a different post.

Guns are pretty intensely lethal but that's a flavor of Star Wars people could like.

Guns in Star Wars are so infamously not lethal that people were making fun of it back in the friggin' 80s.

I understand that you don't want blasters to be a total joke when not in the hands of the shiny protagonists, but if you want a game in which a couple of stray droids holding blasters are still a serious threat to your typical action hero you're barking up the wrong tree.

Spaceships and Shit
The ships are pretty good and function with many of the same rules (like modding) that the gear system does so that's a plus. Unfortunately the thing that determines how good you are in space combat is really your ship and not the pilot particularly. But....whatever.

There's no excuse for that fucking bullshit. If there's one space combat setting where the personal awesomeness of the pilot should be a huge factor in how your ship performs or overperforms it's Star Wars.

[Voss]

Not sure what you are on about Lago. The issue with guns in Star Wars was never that they were 'not lethal' - people in armor were one shot kills all the damn time. The gun issue was simply that Protagonists were Awesome, and everyone else officially sucked cock. Ship combat followed the same rules. Everybody but the main characters died horribly really fast in space. Training time and skill level had no apparent bearing on anything anyone ever did in space combat. If you weren't part of the main story, you might have a 1 in 50 chance of survival. Otherwise you were a cinematic explosion waiting to happen.

Core Mechanic
Alright lets get started here. The core mechanic is made of clown nightmares and insanity. It is fucking madness[...]You construct the dice yourself by taking stickers from a sheet in the back of the book and sticking them on all your die's faces as they instruct until you have a set of shitty Star Wars dice.

That is definitely one of the most bonkers things I have ever heard. "Buy this book and ruin your dice" is quite possibly the worst sales pitch I have ever heard. It actively makes me want to not try the game. Even "you must buy special dice to play" would have been more appealing.

Enjoyable review. Would read again.

echo

I'm not surprised- it is exactly the same thing FFG did when they took over the Warhammer Fantasy RPG, and surprisingly made it worse. (Because no one really thought that was a thing that can happen) The original game had its decent points if you liked character death, but as an rpg went, the system was pretty much shitty.

Presumably the real release of SW will be a horribly overpriced box set like the WHFRPG set, and have custom dice rather than stickers.
Other than that, the only good I can see in this is they correctly made the force users go stand in the corner so they don't shit all over everything.

[Dean]

HYPA-RESPONSE-A-GOOOO

So you can be a Human or a Rodian or a Chewbacca plus some other things that are terrible. You can also be a shitty droid if you want to be terrible and you hate yourself because your so fat.

You pretty much lost me right there.

Now, the second one needn't necessarily be bad. A small racial list can be beneficial if it comes with a level of pontification to give the races more depth. Indeed, that's pretty much the only reason to have a small racial list. But Star Wars races are intensely shallow. Even series like Star Trek and Stargate: Atlantis have nothing on them.

Yeah. In general the races are....slightly unbalanced but the droid is just totally left field. Basically the droid starts with a pile of free xp which allow it to hyperspecialize in one area super hard but if you tried to make an organic character it would be objectively terrible. This is interesting to me because it means the droid is unbalanced but it is unbalanced exactly the opposite of how well balanced the game is. If the game is poorly done and being amazing at one task and being a total one trick pony is enough to shortcut every problem then droids are the best. If the game is well balanced and multiple situations call for multiple methods of resolution then droids are by far and away the worst. There is literally no way to balance droids as they are written.

That is definitely one of the most bonkers things I have ever heard. "Buy this book and ruin your dice" is quite possibly the worst sales pitch I have ever heard. It actively makes me want to not try the game. Even "you must buy special dice to play" would have been more appealing.

Not only is it an almost aggresive anti-sales tactic to me it also makes it FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE to figure out the math on a lot of these things. I mean I know what the odds of rolling 8+ on a d12 are but when you put a bunch of hieroglyphics on them and ask me to figure out the probability of rolling Sarsaparilla on 2d4'+3 my fucking MIND BREAKS.

That thread is hilarious.

I liked the part where dean gets accused of being a "conversational rapist." I think they meant that he raped conversations, but it instead it was taken as if he was a chatty sex predator.

I'm genuinely glad you appreciated that. It was my favorite thing that happened to me recently. I loved the phrase "conversational rapist" and I now try to fit it into conversations. I try to insert it into conversations even without consent in fact.

But it's fucking Star Wars! It's a setting that has exactly two things going for it.

1) Awesome space combat that ignores all laws of physics for the sake of having The Battle of Midway.... In Sppaaaccccce!

2) Magic Ninjas with Laser Swords

That's pretty fair, the problem for me is that the conceptual space of "Jedi" in Star Wars is "Everything you do plus magic and laser swords". As a result every game I'm in is chock full of Jedi and everything ends up looking like the Arena scene in Clone Wars that ruined lightsabers forever. Yes....you are picturing that scene now. Feel the hate that rises in you. So I think saying that you can't use Jedi (PS: there's rules for Jedi in back) is actually a very tactful way to try to have there be 0-1 Jedi in the average party as opposed to 2-3.

[Whipstitch]

I'm also confused at the resistance to trade rules when there is a fucking character class called Trader and entire groups of rules that incompletely handle trade-type stuff.

It's like they're terrified that players might end up having a clue what the fuck is going on around them. FFS, a space trader PC isn't fucking Fry, and it's more fun when players immediately understand that yes, that cargo container is filled with enough narcotics to retire off of without having having to ask "Is that good?" first.

[raben-aas]

STAR WARS already HAD the best possible gaming system or this franchise, d6. That anyone actually develops yet another STAR WARS rules system even though d6 is open license and free to use, even for a publisher, is totally bonkers.

[fbmf]

STAR WARS already HAD the best possible gaming system or this franchise, d6. That anyone actually develops yet another STAR WARS rules system even though d6 is open license and free to use, even for a publisher, is totally bonkers.

d6 STAR WARS requires a lot of MTP and Mother May I. This is a documented turn-off to some people.

Game On,
fbmf

[sabs]

The dice sound like they want you to use the dice from their warhammer game.
Its basically a success/failures/advantages dice rolling system.
You have a stat die, with a weighted success/failure distribution, some skill dice, special googlyboogly dice, and then challenge dice, that have more fail than success.

You build your hand, roll some dice, figure out what your net success/fail ad/disad is.
Then you mtp based on that.

[sabs]

You should do star wars like ars magica. Everyone gets to play a jedi, and is part of a local council, and then everyone has a 'hero' character that's a smuggler, princess, chewbacca, what ever. And every time only 1 or 2 max jedi get to come along on the adventure.
Maybe make jedi character only gain experience if they are spending days on end meditating on their navel.

[raben-aas]

God I hate Jedis.

[Fuchs]

You should do star wars like ars magica. Everyone gets to play a jedi, and is part of a local council, and then everyone has a 'hero' character that's a smuggler, princess, chewbacca, what ever. And every time only 1 or 2 max jedi get to come along on the adventure.
Maybe make jedi character only gain experience if they are spending days on end meditating on their navel.

I think it's better to simply limit jedi to "average jedi" and make the other player characters the special "best of the best" ones so that it evens out. So, the PC jedi pilot is not any better than the PC hotshot fighter pilot because the latter just has that much more talent.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Not sure what you are on about Lago. The issue with guns in Star Wars was never that they were 'not lethal' - people in armor were one shot kills all the damn time. The gun issue was simply that Protagonists were Awesome, and everyone else officially sucked cock. Ship combat followed the same rules. Everybody but the main characters died horribly really fast in space. Training time and skill level had no apparent bearing on anything anyone ever did in space combat. If you weren't part of the main story, you might have a 1 in 50 chance of survival. Otherwise you were a cinematic explosion waiting to happen.

Fair enough. I've had my experiences colored by the many excellent Star Wars video games -- where even if you weren't a movie-original protagonist you're still an unstoppable badass no matter how pathetic you originally were.

But when you step outside the protagonist bubble, holy shit I can see what you're talking about.

[Aryxbez]

My Star Wars experienced got a major coloring from Gennedy Tartakovsky's Star Wars: Clone Wars 5 minute cartoon. Where the characters were far more awesome, and had higher level capabilities, most especially Mace Windu. Also that, even non main characters were awesome, like that Clone Trooper squadron taking on an army of droids.

As a result every game I'm in is chock full of Jedi and everything ends up looking like the Arena scene in Clone Wars that ruined lightsabers forever.

Wait, how'd that scene ruin Lightsabers forever, did it make them too good, not good enough?

[Dean]

As a result every game I'm in is chock full of Jedi and everything ends up looking like the Arena scene in Clone Wars that ruined lightsabers forever.

Wait, how'd that scene ruin Lightsabers forever, did it make them too good, not good enough?

Lightsabers used to be a cultural symbol for "Extreme Awesome" to the point of being used for humor. Obviously they were also a symbol for nerdiness but they were also the symbol of absurd awesome. 15 years ago if you were to draw a humorous T-shirt of a Tyrannosaur on a skateboard doing a sweet jump you would ALSO give him a lightsaber. That was their place in the cultural conscious. They were the go-to concept for something that is so awesome and impossible that it is desired by everyone.

Lightsabers were that cool because in the originals they were special weapons that only the protagonist and antagonist had. At any one moment 2 people have lightsabers in the entire universe. Lightsabers mixed excalibur with awesome lasers, and that shit is cool in every language.

Then the new movies came out. And lightsabers were fucking everywhere. Some guys had two, one guy had two he'd ducktaped together, and one guy had like fucking FIVE and he used them all at the same fucking time because George Lucas has lightsbergers now. Also he used them while riding a dinosaur down a mineshaft. So lightsabers started losing their edge cause they were in shitty movies and they were being robbed of a big part of their appeal. But people were still holding on. Then in Attack of The Clones a scene started like this



See in Psychology there is this thing called flooding that they use to help people with phobia's. As it turns out when you have a reaction to a stimulus you do so less and less each time you're exposed to it if it's done in fast order. So you can take someone that's terrified of cars and drive them around for hours and possibly cure them. At first they'll be hysterical but then they'll chill out after the thousandth stimulus just can't produce an important response. So if you HATE cars a 4 hour drive can actually cure you of that, and if you LOVE lightsabers a scene that looks like this....



Can cure you of that. And when I get friends to try to envision a moment that defines the disappointment of the new movies to them it is often instinctively that scene. Because that is the scene where lightsabers died. Whether they know it or not that was the scene that took their love of that universe...and cured it.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

I agree with this sentiment. Also, I further did not like this sequence because it involved Jedi going down to gunfire at least once and probably multiple times. I understand this from a storytelling standpoint, since you need casualties on the good-guy side to establish drama, but at the same time we'd had several movies by that point that established that a Jedi with a lit lightsaber is immune to gunfire.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

Also, I had the realization earlier this year that I don't really want to explore the Star Wars universe as a game space anymore, and despite my best efforts this was largely because of the prequels in general and the sequence of Idiot and Conflict balls held high by the Jedi as an order in those films. This was somewhat depressing to me; to give you an idea of why, this screen name I am using now is one I created for a Jedi in a Star Wars game.