Star Wars Edge of the Empire preliminary review

So much stuff

I’ve been talking RPGs with the brother in law for a while now. He finally decided we needed to get one going and arranged things in a surprisingly short period of time. We’ve started in on a game I’ve never played before: Star Wars Edge of the Empire. Today I thought I’d give my opening thoughts on the game.

Victor (the brother in law) bought the Beginner Game pack. It includes a thinned down rule book, an adventure book, 4 pre-generated characters, a double sided map, custom dice, and a stack of tokens. It’s a great way to introduce new players to the game as the rules and dice are different than I was used to. I think this is a fantastic pack for getting players directly into the play style because it’s hard to get new people into role playing while slogging through character creation. Fantasy Flight Games does well understanding this even adding some extra characters for free under character resources on their site. This is also a considerably cheaper option for trying out the game as it costs half of what the core book does. This is the best option if you really aren’t sure about role playing but are willing to give it a try.

I want to fly my own Millennium Falcon.

To really get into the game though I think you definitely need the core book. It goes deeper into rules and provides significant information. Players have more options for character design as well. It is a better resource for both players and game masters in an ongoing campaign. Personally I liked having both versions of the rule book at the table this weekend because we had several players creating characters together, anyone looking for in depth information grabbed the core rule book while those needing some simple information grabbed the beginners book.

Our group has yet to pick up the Game Master kit but I think that might happen soon. As we are all new to the game I think whoever ends up running the game could benefit from having more resources at hand.

I love that the game seems more character driven. Most of character creation is aimed towards the story element and players even figure out a story as to how their characters came together. Personally I prefer working at my role over rolling dice (but diceless role playing is blasphemy to me.) I've been burned in the past by genre games that were simple veneers of the source material over some clunky rules. I'm glad to say this is not the case with Edge of the Empire, you really do get a feel of the Star Wars universe while you play. It helped that we are all mega-geeks who played the theme music on our phones for scene changes.

Making role playing dice more obscure and nerdier. Yay!

I’m still unsure about the dice for this game. Interpreting them can be a bit of an oddity. You roll an assigned number of dice and sum up the results. The ability, proficiency, and boost dice give positive markers while the difficulty, challenge and setback dice have negative markers. Certain results cancel each other out: Success vs. failure, advantage vs. threat, and triumph vs. despair. This all leads to the need to create a rationale for the results. A player can roll a strong failure and a triumph together. Maybe they Jar Jar Binksed it up and tripped over a destroyed combat droid… accidentally causing it to shoot at the exact right thing. (Yes I hate myself for referencing Jar Jar Binks) Of course the opposite happens, strongly successful but with a lot of threat… you managed to leap the dangerous gap away from the storm troopers chasing you and landed in a room full of battle ready storm troopers. Whoops. Sometimes this caused some speed bumps in the flow of the evening but I found that once people got into the narrative of the story, ideas on how to resolve these results came from everyone and entertained the group

There are free dice apps in the google play store and whatever you apple people use so getting your own set is easy.

There were a couple of other problems; some of the rules needed more clarification in the book. Melee weapons should be brawn + weapon damage but it isn’t worded clearly in the book. It caused some friction between the gm and I but we worked it out. Issues were rather minor so the hurdles they created didn't derail the game.

I'm taking his leadership advice to heart.

For my first character I rolled up a Wookie hired gun-mercenary. I was a little bummed I couldn’t afford my bowcaster but I’m just going to use that as something to work for in the game. I’m also looking at a vibro-axe but then I’m going to need to dump some exp into melee too… I went more for a heavy weapon, brawling, leader type in character creation. I wanted to play someone who was equally comfortable in a cantina brawl as he would be in thermal detonator diplomacy.

I’m psyched for the next session but I’m worried about when that would be. This long weekend is being spent with the wife, and then there is Gamealot, nieces’ birthdays and Edmonton Expo. September is booked solid. Although two nieces are only 1 and 2 so they don’t party too late.

I will update more on Star Wars Edge of the Empire after we put some serious time into the campaign