Star Wars

So, I splurged a bit and picked up the new Star Wars RPG, Edge of Empire. Its been out for a while, but I avoided buying it because... well...

Lots of reasons. Look, I've had, and played, just about every edition of Star Wars the RPG, evah.  I played the West End Games edition, and even now have a book or two left from it. I played both editions of the Wizards of the Coast D&D edition, and have every book but one from the SAGA edition... I refuse to pay Half Price Books more than the cover price for a used book, and my Ships of the Galaxy book went missing along with my bag and a slew of traveller books, right out of my car, at work, about five years ago (that long? Damn I'm getting old..).

You might think I'm a deep fan of Star Wars.

Oddly, I'm rather ambivalent to the whole thing. Like a Hipster, I got my start before it was cool, back when Lucas began putting out shitty games that the fans adored because, you know... Star Wars, and sealed when he released the original trilogy with all new singing and dancing nonsense.  So, I saw A New Hope, with the new bits, and skipped the other two.

I'm a Dune man myself, if I had to pick a major franchise to keep.  The Spice Must Flow, bitches.

Anyway.

First, let me say that Fantasy Flight Games needs to just quit. Now.

I mean, they produce some pretty, pretty books, but they are definitely grinding out the money tree aspect of it.  For fucking game books.  I'm far more likely to splurge on a cheap and functional book than a pretty, pretty book.  Look, I own some four or five traveller core rule books, from Mongoose... okay, two, one of which was a replacement. Why? Because, for game books, they are cheap!  I don't have any problems buying extra books if they are functional and cheap! But pretty, and expensive books? Fuck you, I'll find someone with a PDF to "loan" me.... <wink>

I wouldn't mind so much if the pretty books were good games. But no, it seems almost as if the bigger and prettier the book the more ass the system is. Look, some of my favorite Game Books are the Anima: Beyond Fantasy stuff, but I'd never offer to run it, and I might think twice before playing it, simply because the system seems so very unwieldy.

But its a fucking peach compared to Rogue Trader/40K (from Fantasy Flight Games, hence the diatribe earlier), and That Game is a fucking gem compared to the new Star Wars.

That requires a bit of an unpacking to make sense of it.  At the core of it, Edge of Empire looks to be a pretty simple little game system. Almost intuitive, really.  I mean, they do waste entire chapters on redundant nonsense, and much like Rogue Trader your character is at least half defined by a fairly substantial list of 'Talents', but at least its a functional list of talents... or more accurately, at least the Game Master doesn't have to memorize every fucking talent, twice over, to simply judge a 'threat'.

Hell, there are even some things I like about it, such as a sensible system of reducing the number of rolls in combat that doesn't make my teeth ache. Hell, taken by itself, I would almost say that they'd  redeemed themselves with this game.

But no.

Right off the bat, in chapter one, page 1... earlier if you really thought to pay attention when browsing your game store, you realize that this game uses... special dice.

Anyone remember Dragon Dice, from TSR just before they went under and were bought by Wizards of the Coast?  What was the thing with Dragon Dice? They didn't have numbers, just a bunch of wonky symbols that had to be decoded, right?

Yeah. That was a dumb idea.

Fantasy Flight Games decided Dragon Dice were the bees fucking knees, and resurrected them for this game.  So you have to have a pack of special dice, color coded for good and bad, and with their special symbols representing successes and shit, to play the game.

Oh, sure, they included a nice little chart so you could TRY and play the game with ordinary, numeric, dice... if you want to spend an hour or so out of every game night interpreting the rules and rolls you made.   See, the book is written in cute little icon codes. You have three black diamonds? Oh, thats three difficulty dice, plus a light blue square? That's a boost dice...

Ugh.

Now, with their nice Star Wars dice, the little icons make some sense, I guess. I mean, the dice and the icons match color schemes and so forth.

But fuck you if you think I'm gonna plunk down sixty bucks for a pretty book that is just chock full of artwork, but can't be bothered to put appropriate images down for half the stuff (like starships) so you know what shit looks like... THEN plunk down another ten, fifteen bucks for the shitty dice that can't be used with any other game I own.

There is another matter: Gimping the Game.

See, what is the nice, iconic thing about Star Wars?

Jedi, amirite?

What is not in this book?

Did you guess Jedi?

Man, you must be smart.

Oh, you can play a non-jedi 'force using exile', with no lightsaber training and all that... speaking of lightsaber training, where in the movies does it suggest that lightsabers are jedi only weapons? I mean, Luke is handed one by old Ben Kenobi and can swing it around just fine with no real training at all!  No, his cool training is how to deflect blaster bolts and shit, amirite?

No, that's some dumb as rocks shit some Expanded Universe writer-fanboi came up with (I bet it was Kevin J. Anderson. That fucker singlehandedly proved that Lucas isn't the only one who can fuck Star Wars fans up the ass with Stupid!), and everyone and their cousin has run off with for the last thirty fucking years like it was graven in stone. I welcome the canon dump of our new Disney Overlords!

Look: The inspiration for Star Wars was Samurai flicks (Hidden Fortress!), and Samurai used fucking Katanas. That didn't mean ONLY Samurai could use the fucking things, only that it was the signature weapon of a Katana. Any time you tell me that only 'Special People' can use a specific item of awesome, my suspension of disbelief gets punched right in the fucking Nads.

So, the book includes Lightsabers, but no one can use them. Yes, it pretty much says that. But you can play a crappy, wannabe Jedi! Or, you can plunk down another forty buck (at a guess) for the super special book of Jedi. Bah.

There is more on that too.  Bounty Hunters can't use pistols, sort of, but a 'bodyguard' can use everything from pistols to ship guns...  ???

Then too: your character starts out with something called an Obligation, which basically is a debt, though it could be something like a drug addiction, so you've got some history at the start, right?

Only you start fucking dirt poor...unless you take on more obligation, which leads us to a problem.

How poor? Well, basically: A bounty Hunter can't start with a fucking blaster he can use, much less armor.  And the game recommends keeping the party poor, as poor as possible. Hey, look! You, asshole game designer! YOU!!! with the funny hat!!!  You just started the players unable to afford even the basic tools of their trade, why the fuck are you telling the GM to pay them in styrofoam packing peanuts!!!

Oh, you get a starship. Well.

How the fuck is it that my Bounty Hunter doesn't have some sort of armor (a signature feature of the class in most fandom depictions), much less a fucking BLASTER!!!... but he's got a starship? Fuck! Sell the god damn starship and use it to buy the shit you need to do your fucking job so you can earn money to buy... a new starship!

Seriously. You start with 500 credits, and the cheapest blaster that a bounty hunter can use is 850.   At least the pistol guys can afford a pistol.

Oh, sure. You can start with a slug thrower, which is great if your concept is a back world primitive, right? I mean: Star Wars. Blasters. Duh.

But that takes us back to Obligation. See: The party pools their collective Obligation, and the game is roughly scaled so that no matter how big or small the party is, they should have close to 50 Obligation. Well, within limits, I suppose... if you have twenty players you've done broke gaming anyway.

Obligation is treated like a percentile skill, rolled each session/adventure/whatever, and there are some harsh penalties for having your party Obligation come calling, right? So buying down your Obligation is a worthy reason to adventure.

So far, so good.

Well, you can buy more obligation, player by player.  You can get additional Xp for building your character and you can get more starting money, and you do this in increments of 5 or 10 obligation, meaning each potential character can add an additional 20 obligation to the party pool.

So, if you have more than two players you just pushed your Obligation higher than 100 percent!  And yes, there are rules for that too.

And yes, players WILL want to pick up those extra XP and that sweet extra cash.  The XP because you can only raise your core attributes with starting XP, meaning you really need every point you can get, and your starting cash because... well... otherwise you have no equipment with which to do your fucking job/adventure with.

Shit, man. D&D is the poster child for starting weak and broke, and you're positively swimming in gear and talent compared to this beast!  Never seen a game start a party as a bunch of fuckign space hobos before!

But there is a logical inconsistency here, a violation of the standards of the setting.   Luke fucking Skywalker may have started out as some sort of piss-poor desert dwelling boychick, but he at least had a land speeder worth a few thousand credits to his name.  Blasters could be picked up like candy anywhere in the setting.... and every other character started with everything they needed to be a distinct and useful character.  Han Solo didn't have to scrounge up a second mortgage on the Millennium Falcon in order to shoot Greedo, and Chewie had his bowcaster.  Hell, in EU canon, Han Solo's blaster wasn't just a gun he happened to have, it was a highly customized, magnum version of the blaster it appeared to be or something.

Now, if this was the only sin... and if the game didn't have a hard coded rule for selling your soul to Jabba the Hutt (or whomever) just to afford a fucking blaster in the first fucking place, I'd just hand waive the starting cash a bit... 500 credits is your pocket money, you also have the BASIC FUCKING TOOLS OF YOUR TRADE!!!!

Which, for a bounty hunter, would include a blaster rifle of some sort (because, fuck pistols apparently), and for a Mechanic would include a fuckload of tools.

Because if there is one fucking thing I associate Star Wars with, its digging in the couch cushions for pocket change to afford that reconstructive surgery after a dark lord of the Sith cuts off your fucking arm... Amirite?

Hell, that's MOST Science Fiction settings.

Hell, in Firefly Captain Mal is constantly bitching about being poor, shit falls off his ship and so on, but not once does he go 'Damn, I wish I could afford some bullets for my fucking gun!'.  I mean, its just sort of assumed that if you can afford a fucking starship, even a battered piece of junk, trivial shit like personal firearms and bullets and shit sort of stop mattering so much.

But no. One reload for the gun you can barely afford costs a full 5% of your starting cash, or a much bigger slice of what you have left after buying a gun.

On the upside, at least I think it would be trivially simple to make a Riddick in this rule set.

Should have bought the cheaper Beta. C'est le vie.