Star Wars Edge of the Empire: Beginner Game

A long while ago (a year or more) I bought the Star Wars Edge of the Empire beginner box by Fantasy Flight Games. It looked interesting and I had a local friend that was playing in a game of it. My friends and I played through two or three sessions before giving up. Today, I did something I've never done before: I through out an RPG system, namely the aforementioned game.



While it was a long time ago, so I don't recall all the details, here's my general recollection of it: The system was hugely clunky. Dice rolls in the system produce results along two axes, one determines success or failure as to what the player was attempting while the other produces positive or negative effects that result from the action beyond the intended result. So a missed blaster shot might hit a control panel, closing a door and shutting off enemy reinforcements or it could damage the hero's space craft in some way. It sounds really interesting on paper, but in practice it was mostly just annoying. It had it's moments, but game play got slowed down as the Game Master (me) tried to keep coming up with new incidentals to have happen in response to die rolls, when really everyone just wants to know did I hit? When do I get to shoot again?

Another major complaint was that the pilot character didn't really get to do a lot, since he had lower stats than the other characters in combat and while he did have to be in the cockpit of the spacecraft to fly it, (thus preventing him from doing other things,) there weren't many interesting decisions for him to make there and the combat wasn't heavily influenced by his actions. As a result, the player in the role of pilot mostly got to sit around and be bored in ship to ship combat and was under powered in other types of encounters.

Another problem as I recall, which might not be an issue for most groups, is that I was playing with some die hard Star Wars Expanded Universe fans, who complained to no end whenever the plot presented in the beginner game conflicted with established cannon. The biggest issue was that imperial storm troopers are shown as at the beck and call of a blatantly corrupt officer, the argument being that storm troopers are too well disciplined and personally loyal to the emperor to allow themselves to be utilized in that way.

Also, the crushed box of the beginner game looked terrible on my bookshelf among the more stately volumes of other RPG systems. I am hanging onto the specialized dice, which I can rehabilitate with a sharpie into productive members of society.