This is a question which spans all three FFG Star Wars RPG games. I'm posting it here because this appears to be the busiest subforum. My question is, do people combine the rules and roles of all three games? I bought and played EofE, beginner game. Now I've bought FaD. I'm bummed that FFG's approach is to create three different games, with a lot of redundancy, instead of one containing all the character types. I'm guessing that it is trivial to combine types from the different games. Say I wanted to have a game with bounty hunters and Jedi. Thanks for your help.

People do combine all three games and they appear to run fine alongside each other.

Really, the biggest complication seems to revolve around whether everyone or only specific characters should use Obligation, Duty, and/or Morality.

In my group, some of the characters use Duty and others use Morality. Eventually, everyone might end up using Duty based on how the story goes. Right now, nobody is using Obligation because nobody is playing an Edge career (and none of us really like being punished into roleplaying rather than enticed ).

As far as I'm concerned there's only one game. The three core books are just clever marketing to force us to buy more stuff.

Choose one or two of the options you like best between Morality, Duty, and Obligation. I recommend not doing all three just because it's a bit much to keep track of. Our group is currently doing Obligation for everybody, and morality if you're a force user.

Ditto

I hate to be 'that guy' but seriously, does no one use the search field? This question comes up on a near weekly basis. Perhaps someone should make a nice, well written and formatted post then ask the moderators to sticky it or something. FFG has said from the beginning the games are intended to focus on each of the three iconic aspects of Star Wars for fans and can each be played separately but are built to work together as one complete Star Wars galaxy as well. Each subsequent book offers a little more insight on how you can bring the three systems together primarily in regards to balancing things like the Morality, Obligation, Duty systems and rewarding players.

Idea: Rebel soldier characters escorting young force sensitive characters need help from characters with smuggler ship to fly under the radar or the Empire. All three games in one.

As SplitLight says... it's one game, with three flavours. This way, we addicts buy more books

And it's way, way easier to play them all together than - say - the FFG 40K lines or White Wolf's World of Darkness. This may be the first SW game I've played where the Force-users are well-balanced against the muggles.

I run 4 or 5 different groups across all three versions, in a shared galaxy, and some of the players have transitioned between the groups. One of the AOR characters hooked up with a smuggler consortium (who are now Alliance privateers with Letter of Marque to attack Imperials), and one of the F&D characters ran away to join her lover in the Alliance. They all fit in seamlessly.

The only issue, as someone said, is whether you use Obligation, Duty or Morality. But I didn't bother with any of them and the game still runs fine.

The redundancy is for those odd few (and I don't mean that derogatorily; most people will buy all three core books) who want to just play a rebellion campaign or a "scum and villainy" campaign and don't want to be bothered with the other aspects. When/if your intention is to have all three, it's a tiny bit annoying, or at least it was for me. But I remember that they're supposed to be stand-alone books.

As been said over and over, they're completely compatible. I haven’t been able to find one instance where there is major incompatibility.

I considered how to mix things for my game.

So far we are just cruising along a modified path for the EoE starter set. Modified PC's based loosely off the ones presented in the kit. The PC's will be shooting off on their own soon.
Pash the Human Scoundrel / Lohwrick the Wookie Marauder / Matthus the Human Mechanic / Oskara the Twi'lek Gadgeteer

Since two of the PC's were interested in being force users, I made them all go through Morality at character generation, then I am trying to link both Obligation and Duty to their personal Morality. Basically, Obligations are pulling them to the dark path and Duty calling them to the light. Obligations things the dark side forces on you, Duties what your better self will step up to do. For instance, our Wookie pit slave chose an Obligation to hunt down and kill the Trandoshan slavers that enslaved him and killed his people, it wears on his conscious, leads him to violence and hatred, yet he choose a related Duty to help slaves everywhere. Looks like our Wookie is planning to become a force sensitive emergent pretty soon too, so even more fun.

So far the **** players are being incredibly good a being really nice guys and trying to avoid unnecessary confrontation and death, straying to far to the right. So next session I'm going to be using some Obligations against them to fix that a little.

What is interesting is that I can use both Duty and Obligation for elements in the same story. Especially fun when I get to torment one PC with both in the same session. Lots of moral Quandries for the PC's I hope.

Idea: Rebel soldier characters escorting young force sensitive characters need help from characters with smuggler ship to fly under the radar or the Empire. All three games in one.

Here's a campaign idea on a similar theme: Aging Exiled Jedi requires '...A Fast Ship...' to neutral planet. No Questions Asked... oh wait, **** it, somebody made it into a film

And it's way, way easier to play them all together than - say - the FFG 40K lines or White Wolf's World of Darkness.

Well, in regards to 40K that wasn't entirely FFG's doing. They got handed the ruleset for Dark Heresy, which was initially devised by Black Industries based upon the core mechanics in the WFRP 1st and 2nd edition RPGs, and were told to use that same ruleset to make RPG books for Rogue Traders and Space Marines, while also trying to accommodate those GMs that would want to combine the three. The system used for Dark Heresy and pre-3e WFRP worked good for those games because the PCs aren't meant to be mighty heroes, but rather are the lowest of the low and just trying to survive.

For White Wolf, the intent with the original WoD was that there would be little to no cross-over between the lines. Rather foolish of them, but then White Wolf's design team of that day and age had their particular notions of how things should be done and could get "testy" or "prickly" towards the people that went against those notions. The 20th Anniversary editions have improved quite a bit, and do take steps to accommodate the other lines in terms of what happens when a vampire, a werewolf, a mage, and a changeling walk into a bar. But I think it's also a very different team of developers that are doing the 20th Anniversary books, which probably helps.

For FFG, the fiasco of having to use the Dark Heresy rules as the foundation for two other game lines featuring increasingly more powerful character types probably did count towards "lessons learned" in terms of what not to do when it came to making the various books in their Star Wars line be compatible with one another. As has been noted, that Force users don't automatically rule the roost as they could easily do in prior RPGs, and are maybe even lag a wee bit behind in the very early going, helps illustrate that one of FFG's core design precepts was allowing the three lines to be used interchangeably and not cause major balance issues.

Oh yes, totally agree that the FFG SW game benefitted from earlier work done on the 40K and the WHFRP systems. You can see how it's streamlined and how earnestly they tried to balance all character types.

(And the 40K lines suffer from the fact that - in the lore - Space Marines have to be invincible super-heroes, while in the wargame they're not that much better than other troops. Something they averted with the Jedi this time around.)

And yes, I kind of figured that WW didn't like you mixing their lines, but I never met anyone who didn't. I never ran the second set of games, but I understand they were far more compatible.

And yes, I kind of figured that WW didn't like you mixing their lines, but I never met anyone who didn't. I never ran the second set of games, but I understand they were far more compatible.

Likewise, I took part in a number of cross-over games between the White Wolf Old WoD lines. Never played much of the New WoD, but by that point I think they'd realized that folks were going to do cross-over games anyway and bowed to the inevitable.

It's worth noting that in terms of background fluff the Jedi get a lot of hype, but I think that's due to the core problem of most of the named Jedi we see in action are exceptional individuals; the honor roll students of the class as it were. I liked that in Force and Destiny it's made pretty clear from the get-go that the PCs are not Jedi (especially starting out) and so aren't going to be as potent right out the gate, and they don't have the benefit of being the "Chosen One" that Anakin (and to a slightly lesser extent Luke) had going for him. Instead, they have to earn that power the same way any other PC in this system has to, slowly and with XP.

True, depending on the build an EotE or AoR PC may not be as "flashy" as a FaD PC can be; Move and Influence can be two incredibly potent powers for a PC that's devoted XP to both the power and up'ing their Force Rating, with even Autofire having a tough time matching up to the damage of three Silhouette 2 objects hurled from long range. But what the EotE and AoR PCs might lack in flashy tricks, they generally make up for in reliability of their talents and skill. I've got a PC in my FaD campaign that's sitting at Force Rating 2 (and en route to Force Rating 3), but she's rarely able to make full use of her Force powers due to constantly rolling single DS pips on both her Force dice and not always wanting to burn the Destiny Point to be able to use those pips for Force Points.