![]() I’m a huge fan of systems that characterize the quality of success or failure (instead of just treating those as binary qualities). Ignoring quantitative differences, these give you 18 qualitative results: Threat (these cancel, multiples of both accumulate) Failure (these cancel, multiples successes accumulate but failures don’t) … and that’s when the hoverpads fall off the landspeeder. You roll all the dice, you count up all the symbols and… The key point is that all of the dice in these pools are marked with a number of different symbols: Success, Failure, Advantage, Threat, Triumph, and Despair. Particularly notable successes or failures on previous checks might also grant you Boost Dice or Setback Dice, and so forth. This basic pool can be then be modified in various ways: The GM can add Difficulty Dice (representing the difficulty of the task), which can be upgraded to Challenge Dice by various horrible circumstances. That would give you dice pool of one Ability Die and two Proficiency Dice.) Then you’d upgrade two of those to Proficiency Dice because the lower score is 2. ![]() You’d take three Ability Dice because the higher score is 3. (For example, let’s say you’re making a Brawn + Athletics check and you’ve got Brawn 3 and Athletics 2. Then you upgrade a number of those Ability Dice to Proficiency Dice equal to either your Characteristic or your Skill, whichever is lower. In order to resolve an action, you take a number of Ability Dice equal to either your Characteristic or your Skill, whichever is higher. In FFG’s Star Wars, your character is defined by their Characteristics and their Skills. ![]() So let’s lay the cost aside and talk about the game itself. But I had a friend who wanted me to run it for them, and they purchased all the books and supplies. Honestly, the cost would have kept me from ever trying the game. And instead of opening the door wide to those new players, Fantasy Flight has packaged the game at an exorbitant price point which makes it basically as unattractive as possible. And that’s particularly true right now as Star Wars enters its second renaissance. ![]() But I think what I find particularly frustrating is that the Star Wars roleplaying game should be a major point of entry for players new to RPGs. Money-grubbing corporations will grub money, right? Fair enough. So there’s another $45 you need to spend in order to start playing the game effectively. I don’t actually have a problem with a game using a specialized dice set, but these are sold at $15 per set… and in order to get a dice pool large enough that a table of beginning characters can reliably make their checks without having to reroll dice to form a full pool you’ll need three sets. On top of that, however, there’s the specialized dice. The claim by the game designers that the “core experience” of the Star Wars universe is for Han Solo ( Edge of Empire), Princess Leia ( Age of Rebellion), and Luke Skywalker ( Force and Destiny) to all adventure separately from each other is utterly bizarre. And it began to look a lot more like a marketing strategy: By executing a beta-beginning-core triumvirate for three separate games, it looked suspiciously as if Fantasy Flight Games had figured out how to sell the same core rules nine times over.Īnd there’s really no justification for it. … but then they did it again for Age of Rebellion and for Force and Destiny. And it wasn’t the first (nor the last) time that a beta program had a price of admission. Nobody was being forced to pay for it if they didn’t want to. And that’s largely because I find Fantasy Flight’s packaging of the game absurd.īack in 2012 when they released the beta version of Star Wars: Edge of Empire for $40 I didn’t have a problem with it: It provided early access to the game. Over time, though, I started putting the book back faster and faster, and eventually I just stopped picking them up. Then I’d look at the price, realize I wasn’t likely to get a Star Wars game together any time in the near future, and then slowly put the book back on the shelf with a lingering pang of regret. For several years I would walk past them in game stores, pick them up, and say, “Wow!” The core rulebooks for Fantasy Flight’s iteration of the Star Wars Roleplaying Game are incredibly gorgeous.
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