The key to enjoying Edge of the Empire is embracing these constraints. Advantage and threat in Edge of the Empire are the result of an interesting die roll. If you spend energy coming up with some creative tagging in Fate you can still blow the check, in which case it's easy to feel like it was all for naught. This has the nice feature that creativity always feels like it's rewarded.
The rules are mealy-mouthed on how much control players get over their advantage results, especially outside of combat, but I'd suggest that by default if the player has a good idea you should go with it. So if I get a couple of Advantage symbols, maybe a stray shot creates a venting gas leak that another player can use as cover in the future (giving a setback die to shots aimed at her). By contrast, in Edge of the Empire (as in The One Ring), you say what you're trying to do, roll the dice, look at the pool, and create the outcome out of the mixture of success, advantage, and threat. Most of your creative energy goes into the setup of the challenge and ends after the dice are rolled. In combat in Fate, I might spend a Fate point to tag a "venting gas leak" for a +2 bonus to my shot as my character uses it for cover to get into a better firing position. In that game, fate point give the players interesting narrative control over a skill check by allowing them to tag their own aspects or things in the environment for bonuses. This dice pool compares interestingly to Fate, a game system that seems to have influenced Edge of the Empire significantly. Outside of combat, they are used as narrative hooks to allow you to succeed at tasks with complications, or to fail but gain some advantage, or some other mix.
In combat, threat and advantage tends to be spent in well-specified, crunchy ways to score critical hits, use weapon or character special powers, or create a temporary situational advantage. They are netted out similarly to successes and failures, and can serve both mechanical and narrative purposes. The twist, and why rolling all these dice is interesting, is that in addition to success or failure symbols there are also threat and advantage symbols along with their more powerful cousins despair and triumph. Net out the success and failure symbols to see if you succeeded. Task resolution involves a set of customized dice built into a pool: add positive 8 and 12-siders for your level of skill, negative 8 and 12-siders for the level of difficulty, throw in some d6s for situational modifiers, gather up all the dice, roll them, and try to keep them all on the table (difficulty level: average, modified by your table's elasticity). Edge of the Empire reminds me of The One Ring, which I reviewed last year.
0 kommentar(er)
