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Is there anything official for having the players be Imperials? I know the military careers are easily reskinned to make a party of Imperial soldiers and pilots instead of rebels if you hand them Imperial gear and ships, but I'm a bit curious as to whether the option is ever even addressed.
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Aug 31, 2014 20:34
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AFAIK they don't have any KotOR content yet. But rakghouls aren't particularly complicated, so shouldn't be too hard to work stats out for 'em.
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Sep 2, 2014 21:04
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I think they did a good job with the force. Basic stuff like buffing your skills with the force are in place so you can be awesome at stuff with Enhance and be persuasive with Influence, without costing a separate action or anything. More active stuff like tossing people around or throwing lightning bolts require actions be used and force dice be rolled and if you don't get enough force dots to do what you want from the dice, you've either failed or have to resort to the dark side for the juice you need. One thing that I staunchly approve of is the fact that the force powers don't rely on an expendable force pool inherent to the character, or deplete the character's stamina, or things like that which tried to make force users into spellcasters in older editions of the game. Some lightsaber combat maneuvers cause strain so they can't just auto-parry blasters forever, but that's physical exhaustion instead of running out of "mana". Lightsabers are appropriately ferocious in close combat, but a modded-up blaster rifle can really lay waste to things too, so when it comes to being a murder machine Jedi don't have a particular edge over a similarly experienced soldier, which is also how it should be. By and large FFG managed to have a good answer to the problems I had with Jedi in the older RPGs that either made them gods or wimps. They're cool enough that someone who wants to be one should be pretty happy with it, but they don't leave the other professions in the dust. The only iffy thing about them in my opinion is that a starting force user with just one force die is going to either sort of suck at force powers or have to resort to the dark side until they progress far enough to get a second force die to smooth out the probability curves somewhat.
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Sep 9, 2014 06:50
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I was in the game with Jack, got stuck with the loving wookiee. The only snag we encountered came up with advantage/threat results where the GM had to pull something out of his rear end to come up with a good or bad side-effect. He was running from the crappy starter set book, however, so he didn't have easy access to the guidelines about using those die results. [Edit: Here's the introductory crawl I made for the starter game. It was cruelest irony that my random character pick stuck me with Lowhhrick after I made this. ] 
Valatar fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Sep 9, 2014 |
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Sep 9, 2014 23:36
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I hadn't posted it online anywhere, so GIS wasn't gonna get you far. I'd've sent you a copy if you told me you wanted one. Thankfully they only take a couple minutes of loving around with text in Photoshop to crank out, so it's pretty easy for a GM to prepare a crawl for each session to keep players feeling properly motivated.
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Sep 10, 2014 02:58
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Carteret posted:There's always the "official" one. ... God dammit. Actually, the language filter on the official generator plus the weird shortness of the audio sort of hamper it. alg's video looks amazing on the other hand, but my only mac is a hackintoshed netbook and I have grave doubts about whether it could run that. May still give it a try though, since the results were fantastic.
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Sep 10, 2014 19:31
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Our time with the starter box went fairly smoothly. There's a deus ex machina moment after the first encounter that basically hands the PCs their mission that I found clunky, and vehicular combat is complex enough that you shouldn't just go into it completely cold as a GM like ours did. The rest of the stuff is easy enough that any halfway-competent GM could crack open the box, hand out the characters, and start running on the spot with no prep. Another thing is that the actual rulebooks have handy guidelines for advantages/threats/triumphs/despairs for every player skill to give hints about what a GM does when those results come up for non-combat stuff. The starter rulebook does not have any of those guidelines, so it's up to the GM to think fast when something like that pops up in a die roll.
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Sep 16, 2014 18:31
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Yeah, but that's like using a tank's main gun on a soldier. Anti-vehicular weapons aren't made for pegging individual people. You might get a stupidly lucky shot but you're more likely just eating ammo. Some ground vehicles have anti-personnel guns; their stat blocks mention such weapons where appropriate. Alternately, a weapon with blast has a much higher chance of doing damage. Dunno if any starship weapons have that quality though.
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Sep 19, 2014 18:20
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Other RPGs aren't being published for sixty bucks a book by a company that has ties with legions of artists that they use to produce the graphics on piles of board and card games. They'd probably look great too if they were. Same reason Wizards tends to have high-quality art design for D&D stuff.
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Sep 19, 2014 22:29
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vuk83 posted:In fairness saga is better if you want some clone wars action star wars. I hated the saga system so very much. I set up a game in the old republic era with some friends, and it seemed to be calibrated with the utmost care to remove as much joy and excitement as possible from the game. Everything was just...meh. This is the best Star Wars RPG system to date, in my opinion. It's not perfect, but it meets the stated goal of cinematic roleplaying very well in my book.
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Sep 21, 2014 03:23
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Droids and their expanded free skills let you be fairly un-specialized. You just have to not be afraid of keeping some unnecessary stats at 1 and by and large a droid character will have a broader base of trained skills to work with than the meatbags.
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Sep 23, 2014 08:27
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Droids are pretty good in this incarnation, I wouldn't balk at playing one. The way they're laid out really sort of begs for a person to specialize by boosting just one or two stats very high, but that makes sense given that droids are machines usually optimized for a small range of tasks that fall under their specialty. The only thing that irks me about FF's droid implementation is the lack of crunchier droid building rules. Specifically there's nothing for starting as a droid that flies with repulsorlifts instead of having legs or wheels. Most other things can be handwaved away by the whole 'you can treat the character's equipment as being installed directly in the droid' part, which makes perfect sense, but there is no flight equipment in the financial reach of a starting character. So any GM who doesn't want to be all 'Oh sorry Tim, your probe droid can't afford a repulsorlift. You'll just have to drag yourself around on those tiny arm things until you get more cash' will have to pull something out of their rear end.
Valatar fucked around with this message at 07:02 on Sep 24, 2014 |
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Sep 24, 2014 06:59
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R2 is a more fun example of the things a droid pc can do, I think. He hacked the hell out of everything, repaired important stuff, and rode shotgun on a starfighter. 3PO just stood around being gay most of the time, up until he saved the galaxy.
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Sep 25, 2014 00:13
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Handing a lightsaber to Luke was an act of insanity or extreme recklessness on Obi-Wan's part. Then sticking a helmet over his eyes while he's in a confined room inside a spaceship and telling him to block blaster shots was just begging for him to kill Han when he walked in or put a hole in the Falcon's hull with an errant swing. Unless that lightsaber had a beginner setting on it and the blade wasn't at full power or something similar, putting it in the hands of a total novice and having him swing it around blindly lends credence to the theory that Obi-Wan was an insane drunk by that point.
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Sep 30, 2014 20:34
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ProfessorCirno posted:EDIT: And I mean, "I don't think Jedi should be good at using a lightsaber AND using a blaster AND piloting a spaceship" literally describes Luke, and it's also really weird because you can make any given character who's great at blasterin' and flyin' but somehow you add a melee weapon that the blaster dudes would never use and suddenly it's out of the question. Luke always struck me as a jack of all trades sorta guy. He was competent at a lot of stuff, but not really great at anything. He never did anything all that extraordinary with the force, was only okay with his lightsaber, a fair shot with a blaster, and a pretty good pilot who was able to do a little mechanical tinkering. Any of the prequel ninjas on crack Jedi could have taken him apart without blinking while they're cartwheeling around on the walls and poo poo. I think Luke was a good example of a fairly balanced force user character; he had unique gifts but didn't overshadow the other characters. I wouldn't actually want to play a character like that except in a very small party, though. Being the guy who's okay at doing anything usually winds up with nothing to do while the people who specialized take point.
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Sep 30, 2014 20:47
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Fuzz posted:And this is the key point. Luke was supposedly CRAZY STRONG with the Force, like one of the most powerful Force users to ever live... Vader and the Emperor even mention this when they talk about how quickly his skills progress, because he's a natural. It just flows naturally through him and requires minimal effort, unlike most Jedi. Yeah, I entirely agree. There's no other way for a mixed party to ever have any sort of balance if the force users are bouncing around like gummi bears while force choking every enemy within a city block. Vader was head and shoulders superior to any non-Jedi, but he was also more or less Sauron at that point and an example of the pinnacle of force users.
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Sep 30, 2014 21:25
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Mendrian posted:Having recently finished an EotE game in which I dipped pretty deep into the available Force Powers, I can say the problem is definitely consistency versus strength. If you're going to do anything with the force, you really want to have prioritized willpower at character creation. If you don't have at least three willpower, preferably four, you can't count on reliably pulling off any force power that involves a Discipline check. Especially because in Force and Destiny they finally address targets resisting your attempts to use the force on them so you can't just force push people around like dolls. There are good passive force powers and talents to pick if a high-willpower character doesn't fit your plan, but if you want to use active powers and go around tossing, choking, mind-controlling, or lightning bolting people, you'd better have built a character for succeeding Discipline rolls.
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Oct 5, 2014 20:18
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FISHMANPET posted:Are there any of the supplemental books that aren't good enough to bother getting? I'm stocking up and wondering if I need to get everything. If for whatever reason you have a giant nerd boner for a particular career, go ahead and shell out for its splatbook, but most of them are  fodder, in my opinion. They have about twenty-five pages of info that you only ever need for long enough to write down on a character sheet, like species and equipment and talents. The rest of the content is  that are unlikely to significantly enrich anything. Nothing in the books was content that made me think, "I should buy this book and have it handy for any game I'm playing and will definitely get thirty bucks worth of value out of it."[Edit: Actually, the book on the Corellian sector is fairly useful, since it has setting stuff in addition to the usual handful of species and gear.]
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Oct 6, 2014 19:34
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I'm coming to the party a bit late, but I can't help but notice that your super death droid has 2 willpower and no discipline. Have a slicer hack him. Have a wookiee stick a restraining bolt on the end of a bowcaster quarrel and shoot him with it. If it's the right era for it, have him run up against someone with a lightsaber and see how long he lasts against a weapon that ignores all of his soak. Those are just temporary solutions though, the permanent fix is to make sure your game has plenty of non-combat goals to achieve. That way your combat monster gets to feel special in a fight, but in the other three-quarters of the game he's cooling his heels while the non-combat players are doing their things. A combat monster character only ruins things for everyone else if the game is hinging mostly on combat, and there's nothing inherently wrong about a player who wants their character to be an rear end-beater. Let the guy beat rear end, just make sure you set things up so that him beating rear end is not the only thing that occurs in game sessions.
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Nov 19, 2014 08:56
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In a crewed ship, the techies have their hands as full as the pilot and gunners. Star Wars consoles are nearly as explosive as Star Trek consoles, after all, and things will go south pretty fast for the party if someone isn't repairing the strain and damage to the ship throughout the fight.
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Dec 4, 2014 10:45
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homullus posted:I don't feel "make the one die roll you can, in this situation" is much more interesting than "do nothing," since there's no interesting choice. Do I make this totally-expected and straightforward Mechanics check, or do I just do nothing and let the ship blow up? Clearly I choose the former, but it's only nominally "something to do." There's more for the techie to do than repair hull trauma. There's also recovering system strain, which is really important in a space fight as unlike living creatures, vehicles don't get free strain recovery back from advantages in dice rolls and the ship is dead in the water if it runs out. There's also the chart of other various ship crew actions, and the techie would be good for any of the ones that use mechanics or computers, like Boost Shields, Jamming, Slice Enemy Systems, and Spoof Missiles. They've made a pretty good effort for giving people other than the pilot and gunners something to do.
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Dec 11, 2014 23:39
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Lemon Curdistan posted:Or they could just have low-lethality combat and let you abstract it however you want (either as "they miss until you get dropped" or as "action heroes taking flesh wounds" depending on what the table wants the tone to be). HP has never represented health, it's always been a combination of stamina/luck, so it's pretty silly to go for a system where hitting is infrequent but damage is high (doubly bad because it leads to frustrating fights where everyone whiffs, and stupid spike damage when hits do happen, which is largely out of your control). Wound threshold in Star Wars is representing health. Strain threshold is stamina, destiny points are luck. You burn strain and destiny to not be hit, but the weapons in Star Wars are insanely lethal so taking a shot straight to the chest is probably leaving you in a really bad way. There are spots in the movies where characters were just grazed by blasters or lightsabers and were more or less okay, and it seems fair that that's represented by 'just' damaging wound threshold without critical damage, since there's no in-game effect to being injured until you run out of wound threshold or gain critical damage. But at no point ever in Star Wars has anyone been okay after taking three or four hits. I think that's fairly represented with the system here.
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Dec 17, 2014 22:07
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FISHMANPET posted:The D20 versions represented HP as a generic idea of how long you could dodge blaster fire before getting taken down. So it was more a mix of physical and mental endurance. The D20 versions were also retarded. They were trying to shoehorn a cinematic and lethal setup into the D&D system of HP sponges. Fantasy Flight's done it considerably better where if someone's running at you with a laser sword that cuts through bank vaults, you'd better be actively dodging or blocking it, because having it stuck through you is likely going to kill you. They really missed the boat in Force and Destiny in not having a Jedi talent specifically for lopping off arms with lightsabers. They really seem to love doing that.
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Dec 17, 2014 22:42
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In fairness, I probably also would not expect that my hundred-mile-wide laser moon was going to be in any sort of danger from anything shy of people kamikazeing capital ships into it en masse. As a counterpoint, I'd still probably park a couple hundred star destroyers around it just to be on the safe side.
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May 13, 2015 20:03
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Kai Tave posted:Nah, the character everyone hails as the height of the EU is Thrawn, who also isn't that great but for different reasons. Nonetheless I'd be surprised as hell if FFG doesn't have Thrawn show up in Armada. They seem to be missing their window of opportunity, since Chimaera was an ISD and makes the most sense to include him with that ship, but the spoiler photo doesn't seem to have any blue-skinned people on any of the cards that come with it.
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May 14, 2015 07:36
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If you want a derelict ship adventure, the GM screen kit for Age of Rebellion has a surprisingly good premade scenario involving a hosed up ship, Dead in the Water. I'm not gonna drop any details to avoid spoiling it for anyone, but if handled with some care by a GM, it can be creepy as hell. Like, System Shock creepy.
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Apr 3, 2016 04:02
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I'm fairly well disposed towards the space combat rules since they're good about giving everyone in a group something they can do, and the fact that the system doesn't have any skills that you can't roll on without skill ranks means that no player's stuck with 'Well I didn't take <skill> so there's nothing I can do for this entire encounter...' It has its flaws but then so does pretty much any multi-crew vehicular combat system I've ever seen and it at least manages to dodge the worst pitfalls.
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Sep 13, 2016 21:12
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Re: Players being all Voldemort with mind tricks - dark side the poo poo out of that. Remember, the dark side is "the quick and easy path", and mind-loving everyone you come across instead of trying to come to a conclusion fair to all parties is unquestionably a dark side amount of shortcutting. I've always viewed light and dark side as less a morality spectrum and more a giving a poo poo spectrum. Light side is taking the time and effort to do things the right way with the fewest ripples, dark side is being sloppy and lazy and just Hulk smashing your way through life. So if a sentence starts with, "gently caress it, I'm just going to (lightning/mind rape/choke a bitch)...", it's time to start adding conflict. Also, it's blatant as hell, if not as blatant as throwing lightning bolts and levitating stuff around, so I'd definitely have gentlemen in white plastic suits urgently inquiring as to their whereabouts after the first couple of stops where they throw the force around that casually. I've started up a small EotE game over Fantasy Grounds, which actually has a pretty neat Star Wars plugin with a dice roller, combat tracker, NPCs pre-statted from the books, etc. I'm hoping it'll work out pretty smoothly. I made an opening crawl for it here.
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Oct 13, 2016 19:35
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Panzeh posted:I've found this game to be significantly easier to teach to people who haven't been playing D&D/WoD/PF for years and years. 
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Oct 17, 2016 20:49
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Like almost every other rifle in Star Wars, that is a pistol. It's faintly ridiculous that the RPG mandates a separate skill for them when people have no problem slinging them around one-handed and pretty much nobody actually uses sights.
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Oct 22, 2016 04:23
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Yeah, 150 is more of an apprentice level. At that point you probably have some decent talents, a second force die and a couple of force powers with some upgrades. It's enough to be barely competent at being Jedi-ish. To have good odds of pulling off the stuff that you see the knights doing, you'd probably need to be more around 250.
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Nov 17, 2016 04:02
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Covok posted:What's the best way to play this online? Tried using hangouts with embedded roll20 so I could use a free dice roller. Use a synchtube to handle all the music and my Star Wars opening crawls. I shelled out for a Fantasy Grounds license and it's been pretty perfect. There's a free fan-made Star Wars rules module for it with a dice roller, weapon/armor stats, NPC stats, pretty much everything I've needed. I paid the $120 for the DM license that let the players use the free demo version to connect to me, though right now it's on a black Friday sale for $112. You can also pay $10 monthly like roll20, but I preferred a one-time cost over paying forever.
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Nov 28, 2016 20:54
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Edge of the Empire, in my opinion. Obligation is a mechanic that I find works better for good roleplaying than Duty or Morality.
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Nov 30, 2016 04:58
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PupsOfWar posted:also need stats for Baze's repeater cannon It's a heavy blaster rifle. 10 dam, 3 crit, 6 encumbrance, long range, 4 hardpoints, 6 rarity, auto-fire and cumbersome 3 are the base stats, and safe to assume some mods were installed. [Edit: Or if you want to go bonkers, could say it's a light repeater rifle, but that's supposed to be a squad support weapon that's too large to reasonably jog around with. Heavy blaster rifles are a slightly more reasonable thing for a person to be carrying around while still having the auto-fire quality.] Valatar fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Oct 12, 2017 |
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Oct 12, 2017 21:48
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The rules for dual-wielding say that you build the dice pool with the worst stat and worst skill and worst range/cover/etc modifier then add a penalty on top of that then roll, so yeah, the rules definitely seem to be in favor of using the worst modifiers for the check. At lower skill ranks you're probably better off using a weapon with Linked or Auto-fire than trying to dual-wield.
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Oct 22, 2017 04:27
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Autofire is dandy against minion groups with negligible defenses, but then it kinda should be. Against a nemesis or anything with good defensive abilities, however, it opens the user up to increased likelihood of hitting despairs or just missing. That extra black die isn't insignificant if it's on top of a couple other black dice and some difficulty upgrades. So I guess the actual answer to the question is: It depends. If your GM tends to throw large groups of goons, autofire is very powerful and your best friend. If your GM uses fewer but more dangerous opponents, autofire is less helpful. Linked is a better quality to have against solo opponents, as it has no real downside. Also, very important detail, multiple hits from autofire and linked have soak reduce damage for EACH HIT. So if you autofire on something and do two 10-damage hits but it soaks for 8, you do 4 damage, not 12. If someone's getting that rule wrong, it makes multi-hit go immediately and insanely overpowered.
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Jan 5, 2018 23:39
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 07:17 |
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I use Fantasy Grounds over Roll20 for Star Wars; it's a one-time purchase rather than a monthly subscription and there's an excellent Star Wars ruleset made by one of the community people with dice rolling, combat tracker, character sheets, pre-inserted NPC and equipment data, basically anything one could want. It's about as user friendly as a cinderblock with a vaguely lovely 90s UI, but once past the learning curve it's a great program.
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Mar 20, 2018 03:37
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