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Burton Delvers
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« on: 19 March 2013, 14:38:49 » |
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So, i got to pay Star Wars: Edge of the Empire last Thursday. I must say i enjoyed the experience. Set during the first original Star Wars film (or the fourth), In many ways the game provides similar components of play to other roleplaying games. It has character sheets (with vital stats, skills & attacks), a dice pool and battle maps. All three of these things have unique features.
The character sheet has pretty similar vital statistics to toughness and intelligence etc, but with a Soak value that absorbs damage before wounds incurred, like in Dark Heresy et al. You also have a Strain value that lets you take an extra action during your round, like an action point in 4th Ed, but you get some back at end of combat and over a period of rest.
Further down, you get to the actual skills list. Along with the obligatory space-based skills (astrogation, piloting, knowledge; xenology), they also have various renamed skills that leave you to guess as to what their equivalents are in other systems or indeed their meaning at all i.e. cool, skullduggery. Many times were spent awkwardly trying to guess what skills to use in situations, but the GM was usually forthcoming with suggestions.
Weapons have a section further down, with ample space for the simple stats of your weapon of choice. Your dice pool for your attack roll is visually represented with the actual colour coded dice used, say yellow, green, green. this is the same method used for showing your dice pool for your skills above. If you hit, your damage is a static number increased by the number of 'successes' on your dice. Your critical hits are represented by a number of certain symbols found on your attack dice. these are difficult to roll in multiples, but not impossible as i found out myself during a climactic battle last week. Criticals kill mooks outright, but provide special NPCs with setbacks.
Onwards you have Motivations and Obligations. As is de-rigeur these days, there are some flavourful background gubbins that give you minor setbacks and bonuses to be found in the Core Book.
Finally you have Talents and Special Abilities that you start off with and gain in skill-tree-like manner as you level up.
The dice pool itself is based on beating challenge dice you roll with your pool. A simple challenge might involve beating one purple dice, but a difficult one may have two purple and even a red dice. You roll green dice and yellows that are green dice 'upgraded' by a skill increase etc. Your dice pool has success symbols and advantage symbols. Your challenge dice have failure dice and disadvantage symbols. Beat the number of failure symbols with your successes and you succeed, have more advantage symbols than disadvantages and you have advantages to use either in the current situation or to boost a friends next roll or add challenge dice to your opponents. This system of advantages has unique storytelling implications, especially when the reverse happens and you roll more disadvantages. In this manner, the GM may spring new problems upon you or make your goal harder to reach. Entirely new encounters can happen or your plans may have to change completely as you find you have knocked over a peddlers stall while trying to remain discreetly pedestrian. This is by far the most unique and entertaining element of the game for me and provides a challenge for the GM to suggest new complications while asking players to think on their feet and to be flexible in their plans.
Lastly, the battle maps vary in scale considerably. This is because the players and NPC are all represented by tokens and distance is mostly based on GM discretion as to what constitutes short and long range. A lack of formality regarding battle movement and rangefinding may concern some, but as long as you have a reasonable GM who is interested in playing an enjoyable game, there shouldn't be a problem. I personally thought the varying scale maps were wonderful for roleplaying your way through a city's streets one minute before blasting around a canteena the next.
Overall, i enjoyed the game system and found the dice pool and setting to be my biggest draw. I do reccommend it.
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