So, I've been analyzing the Narrative Dice System, the one used by FFS Star Wars. Honestly, I have to say that it's quite a good system that deals with many issues inherent to most standard RPGs, and is especially great at blending the line between Role/Roll-playing.
I also think it'd be a great system to Port most of the World of Darkness games to, particularly Mage. Anyone else agree?
bump of interest
I have yet to try it
Having played Edge of the Empire extensively with my old group I have a few positive and negative things to say about the system
Pros:
-Keeps the game story flowing seamlessly from action to action. Almost no time is wasted crunching numbers, determining HP, referencing source books for rules, etc. It's as simple as Failure, Success, Triumph or Despair.
-The dice are easy to read once you've got the hang of it. It seems mildly complicated at first, rolling so many counteracting dice, but when you start getting into a swing of things, you can almost instantaneously determine the outcome of a given roll despite how many dice thrown
-It's simple for somebody who has never played a tabletop to get into because of how little the player actually has to do during the course of the game. Because of these dice, there's no number referencing, the GM is almost solely responsible for determining what happens post roll. The only thing that players really have to be responsible for is the roll itself, subtracting their soak from whatever damage is dealt to them, and keeping their sheet up to date.
Cons:
-The force die is almost useless and could easily be replaced. It's rolled literally once by every player at the beginning of the session to determine how many "force points" are available to the team and to the GM. This doesn't really work in any setting/system aside from the FF Star Wars Games.
-Even the most simple tasks need to be rolled for, from lifting your ship off the ground to firing a blaster. Even if it's something that lorewise, your character has done literally thousands of times before without fail, even with no setback dice and a full arsenal of advantage dice, there's still a chance you can fail. This can severely turn the tide of a game for seemingly no reason. Based on the system, it's not up to GM discretion as to when you should roll. It's for literally every action stated by a player or GM that has correlation to the multitude of skills present in the game.
-We tried using the dice in a Call of Cthulhu game because of how story-based the system is and even in something so mechanically simple, the dice just didn't work. We kept our D100 for certain skill rolls that just didn't work on "success" or "failure" eg. Knowledges, and it still proved a headache most of the time. FF's system was designed with these dice in mind and no other tabletop that I know of follows an even remotely similar system. After spending hours personally transcribing the CoC Character Sheet to be compatible with these dice, it just didn't play the same or even remotely similar to EotE. It was difficult enough setting CoC, a very numbers-light system to Narration dice, I can't imagine trying to do the same thing to WoD, which is nominally more numbers/stat heavy.
All that being said, the dice are a ton of fun to use and make perfect sense for their particular system, but keep in mind this analogy
Fantasy Flight Star Wars and it's dice are like a TellTale Game. Very story driven and mechanically Barebones. There's some semblance of "Gameplay," but it's almost entirely exposition. You don't play it to see big numbers and statmax, you play it to enjoy your time and relax, go with the flow.
Number heavy systems and their dice are like RTS games. There's a lot to pay attention to, a noteworthy amount of strategy involved and the story takes something of a backseat to the gameplay, shining through when the opportunities are right but not distracting from the overall game you're playing.
I can see where Mage or most things WoD would seem compatible with a narrative dice system, but take it from me, it's a lot better in theory than it is on paper. If Call of Cthulhu couldn't be swung with almost solely narration, I wish you luck in your attempts and commend you if you find a system that works.
That being said
I fucking love EotE and its dice system. Fantasy Flight give me more modules.
I quite like it as well, the fact it means people have to be a lot more inventive than just turning up, chugging softdrinks and chucking dice has really offloaded so much work as a GM its ridiculous. Very easy to ad-hoc, I think the most in game downtime I've ever needed for a sudden major event was about 5min to cook up some NPC's, come up with a bit of a basic plot and then the rest was player driven. For a lot of games, thats sometimes a bit hard to do.
Its not without its flaws, the vehicle combat sucks balls and needed to be house ruled pretty hard to work- typical FFG though
Aside from that, it hangs together at high xp and the players are always eminently 'killable', so if you come from super-power stuff like D&D where players turn into unstoppable feat spamming-machines, make sure you reset their expectations in this system.
That's a fair enough comparison, but I would say it's more involved than Telltale. The dice direct the story quite a but under our GMs and with our group all collabing on advantages and such. It's good for setting up what goes right, wrong, and horribly wrong and with some improv, what happens from there.
>Force Dice are useless
Yeah, if you play the non-Force module.
I'm honestly considering sitting down and writing up a fantasy version of the Narrative Dice used in F&D/EotE for 'tell me a story' games.
The Force Dice would basically create Law/Chaos Mana to replace Light/Dark points. Law Mana and Chaos Mana can be spent to alter spell effects, like metamagic- but use of one type of metamagic bends you towards its alignment, and using both creates Paradox, basically a special type of magic backlash.
Haven't thought that all the way through, but it seemed neat.
You've obviously never stat maxed in this game (despite what I said before, it can be done.)
Pick the Marauder skill tree, Max Brawn, purchase Riot Armor, buy a Personal Deflector Shield (10,000 Credits), use your Hardpoints on the Riot Armor to add the Hardened Attachment, dump all of your skill points in Melee. Laugh as the enemies blasters fizzle off your skin before punching their jaw in two places.
Playing a Codru-Ji walking mountain was one of the most fun characters I'd ever conceived. I was nigh unkillable, even against an array of B2 Super Battle Droids.
I was using TellTale as an extreme example, but I get where you're coming from.
Let me rephrase. Not useless, but seemingly shoehorned. It was more or less a game of back and forth. Party uses a force point and does something totally off the wall heroic/incredible, GM is given the force point and retaliates later in the game with something totally off the wall unexpected/dickish.
If the points weren't passed back and forth, it would be different, but half the time our party felt it best to just never use force points if we were ahead (Say we rolled 4 white 2 black to start) because it kept the GM in a position of disadvantage if he decided he needed to use one of his points. If we were behind, we said fuck it and used them where we thought best because we were at an inherent disadvantage to begin with. It's a neat concept, but mechanically it just doesn't make sense. It would be easier to just label Force Points as Auto-Success points and drop the reference altogether. I actually enjoy your Law/Chaos/Paradox idea, care to expound upon it?
>You've obviously never stat maxed
I'm a GM, there's a multitude of things I've got to make you weep where your soak no longer matters.
Lol I'm not trying to challenge you here. I've GM'd the system as well and I'm very aware that there are beasts/droids/weapons that could literally obliterate me despite my 6 soak, 20 wound threshold and 3 defense. I was just poking fun at your
>players are always eminently killable
comment while throwing in some bragging about my own experience. I was killable, and admittedly far from immortal (Nix had an affinity for Death Sticks), but there are a few armor/class/stat customizations that can get you pretty close to untouchable sans Rancor/Battlecruiser cannon
>I actually enjoy your Law/Chaos/Paradox idea, care to expound upon it?
Alright. Let's say I need to cast a fire bolt.
Now, I have a Mana Pool of, say, 1, because I'm your 1st level wizard. I roll up to 1 (so one) Mana die for gathering Mana.
Since Fire Bolt requires just one Mana pip to activate, I can use it as long as I have some magical ability and have bought the training for the spell.
Now, I go to Fire Bolt/ Evocation.
>You may spend Chaos pips to deal 2 wounds to a target, but you generate 1 Threat.
>You may spend Law pips to deal 1 wound to a target.
>Paradox: You may spend one Law and one Chaos pip to deal 4 wounds to a target, but automatically generate one Despair.
This is a shitty example,. but you get my point.
Literally any ship gun and you're done son.
The funniest thing I've ever run was a 'Firefly' moment where the group has to go to a high society ball to meet a customer.
I had nobles in minion groups with the 'Scathing Tirade' start picking on the more knuckle dragging PC's that where disrespectful or just plain annoying... words can hurt! Oh boy, talk about a high school verbal beatdown, a Wookie was down to zero strain in about 3 rounds, his Trando buddy lasted about 5 before making a discrete exit to go outside and cry.
But yeah, its not like where you had say level 15 characters in the old 3rd ed D&D stuff which could walk through armies and damn near anything else.
Also, let me point out the following:
If you use both types of mana, you have to fill up Paradox first.
Like, you can have 1 Paradox and 1 Law, but not 1 Chaos and 2 Law.
You have a 3/3 split? Better get ready to deal with the fact that you just vaporised that sucker but are dealing with the general area being on fire.
I understand where you're going with it, but in what circumstances would you be rolling to determine your pool. Beginning of the session? Every rest? Once per in game week? I think the availability of mana would play a serious determining factor in your system. Too much and the player won't need to make any sort of personal sacrifice, too little and the player will be sacrificing too much to be worth the advantage.
Literally any ship gun and pretty much anything, Rancor, Battlecruiser or Character is done son. Keep it in a realm of realism. Unless you have an outright dick for a GM, he's not going to pit a group of vehicle-less players against a planetary cruiser.
>Wookie with a Trandoshan friend
wut
beyond that, in this particular campaign we were running smuggled goods for a higher-up on Nal Hutta. We mostly went through a Watto middle man and the party would constantly give this Watto grief because of his size and social position, often referring to him as "Waterboy" or "Spider-bait"
>watto
FUCK
meant Toydarian. Fucking mixed up a name with a species
'Mana Pool' is a stand in for Force Rating here. Forgot to clarify.
Still, there should be a hard cap on who can do what with spells.
Why not transcribe class trees from Fantasy Flight entirely and give certain classes access to certain spells?
Probably that, but with appropriate modifications.
Wonder how much XP it takes to cap Force Rating.
Wouldn't use it for wod, but I did run a homebrew sci Fi like Stargate, with a ton of homebrew races and guns.
Currently your max Force Rating is two (One at the beginning of the Force Sensitive Exile tree, and one at the end. This may be altered when more classes are made available with more books. The only character with a Force Rating of three is The Forsaken Jedi (Page 412, Core Rulebook, under Adversaries)
To cap your force rating, if you start in the Force Sensitive tree, you can raise it as normal, or to buy in to it, it's the same amount of XP as buying into a new career specialization, which if I remember correctly is (10 * [Number of Specs After Buy In]), then you can just purchase the talents as regular.
To expand upon this, the least costly path to the second Force Rating is 10 + 15 + 20 + 25 for a total of 70 xp after your buy in on the tree (unless you started with that tree, in which case, ~70)
There's other force sensitive trees.
>Age of Rebellion
>Force and Destiny
I wasn't aware you were assuming one character taking from all three sourcebooks. I don't remember for sure, but I'm fairly certain all three books mention that characters should only take talents from one book.
If you're using all of them,
Force Sensitive Exile: 70 XP for 2 Force Rating
Force Sensitive Emergent: 75 XP for 2 Force Rating
Consular Healer: 90 XP for 1 Force Rating
Niman Disciple: 95 XP for 1 Force Rating
Sage: 135 XP for 2 Force Rating
Peacekeeper: 135 XP for 1 Force Rating
Protector: 75 XP for 1 Force Rating
Armorer: 115 XP for 1 Force Rating
Warden: 110 XP for 1 Force Rating
Warleader: 110 XP for 1 Force Rating
Advisor: 115 XP for 1 Force Rating
Seer: 150 XP for 2 Force Rating
Hunter: 90 XP for 1 Force Rating
Pathfinder: 70 XP for 1 Force Rating
Artisan: 70 XP for 1 Force Rating
Shadow: 100 XP for 1 Force Rating
Aggressor: 75 XP for 1 Force Rating
Starfighter Ace: 95 XP for 1 Force Rating
1775 XP for a total of 22 Force Rating
This isn't counting the XP to spec into the particular talent trees, which is (10 * [Number of Specs After Buy])
So your second would be 20, third 30, etc.
But thats for classes within your career. When buying outside of your starting career, you tack on an extra 10. For the sake of simplicity, let's say you started with force exile.
To buy in to Force Emergent, it would be 20 + 10 (Universal always adds as if out of career)
30, then to Consular; Healer through Sage, 50, 60, 70
then Guardians; Peacekeeper through Warleader, 90, 100, 110, 120, 130
then to Mystic; Advisor through Seer, 150, 160
then to Seeker; Hunter through Pathfinder, 180, 190
then to Sentinel; Artisan and Shadow, 210, 220
then to Warrior; Agressor and Starfighter Ace, 240, 250
The career transitions total an extra 2360 XP
For a capped 22 Force Rating you'd have to spend a total 4135 XP
It's two in the morning and I just went out of my way to do that math...
What am I doing with my life?
Everyone I know uses all the sourcebooks combined.
Though I'm pretty sure you only get the force rating at the beginning of a tree the first time. That's at least how I ran it and how all the other gms I know run it. Like the overlapping skills on different talent specializations.
Personally, I pulled all the proficiencies and force ratings out of the tree acquisitions, and reduced the cost to pick each one up by 10(iirc). Then I let players but ones they don't already have, at cost. That way they don't have to pay for overlapping stuff they don't get to have.
Post note: The game recommends 10 to 20 XP per session involving two/three major encounters and a handful of minor ones with an extra 5 XP awarded for roleplaying, completing story arcs, etc. Assume 20 xp per five hour session.
This boils down to ~4 XP/hour
That's ~1000 hours of play to cap your force rating.
I only counter the beginning force rating for Exile and emergent. Assuming you only get that once, it's the same XP for 21 Force Rating.
The way your doing it would cut XP cost by about 2/3 if you're letting them pick talents at will without meeting prerequisites (because most of these trees have prerequisites leading from the very top of the tree down to the force rating, a handful start at tier-2)
Even so, that's ~1800 XP after everything to get all of the force ratings if you're keeping the out-of-career buy in cost.
If you eliminate that, you could feasibly cap it around 1000 XP
That's still a solid 250 hours of play time.
If you keep to the games rules though, that's 43 out-of-game days of play time to achieve your intended goal. At 5 hours a session and 2 sessions a week, that's still 103 weeks, almost two years of bi-weekly meetings.
In all fairness, if you're going to dedicate two years of consistent play, I guess you deserve to be horrendously overpowered.
Not all tasks need to be rolled for, see simple tasks on page 17 of the EOTE core book. It says "Success is assumed for the majority of simple tasks"
Ah. My second point is moot then. Thank you user.
Agreed with most of that.
I don't let them cherry pick abilities though.
I just don't make them take the career skills that come with a new specialization, and if they would need to buy a non-stacking ability to get through a tree, and they already have it, they can skip that slot.
In terms of cost, each career costs 10 less, and you get the occasional gimme for non stacking overlapping abilities.
No problem, I only knew that because I just started reading through. I haven't played it yet myself, but I'm excited to
I see. If they played a literally skill-less character that relied solely on abilities from trees, they could achieve their 21 Force Rating with the aforementioned 4135 XP.
If you're allowing them to skip duplicate abilities that don't stack (or they already have and don't want) and not force them to put a point in their career skills, you might cut the total XP cost by 450, maybe 500. 3650 XP is still an entirely outrageous goal to reach. I'd like to see a character do it though, following the games rules (meaning taking all requisite abilities, skills, etc.)
After skill purchases, Ability point purchases (Brawn, Intellect, Etc.) and ability purchases, The character would probably have a solid 4500 - 4800 XP invested in them. I can only imagine what kind of monster that character would be.
It's a fun game. It's really easy to take casually and not try-hard-to-win. In fact, when it comes to this game, I think I've done more math in the hour and a half I've been in this thread than I have in the fifty - sixty hours I've spent playing the actual game. There's seemingly no number crunching in comparison to most Tabletops and that leaves a lot of room for dynamic and player/GM driven story. I hope you find a good group.
It's a pretty good game, but it's got some bits that are less than ideal.
Force dice for force powers are shit. If you swap the dark and light force points generated that helps.
Unless you do , players pay for a ton of overlapping abilities and skills for wasted cost.
And starting characters are absolute shit, unfortunately. And because of how important attributes are, you *really* want to spend all those base starting points on attributes.
I explicitly only allow my players to spend those points on attributes, and then i give them +100 XP on top of that that's regular XP. This doesn't make them strong, simply not pathetic.
Indeed. That's a hell of a lot of points.
I'm less generous than you're suggesting though. They only get to skip the abilities that would literally just be wasted points, not things that stack which they don't want.
Well, this has been fun. This thread got a little off track when we started talking about Force Rating but I don't regret the math. This was enlightening in a sense.
Thanks for shooting shit anons, but I should have been asleep hours ago.
To the guy doing the Law/Chaos system, if anything ever comes of it, make a thread, I'd like to see if you go anywhere with that.
People really give undo praise to this system.
>undo praise
>dosn't elaborate
Use your words you illiterate cunt.
The idea with Desinty Points is that they're supposed to be going back and forth, adding a sense of unpredictability to the game. Regardless of if I'm GMing or playing, I find them really fun and refreshing.
They're also really great for introducing new elements to the narrative.
Hoarding them is just being silly and being a twat. Sounds to me like your group has a severe case of "Players vs GM" syndrome going on.
>Force dice for force powers are shit. If you swap the dark and light force points generated that helps.
How? You'd be gimping yourself at higher xp.
It's "undue praise," you dummy. Read a book!
Brawn I think is one of the odd points of the system: Brawn effectively determines how well you can deal damage in melee, how well you can get into melee, and how well you can survive hits in and out of melee. It's strange to have one stat be so useful in so many ways as far as building a particular character archetype.
Droids are also immensely useful in minmaxing. They can easily achieve 8 soak starting and, with the team's help, usually 9 soak by the end of the first session.
I mean, yes, you could drop AT-AT's on them, or a Sith nemesis. Or maybe everyone's carrying Disruptors instead of Blasters.
In most cases the solution to adequately defeat 9 soak characters puts the rest of the party further behind defensively, and aren't terribly reasonable to begin with. If you're going to deal with edge cases by doubling down on ridiculousness... well, it's your game.
The main point with the durability is that they are effectively immune to normal, run of the mill mooks. Not fodder, but what one might consider line infantry.
A dozen stormtroopers can be a believable threat to a flight mechanic or a wily smuggler. They'd have to grab cover, use interesting equipment, their environment, etc to come out ahead.
A melee droid, on the other hand, can take his time and casually stroll about the battlefield punching stormtroopers in the dick until they all die.
I've never seen more than 3 force dice before the campaign ended, have you?
>undo praise
Brawn is outrageously useful, even though it only applies to a handful of skills. Brawn is solely responsible for your ability to use hand-to-hand or melee combat effectively. If it's maxed early, not only are you a walking powerhouse, because you decided to turn yourself into a wall of muscle, you're effectively that much harder to beat down. Brawn is what happens when you mix Strength and Constitution, and frankly, I believe those two are separate for a reason. When I was reading through the games system the first time and I noticed how universally "Arnold Schwarzenegger" Brawn was as an ability, I couldn't help myself. Picking a naturally high brawn species helped in lowering the mandatory XP to max it, and using almost all of my credits on A vibro sword, personal deflector shield and my Riot Armor + Hardened was more than worth it. I still have that character sheet somewhere. All of the other attribute scores never broke 2, save for Brawn at a whopping six. The only skills I ever poured in to were max brawl, 4 melee, 1 heavy gun, 1 light gun, 1 gunnery, 1 vigilance and 1 survival. I always carried at least 1 litre of Bacta, a pack of death sticks and a pair of chance cubes. This combination overall made up the character Nix Fon-Codru, and for lacking versatility so intensely, Nix was the only reason our party made it through the majority of our scraps with empiricals and rivaling smugglers. Sure, if he wasn't there we could have been pinned down and slowly shot the enemies out one by one, but Nix was the "Casually stroll up to the person shooting at you and promptly rip his arms off, pausing for a moment to enjoy the scenery."
I can't think of a single other character archetype aside from, say, diplomat, that can benefit so heavily from one ability stat. Cunning works if your ONLY intent through the whole campaign is to silvertongue, but other than that, I can't think of an example
A dozen stormtroopers can still fuck up a high soak character.
5 dudes with blaster rifles can and will ruin a droids day. yyygg + a rifle will damage even a soak monster and crits rack up.
>Everything is maxed at 6, regardless of species, with the exception of cybernetic implants.
One of my gripes with the system.
I think i just set the max to be racial base +4, except for droids which Max out at 6 anyways.