What is up, GamerNation! The Order 66 Podcast will be welcoming Lead Developer Andrew Fischer and Developer Jason Marker back the show to discuss YOUR questions about Stay on Target!

The show will be simulcast live on Saturday, Jan. 31 at 8:00pm CST - and we want your questions! Curious about some of the new ships? Specializations? The new species or equipment? Get those questions in and have them addressed by the Devs!

Please post your questions for Fisch and Jason right here in this thread. But, we will have A HARD CUTOFF OF MONDAY, JAN. 26 to get all questions in! (We need to give the FFG staffers time to review them.)

As usual (you all know the drill), Andy and Jason cannot and will not be able to answer or address any questions about future material or products not yet released. So if we get those questions, we're not going to kill the air-time by asking them for a predetermined answer of "I cannot comment."

Please, get your questions in! And we hope to see you all in live chat for the simulcast on the 31st! (http://www.ustream.tv/channel/d20radio).

Peace, Love and Good Gaming!

GM Chris

Oooh lots of good question potential.

First questions:

With the three new specializations for the ace career all focusing on vehicles or vehicular combat (with the beast for the Beast Rider being an obvious stand-in for a vehicle), the Signature Abilities created for the Ace seem an obvious choice. Both center around the role of the pilot. This leaves the Gunner and to an extent the Rigger specialization as the odd duck. If a player were to play an Ace: Gunner to fill the role of gunman in a Y-Wing, he or she is left with a conundrum when it comes to the Ace signature abilities. Both abilities require the character to be piloting the ship. What about the Ace: Rigger who fills the role ship's engineer and not the pilot? Could the character still use Unmatched survivability to keep the ship going even if the character is stuck in the engineering bay?

Second Question:

With the release of the Xexto, many were expecting rules to handle combat checks made by characters with more than 2 limbs. Would you offer any advice on how a GM should adjudicate a combat check with a Xexto wielding 3 or 4 pistols? By the rules as written they would they only be able to use 2 in a single turn. Should a character be allowed to fire 3 or more weapons in a single turn?

Since errata for Age seems to take an age (bad pun intended), let me sneak these in:

Page 56: The R-60 "T-wing" Interceptor is listed as having proton torpedo launchers, but the game stat line is that of concussion missile launchers (Damage 6; Critical 3; Blast 4, Breach 4, Guided 3). Should this fighter have proton torpedoes (requiring a change to the game stat line) or should it mount concussion missile launchers (with the given stat line)?

Page 59: The TIE Hunter description says it has four linked medium laser cannons, but the stat line only has Linked 1 (indicating two linked laser cannons) rather than Linked 3. Which is correct, the description or the stat line?

Page 60: The TIE Phantom description says it has five linked light laser cannons, but the stat line says medium laser cannons (and has Damage 6, which is appropriate for medium laser cannons). Which is correct, the description or the stat line?

How was it decided which starfighter models were included in the book?

Dang, now I'm wishing I hadn't ordered it to ship with Lords of Nal Hutta...but I guess it will be twice the joy when it finally arrives.

This book introduces the idea of a 'refitted' ship, more specifically the 'Heavy 95'. I have a player who currently has a Z-95 and wishes to upgrade without having to buy a Heavy 95. How best should I handle the refitting from a cost and mechanical standpoint?

Two questions about the DR-45 Dragoon?

What was the intention behind allowing it to swap between Ranged Light and Ranged Heavy?

What attachments can go into the weapon?

On the DR-45 Dragoon, please compare and contrast with other heavy blaster pistols, carbines, and rifles. Why does it have only one point of Encumbrance? Why is it not Restricted?

On the Rigger specialization, why does it have so many talents each of which seems to be as useful as Tinkerer or Jury Rigged? No other specialization has more than two or three such highly useful and unique talents, yet Rigger seems to have eight or nine of them?

My understanding was that one of the guiding principles of the game system was to strive for balance, and if any career or specialization was so over or under weighted relative to all the others that it was an obvious “must have” or “must avoid at all costs”, then the game wasn’t balanced properly.

Yet, now we have Rigger, and it seems obvious to me that this is now a “must have” specialization for anyone who has a ship. I could see this many talents being spread across multiple specializations in a whole career like Mechanic or Technician, but not a single specialization in the first career expansion in the AoR system.

So, what am I missing here? Are all of the new specializations for all the other careers going to be as good as Rigger?

Time for some hard questions without the glaze of being a star-struck fan and some objective discussion about how things are/aren't working as I've seen them over the last 12 or so months.

I am not a troll or being nasty and I've actually got a decent enough rep here for being helpful towards others.

But, if you don't want to touch this with a 40ft pole because it'll cause your guests to be offended I'd understand, its hard to be critical sometimes and I understand its hard to take criticism as well.

Sorry its not succinct, but there's a lot to explain.

The 800lb gorilla vs the 800lb pane of glass
Biggest problem facing the addition of new ships, starfighters and so forth into the game is that the crux of where the most complaints are coming from is that it's not scaling well. Especially at the Starfighter level-
The ships are very expensive and get broken way too easily.

Shielding is a mere setback dice for each pip covered, which does very little 1/3 of the time
Silhouette is more important than anything else skill or talent based, because it determines how hard it is to hit
Combat growth over time gets progressively more lethal as gunnery increases, while defences, system strain, difficulty to hit and hull resilience remain the same.

Essentially, its rocket-tag death match, those that go first, kill first.

A lot of people will reference back to the movies that 'starfighters go pop' really quickly, however, movies are plot driven and the hero will survive depending on how the writer deems them to endure. This isn't a movie, we set a scene admittedly which is cinematic, but whatever happens past that comes down to "statistics".
We can manipulate 'what' the characters will fight, how many and where, but as both a long suffering GM and a Player (with the Ace spec) it isn't in my or the players best interests to do anything more than arbitrate what the dice land as after they're thrown and to "fudge it for plot" so there's not any consequences would cheapen the experience for everyone.

It should be dangerous, no one disagrees with that.

But at the very start of a character's Piloting career or even middling amounts of xp, if you engage in starfighter combat, you will get your ship wrecked in very short order. Welcome to the high excitement of sitting in a busted-ass fighter and watching the galaxy spin... and hopefully the enemy doesn't shoot you up for amusement.

It is literally a waste of time, even 2-3 TIE's will make short order of anyone, even if you've got some NPC friendlies along for the ride. As much as I like the mass combat rules and they're eminently workable, using NPC friends as 'Ablative Armour' so to speak, really doesn't sit well with me and cheapens my own or other players efforts in their struggle.

Heck after a few missions, when you're the only one coming back out of a squadron of 6 rookies, that's going to incur some "nasty rep" that you don't look after your wing mates!

This doesn't scale over time even with about 300-350 odd xp into Ace talents and some decent levels of Skills in the relevant areas, I still dread starship combat.
Unless I go first, I will probably get shot down.
Doesn't matter if I have all the trick talents, want to pull off some evasive manoeuvres and a good piloting skill- they're all actions and moves to get up and running, so if you're 2nd off the blocks, you're still last at the end of the race. Likewise when I'm GM'ing, if my poor NPC's don't get to go first, then they're going to do nothing but eat lasers, missiles and die worthlessly in very short order.

However, there was the time I had an Entertainer-Assassin Character who like to stab and shoot people for well... "entertainment" and the difference between it and my Slicer-Pilot is that the Entertainer wasn't too fussed if I didn't get lucky enough to go first, there was a backup to moderate the chance I get unlucky and statistically the dice hate me:
Anytime Reactions- Dodge at 3 ranks!
Pilots get nothing like that and it really does, literally kill what they can do.
Rigger has gone 'some' way to helping, however adding 1-2 armour, hull or strain isn't really adding that much when you're going to eat some big damage that you can't really do much about.

Synopsis for the TL-DR crowd
Go first or die, it's too easy to hit and mechanically has some huge holes in the system that I don't know how they made it through the betas.

But, it needs to be addressed as it's a black mark against what is actually one of the best games of its type in years.

I'm strongly backing this set of questions. It would look *good* and almost unheard-of coming from a tabletop game company where the default stance tends to be "Ignore it until release" followed by "well it's out now so it wouldn't be right to change it". That's some serious good-press and can only make things better, since holes in a system get spread far and wide even if they're unaddressed!

Right now, ship customization is extremely limited. Starfighters in fact often have 0 or 1 hardpoint, and many upgrades require 2. However, given these are *attachments* it's acceptable on the basis that these are literally spare hardpoints for quickly installing extra systems (to the point where it takes mere hours and a workbench to completely plate a YT with a new layer of armor!). That said: when will we get crafting/upgrade rules that cover things such as this? Not "if", "When".

Shields do nothing 1/3 of the time, very little 1/3 of the time, and help *dodge* 1/3 of the time. Piloting/Handling do nothing for avoiding hits, and a single concussion missile can instantly vaporize an entire *WING* of fighters. There's not even a "why?" to be asked here. The only question is "FIX IT". It does not require a whole book, but it does require something that's marked *official* as a remedy

The basic game system, the dice, the way it's all written are excellent. I won't give exact names (partly because that would be a good paragraph of its own) but many games don't get this kind of "this needs repairs now" attitude from people. When they don't, it's usually because it wasn't good enough to bother. There's great things in EotE/AoR, but when the little TPK-heavy details get in the way of Star Wars having wars in the stars, we gotta do somethin!

I'm looking forward to sitting in echo base for this one. It was fun to be part of the project, but Andy is the producer, and really carried the vision for the whole book.

I can comment if briefly on the "whoever goes first, wins" in terms of Starfighter combat. The assumption made is that people start shooting as soon as initiative is rolled, so that nobody has a chance to assume a defensive posture. My suggestion for any form of Starfighter combat is that initiative is rolled at when fighters are well outside of close range that one full round must be spent to close the distance, and pilots are actively trying not to be hit. Evasive manuevers are perhaps the most important thing that any pilot needs to be making at the beginning of an engagement. Get your opponent to start throwing red dice when they're attacking, which allows for the spending of advantage/threat and triumph/despair. Basic narrative is used evasive maneuvers, and then try to gain the advantage and line up an effective shot.

When will I get to see it here in the Netherlands?

**** the Holidays really threw a spanner in the FFG releases here man... No Stay on Target, no End of the World Zombie Apocalypse... I am yearning for these books!

I can comment if briefly on the "whoever goes first, wins" in terms of Starfighter combat. The assumption made is that people start shooting as soon as initiative is rolled, so that nobody has a chance to assume a defensive posture. My suggestion for any form of Starfighter combat is that initiative is rolled at when fighters are well outside of close range that one full round must be spent to close the distance, and pilots are actively trying not to be hit. Evasive manuevers are perhaps the most important thing that any pilot needs to be making at the beginning of an engagement. Get your opponent to start throwing red dice when they're attacking, which allows for the spending of advantage/threat and triumph/despair. Basic narrative is used evasive maneuvers, and then try to gain the advantage and line up an effective shot.

Remember that most starfighters only have a sensor range of Close, and this can only be extended out to Short through active use. This means that any targets they can detect are already in range of missiles and torpedoes. Unless the assumption is that fighters are always going to go evasive, then knowing when to go evasive when targets are beyond your sensor range is either blind luck or metagaming.

Nothing I've seen indicates that AWACS exists in Star Wars to address this issue, but maybe the Commander book will give us something.

I'm looking forward to sitting in echo base for this one. It was fun to be part of the project, but Andy is the producer, and really carried the vision for the whole book.

I can comment if briefly on the "whoever goes first, wins" in terms of Starfighter combat. The assumption made is that people start shooting as soon as initiative is rolled, so that nobody has a chance to assume a defensive posture. My suggestion for any form of Starfighter combat is that initiative is rolled at when fighters are well outside of close range that one full round must be spent to close the distance, and pilots are actively trying not to be hit. Evasive manuevers are perhaps the most important thing that any pilot needs to be making at the beginning of an engagement. Get your opponent to start throwing red dice when they're attacking, which allows for the spending of advantage/threat and triumph/despair. Basic narrative is used evasive maneuvers, and then try to gain the advantage and line up an effective shot.

I think you're massively overselling how effective a single difficulty upgrade is. Even spending a round angling shields forward, boosting shields, and evasively maneuvering (pool) you only reduce your chance to be hit by ~20% (pool). You still have a 50% chance to be hit by a PC with Agi 4/Gunnery 2 (not an unreasonable pool, and one accessible even to non-pilots via the Advanced Targeting Array modification).

Most fighters have Concussion Missiles (minimum damage 7/breach 4) or Proton Torpedos (9/B6), which are guaranteed to pop any TIEs smaller than a TIE/D or any A-Wings/interceptors in a single hit, and can destroy *any* starfighter in a single hit if you get 2A/1T and trigger Linked. This makes running enemy Aces *really* hard- you can't have long-running dogfights where they trade the upper hand as Gain the Advantage implies is supposed to happen, as any time you spend an action to GtA you're missing a 50:50 chance to just straight up kill the other ship.

Even if the opponent has Nemesis, GtA still offers a minimal increase in hit chance compared to just shooting them (evading Nemesis 2, non-evading, non-boosted Nemesis 2). Whilst the book describes Ace v. Ace rivalries, it doesn't offer any mechanics to make them plausible.

E: Plus there's not really any way for a damaged Ace to flee- their ship simply goes from AOK to zero. Equally, there's no way to *kill* an enemy Ace- my PCs decided to try, and spent 3 rounds firing at a broken ship before I drove them off with reinforcements. They needed to score ~5-7 crits before they had a decent chance to actually kill the guy. Equally, he had no practical response- if I had him eject, he'd be silhouette 1 and the difficulty to hit would only be increased by 1, making him a sitting duck. Obviously I can house rule around this but it's still a bit disappointing the book spends a lot of time describing things it then fails to provide mechanical support for.

Remember that most starfighters only have a sensor range of Close, and this can only be extended out to Short through active use. This means that any targets they can detect are already in range of missiles and torpedoes. Unless the assumption is that fighters are always going to go evasive, then knowing when to go evasive when targets are beyond your sensor range is either blind luck or metagaming.

Nothing I've seen indicates that AWACS exists in Star Wars to address this issue, but maybe the Commander book will give us something.

Fair points from both you and Talkie, but keep in mind that anytime we've seen Starfighter combat in any of the Star Wars films, the snubfighters are never without some degree of wider support. While AWACs may not necessarily exist in a formal sense, we know from the films that they always had some broader support. The base on Yavin IV informing those launching the raid on the Death Star that they had a new set of signals, incoming fighters. Being on alert, the fighters were prepared for incoming TIEs before they saw them. Scanner range wasn't an issue at Endor, because again, capital ship support was able to coordinate their actions.

I think you're massively overselling how effective a single difficulty upgrade is. Even spending a round angling shields forward, boosting shields, and evasively maneuvering (pool) you only reduce your chance to be hit by ~20% (pool). You still have a 50% chance to be hit by a PC with Agi 4/Gunnery 2 (not an unreasonable pool, and one accessible even to non-pilots via the Advanced Targeting Array modification).

Looking at the Ace TIE pilot, this is true... but Aces are supposed to be scary. The presence of an Ace in an encounter certainly makes for a much more difficult fight. After all, Darth Vader pretty much one-shotted every ship at Yavin with basic laser cannons, save for the one(s) protected by plot armor. Using the same dice rolling app for basic minion TIE pilots, the chances are quite a bit lower, and the TIEs will be generating more threat than advantages even if they hit.

I think it depends on what you're trying to do with a dogfight encounter. What's the purpose of it? Simply engaging in a furball and shooting down as many enemy fighters as possible is rarely the objective of a dogfight, and frankly not a good use of resources from the standpoint of the rebels. In building encounters, players need an objective beyond "shoot everything". Usually something else is happening...

For example, the players are part of a strike team, escorting a flight of B-wings into their target. Opposing them are several minion TIEs with one Ace at the lead. From the perspective of the TIE Ace, the players are not the target, the B-wings are. So the Ace's primary objective are NPC B-wings, but it's up to the PCs to keep the b-wings alive long enough so they can deliver their payload to the mission target. In this case, the Ace is not specifically after the PCs, but it is up to the PCs to either draw fire away from the B-wings or shoot down the TIEs as they attempt to line up on the B-wings. Part of this could even be run as a chase.

I think you're massively overselling how effective a single difficulty upgrade is. Even spending a round angling shields forward, boosting shields, and evasively maneuvering (pool) you only reduce your chance to be hit by ~20% (pool). You still have a 50% chance to be hit by a PC with Agi 4/Gunnery 2 (not an unreasonable pool, and one accessible even to non-pilots via the Advanced Targeting Array modification).

Looking at the Ace TIE pilot, this is true... but Aces are supposed to be scary. The presence of an Ace in an encounter certainly makes for a much more difficult fight. After all, Darth Vader pretty much one-shotted every ship at Yavin with basic laser cannons, save for the one(s) protected by plot armor. Using the same dice rolling app for basic minion TIE pilots, the chances are quite a bit lower, and the TIEs will be generating more threat than advantages even if they hit.

I think it depends on what you're trying to do with a dogfight encounter. What's the purpose of it? Simply engaging in a furball and shooting down as many enemy fighters as possible is rarely the objective of a dogfight, and frankly not a good use of resources from the standpoint of the rebels. In building encounters, players need an objective beyond "shoot everything". Usually something else is happening...

For example, the players are part of a strike team, escorting a flight of B-wings into their target. Opposing them are several minion TIEs with one Ace at the lead. From the perspective of the TIE Ace, the players are not the target, the B-wings are. So the Ace's primary objective are NPC B-wings, but it's up to the PCs to keep the b-wings alive long enough so they can deliver their payload to the mission target. In this case, the Ace is not specifically after the PCs, but it is up to the PCs to either draw fire away from the B-wings or shoot down the TIEs as they attempt to line up on the B-wings. Part of this could even be run as a chase.

I think you might've missed my comment that the player's dice pool is often that size. Yes, you might want an Ace to be scary and able to one-shot most players (though as pointed out that makes rivalries hard) but any pilot, gunner, or agility-oriented player with 5k to spare for an Advanced Targeting System (only 4k and rarity 4) has a 50:50 or better chance of shooting an Ace out of the sky in round 1, even if they're doing everything they can to protect themselves.

As a result 'Protect the B-Wings' will basically boil down to 'Shoot the Ace'. You don't really have any other options. He deals way more damage than anything else, but dies just as easily. Any objective-based combat will still suffer from the fact that the defensive options are so vastly inferior to the offensive ones that 'Gank the DPS' is the only sensible thing to do.

Plus, whilst fighter duels might not be a great idea in-universe, surely you can accept it's remiss that a Star Wars system doesn't support them? (Putting aside the fact that from Gain the Advantage it's clear that it intends to, and that SoT encourages them)

The rules are actually kinda *worse* for chases- I run an EotE campaign, and a lot of space combat occurs as chases. Chases almost always end near-immediately as once the two ships involved share a range band there's better than even odds that one of them will be dead by the end of the round. Plus, given most ship weapons are Close range, if you drop out of that position then you just spend round after round just rolling opposed Piloting until you decide they're far enough away. If you add in terrain to make it interesting, you run into the odd issues with larger vehicles with multiple crew being waaay better at navigating terrain than fighters due to Copilot, Plot Course and Damage Control (a Sil 4 ship won't have any more Sil upgrades than a Sil 3 one, but can reduce the difficulty multiple times, discard the Setback from terrain, and double-maneuver as many times as it wants).

Okay, perhaps I misunderstood, but your argument initially seemed that the space combat system was too dangerous for PCs, not too easy. Maybe a question to be posed to Andy and Jason for this particular podcast would be to ask about suggestions for encounter building with dogfights.

When I was doing the dogfight encounters section with SoT, I wanted to make sure that things like ship facing mattered in encounters like that, but would still be handled narratively. On page 74, under the "Move!" title, that pilots need to indicate what direction their craft is pointed. So someone running away from TIE fighters cannot in the same turn choose to fire their forward mounted weapons at the same fighters. Yet this isn't handled mechanically, but rather narratively,

Outside of this, if push really comes to shove, I'd even go so far to say that pilots need to win an opposed piloting check OR have Gained the Advantage in the previous turn in order to bring their weapons to bear.

Okay, perhaps I misunderstood, but your argument initially seemed that the space combat system was too dangerous for PCs, not too easy. Maybe a question to be posed to Andy and Jason for this particular podcast would be to ask about suggestions for encounter building with dogfights.

When I was doing the dogfight encounters section with SoT, I wanted to make sure that things like ship facing mattered in encounters like that, but would still be handled narratively. On page 74, under the "Move!" title, that pilots need to indicate what direction their craft is pointed. So someone running away from TIE fighters cannot in the same turn choose to fire their forward mounted weapons at the same fighters. Yet this isn't handled mechanically, but rather narratively,

Outside of this, if push really comes to shove, I'd even go so far to say that pilots need to win an opposed piloting check OR have Gained the Advantage in the previous turn in order to bring their weapons to bear.

I'm afraid you misread- my first post was about the difficulties of using enemy Aces (my PCs wish they could get the Nemesis talent!). Equally though, all of the points about how it's too easy to down an Ace *do* also apply to PCs. As HappyDaze pointed out, starfighter combat is rocket tag, and the only counter you suggested was to spend a round preparing, which I showed offers a fairly small benefit (reducing the odds of a round 1 instakill from ~70% to 50%).

I think some sort of section outlining how to handle fire arcs when the relative facing isn't narratively obvious (e.g. most dogfights after round 1) with those solutions would've helped- the core rules, for example, assume it's not and that fighters take hits on whatever facing they want. Will there be more extensive guidelines coming in any other vehicle-focused suppliments?

It's also worth noting that reducing silhouette by 1 does *not* affect Starfighter vs Starfighter combat: It takes both the talent *and* a set of jammers to make it harder to hit, say, an A-Wing.

Even the Rigger upgrades may, alltogether, increase the total-system-failure level from 2 medium lasers to 3 medium lasers - assuming enemy gunnery did *not* follow all your XP.

Better starfighters are *significantly* rarer and more expensive than crud that was already outdated before the clone-wars, for the sake of balance, but then are, when you get down to the mechanics in-practice, not much better (and just as quickly annihilated), also for the sake of balance. "Balancing" at both ends left it without a tasty middle: Let us not forget that you could for half that cost simply buy a silhouette 4 ship and more than double your survivability, firepower and action and XP economies!

Again, though. We wouldn't be this insistent if we didn't love the rest of the system, and there's so much awesome the game *deserves* to be just as great in space.

It sounds to me that the topic of "Rocket Tag" and "First in initiative wins" could be a show topic in of itself.

Is the Slave Circuit vehicle mod useless without the Remote DVI Activator from Suns of Fortune and vice versa? If they do function independently, why would anyone buy the 10,000 credit mod that uses a valuable ship hardpoint instead of picking up the 1,500 credit piece of equipment? If you do need both, then why aren't they both in the same book, instead of two different books in two different product lines?

Are Increase Power, Watch Your Back!, and Target Lock only supposed to be usable by astromechs in sockets? Only Watch Your Back! specifically mentions the socket. Since astromechs get these extra maneuvers and actions as well as the ability to store hyperspace routes to make astrogation simpler do they get any balancing drawbacks? If not, is it simply worse to be any other kind of mechanic droid?

I don't know if other kinds of droids get something to compensate (I hope they do, and if they don't that requires fixing) but Astromechs are generally exactly what you are supposed to slot into a starfighter socket. They're a second crew position without the life-support requirement, 'balanced' by the fact that they're basically worthless when not interfacing with machines for you. Actually can you even install a different droid into the astromech socket? I don't mean just SCOMP-linking, I mean the socket itself.

However, it would be good if other droids have some maneuvers of their own. If one of those walking generator things can boost weapon and shield-power for example, or perhaps help compensate for any overcharging acts...

On a Saturday?! I'll def be chilling in the chat room for the live broadcast.

So, any chance the 'harder' questions will be covered?

It's not like it would be too much work: only choosing a few from the myriad of solutions - many of them workable - provided, and stuffing them into an errata document to be official. Could be as easy as five minutes and copy-paste. People who love these games can and have worked out viable solutions and I'm pretty sure no one's asking for royalties on errata.

Most importantly though that would be one of the few (if not maybe even one of the first) times that a system with some serious holes in it actually gets them something other than denied by the creators, but actually gets them plugged. I can't imagine "Oh yeah and they listened to players so the space combat system's amazing now" would make bad press!