My beginner box and core book showed up mid-week last week and I had convinced a group of friends to give it a shot this past Saturday. Between reading all the FFG materials, reading tons of great postings on these forums and listening to the Order 66 podcast, I felt as though I had a solid-enough grasp of the rules for us to play. The players were two folks that had never really played rpgs before and one pathfinder player.
It took just a few minutes for them to understand and start using the dice results to do fun and interesting things. The cantina fight ended with the wookiee running up behind the last two gamorreans and bashing their heads together to knock them out so they could escape. Something like that is tricky to adjudicate in other game systems so players wouldn't usually try maneuvers like that. Here it's no problem at all - brawl check vs hard difficulty with one boost die for the element of surprise - voila!
I tried to remove some of the railroading so I stopped the bartender from giving them a checklist of everything they had to do for the adventure. They just left the cantina knowing that there was a trandoshan bounty hunter docked in bay Aurek with a busted-up ship.
One highlight of the session was the surprise encounter with two squads of stormtroopers as they left starport control. One player (a first time rpg player!) remembered they could use destiny points to invent details. Hey look, there is a jawa riding by on a dewback! She lept on and shoved the jawa off. The wookiee grabbed the droid and tried to jump on (easy athletics check!) and failed but with lots of advantage. So we said that he managed to boost the droid up but couldn't get a good hold himself. He slid down the back and grabbed onto the dewback's tail. They spurred the beast on through the narrow streets as the wookiee was dragged hanging onto the tail slamming into market stalls and buildings with stormtroopers chasing them! I was really impressed that the rules system helped guide us to all of that happening.
I took a suggestion I read in another post and upgraded Trex to have Adversary 1 to make him a little more imposing. He and the wookiee had an epic fight underneath the Krayt Fang with steam pouring out of vents and hoses all around them. The others finished off the droids and they and the wookiee (with 17/18 wounds!) ran for the boarding hatch and sealed it as more stormtroopers showed up. The ship was rocked by an explosion as an enraged Trex damaged one of the landing struts. They rocketed out of Mos Shuuta, but I wanted to give them a little taste of space combat as well so two TIEs began pursuit at long range. I hadn't read the space combat rules very well so I just kind of ran it as I remembered and let them punch it, do some evasive maneuvers, shoot down a TIE and do some damage control. Finally the ignitor came online, they leapt to escape to hyperspace and the players celebrated!
One of the players downloaded a star wars soundboard from one of the app stores about halfway through. We had all the wookiee-roar and droid-beep sounds, as well as the big dramatic jump to hyperspace sound to cap it all off.
I know it has been said and written in many places that this system really encourages great roleplaying and lends very Star Wars feel to the game. But I guess I didn't really 'get it' until I saw it all play out for myself. Aside from the first and last combat encounters most of the game was roleplaying, investigating, and narration -- and the players were ok with that! In lots of other systems all 'that stuff' is sometimes regarded as filler to be glossed over so you can get to the next fight.
The dice system gives players the freedom to be as creative as they like, and in return the players all contribute richness and details to the game that a gm never would have thought of. It really was 'our' game, not just my game that I was running them through. There is just the right amount of structure in place to hold it all together and not so much that it gets in the way.
I know I'm a year and a half late to this party and what I've written isn't exactly news to folks around here. But I was so psyched about the system and that our first play of it went so well. Had to get it out!