Donovan, you had a good post going there until the last paragraph threw in a bash on another member.

Personally I think he's right. Erik doesn't play the games and isn't interested in AoR. The board is just a vehicle for him to be a gushing fanboy about his overpowered Jedi fantasies. Donovan was correct when he advised me to ignore Erik and not to rise to the troll bait, because Erik loves it when he can derail a thread with arguments.

I'm a GM for EoE and AoR campaigns; therefore it's a matter of supreme importance to me that F&D is well balanced. I don't assume it will be a perfect balance, because anyone who fills the Move tree and can demolish half a dozen ATATs with a single gesture is always going to be more potent than some guy who's good with a gun or good at diplomacy.

BUT I have faith that FFG left F&D 'til last for a reason, and that the three games will be as balanced as humanly possible.

Or are you just hoping your gm will run the campaign as an advanced one that let's you start with 500 bonus xp?

Ghost, the guy doesn't have a GM, he doesn't play the games, he's not interested in the rules.

He's admitted this board is just a way to get attention, to drone on about how uber the Jedi are, and spam posts with multiple WW2/EU pictures. (I recall he once derailed a Beta thread for over 50 pages; we ended up talking about Red Dwarf, I think!)

The huge irony is that if he actually played the games, he might actually live out some of his overpowered fantasies, assuming he could find a GM tolerant enough to let him go overboard.

I mean... it's ErikB. Even if you share the same opinions it's hard to get along.

I'm extremely pro-Alliance and anti-Empire, and Erik even managed to annoy me with his antics.

Plenty of people on here have tried to engage him, I even offered to send him my spare Beta rules so he could get into the game.

For a more palatable video game reference, at least there's also a nod to the game X-Wing (the destruction of the Invincible that was the goal of the first campaign (which I did twice before I was "supposed to", most inaccurate starship name ever )). Not a bad game to keep in mind for a starfighter-based AOR campaign, either, though I'd use fewer escort missions.

As for the book itself, no huge surprises from the beta version. Love the artwork, no major screw-ups stood out beyond possibly under-costing the second Indistinguishable talent in Ambassador (assuming it's not supposed to be 5xp). A little more info on suggested Duty rewards would have been nice, as other folks mentioned, but all in all a pretty good book really.

The Invincible has never eally been a good name for a ship as real world history could attest to (Wrecked on Sandbar, wrecked on Norfolk coast, renamed, sank during a storm, blew up and sank after taking a hit in the Battle of Jutland)

One problem with the X-wing series of games is that the ships had no "armor" to soak up damage, and just relied on Hit points. I could take out a Solo Star Destroyer with nothing but a TIE fighter in the game. Took a while, but it was possible

Yeah the tendency of ships named invincible to be destroyed easily was mentioned in a military scifi series I read. The solution of the characters was to recommission an Alien super battleship (Roughly a Super Star Destroyer to a Battleship's Star Destroyer) they had captured and name it invincible so that their navy couldn't name any more fragile ships invincible.

Hey, I'm reading that right now!

Just got mine today (5 business days from MM to Toronto - a new record!).

Only flipped through to look at the art, which is as fantastic as you'd expect. In particular, the painting on page 49 of the X-wing pilot trying to drag her Astromech out of her fighter with a handheld suction cup cracked me right up!

Can't wait to read this, since I skipped the beta...

[EDIT: also, I find the red of the cover quite pleasing to my eye.]