#STAR WARS EDGE OF EMPIRE XP HOW TO#

In fact, a major appeal of the Star Wars system is that dice pools are so intuitive to construct but the probability curves they produce are so complicated as to be essentially incalculable. Now, a little bit (or even a lot) of opacity in the odds is not a bad thing.

But is this really true? It didn’t feel like it. The rules seemed to imply that a boost/setback die was a lesser effect while upgrading a die (for example, turning green ability die into a yellow proficiency die) was a bigger deal.

#STAR WARS EDGE OF EMPIRE XP HOW TO#

Then finally, because nobody really had any idea what the magnitude of the effects of adding various dice were, it made it hard to know what to do with the Destiny Pool, or how to rate the importance of boost and setback dice, or how to wisely spend advantages in combat. A skilled character with a lower characteristic (so, say, a character with Piloting 2 and Agility 2) did not seem to do as well as a character with a slightly higher characteristic (so, no Piloting skill but Agility 3). So canceling out all the failures and all the threats while having surplus successes and advantages is obviously rare. While there are in theory four different possible “quadrants” the result of a dice roll could fall into (success or failure with advantage or threat), in practice two of them (success with threat and failure with advantage) are predominant, with critical success and critical failure seeming quite rare unless you have a big imbalance between good and bad dice in the pool.Īnother odd thing was that it seemed like having high characteristics (Agility, Perception, Brawn, etc.) was a much bigger deal than actually having ranks in skills. Good dice only have good faces, and bad dice only have bad faces. The dice faces never have more than two symbols and rarely show both success and advantage. A little bit of analysis of the dice and this made sense. The big thing was that critical hits (which generally require a successful combat check with three advantages) seemed exceptionally rare, and even weapons special powers were hard to activate (they generally require successful check with two advantages). However, as I played more, I kept noticing unexpected quirks in the results. It’s a pretty cool idea and rolling lots of dice is fun. Remaining threat or advantage may give an additional bonus or penalty. If you end up with at least one success, you succeed. Net out success and failure icons, and advantage and threat icons. At their most basic, they are simple and elegant: just add positive ability (green 8-sided) and proficiency (yellow 12-sided) dice for your level of skill, negative purple 8-sided difficulty dice for the difficulty level negative red 12-siders for reasons, and then even some more dice (positive blue boosts and negative black setbacks, both 6-siders) for situational modifiers (cover, time pressure, assistance from an ally), grab them all, and roll them. The central, most intriguing, and most opaque idea in the game is the set of customized dice that are used to form dice pools for task resolution.

The dice in Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, image courtesy FFG.

Star wars edge of empire xp