[NewChief]

We played through quite a bit of the beta pack of Star Wars: Edge of the Empire tonight.

Overall: a lot of fun, if confusing (in a good way).

I'll basically focus on the mechanics of the system, because that's probably what sets this game apart from a lot of other games. At first, I was turned off by the unique dice system of the game. Why invent a whole new icon based system, distancing yourself from the tried and true polyhedral numerics that gaming geeks know and love?

It turns out there's a very good reason, at least for me. You see, I'm a hardcore 4e player. I read the charop forums and have a bad tendency to min/max. I want to play in an optimized party with a lot of synergy between the various members (where the party is built around a specific vulnerability such as frost, or built to prone, or for radiant cheese, etc...). I love playing tactically like that but... it can also be exhausting and override just having normal fun. It becomes a contest instead of the old school roleplaying game. By removing the numerical values from the game, they make it really dificult to figure out how to min max. I, honestly, had no clue of what my chances of success or failure on a given task were. There are also "rider" dice when you toss your dice pool. So you might succeed with negative riders, or you might fail with positive riders.

How does this look? Someone tries to pick a lock. They end up succeeding, but they have negative riders with that. So, they pick the lock.. but break their lockpicks. Or they pick the lock, but (in the event of major negative riders), there is someone waiting on the other side who hears their attempts at entry. Conversely, you might fail the lockpick with positive riders. So you fail to pick the lock, but you remember that you heard about another entrance. Or you fail to pick the lock, but you gain familiarity with the locks in this security system, giving you a better chance of success on the next lock you attempt.

Combat has similar negative/positive riders. This is really cool and gives both the DMs and players a nice mechanic to enhance the story and action to make things more interesting from a narrative perspective. After our short playthrough tonight, we decided we're going to stick with the system for a while and explore it.