Last night during the first session of a new campaign of Edge of the Empire I got to thinking about how it has more...
Originally shared by Brian Ashford
Last night during the first session of a new campaign of Edge of the Empire I got to thinking about how it has more in common with Whitehack than I had previously realised. It has a fairly structured set of rules which can be applied in anyway that the players and GM agree to through negotiation.
I tried to write this down as a quick not to you, my Google+ friends, but it sent me down a game theory rabbit hole and I moved the small stream-of-consciousness to my blog.
I'd love to hear your thoughts,
https://ominosity.wordpress.com/2017/03/21/negotiated-strictness-for-fun-profit/
https://ominosity.wordpress.com/2017/03/21/negotiated-strictness-for-fun-profit/
Last night during the first session of a new campaign of Edge of the Empire I got to thinking about how it has more in common with Whitehack than I had previously realised. It has a fairly structured set of rules which can be applied in anyway that the players and GM agree to through negotiation.
I tried to write this down as a quick not to you, my Google+ friends, but it sent me down a game theory rabbit hole and I moved the small stream-of-consciousness to my blog.
I'd love to hear your thoughts,
https://ominosity.wordpress.com/2017/03/21/negotiated-strictness-for-fun-profit/
https://ominosity.wordpress.com/2017/03/21/negotiated-strictness-for-fun-profit/
Looking forward to reading this later.
ReplyDeleteBrian Ashford
ReplyDeleteWhat do you think of the Star Wars system overall? It's a toss-up between that and M-Space for me at the moment.
I love it. The dice take a bit of getting used to but they add so much to the game and they have done a great job of recreating the type of characters we all love in Star Wars. If can be a bit fiddly though, there are a lot of options for equipment, weapons, weapon mods, ships, aliens, abilities and each book you buy adds more of each one (note that any one of the three core books has everything you need to play and you can ignore most of the detail if you want).
ReplyDeleteTo go into more detail on the dice, the seven different types make it very easy to add all sorts of factors into the roll. Green and Yellow for the character's skill and ability, blue for incidental bonuses or quality equipment, purple for difficulty, red for danger and black for incidental problems.
ReplyDeleteThe three good dice can provide you with successes, bonuses and criticals while the bad dice give fails, penalties and despair. That's a lot of stuff but some of the dice will probably roll a blank and successes and fails cancel while bonuses and penalties cancel.
What this ends up meaning is that you will most often be rolling a pass, but with penalties or a fail but with bonuses. So even when things go your way, there are fun incidental problems going on and if you fail your roll, you should get some bonus points to help out in some way. You will also sometimes roll successes with bonuses or failures with penalties and then triumphs and despairs can come up in all of these too.
So it is important for the GM to only call for a roll in important situations, because they can escalate quickly. What I love most though is that no-one can really predict how each situation is going to play out.
Unlike many systems this one also does a great job of representing both inexperienced have-a-go heroes and experts.
Just to complicate matters, I really like M-Space too. It's solid, and a lot more straight forward that Star Wars.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the detailed feedback! Have been playing some Descent recently and I was surprised by how much I enjoy the FFG dice. I'm getting into Imperial Assault as well. Will have to look through the rules for this and M-Space and see which will best suit a sandbox Firefly-style campaign!
ReplyDeleteEither game will do that well. The biggest difference is that in the FFG games the PCs are able to act in just about any situation, whatever their skill set, success just ends up taking a more roundabout route.
ReplyDeleteIn M-Space though, I think that characters are likely to be far more specialised meaning that each player will likely have to stick to their own role within the group.
I guess it is pretty hard to kill a PC in the FFG system, whereas that isn't likely to be the case in M-Space, so that's worth considering.