Star Wars: Edge of the Empire 1st Beginning game Report

Post date: Nov 18, 2013 5:44:55 PM

This is my first experience with a "Narrative" RPG I think. I played Toon once, didn't like it, and I played a diceless/ruleless freeform storytelling game once, I found it even worse than Toon, probably the worst RPG I've ever played, if you can even call it that. I'm not sure they would qualify for Narrative, but both of those were a very long time ago, and this is a modern one. I've mostly played some version of D&D, and have been into the OSR movement lately running 1e AD&D and Mutant Future. My players aren't warming to 1e AD&D, and Mutant Future is only online. I wouldn't even have know about or tried it had it not been a couple players wanting to try it out. I might have tried one of the earlier versions of SW RPGs eventually should I find players.

We finally got to play SW:EotE for a couple hours, months after I got it. We used the beginner adventure, although I had 5 players in addition to myself and it's supposed to only handle 4, a couple who were a little more experienced (all of one hour) had characters , so we integrated them into it. The beginner adventure is extremely railroady, that's probably good to start out, but seems counter to the "Narrative" style. It was easy enough to interpret the dice, considering the difference and limited time of the game and being a first game. Combat went way faster than I expected, far better than 4e D&D, perhaps even slightly faster than 1e. We finished off 2 combat encounters, 5 encounters total in only 2 hours.

Combat felt extremely random, I almost felt like I could have rolled a single die on a chart for what happens like 1 - hit with extra good stuff, 2 - hit, 3 - hit with extra bad stuff, 4 - miss with extra good stuff, 5 miss, 6 miss with extra bad stuff. Hits were far more common than misses though. The Players liked this vs. low level 1e AD&D where it's misses most of the time. I probably didn't do the advantage/threat system justice, I pretty much just did strain whenever threat came up, the players were slightly more inventive with the advantages, but not that much. The PCs were mostly doing extreme amounts of damage, killing off the Gamorans & Storm Troopers with single shots, while they did little to the PCs - except the Wookie who took some good hits from the Gamorans. On the Storm Trooper encounter I used the rules from the big book to figure out initiative. I did not like that, it was even more time consuming and annoying than 3e/4e D&D's version. I far prefer 1e group Initiative there, I may try to figure out some way to change that, House Rule time already! I greatly liked the different range categories and eyeballing instead of having a set grid and space, and the way engagement worked for that, huge improvement I think, though some of the players had some difficulty with it. I think I may have a hard time going back to using actual grids after this.

On the Narrative front, the usual all roll-play no role-play player turned out to be describing things that happened and getting into it, which highly surprised me, he was probably the 2nd most narrative of the PCs. This also started out a bit rough, only one player tried anything other than just hiding in a booth, she tried to pass herself off as a dancer, but her coordination failed, and she got kicked off stage. I found myself saying no a bit much in the storm trooper encounter, I know you are supposed to say yes, or yes, but... but I didn't... I chalk it partially up to being railroady.

Not a bad game, I'm still having more fun with Mutant Future. I can see a lot of potential here, perhaps considerably more than MF. I really need to practice a bit more, get my understanding of the rules down better, and loosen up a bit, then perhaps it'll be a better game. It feels like it might have a bit more long term potential, and run to a campaign I'd like to run. I'm worried it's going to be far too 'easy mode' to satisfy me as a DM, much as D&D Next was, at least my players seem to like 'easy mode', but I don't have quite a grip on the rules enough to say that for sure, and I can always experiment with upping the difficulty after I'm more familiar with it.

They players may be setting themselves up for that, they are discussing wanting to steal the Imperial shuttle instead of the freighter, which would get them in a lot more hot water. I'm really looking forward to the next game, I'm tentatively excited. I really wish we could have played more than 2 hours. A couple of the players can only play about 3 and other people were late, cutting it to 2 hours.