Got a rules or clarification question? Feel free to ask here for an in-depth rules discussion

Pardon the FFG-newbie questions, BUT:

1. In rules-as-written, is there a way other than using strain to actively defend, ala dodge and various parry skills in WEG D6? For example, could coordination or other agility or brawn skills be used?

2. Must you follow a talent tree progression linearly? Can I stop and start one or another, provided that my character build gives me access and XP allows? Then pick back up elsewhere?

Thanks in advance for any insight.
This message was last edited by the player at 23:18, Wed 04 Sept 2019.

1. There is a Talent in the Performer tree that lets you flip a Destiny Point to add Failure equal to ranks in Coordination to checks directed at you. Coordination Dodge, I think? You can also do the Take Cover or Guarded Stance maneuvers to add 1 to ranged and melee defense respectively. Other than that, I don't know of anything in the rules as written.

2. You have to follow the branches in the tree, but you don't have to go all the way in any of them before switching. You don't even have to stay in the same tree, if you've bought another spec. As long as you meet the prereqs, you can take any Talent in your trees.

A little unexpected that it's in the Performer talent tree, but that makes sense, as do the other maneuvers, and being able to switch around in talent trees as long as the prereqs are met.

Thank you!

In reply to Magna Tolvan (msg # 4):

To piggyback. Yes, just follow the lines in the trees. And if there is no line before it then you have to get the entire row before it. That is unless there is a line that branches to it from the side. For example the Explorer Trader tree. If you already have "Know Somebody" and "Wheel and Deal" then you can buy all the way to the right from there and the talents before that are stand alones. But for the Smuggler Scoundrel you need to purchase everything in the first row before being able to buy the second row of "Convincing Demeanor" and "Black Market Contact" that has no link to it.

Also, on the dodge type stuff. There are other trees besides Performer that have ways of increasing defense. But strain is meant to be spent. Think of it as the way your character has to commit energy to doing x, y or z. Also, there is the maneuver called Guarded Stance which you can use to add setback die to a roll against you. And if you look outside the Edge careers there are others that do similar talents on Age and Force core books.

1. Every  box you pick must follow a line back to the top row but you are free to start different paths and circle back around.


So you could end up with a talent tree selection that looks like this:

(Xs are picks)


But not something like this


Because the right tree doesn't have an anchor point on the top row.

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For defense the idea behind the mechanics is that your defense dice represent your "active" defense. Things like other games would call dodge or evasion are represented in game by an increase in melee/ranged defense which adds dice. In addition there are abilities (common among NPCs) that further upgrade defense dice which again makes it harder to hit.

Your green/blue/yellow dice represent your ability to hit the target while the black/purple/red dice represent the targets ability to avoid getting hit.

While as mentioned there are a few exceptions to this the game is designed to
A) Slightly favor attackers.
B) Avoid multiple rolls for a check.

Both of those are designed for game fun more so than game balance. By making the "offensive" dice sliiightly better than equivalent defense dice (off the top of my head, defensive dice (black/purple/red) are more likely to roll up with disadvantages while offensive dice (blue/green/yellow) are more likely to roll up with hits by like 1 face on each) you avoid problems where characters are just whiffing left and right. You're much more likely to succeed but with some disadvantages that allows the GM to allow the story progress but with a price.

The second thing is for speed of play. You'll notice that they don't have you roll damage dice, all your abilities and attacks etc. are based entirely off of that  one single roll. In fact compared to other systems even contested dice rolls are pretty uncommon as even for social checks it is more typical that the GM just sets the NPCs reaction as difficulty dice on the roll.  This helps the game play move as well as putting more dice rolls in the hands of the players which is a nice relief for the GM.

Thank you for the in-depth responses, praguepride and armlessbabby!

The charts depicted chosen talents in the tree is quite helpful as well.

And I may have to start using Guarded Stance then!

Pardon my own late reply. I usually go MIA in the days surrounding a bigger GM post.

Hi everyone,

  I've been tooling around with some ideas for my group.  We were all fans of the old expanded universe before Disney.

  The group are more interested in playing Imperials.  The idea then is to set the timeframe to 5-6 years after ROTJ.  After the Dark Empire and Thrawn Trilogy.

  The group would likely start as some part of the imperial war machine working for one of the warlords.  Primary story elements would be consolidation of the Imperial forces.  Formation of the Imperial Council at Bastion.  Dealing with the formation of the New Order and Snoke.  Carnor Jax and Kennix Kil.  The group would end up on a small cruiser wandering around and serving underneath Palleon.
  There would also be some confrontation and negotiation with the budding New Republic.

If any of the characters are open to the force the Imperial Remnant even ends up with Imperial Knights.  So they would be free to go to Lukes academy.

I don't think this is a new idea.  It seems a good balance of not serving or being part of Palpatine's very evil empire and having to always play the rebels.



Just want to ask those of you that have worked with this; which elements worked and which didn't?  Which ship works the best for them to go exploring the Unknown Regions for resources and bolt holes to hide?
I don't want an actual Star Destroyer or Interdictor.  What else works?

Thanks for any input.

So first of all if you want a "grand strategy" game you're going to have to address the idea of paperwork. How many resources do they have at their disposal? Can they send other characters/fleets/armies to do other things? What are their logistic lines?

Now you can just hand wave all that away, you can try and create very detailed economic and political systems. I would just ensure that you and your players are all comfy with the level of detail being a high level officer entails. I believe Age of Rebellion goes into the FFG system for dealing with supply chains and such  so that should be a good starting point. My advice is unless people LOVE fiddly numbers and you LOVE creating custom systems to just hand wave stuff away. The PCs have whatever they have that makes sense and suits the plot.

Think of the Clone Wars TV series where if you stepped back and looked at the grand theme the Clone War made no freaking sense whatsoever BUT because you were just focused on smaller stories: "Oh no, your supply fleet was ambushed! No more consumable weapons until you can break the siege!" kind of stuff and just hand wave away logistics and # of stormtroopers etc.

---

As for ships if you want a classic Imperial ship that isn't a Star Destroyer and more suitable for a group of PCs I would recommend something like a Correllion Corvette or if you want them a bit more punch a Nebulon-B Frigate.  Ideally I think a Carrack cruiser would be the perfect size and power but I don't recall of the top of my head if the stats for that are published anywhere yet.

 Would there happen to be  GM out there, that would be interested  in running an Edge of the Empire bounty hunter campaign?

 The game could be solo or a small group.

 Thank you for reading this.
This message was last edited by the player at 08:25, Fri 24 July 2020.

I have been mulling over an idea like this. There are two concepts.

First, Metal Gear Star Wars. You are mercenaries in a war zone, taking jobs for the large factions. You also have your own base and ship.
Some of the missions involve capturing or eliminating high value targets. The ones that don't will still have HVTs that can be captured as side objectives.
Turn over the HVTs for money or use them as your own staff.

The second is called Star Wars Blood Money. This one is a tight focus on one mission at a time. I drop you into a small sandbox, like a casino or an airport. The mission objective is always to capture or eliminate a target, maybe multiple targets. Pursue the objective by any means you see fit.

I haven't started because I don't want to go to a lot of trouble when I don't know if the game will last more than the first few posts. It's always a pain getting started because you never know who is going to ghost on you. I find it very frustrating to go to a lot of effort only to find that players drop out early on, and that discourages the ones who are committed.

This definitely sounds like something I would be interested in.

The first option sounds rather interesting.

First option sounds more playable.  The second might be fun once or twice.  I am interested, but have read the rules and never actually played them.

Both ideas sound interesting and enjoyable. I think the first option has more long term viability, but both would be fun.

With option 1, you could set up a few teams to compete against each other for contracts. Have say a dozen bounty's out there and the fun begins when they both go after the same target. It will make for a bloodthirsty game. Maybe a dead pool for ranking the teams.

Have a limit of 4 to a team will allow you to add new players/teams to keep down the dead time. They can replace individual players lost to attrition or if bad luck happens and they all get wiped out.

 I really like the second option.

I don't want to do both because the concepts bump. If someone else wants to do Blood Money, I can help run or design.

Isn't that just retooling the Hitman game for Star Wars?

Sort of. 47 never bounty Hunts, he just assassinates.

Tell that to Boba Fett

Gotta ask if anyone is willing to just run me through a oneshot so I understand the rules.
I just want to make sure I understand combat and force powers.

Combat is pretty straight forward.

You assemble your dice pool of Weapon + Attribute. Most common examples are Ranged (Light/Heavy) + Dexterity, Melee + Brawn, Brawl + Brawn etc.

If it is a ranged attack you add 2 purple dice as the standard difficulty. If they have any ranged defense or if they have some kind of NPC ability  that increases difficulty (common for bosses) then you add black dice or possibly even upgrade a purple die to a red die.

Then you look at the situation and beg the GM for conditional bonuses. Basically you can get advantage (blue dice) or disadvantages (black dice) depending on situations and favorability. Attacking in the dark and can't see? Add black dice. Catching the enemy off guard? Add blue dice. Flanking? Blue die. Enemy has cover? Black die etc. etc.

Don't forget to include any extra bonuses that may have been spent (see below). In big combats this can become quite a big dice pool.

Roll the dice and start resolving symbols. There are three categories to look at and the positive/negative ones cancel one another out.

Hits:
Successes (they look like explosions) are canceled by Failures (look like caltrops, have three points). If you end up with at least one success after everything cancels out the attack lands. If not then it misses. It doesn't matter how many failures you get at this point, it just means it didn't succeed.

Advantage:
Advantages (rebel symbols) are canceled by disadvantages (imperial symbols). This is really important because whatever is left over can be spent like a currency for side effects. For example you can spend leftover advantages to cause your weapon to crit, to apply a status effect like stun or disorient based on your weapon. You can also spend it to get a free move etc. There is a whole section in the book on this but the most common default is "give the next playe an Advantage (blue die) on their next roll or "heal strain". Meanwhile disadvantages, if you end up with them in your final total, can be spent by the "enemy" to inflict penalties. If it is your roll the GM will spend it to hurt you while if it is the enemy NPC roll you might get to choose what to do. The default option is to inflict strain but there are a lot of options like they are knocked prone, their weapon gets jammed etc.

Note that advantages/disadvantages are independent of successes. You can fail a roll but get a ton of advantage and while you can't turn a miss into a hit, you can still spend those advantages to set up your team mates for advantages or better position yourself or heal strain. Same with disadvantages in that you might hit with your shot but the GM spends the disadvantages to cause your ammo to run out.

This is where a lot of the power comes from the game because it isn't just a binary "win/lose" for each roll but you can "win, win at cost, lose with advantage, or lose" with each roll.

Finally there are crits. These do not cancel out I think but to be honest the red die Despairs come into play so rarely I need a refresher on this so I might be wrong.

Basically the yellow die has a single crit face (the cross & circle, reminds me of someone holding up a lightsaber ala a new hope) and the red die has a despair aka crit fail (triangle inside a circle). These count as a success/failure AND IN ADDITION allow you to spend a crit. This is typically on stuff like critting your weapon or triggering some other ability. Officially a crit can be canceled out by enough failures but my group tends to home brew it that a crit is an automatic success no matter how many failures are left over. To each their own.

So now you've got your attack. If you miss, you're done. If you hit, add up each success beyond the first and that gets added to your weapon's damage value. For guns this is fixed, a lot of melee weapons add your brawn. That is your damage. The target subtracts their armor's soak and their brawn value and whatever is left over is damage taking to their health. When that hits 0 then they are down.

If you stack your brawn and armor soak (typically 1 but heavy armors can go higher) you can resist a LOT of damage.

And that's pretty much the basics. If you have any specific questions I can address them. Stun damage hits strain and you can self-inflict strain to take an extra action in a turn but you can only take a single action once so you can't get two attacks but you can move, use an ability, and shoot.

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Force powers work as follows. Some of them are passive and just give you bonus dice to your rolls. For example the enhance line does this where you add your force rating to Athletic rolls, for example.

Some of them are actions. Instead of shooting your gun or swinging your saber you use an actino to direclty do something. Influence a mind, push someone around etc.

Some of the powers are sustained where you have to commit force dice to a power which temporarily lowers your score.

So lets dig in. First things first is what kind of jedi are you? Chances are if you're a PC you're a light sider which means that when you roll the force die you want the white circles (open circles) not the filled in/black ones. White = light, black - dark side. Of interesting note a given force die is slightly more likely to roll up a dark side point but the light side points have more "double" dot sides so while the overall expected value is the same the actual gameplay effect is interesting.

So you want to use a power. Roll your force rating in force dice and check the results. If you roll light side points then you can spend them to power your force power. A lot of the fore power upgrades give you additional things you can spend excess force points on. So for example a power requires one force point to power but if you have the right upgrades you can spend an additional point to effect more targets.

If you're a light sider you can use dark side points but that inflicts morality penalties and strain. There are lots of rules on this so that's something you'll just have to read but the long story short is you can almost always use a force power but using the dark side can have long term repercussions as you slip towards the darkside.

For sustained powers you are literally committing the die from your pool so, for example, the illusion path lets you commit a force die to make your illusion last for the whole scene but for the rest of your scene your force ability is now -1. For new jedi that means you cannot use other force powers, including your passive powers.

Again if you have specific questions we can help answer them. Some of the power can be a little tricky to figure out what is going on until you get used to them.

Ok. I will read up on using the dark side points for force powers. You’ve confirmed what I though about the rest. I’m just concerned about running a system I’ve never experienced before.

My group is planning to play Imperials about 6 to 7 years after RotJ. Working for the Pentastar Alignment and dealing with factions, warlords and galactic events. Mostly Legends stuff, but I may throw in the choice for them to assist The First Order to start.
Going to start them after Thrawn, and Emperor Reborn. They will start with having to deal with Carnor Jax, then Daala and then help Pallaeon establish the Imperial Remnant.
Planning to start them with Operation Shadowpoint. I don’t have takeover at whisper base, but I’m sure I can figure it out from Shadowpoint.

Any other good suggestions?

Has anyone gone through The Perlimian Haul in the back of AoR?  What did you load the three cargo compartments with?