Hi everyone!

A few months ago I started to think about a question to try to interpretate developers point of view about world concept on Edge.

Who are our characters inside the world in "level" or scale of power? I mean...

Our starting characters with 2 Y 1 G are stronger than minion like Imperial Stormtroopers, the same way than Han, Luke and Leia in movies.

When they evolve at pseudo-maximum skills they can become 4 Y 1 G or even more!

I know that "universe scale of power" is a GM/Player design, but, what do you believe that is developers point of view? I'll try to send them this question too, but first I would like to learn about your points of view and the "general idea" between players and GM's.

So, if someone became 6 Y 1 G (extreme but possible) will be the one who can confront major characters in the story, or they are far away from that? In that case, major characters are "invincible" because they have tons of dices or because its a "plot thing"?

So, again, I'm aware that its a player/GM decision but, I would like to understand their point of view (or the idea that they gave to us) about game concept and design.

Thanks to everyone!

I view characters as worldly at beginning play level and they have hit that point in their lives where their fortunes begin to take off, for good or ill. They have some notoriety as indicated by their Obligation. I wouldn't get into some linear power level comparison between them and the iconic characters because story is more the deciding factor. Major historical figures are many times normal people that through circumstance and chance (story) were thrust into situations that swept them away.

In a galaxy of trillions of beings, at 600XP, I would hazard to guess that our group is in the bottom 5%. One may argue bottom 10%.

Since skills scale in cost as you get better, someone who uses 5 yellow on a skill would be one of the best in the galaxy. most humans would be hard pressed to be at that level.

But with how ability meshes with ranks in a skill there is no true measuring stick that can be used. Is 3Y2G better then 4Y? what is the point in trying to be better when your ability is only a two or three? also what is the advantaged of "Galaxy Mapper" talent compared to someone without it?

It all boils down to how you use it, what you do with it, and what else to have to offer.

Han had a ship, his experience as a smuggler, charm, as well as a quick draw and accurate shooter with his blaster? What he the best with a blaster? likely not (we know he wasn't) but good enough for the Rebellion

Luke was a great pilot, an innocent naive farmboy attitude, but he also had the force and his father's lightsaber. Was he the best pilot in the Rebellion? probably not, but he was good enough to lead Rogue Squadron.

I don't like comparing my team to the original trilogy crew as there's just so many ways of building them that few people will agree with other folk's interpretations. Instead I'll just go with how it felt.

When I started I felt like a plebe. A mook. A nameless NPC, but with a name .

+100 xp in I'd rank my character equal to an underling with obvious potential.

+200 xp in I felt like an enforcer who'd proven themselves - a tool too useful to be discarded carelessly.

+300 xp in and I was attempting coercion rolls while outnumbered 5-to-1 (and was willing to fight when that didn't work (a buyer had ripped us off)).

+400 xp in and we were willing to perform a 4 person assault on a carrier/destroyer-size pirate ship.

Luke was a great pilot, an innocent naive farmboy attitude, but he also had the force and his father's lightsaber. Was he the best pilot in the Rebellion? probably not, but he was good enough to lead Rogue Squadron.

That would be Wedge.

"There's always a bigger fish."

As awesome as the PCs may be there is always someone better. They may never interact with that someone because the story focuses on them, but they are not the be all end all of the universe.

I like to keep the PCs humble.

Great explanations and points of view here

I'll try to explain myself mixing roleplay and canon.

Luke and Wedge probably would have the same Agility, but seems that Wedge piloting ranks are higher than Luke's. Also and probably, Wedge have a few more nice Pilot and Gunner talents than Luke BUT, Luke have some kind of Force Piloting powers that helps him.

The same way I say that, again probably, Wedge isn't the best pilot on the galaxy (yes among them) so its skills aren't full maxed out.

So moving about those therms, Wedge probably is near a player that have 4 or 5 Ranks and at least 4 Piloting/Gunnery talents. So, based on rules, a maxed player probably can go further those limits!

Also Col. Orange, if "+400 xp in and we were willing to perform a 4 person assault on a carrier/destroyer-size pirate ship." what is a characters of one of my players that have more than 2.500XP? XDD You probably refered about that amount of XP on a precise field. Doesn't care how many tons you can lift with the Force on a history exam XD

I will send a message to developers to see if they share our general ideas or if they have other ones in mind.

Thank you so much!

No matter how big you get, a star destroyer in orbit will make any character **** their pants.

I've mentioned it before, but my players are around 500xp (100 base, earned around 400xp at this point) and are pretty tough. They had attacked an imperial base and were fighting off stormtroopers in a hangar while their loading droids moved arms and equipment onto their frigate.

They were doing well picking off groups of stormtroopers as they attacked, even stormtrooper minion groups backed by rivals (captains and sgt's that gave bonuses). They had taken a few hits but by and large they were doing fine. Then an AT-PT showed up. Now this isn't even an AT-ST from the films, this is the more personal-sized one. It fired at the wookie, who was charging a group of stormies - and it dealt 70 damage to him, tossing him across the room, incapacitating him and dealing him yet another crit (his 3rd of the session). Their biggest, baddest PC, with 24 wound threshold and 7 soak, just took a one-shot and almost died.

They scooped him up, distracted the AT-PT for a round and scampered away in their ship.

So really, in this game, 'power' is a very relative thing. Especially when you consider the size of the Black Sun or Hutts organizations, or that Star Destroyers can have upwards of 50,000 crew.

one of my players that have more than 2.500XP

Holy crap, Josep! How long have you guys been playing? How much XP do you award per session?

Yeah, at that point your boys probably should be overshadowing the original trilogy characters. That and taking over the universe.

Has anyone at FFG explained why they don't have stats for the Star Wars characters in the book? EotE is the Han Solo RPG yet you can't play Han Solo.

I have never read anything saying why they haven't. I can't think of a good reason they would want to though, so maybe they can't either.

I have two schools of thought on this.

First is that is most people try to max out the skills they use constantly. The same for attributes. Building a 'subpar' or more diversified or balanced character has been ingrained into most of us it seems, from the games we played. 3.x d&d I found to be the worst. The progression mechanics required you to need every bonus possible. Many other games are like this as well. This, has lead to a mentality of be the best or you will constantly fail at everything, that bleeds over to other games. The number of threads and comments ive seen saying to spend starting xp on attributes attest to this.

If a gm is making the game too difficult, the players respond by maximizing their characters in a vicious cycle.

Secondly is the way games present attributes, and this does tie into the above. We see attributes and skills as being the way to mathematically represent our character. But games tend to focus on the physical aspects. I feel that a person excelling at something has, often as much to do with their their personality as often as other factors. But this is hard to quantify, so it gets ignored.

Other symptoms of games are getting the freedom to build the character any way you like. This let's people make the strongest or best individual they can. Traveller has the best character gen system around because it is random, but has logical increases (mostly) on how a character improves/is created. If you havent tried this game, serk out a copy just for character creation.

one of my players that have more than 2.500XP

Holy crap, Josep! How long have you guys been playing? How much XP do you award per session?

Yeah, at that point your boys probably should be overshadowing the original trilogy characters. That and taking over the universe.

XDD Well, we started at 1999. We stop playing about 2 or 3 years abut after that we continued so on. We use to play at least 4-6 hours a week so... yes, more than 2.500xp... and we still need the Force book XDD

About XP assign method, well, we use "personal considerations". My players say "I focus on X skill/talent" and after a few time they ask me if its enough to "level up".

Hedgehobbit, until the moment there are two of them: Lando and Lobot.

in my group, we just hit 800 XP.

My character has two Dedications and 1 level 4 skill. I still haven't felt like I have surpassed the star wars characters in ability and I think that's cool.

Luke was a great pilot, an innocent naive farmboy attitude, but he also had the force and his father's lightsaber. Was he the best pilot in the Rebellion? probably not, but he was good enough to lead Rogue Squadron.

That would be Wedge.

*sarcasum* Yea, Mr "Look at the size of that thing!", the guy who lost ONE of his FOUR engines during the battle of Yavin and had to bail on Luke. Didn't even get a medal at the ceremony and a chance to freely closely look directly down at Liea's boobs

No matter how big you get, a star destroyer in orbit will make any character **** their pants.

I've mentioned it before, but my players are around 500xp (100 base, earned around 400xp at this point) and are pretty tough. They had attacked an imperial base and were fighting off stormtroopers in a hangar while their loading droids moved arms and equipment onto their frigate.

They were doing well picking off groups of stormtroopers as they attacked, even stormtrooper minion groups backed by rivals (captains and sgt's that gave bonuses). They had taken a few hits but by and large they were doing fine. Then an AT-PT showed up. Now this isn't even an AT-ST from the films, this is the more personal-sized one. It fired at the wookie, who was charging a group of stormies - and it dealt 70 damage to him, tossing him across the room, incapacitating him and dealing him yet another crit (his 3rd of the session). Their biggest, baddest PC, with 24 wound threshold and 7 soak, just took a one-shot and almost died.

They scooped him up, distracted the AT-PT for a round and scampered away in their ship.

So really, in this game, 'power' is a very relative thing. Especially when you consider the size of the Black Sun or Hutts organizations, or that Star Destroyers can have upwards of 50,000 crew.

Yea, but that Wookie is called Sir wherever he goes!

It was a wakeup call when the Hutt we'd pissed off put out a bounty big enough to almost interest a top level bounty hunter on a slow day... after someone started looking at the bounty hunter assassin talents and figured out how much damage a sneaky dead-not-alive minded assassin could do.

"New plan: Let the mean bad guys win!"

I don't think this system will, or should, ever approach what major characters in the story ended up being.

Thats why some things are better left without stats. Destroyer Droids, Darth Vader, Luke, and other heroic characters simply don't fit in the system.

Sure, you may be able to hold off a few hundred Storm Troopers. But if they bring in some armored vehicles and heavy weapons you are in trouble no matter how strong you are.

Meanwhile Darth Vader in the same situation wouldn't be in the slightest danger.

Since skills scale in cost as you get better, someone who uses 5 yellow on a skill would be one of the best in the galaxy. most humans would be hard pressed to be at that level.

I mean theoretically, but it's not that huge an investment. I don't like systems that have relatively low caps for Skills (usually 5-6). At least in Edge, that cap is not attainable in chargen (unlike, say, WoD or Shadowrun 4, where you can start with a maxed Skill from the gate). I do like a bigger spread, and being able to start "merely" on the higher levels of professionally competent, versus at the top tier of possibility, and while I feel like Edge succeeded there, I also think that just having 5 ranks in a skill means each skill rank is very broad in the competence it is intended to portray, and that is narratively problematic in some ways.

But with how ability meshes with ranks in a skill there is no true measuring stick that can be used. Is 3Y2G better then 4Y? what is the point in trying to be better when your ability is only a two or three? ...

It all boils down to how you use it, what you do with it, and what else to have to offer.

I would say, unless your build really needs Triumphs to trigger Talents, YYYGG is better than YYYY, simply because it's more dice. But I also agree that it depends what you offer. I have seen medical droids built with 5 Int at chargen. That means throwing GGGGG at a lot of skills (without penalty, usually) and of course tacking on a couple upgrades to that pool for Medicine 2. GGGGG is nothing at all to be ashamed of especially when it's applied to a very versatile bunch of skills. I don't think the same can necessarily be said if you're an optimized Marauder with a Melee dice pool of GGGYY, because high Brawn does not bring near as much to the roundedness or versatility of the character in outside-of-normal-role situations as Intellect or Cunning do.

Has anyone at FFG explained why they don't have stats for the Star Wars characters in the book? EotE is the Han Solo RPG yet you can't play Han Solo.

I'm thankful that they don't for several reasons.

(1) Nobody will ever agree that stats were right, will always raise just pointless subjective arguments constantly

(2) A given character sheet is a screenshot of a character at a particular moment in time. A character 400 XP in is no longer the same person they were at 100 XP in, because of narrative experiences and mechanical experience purchases. You can't just "stat Luke." Luke would have different stats for every movie and virtually every book in the EU as his experience grows. I think Saga addressed this by putting out different stats in different sourcebooks for characters in different levels of power during the metaplot (since its time period sourcebooks went from everything from the Clone Wars to Legacy era). Even the stat block of Lando in (IIRC) JoY says it is Lando at a very specific period of time and shouldn't be taken to represent Lando, necessarily, in ESB or RotJ. Which makes sense, since he would have years more of "experience" to get to that point.

Destroyer Droids, Darth Vader, Luke, and other heroic characters simply don't fit in the system.

Virtually all game systems break down at very high XP levels. It's why the sweet spot for D&D is like 8-14 and why the Storyteller system, particularly OWoD, fell apart at higher ranks - the overall mechanics just don't mesh well with the kinds of dice pools and powers thrown around at that level, particularly when you can never increase things like your HP in OWoD. I am sure there is a point that Edge does not work great either. We see stress points in certain areas even at low XP - optimized Marauders and Jury-Rigged disruptors, for example.

One can adequately represent ANH Luke in this system fairly easily between Fringer and Force-Sensitive Exile. Not everything Force-related Luke does in ANH has to be explained with a particular Force power beyond just a GM giving lots of situational Boosts by being guided by Obi-Wan. But Sense and Enhance (Agility) don't hurt in the long term.

You can't really do the same for Vader without giving him a couple Characteristics at 7 (from cyber) and Skills at 5-6. A character can get here with time, but will never get the ranks of Adversary on top of it, and we won't have adequate Force rules for characters like Vader, Yoda, Palpy, or any Jedi from the PT and TCW until F&D is released, at least.

Luke was a great pilot, an innocent naive farmboy attitude, but he also had the force and his father's lightsaber. Was he the best pilot in the Rebellion? probably not, but he was good enough to lead Rogue Squadron.

That would be Wedge.

*sarcasum* Yea, Mr "Look at the size of that thing!", the guy who lost ONE of his FOUR engines during the battle of Yavin and had to bail on Luke. Didn't even get a medal at the ceremony and a chance to freely closely look directly down at Liea's boobs

Put it this way at the Battle of Yavin Luke took a hit from TIE pilot Minon #3 and had to have Wedge bail him out. Wedge took a hit from Darth Vader, lost an engine, and only pulled out because Luke ordered him too do so.

Now lets look at the Battle of Hoth Luke gets shot down before he can bring down a walker while Wedge brings down a walker and survives the battle with his speeder intact.

Though I think Lando could probably outfly Wedge the way e had the Falcon flying at Endor, The tunnel run especially.

I recommend in this case playing it dumb in regards to your question since it is a meta meta game question that has no bearing. While ur players may know the ot backwards and forwards and quote every line from the tcw cartoon, so what? The characters wouldn't know Luke Skywalker from Han Solo. They would know what they did but they wouldn't have all the details the players had of their story. So doing a comparison is not all that important at least on a point by point basis because ironically the ot crew isn't the standard to the rules if anything they will probably be the exception. Meaning that they would not use the same character generation format so it makes the comparison even more irrelevant. So I think the better question is what character or universe scale of power do your players want to be? Some people just like making their way in the universe and others want to make a name in it. Also define power? Jabba's wasn't a physical match for even threepio but his power was derived from the fear of the hutts in general. Mon Mothma or admiral Ackbar in a firefight I am not sure how well they would fair based only on OT. However, they had a lot of 'power' at their disposal.

I would actually look at skills for EotE as actually being out of 10 and not 5.

There are 10 progressive level combinations for Skill/Proficiency.

G

Y

YG

YY

YYG

YYY

YYYG

YYYY

YYYYG

YYYYY

PCs will all be somewhere in the bolded section to start off with for any of the major skills they're focusing on.

And that's just progressive skill. We also have the combinations where either skill or an attribute is high but the other one is not. So you might have a character with 4 green and only a single yellow.

So skill progression isn't exactly linear. You have to have both training and natural ability to reach the higher levels.

I would actually look at skills for EotE as actually being out of 10 and not 5.

There are 10 progressive level combinations for Skill/Proficiency.

G

Y

YG

YY

YYG

YYY

YYYG

YYYY

YYYYG

YYYYY

You forgot 5Y1G and 5Y2G. The base attributes themselves max out at six, and can be boosted to a total of 7 by cybernetics.

So skill progression isn't exactly linear. You have to have both training and natural ability to reach the higher levels.

Correct. If your attribute is low, you can max out the skill at 5, and you'll never get better unless/until you use Dedication or Cybernetics to boost the attribute -- but you're better off saving the Cybernetics boost for last, once the attribute hits 6.