Last night at Enfield Gamers there was a bit of learn with teacher as Rich took us through the intro adventure for Fantasy Flight's upcoming Star Wars RPG.I'd been aware of it coming for a while and had taken a look at the preview on FF's site. I have to admit that as an experienced role-player, GM and fan of the SAGA rules, which I've also run, I was a little sceptical. In honestly I was probably also a little snobbish about the idea of intro adventurers. Yeah hardcore dungeon geek, None Shall Pass!
Armed with mug of tea I took my place and skimmed over my character sheet recognising the format and noticing the various different dice, of which there are a number.
The scenario involved the group attempting to step out on the local Tattoine Hutt crime lord and being chased into the local cantina. "What are each doing, you've got 60 seconds". Instantly enjoying the opened feel my tech lad made his way to the door behind the stage and tried to hack the lock. The rest of the guys took their own actions and dice were rolled.
Pretty simple really, roll your allotted number of ability dice, D8 and D12 dependant on your level skill. Difficulty dice are added according to well the difficulty of the task. Ability dice generate Success and Advantage, difficulty dice generate Failure and Despair. Match off Success and Failure to pass or fail and match off Advantage and Despair to find out how well or badly.
A nice mechanism that gives more variation and detail to your result with enough scope for the GM to add flavour and shape. For further effect excess Advantage can be converted to Bonus dice whilst big Despair works the other way. Fate Points remain and can be used to convert "size" of dice up and down by both players and GM.Back at the game we pretty much hid or attempted to blend in in various ways. Skills are broad enough to allow some width of action whilst still providing characters with defined strengths and weaknesses. You can have a go at anything.
With Computer Use I hacked the lock to the dressing room and then accessed the stage controls producing a light and sound show to confuse or Gammorean pursuers.
Sitting quietly at the bar our Bounty Hunter had passed his cool to blending but as a piggy strolled by the player lost his and pulled the trigger.......at which point multiple Successes with a good helping of Advantage drilled porky without our man being spotted.
Unsurprisingly it all kicked off from there and a fire-fight broke. The system coped well if with a little clunk, probably due to the learning curve. With the players ability to order their activation within themselves it's a case of simple actions first with any excess Advantage producing Bonus dice for more critical and difficult actions. So plenty of scope for synergy and group cooperation, nice!
Dispatching our pursuers, a little too bloodily for some, we sussed out a ship available for appropriation and set to our plan. Requiring a hyperdrive part to fix said ship we bargained and connived our way to its purchase before letting ourselves into the space-port via the side door and scamming our way on board.
Finding its captain and crew on board that was a close run thing, failing our first Deceit check quite badly. Quickly sitting on the trigger happy blaster boy we tried again. Plenty of big bad dice we piled in the force points and just about scraped it with no real advantage to speak of!
One quick ship-jacking later, with far too much blaster play from you know who, we were chased out of the atmosphere by a couple of TIEs before jumping to hyperspace.....like dust in crops :)
So pretty impressed really. Quite a bit to get your head round with the SEVEN different dice and how they all interact but I can really see the potential. Rather looking forward to round 2 :)
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