Edge of Epic

Yes, you read right. This is a new post.

I’ve been playing a lot of tabletop roleplaying games this past year. The latest of them is Edge of the Empire, the new Star Wars rpg. I almost immidiately fell in love with the concept: A hard-edged living on the fringes of galactic society. No mystical Jedi, no idealistic Rebel Alliance, just doing business for some creds. Finally!

Edge of the Empire uses the Fantasy Flight Games’ unconventional dice as its base. There are two types of dice: Positive and negative. Positive dice (Ability, Skill and Boost) grant Successes and Advantages, and the negative dice (Difficulty, Challenge and Setback) issue Failures and Threats. Basically, you calculate from your skills and charasteristics what your Ability and Skill die pool is. Then the GM gives you Difficulty dice based on the difficulty on the check, and possibly upgrades some of them to Challenge dice. Then you and your fellow players toss ideas on how to help the check. If the idea sounds good, the GM awards you some Boost dice. Then the GM thinks about any outside difficulties and possibly adds some Setback dice.

Then you roll the pool. Each Failure eats one Success from your results. The Advantages and Threats cancel each other out on one-on-one basis. If you have at least one Success remaining, you succeed. Regardless on whether you succeed or not, if there are any Advantages remaining, something good happens. And if there are any Threats remaining, something bad happens.

So that’s the core mechanic, which I think is very, very good. Rolling dice is a big event, and ideas and narrative description can add tangible rewards to your check in the form of additional dice. The huge handful of dice feels very nice to roll, and the results shape the narrative in a very wide fashion. Your attempt to pass off as an important diplomat fails, but the security guard seems to be in an amicable mood and will let you go for a small bribe. Your blaster shot hits the bounty hunter squarely, but you find yourself exposed after making the shot.

In addition to the basic mechanics, there is the most interesting mechanic of them all: Obligation. Each character has an Obligation, a reason why he is living in the Edge of the Empire. It might be that he is in a deep debt, or that he has a large extended family whose matters require his constant attention. Obligation has also a Magnitude, which is typically in the range of 10-20. The party’s Obligation is tracked in their group sheet. At the beginning of each session, the GM rolls d100, and if the number hits any of the players’ Obligation, then that Obligation triggers, and the players can expect anything from calls to bounty hunters in that session.

The Obligation is a powerful narrative driving force and a resource. Generally, the higher the Obligation, the less official parties will want to deal with the players. Also, the higher the Obligation, the easier working with criminal elements will be. Players can purchase goods and services by increasing their Obligation, and they can adventure and pay off their debts, thus reducing it.

Sounds vague? Well, that’s the interesting thing. The whole book practically oozes the phrase ”Interpret this as you wish”. Everything, from combat rules to the Obligation is very loosely written, and most of the text consists of general guidelines the GM is free to interpret. Go fast and roll with it. Why do the government of this out-of-way-planet care about your family grievances? Because your family has questionable contacts to the criminal underworld, and you are too, by association. Or you can just say: You are right, they don’t. Your Obligation does not matter this time.

That’s what I love about Edge of the Empire. The lightness, openness to interpretation and general feeling of the game. After the horribly old-fashioned d20, the heavyset 40k Roleplay and problematic Cyberpunk, I really like Edge of the Empire.

X-Wing vs. 2 TIE Fighters

Star Wars seems to be cursed: It can never have a good space battle game on a tabletop.

When Wizards of the Coast made the previous space battle game Starship Battles, it dropped the ball on several occasions: First of all, the game was sold in boosters. If there is one universal constant in this world, it is that booster-based miniature games do not work. Especially if there are only two sides in the game. I bought Starship Battles silly much and in the end I had only three ships capable of transporting fighters on the Light Side. Instead, I got 5 Slave 1’s.

Another thing was that the game itself wasn’t very memorable. They just took the space combat from Saga Edition and oversimplified it. There wasn’t any love in the design. What I did like in the game, however, was the flexible scale and the multitude of ships: You could have dogfights or grand-scale showdown between Imperial and Rebel fleets, where capital ships bombard each other and smaller ships zoom around them, lasers blasting. And the miniatures weren’t bad-looking.

The game, perhpas predictably, failed. If they only had packed the miniatures in faction packs and blisters, then it would have been easier for a single person to get the kind of fleet he wanted. And if only they had done something else than their standard d20-based system.

But that’s all ancient history, for X-Wing, a tactical space battle miniature game from Fantasy Flight games has appeared! Wielding the legendary name of a legendary old computer game, it attempts to once again bring us miniature gaming with Star Wars! Let’s behold the end product and pass judgement.

After the massive scale of Starship Battles, X-Wing is kind of a let down. The starter has 3 miniatures. 2 TIE/ln and 1 titular X-Wing. Not the mind-exploding scale I had hoped. But let us remain open to new suggestions and tear into the box.

After beholding the tokens, realization hit me: This was Wings of War. Once again, instead of trying to create something completely novel, someone decided to just take an old game and slap new paint on it. Well, at least WWI flight game is a strangely appropriate choice for a Star Wars space combat game. While the dice in the game look fancy, there are just three attack dice and three defence dice. In a conventional game, about 33% of rolls require 4 dice of one type. And in an advanced game, that number could reach 5 dice. In short, there aren’t enough dice to comfortably play the game. Even one additional attack and defense die would have helped greatly.

After two games, I can say that while X-Wing is just Wings of War, it is an improved version of it. At the beginning of each round, the players choose their maneuvers for every fighter in secret, using a handy maneuver dial. After executing the maneuvers, the players shoot at anything within sight and range, and hopefully deal damage. Repeat until one side is debris. On the other hand, every attack consists of attacker rolling dice and defender rolling dice, which I always think is a terrible mechanic. Since a good hit requires the attacker to roll well and the defender to roll badly, the chances of hitting anything are low. Therefore, there were long streches when not much happened. Not a good sign.

So X-Wing was a resounding ”meh”. It was not very original, nor impressive. The lack of dice and other tokens (we ran out of Focus tokens in the first game), smells of extortion, especially since there is a Die Pack on sale. There are Ship Expansions for sale, but they are expensive and bring only a single ship per expansion.

What the game needs now is customisability. The models are on flying stands, and most of the ship’s information can be stored on a cardboard plaque on the stand. Sell people blank stands, and let them craft their own ships. Those ships could be used in different scenarios, which could be shared with other people via social media. Take a look at the most popular ships and make expansion packs out of them. Have a plan on upgrading the game into a higher scale with Star Destroyers and Mon Calamari Cruisers. Don’t just leave it as a simple dogfighter simulator.

The lack of a good space combat board game is certainly starting to ire me. Must I do everything myself?

A better SWRPG, part one

A wrong tool for the job

Well, damn. I have been going over my designs for Champions of Ilea over and over again, but locking down any decisions has been incredibly hard. My vision of the gameplay is vague and evasive, and finally I have to admit: Champions is a setting, not an entire game. The concept of what the players do is pretty much functional with any roleplaying game system. Trying to create one is hard because it does not need one. Thus, I officially abandon that mission. I’ll probably return to it idly when inspiration strikes, though.

But good news, everyone! Fantasy Flight Games acquired the license for Star Wars! They have already announced Star Wars – The Card Game, a co-operative living card game, and X-wing, a miniature space combat game. This is excellent news, for the franchise is once again in relatively safe hands. Wizards of the Coast, having had the lisence for a long while now, never did get any real use out of it. They made Saga Edition, but only recently did I realize how annoying and old-fashioned the d20 system under it is. They made Star Wars Miniatures and Starship Battles, but they screwed them up with the booster format. Although I do not blame Wizards: I blame Hasbro, the evil corporate entity which tries to squeeze money out of spunky little Wizards. The prospect of a new Star Wars RPG also flared my heart, and got me thinking: How should the mechanics of a Star Wars roleplaying game function to capture the essence of Star Wars?

First of all, Star Wars should be light. New Hope was about a farm boy, who rescued a princess and fought an evil knight and his draconic superweapon. Space fantasy. Star Wars is full of action: The heroes blast stormtroopers, pilot all sorts of vehicles both in dogfights and hair-raising chases and duel great Jedi.

That is my starting point. Lightsaber combat. In the movies, as I have stated, duels usually take quite long and the combatants move around. In Phantom Menace, the duel between Darth Maul and the jedi duo moves from a hangar deck to a strange bridge complex and eventually in a some sort of reactor room. In Revenge of the Sith the action starts in a landing pad, moves through some sort of lava mining facility and ends up beside a volcanic river. A process-based system would drive the action forward nicely. I’m just going to go ahead and rip the spine of Noitahovi and use it as a basis. Three-section conflict resolution process. It will handle everything.

Then we need attributes. I like the system in Storyteller: A character has three-by-three grid of attributes: Mental, Physical and Social attributes, which are divided in Power, Finesse and Resilience. For example the three Physical attributes: Strength, Dexterity and Stamina. Let’s modify it a bit, mainly just by removing Social attributes. Star Wars is not about social interactions, so we do not need attributes for that. Then we’ll group them in three categories: Power, Finesse and Resilience. These groups will be used in conflict resolution. Power and Resilience are Primary groups and Resilience is a Secondary group. In Power, there is Strength and Intelligence. In Finesse, there is Dexterity and Cunning. In Resilience, there is Endurance and Willpower. Every attribute is represented with a number from 1 to 5.

Now we can elaborate on the mechanics. When a Conflict arises, the initiator determines which of the two first groups he or she wants to use in the coming conflict: Power or Finesse. Then he determines the exact attribute based on what he or she wants to do. If the player is opposed by another character, that character must also use the chosen attribute. After adding any other modifers to the base attribute, the player ends up with a number. This is the amount of d6’s he or she will roll. The highest result is used, and every double rolled adds 1 to it. (For example, a character rolls 5d6. He ends up with 5, 5, 4, 1 and 1. The highest number is 5 and there are two double results, so 2 is added to it. The final result is 7.) This result is compared to the opposing roll or difficulty number. This check is called a Phase.

A Conflict consist of a maximum of three Phases. In the event of a tie or when a Force Point has been used to achieve one, the Conflict proceeds to a next Phase, in which the player who did not use a Force Point chooses an attribute to use from the unchosen Primary Category to use. (For example: A wookiee character dropped on a Scout Trooper from a tree, intending to knock him unconscious. He decided to use Strength. He gets a 6 as an end result and the Trooper gets 4 and uses his only two Force Points to raise it to 6. The trooper takes the Wookiee’s weight but manages to wrest free, dropping down a rocky hill. The wookiee player decides to pursue by cutting the trooper off and uses Cunning as the next attribute). If another tie occurs, the final Phase occurs, using the secondary Category, meaning either Stamina or Willpower.

I have observed that people tend to do reasonable things in roleplaying games. They take cover, sacrifice time to fetch proper tools and rarely use their weaker abilities or skills. Most likely this is because the roleplaying systems are generally grounded in reality, and trying something awesome is likely to fail. In contrast, consider the assassination scene in The Revenge of the Sith. After spotting an assassination fleeing the senator’s window, Obi-Wan jumps after it and grabs it. A flying assassination droid, floating thousands of meters above ground level. A few minutes later Anakin jumps off his speeder to land on the assassin’s. Not particularily smart, but bloody awesome. This is the kind of action I want the players to do, and I know just how to incentivize players to try crazy maneuvers: Reward them.

The Force points I mentioned earlier function in the same way as Noitahovi’s Sisu points. If your roll would fail, you can raise the result by sacrificing Force Points. Every FP adds 1 to the result. You can only achieve a tie with them, though, and try winning on the next Challenge Phase. You gain Force Points at the beginning of every game session, and whenever you decide to try something spectacular, or give an awesome description of your character’s doings. The other players are encouraged to offer their opinion on whether something is spectacular or awesome, but the GM is the final (and hopefully generous) adjudicator.

What about failure? I might be just a big softie, but I dislike failures in roleplaying games. The golden rule of improvisation is “Yes, and…”. It means that when someone says something, you accept it and elaborate. Denial cuts inspiration. Failing an important skill check tends to create a “Oh. Well what now?”-situations which stop the flow. So whenever a player fails a significant situation like combat or a high-speed chase through Endor’s trees, he or she does not die. Instead the situation grows more complicated. The player is captured, or crashes his bike and wakes up in the bottom of a cave with a broken foot. The player needs to find his way out of the complication, or the others might need to rescue him. This creates a natural flow for the story.

Dying is not out of the question, though. Instead of making it a punishment for rolling dice badly, let’s make it an option. Enter Noble Sacrifice. In a dire situation, perhaps after a few successive complications, a player can make a noble sacrifice to buy the others more time to escape, or to trap the villain, or whatever. When a player would lose a roll, he or another player in the same scene can announce that he is performing a Heroic Sacrifice. In that case the player rolls the same roll that triggered the sacrifice and adds the end result to the original failing roll. This very likely will result in an astounding success, but at the cost of the character’s life.

Whoa, this is a lot of text. I would have published this post sooner, but I fell into the trap of overthinking and