First, Second and Third Impressions
I have to admit that my impressions of
the Star Wars: Edge of the Empire
RPG from Fantasy Flight Games has been an up-and-down kind of thing.
When
I first saw the beta version of the game at Gen Con last year, I was
really excited. After all, Wizards of the Coast had allowed its
license for the Saga Edition version of the Star Wars RPG to end two
and a half years prior, and so it was good to see that somebody had
acquired the rights to publish a game. I bought a copy of FFG's
softcover and began reading. The full-color book was pretty, and the
art was aesthetically pleasing.
The
first time I noticed the weird dice that Edge of the Empire
would use, however, my enthusiasm waned. After all, I've been playing
other RPG's with standard polyhedral dice for more than twenty years,
and so the new ones seemed unnecessarily strange. I also wondered how
the process of putting together a dice pool would affect the speed
and flow of game play. I'd played the old D6 Star Wars
RPG from West End Games, and that was a very smooth system. While the
D20-based system from WotC could be rather clunky in some ways, it
had the benefit of being familiar and therefore worked pretty well
for those of us who'd been playing D&D
3rd Edition and Pathfinder
for twelve years.
Last
week, however, I actually had a chance to run Edge of the
Empire. While visiting some old
friends, I ran the introductory scenario, "Escape from Mos
Shuuta," from the Beginner Game. It was a lot of fun. While we
did have to stop and look up the rules sometimes, we were quickly able to set
up our dice pools and thus resolve the characters' actions. The
combat sequences moved along at a pace faster than any Saga Editions
I'd run, and were comparable even to ones using the old D6 system.
More
importantly, the mechanic of using Advantage, Triumph, Threat and
Despair to influence the course of action in the game proved to be a
refreshing change. Given the rules-heavy nature of D20-based RPG's,
combat can sometimes feel like it pits the GM and NPC's against the
players and their characters. Running Edge of the Empire,
in contrast, felt like it helped reinforce the idea of cooperative
storytelling, the element that I most enjoy about RPG's.
Take,
for example, the end of the introductory scenario. (WARNING! Spoilers
for "Escape from Mos Shuuta" follow.) As the heroes were
storming the docking bay, they ran into Trex the Trandoshan as he
came walking down the boarding ramp of the Krayt Fang.
He managed to run back into the ship and closing the entry hatch, but
the heroes opened it again. At that point he fled into the cockpit
and closed the door to it behind him. The Twi'lek gave chase and
succeeded in opening it, too, but also generated some Threat. One of
the players suggested that the door would open, but only a little
bit, and I agreed that that was the result. Then the Wookiee ran up
to the door, made an impressive Brawn check to force it open, and incapacitated Trex with a mighty swing of his vibro-axe. It was
a fun encounter, made even more so by the fact that the players added
complications to the scene. I look forward to having many more
memorable adventures in the Star Wars
galaxy playing this game.
-Nate
No comments:
Post a Comment