Ulfgeir
Swashbuckler
Lovade ju i småpratet häromdagen att göra en recension på nya Star Wars-spelet när vi spelade det. Skrev den här för ett engelskt forum först, men känner inte riktigt för att skriva om den, så håll till godo.
Just tested the new Star Wars game from Fantasy Flight. Or rather the Beginner's Box as the full rulebook is not available yet.
The beginners box comes with simplyfied rules*, one set of special dice, and a short adventure and maps.
If I understood the GM correctly, then the adventure is really made for beginners to RPG's as it comes with some hints on possible solutiones in each scene and what skills to use.
It is set so that you will start with just the most basic rules, then more and more elements will be gradually included.
The dice are similar to the ones from the Fantasy Flight version of Warhammer rpg. Instead of numbers you have dice of various colour with various symbols on them.
For a simple skill roll where you don't have ansy skil-ransk you might roll 2-3 green dice. Each has some blank slots and some symvols donoting success and some that will give advantages. If you have a skill-rank you might exchange one green dice for a yellow. This will have many more sides for success and advantages. Now of course it is not as simple as that, so you will propably also roll some purple dice for the opposition. These have blank sides, symbols for failure and symbols for threats. If it is really nasty it will be upgrades to a red dice...
Failures will cancel successes. If you have any net success left you will succeed. Threats cancel advantages. So you might succeed but something bad happens or vice versa.
Then you can also have a blue bonus dice if for example you attack from an ambush, or you can have negative black dice. There is also a white dice for force**
At the beginning of the session each player will also roll the forcedice once to see how many, and of what type of point will be added to the force-pool. You can add 1 or 2 points per player, and they can be dark-side or white-side. The GM can use the dark-side to make something worse for the players and the players can use the white-side for getting a bonus. When used, the force-point is changed into it's opposite, so if the GM uses a dark-side point, the players will then gain the use of a white-side.
Combat is simple but deadly. Mooks (for example stormtroopers) will have a combined number of Hitpoints depending on the number of them. They will of course also become better depending on the number of them. They will make a single combined attack. When I said it was deadly, we managed to with 6 players totally wipe out 2 squads of 5 storm troopers each in 3 rounds. Of course 1 single hit from one of the squads was enough to almost take one of the player characters out. We played for less than 4 hours, and still managed to go through 3 separate combat encounters as well as 2 non-combat encounters and look up some stuff in the rules.
Initiative is a bit weird. The players roll but will then later choose themselves of who will act. So it is more to see on which ticks someone will act. The reason you want to choose who acts is that if you gain lots of advantages you may choose to give the next active character or someone else a bonus dice.
* so simple that you can't make your own character, instead you have a couple of premade ones. The premade characters have premade choices for their advancement as well.
** None of the premade characters was a forceuser as far as I knew so that never came into play other than for determining the sice of the force-pool.
here is a review one of the makers for Penny Arcade did.
/Ulfgeir
Just tested the new Star Wars game from Fantasy Flight. Or rather the Beginner's Box as the full rulebook is not available yet.
The beginners box comes with simplyfied rules*, one set of special dice, and a short adventure and maps.
If I understood the GM correctly, then the adventure is really made for beginners to RPG's as it comes with some hints on possible solutiones in each scene and what skills to use.
It is set so that you will start with just the most basic rules, then more and more elements will be gradually included.
The dice are similar to the ones from the Fantasy Flight version of Warhammer rpg. Instead of numbers you have dice of various colour with various symbols on them.
For a simple skill roll where you don't have ansy skil-ransk you might roll 2-3 green dice. Each has some blank slots and some symvols donoting success and some that will give advantages. If you have a skill-rank you might exchange one green dice for a yellow. This will have many more sides for success and advantages. Now of course it is not as simple as that, so you will propably also roll some purple dice for the opposition. These have blank sides, symbols for failure and symbols for threats. If it is really nasty it will be upgrades to a red dice...
Failures will cancel successes. If you have any net success left you will succeed. Threats cancel advantages. So you might succeed but something bad happens or vice versa.
Then you can also have a blue bonus dice if for example you attack from an ambush, or you can have negative black dice. There is also a white dice for force**
At the beginning of the session each player will also roll the forcedice once to see how many, and of what type of point will be added to the force-pool. You can add 1 or 2 points per player, and they can be dark-side or white-side. The GM can use the dark-side to make something worse for the players and the players can use the white-side for getting a bonus. When used, the force-point is changed into it's opposite, so if the GM uses a dark-side point, the players will then gain the use of a white-side.
Combat is simple but deadly. Mooks (for example stormtroopers) will have a combined number of Hitpoints depending on the number of them. They will of course also become better depending on the number of them. They will make a single combined attack. When I said it was deadly, we managed to with 6 players totally wipe out 2 squads of 5 storm troopers each in 3 rounds. Of course 1 single hit from one of the squads was enough to almost take one of the player characters out. We played for less than 4 hours, and still managed to go through 3 separate combat encounters as well as 2 non-combat encounters and look up some stuff in the rules.
Initiative is a bit weird. The players roll but will then later choose themselves of who will act. So it is more to see on which ticks someone will act. The reason you want to choose who acts is that if you gain lots of advantages you may choose to give the next active character or someone else a bonus dice.
* so simple that you can't make your own character, instead you have a couple of premade ones. The premade characters have premade choices for their advancement as well.
** None of the premade characters was a forceuser as far as I knew so that never came into play other than for determining the sice of the force-pool.
here is a review one of the makers for Penny Arcade did.
/Ulfgeir
