Having studied the Star Wars beta book, I'm now a convert as far as the system goes. It appears the designers are listening to issues with WFRP and streamlinging/correcting things while keeping all of the details. Certain things have become more fun (light pool / dark pool mechanic is awesome) while keeping much of the grandness of WFRP.

I doubt that it will ever occur, but if there happened to be a WFRP 2nd edition, a few things should be considered from the new Star Wars. The system does seem to be WFRP 1.5 for Star Wars.

No mentions of bits and pieces. This concerns me a bit (no pun intended). While I don't want an overwhelming amount of bits and pieces, I DO want at least some.

Here's a new link for that stuff:  dl.dropbox.com/u/9077657/SW-EotE-Reference-Sheets.pdf

jh

Here's what I think I can use in my games:

• Fear (page 4) - can use to determine when creatures run (if I don't just say,"The enemies run.")
• Ranged attack difficulty (p.5)
• Combat modifiers (p.5)
• Vehicle maneuvering (for dwarf gyrocopters and nautulis)

Personally I thnk the dice mechanic is better in EotE than in WFRP …due to following reasons:

* Fewer dice

* Opposed checks are handled better so that trying to beat an equally skilled opponent will be roughly 50/50 whereas in WFRP if either player is higly skilled this skews the result severly …

Also I love the rules for gear modification … a variant of which could easily be implemented for creating high quality weapons in any low magic setting, thus still enabling characters to have something to lust for :D

How are Opposed Checks handled?  That is an area of the WFRP rules that I find weak at higher levels (stat 6 vs stat 6 etc.)  Yepesnopes has some house rules on that, how does the Star Wars system handle it?

I like its addition of challenge dice for ranges.  I've sometimes "backhandedly" put that into WFRP saying the crowd, snow, wind or forest imposes added difficulty farther away the target.

If an action has a 50/50 chance to succeed why roll a tub of dice?  Why not just flip a coin or have each side roll a d10, higher wins?

If two strength 2 characters are wrestling, just flip a coin.  If there's a modifier, well add a white die.

Are we over-thinking this?

Did they get rid of talent socketing?

jh

Emirikol said:

Yes

Hmm.  What other major clunk did they get rid of?

jh

Emirikol said:

Mainly all.

No action cards, no cards for NPCs, no wound cards for critics, conditions, tracking tokens…

So, what's remaining? :)

Just kidding! 

Still, in regards to Actions, what actions can PCs and NPCs do then (Sorry I haven't read the document posted by Emirikol)? Is there basically a list of fixed actions, like WFRP2 that can be done? I think it's sad that this concept went away (although I am not sure whether it would have be appropriate for a Science Fiction setting). Actions cards are fun! Yes, they are not balanced, yes somewhat many of them do very similar results, but the name of it, the picture of it, the content/effects make them very fun, plus it really helps new players to the genre to get a feel of what they can do with their heroes.

The limited list of combat actions for WFRP2 is quite boring, and if you're GM is a stick to the rules kind, any "perform a stunt" kind of action in WFRP2 is nearly impossible. All of this make a combat really boring (although it's faster).

Ditto for the wounds, miscasts, diseases etc… Of course, all of this can be in a table format a la WFRP1 or WFRP2, but it's so fun to have it on the table as well. It's simply a shift in perception. It's interesting to see some beta players of SWEotE are moving towards creating such cards. 

Still, from listening to SWEotE live play, it sounds like very fun and I can't wait for the Beginner's Box as I didn't get the beta.

Cheers

Ceodryn

They still have conditions and wounds but put them on charts (like WFRP lite), but it will be interesting to see what rules "mechanics" they changed as opposed to whether you have to reference charts as opposed to cards.

So, there are no special actions at all?  Every character can do melee or ranged attack and that's it?

Talents are on all the time? (i.e. you can now walk AND chew gum at the same time?)

The charts, from what I can see changed little from WFRP, but they don't explain the rules otherwise.

A player of mine brought it by, but all I got to see was the overly complicated chart of how you gather talents (geez', I wonder sometimes if game companies sacrifice simplification in favor of stupid gimmicks like that ..just to say they did).  In this case, it doesn't need to be presented that way, but "just is."  No it's not keen or smart.  It's just the flow-chart method of describing what D&D 3.0 invented 12 years ago.

jh

Emirikol said:

We've only had the chance to make characters so far, but as far as I know there are no talents of the kind WFRP has. The talents you get from the specialisation trees can be similar to the WFRP talents, but they can also grant you some special "actions". I think they are conceptually more similar to the the feats/talents from DnD3/SW:SAGA.

I also think that the specialisation trees are a bit boring. They do look nice and you start to think about future options for your characters when you look at them, which is nice of course, but they don't really offer any big changes compared to the class talent system from SW:Saga (well, of course they are very different mechanically).

If anything, I think EotE is a kind of hybrid between SW:Saga and WFRP3e. But these are two of my favorite systems, so I'm really looking forward to trying it in play.      

Cool.  Keep us up to date on it :)

jh

Emirikol said:

Talents in EotE function like a mix of both the Action Cards, Career abilities and Talents from WFRP - they all fall intol in the category of :

1) Always on - ei. +1 damage

2) Activatable ei. pay X strain (strain is not used for everything fatigue/strain is in wrfp) or pay a destiny point (=fortune point kinda)

3) Crits ei. can be activated upon rolling a 'Triumph' (1/12 chance per skill die = ½ as likely as sigmars comet, though slightly more skill dies are to be expected than in wfrp)

4) One-time use per session ei. reroll a skill …