Good stuff guys, Im reading it all and will formulate a response, or not. This has probably gone on lone enough.

Now, if you guys are telling me that the game system is designed in a way where it is not mean to represent distances and times in a realistic manner and if used they will only cause confusion the I think I understand but its going to be difficult indeed to deprogram a lifetime of thinking in these terms.

Again, we get back to “You must unlearn what you have learned”.

Trying to switch to these vague references, especially in a technologically advanced society, is going to be hard. I have a hard time imagining an Imperial Commander briefing his troops and saying "Colonel Marso, you are to advance your troops a ways up this line here and engage the enemy at medium range while maintaining a flanking move at long range here. When you get to short range I want you to establish a defensive perimeter out to about long range here and then move your ATATs in at close range." That may be how its supposed to be in this game but wow, its peculiar.

In a real-world scenario where that was actually happened, you’re right.

The problem is that Star Wars doesn’t really make all that much sense from the very beginning. It violates the laws of physics left and right, all in the name of trying to create a good story. If you try to force the real-world laws of physics and mathematics onto it, both sides will suffer.

Star Wars isn’t Science Fiction. It’s Space Fantasy Opera. And there really is very little overlap between those two concepts.

You need to hang your Hard Scientist hat next to the Real-world Physicist Beanie which is next to the Actual Mathematician Helmet, all of which are left in the building before the entrance to the courtyard where you go through the magic doorway to the place where Star Wars exists.

That takes some time to learn how to do. And some are better at doing that quicker than others. And there are certain parts of the game that trip people up more than others.

But my feeling is that sticking to a pure-narrative range band description for distances is probably a good place for you to start.

Well scripted and very cool but completely ignoring the game rules. I'm tempted to go this route though. It woukd seem the best way to dodge the whole issue.

How so? The speederbikes are (presumably, since I'm going from memory at work) a little bit faster than my imaginary landspeeder. It's not unreasonable to have them close in a little bit each turn and run neck and neck with the players once they catch up. The player pilot sets the pace, presumably going as fast as their skill allows, forcing the NPCs to roll against just as hard a difficulty or fall behind.

Since the two sets of vehicles are right on top of each other (assuming the NPCs don't fall back because they're not as good), there's no need to track their relative positions in the landscape anymore. They're moving as fast as the Rule of Cool dictates.

As for the Is This Personal or Is This Planetary Range- what's the end goal? Who is shooting at what? In this instance, the combat is mostly blaster-to-blaster, hand to hand, bumper to bumper. There's no need to fuss about with any of that swapping back and forth. If the player starts targeting the vehicles with their weapons, then you adjust - but generally that's not necessary.

At the end of the day, you use just as many rules as you need to get the point of the actions across. You don't need to worry about exact distances of target to target or precise placement on the map. Start your vehicle combats with the enemy just entering effective range. If the players have been laying in wait (like that other example from the locked thread where the PCs were ambushing the NPCs in a large open space), then kick them a couple of blues or an upgrade and start with the bad guys in medium range. Don't go "They're at Extreme. Okay, its next turn and they're at Long. Okay another turn and now they're at medium. Now they're at short and you can open fire."

Cut to the chase straight away and don't bother with the fiddly bits.

I think I hear what your saying, using the tools to run your narrative rather than running a narrative around the tools.

Thanks!

The dice and skill checks are meant to develop the narrative not just serve it. They aren't meant as just a pass/fail mechanism, What's the point of having narrative symbols on the dice and tables for interpreting the results if they aren't used in the narrative?

I think I hear what your saying, using the tools to run your narrative rather than running a narrative around the tools.

Thanks!

Today my son, you are a man.

Now, if you guys are telling me that the game system is designed in a way where it is not mean to represent distances and times in a realistic manner and if used they will only cause confusion the I think I understand but its going to be difficult indeed to deprogram a lifetime of thinking in these terms.

Trying to switch to these vague references, especially in a technologically advanced society, is going to be hard. I have a hard time imagining an Imperial Commander briefing his troops and saying "Colonel Marso, you are to advance your troops a ways up this line here and engage the enemy at medium range while maintaining a flanking move at long range here. When you get to short range I want you to establish a defensive perimeter out to about long range here and then move your ATATs in at close range." That may be how its supposed to be in this game but wow, its peculiar.

I've never played a game that didn't abstract distance in some way. In Saga it was squares. Sure, you could translate a square into an "exact" distance in meters...but even then you got cases with vehicles, jumping, whatever where the distances didn't really make sense or fit. And like FFG the GM had to take care when mixing vehicles and personal scale.

So, what system are you comparing FFG to where the scene you describe wouldn't conflict with the movement system?

This is a serious question - I think if we knew what you were comparing FFG to - the system where you don't apparently run into this problem it would be helpful. I can understand where you're coming from - I have found range bands confusing too but they become a lot less confusing when you stop trying to convert them to measurements and then apply the measurements to a scene.

Take your scene above - instead of using range band names or even (as you seem to be proposing) using measurements like miles or kilometers use terrain features: "infantry engage the enemy mid-way across the plain, keep flanking this force near the gully, we'll have a ambush unit in this copse of trees here" etc. Set the scene visually with the description of the plan. When a player asks, "ok how close are the gully and this group of trees the scouting unit is hiding in, waiting to ambush" you then answer using range bands.

The real purpose and use in the game of distance - whether you're thinking of it in terms of miles, feet, squares or range bands - is to know if something is within weapon range and the "time" (in Maneuvers, regardless if at personal or vehicle scale) it will take to interact with, engage, disengage, escape other characters in the scene.

Now, if you guys are telling me that the game system is designed in a way where it is not mean to represent distances and times in a realistic manner and if used they will only cause confusion the I think I understand but its going to be difficult indeed to deprogram a lifetime of thinking in these terms.

Trying to switch to these vague references, especially in a technologically advanced society, is going to be hard. I have a hard time imagining an Imperial Commander briefing his troops and saying "Colonel Marso, you are to advance your troops a ways up this line here and engage the enemy at medium range while maintaining a flanking move at long range here. When you get to short range I want you to establish a defensive perimeter out to about long range here and then move your ATATs in at close range." That may be how its supposed to be in this game but wow, its peculiar.

I've never played a game that didn't abstract distance in some way. In Saga it was squares. Sure, you could translate a square into an "exact" distance in meters...but even then you got cases with vehicles, jumping, whatever where the distances didn't really make sense or fit. And like FFG the GM had to take care when mixing vehicles and personal scale.

So, what system are you comparing FFG to where the scene you describe wouldn't conflict with the movement system?

This is a serious question - I think if we knew what you were comparing FFG to - the system where you don't apparently run into this problem it would be helpful. I can understand where you're coming from - I have found range bands confusing too but they become a lot less confusing when you stop trying to convert them to measurements and then apply the measurements to a scene.

Take your scene above - instead of using range band names or even (as you seem to be proposing) using measurements like miles or kilometers use terrain features: "infantry engage the enemy mid-way across the plain, keep flanking this force near the gully, we'll have a ambush unit in this copse of trees here" etc. Set the scene visually with the description of the plan. When a player asks, "ok how close are the gully and this group of trees the scouting unit is hiding in, waiting to ambush" you then answer using range bands.

The real purpose and use in the game of distance - whether you're thinking of it in terms of miles, feet, squares or range bands - is to know if something is within weapon range and the "time" (in Maneuvers, regardless if at personal or vehicle scale) it will take to interact with, engage, disengage, escape other characters in the scene.

Not to mention in Star Wars itself, they don't use distances either. The scene that comes to mind is when Admiral Ackbar and Lando are discussing battle strategies in the fleet assault. "Yes I said closer!! Move the fleet in, and engage those star destroyers at point blank range!" "At that range, we won't last long against those star destroyers." "We'll last longer than we will against that Death Star! And we might just take a few of them with us!" At no point in that discussion, did anyone use actual distance measurements, and yet the strategy was perfectly clear and understandable to everyone who heard it."

If this was a TV show or the movies, that's what we're trying to convey.

Switching scales because you can, doesn't mean you should.

First off, I balked at spotting the base at 30 kilmometers, or 40 kilometers. it's a dot on the horizon.

I ran into this kind of thing a lot with Battletech. Lasers go as light until they hit something solid or are attenuated by smoke.

So people wanted to engage targets on the horizon, when in the game effective range was 24 for a large laser.

So we also had guys saying, It's a mistake that a heavy MG only goes three Squares. I'm a marine and a .50 cal can hit a target at a mile.

But, if we have a game where machine guns go a mile, then there is no reason to have mecha punching each other. or running around to shoot each other in the back, we get real world tank battles head to head miles off, and it's all about armor, battle computers and accuracy.

In this situation, My ruling would have been run to the speeder, jump in.

Guys firing can try to hit the target who can use speeder as cover.

Does the speeder start? yes.

Okay take a shot each as the speeder moves off, medium range, then next round, long range. If you aim you can hit him.. maybe.

This matches what I believe from reality, living around cars and guns, and being in the military for ever.

This also matches scenes we see from movies and TV which if they didn't make sense, ie.e he jumps in and hes 2400 km out in a minute, people would balk.

All of that vehicle ranges exists so that you do not have to have star fighters inch up to a planet at 600 mph. from a space battle that is taking place in high orbit 25,000 miles or clicks out.

In games like Traveller Hard SF speed is exact, and distances are exact, and that's how it is, so that literally hours are taken from orbit to landing, so you have to develop and implement your tactics that was as a hard rules "Of the Universe."

In this game, it is what looks cool, what makes sense, more than the so called Rules.

Now it seems what OP is trying to do here is match the Vehicle range rules to the personal scale rules to consolidate them into what could be called the unified theory of FFG Story physics. So that one can be converted to another.

THey don't exist to be converted. they exist to facilitate te story.

Just as the Transporter in star trek existed to beam people down. Whats the physics behind it?

Converting a human being to energy, and conveying that to a remote target site like another teleporter platform, or even a point in space on a mountain, or in a field or inside a building.. okay first of, you're talking 150 pounds of matter converted to energy. That's a few nuclear devices right there, game over.

Plus such a process would kill the beaming out person. and somehow then at the target mbeam in site create a person out of energy, leading to complex questions of a religious and philosophical nature about the soul, and god and making lives from nothing.

Is there a pattern buffer, can a person be stored? Given enough energy, why could we not just clone 1000 kirks and have them fly every federation starship manned by 5000 Scotty's?

Okay, but the real trick was Roddenberry did not want to have to show a shuttle in every scene for the setup and takedown effort of the craft people and carpenters. and set decorators. They had limited budgets and time, and were shooting the show every week when it was in production, multiple parts of multiple shows.

So "We need to get to the planet. Mr. Spock on Me."

*Steps up to platform.*

"Energize."

"You all appear in the center of the square of the spaceport, where space vixens wear revealing costumes made of diaphnous material that leaves little to the imagination."

Are there rules? Are your books useless piles of paper between two hardback covers?

Choose for yourself. The key being, is it a good story, does it make sense?

Dragons do not exist in the real world. yet 3.5 D&D and other versions have whole books about how Dragons work. Its all fictional.

Do the rules for Dragons make sense? If not, what's a GM to do?

Make a call. it works this way. It doesn't work that way.

Coming here to say what's wrong with this, what am I missing?

You are not missing anything. You have run into the same problem FASA did when they took the images of what they called the Marauder Mecha from Japanese Anime, It;s a big hulking thing with two big arms big feet and a cannon on the roof. it looks manacing.

There is no way for ammunition to get to that gun. Multiple fans pointed this out, on multiple online forums.

In the End Jordan Weisman who was a key figure at FASA was quoted to say "It just is. Tell 'em its magic."

There is no reconciliation of scales because it is all fictional.

This is a set of rules as guidelines to help tell better stories...that sort of feel like Star Wars, ans seen in movies, books, and videogames, in the shared fictional reality we call the star wars universe.

The game is not set up to to simulate reality or man to man or man to beast combat perfectly or as close to perfectly as you can, even though it gets bogged down in minutiae, (like Traveller or pick any flavor of Game by leading edge or the gamut of GURPS with every book included.)

Your attempt to reconcile the various ranges, scales and times is not a wasted effort, as long as you finally see that they are simply tools to help to tell stories to organize a narrative into what did happen, what didn't happen at the point you make the call or players decide or the dice decide and players or GM narrate it.

My wife has a famous tale among our game group, where she is not a player. She observes.

A group of guys and ladies sit around a table with paper sheets in hand and drinks and a bag of doritos, or funyuns.

All of them are intensely concentrating, while the GM speaks and weaves a tale of a space epic, where missiles fly through the void, and there's a sound track of space epic theme going at the same time, and everyone is really excited.

Then someone rolls a die, and it comes up 20. Everyone is cheering and clapping, as to what a cool scene that was.

Then some time later, someone rolls a 1 and everyone groans and a few pats on the back for comfort as a player's sheet gets marked with a few lines in pencil, and he states, "okay, I am half dead." "Okay, We are not gonna let you down man." The biggest guy says, "I will carry him.".

My wife says later, you guys don't really need rules or dice, it's all in your head, made up as you go along, AS LONG AS EVERYONE AGREES ON THE SAME STORY, and rules. In fact the rules don't matter because you could play Star wars with D6, SAGA, FFG, or Even Traveller. Or d20.

Each has a different flavor, but in the end its all about the story. Not what rules simulate what better, because in the end, it's all in our minds, it's all fictional and we get entertainment from imagining ourselves to be heroes, sharing these stories of what we might do if.. if we were heroes, if there was this thing called the force. if spaceships were miles long and could smoke a planet in one shot.

Whats the agreed upon game situation?

Guy runs into a car, others take a shot. Okay roll the dice. we agree to abide by the dice as fail or success. we agree to narrate in a way that makes sense.

Other systems are diceless like Amber. Or heavy narrative like Space Patrol or Fiasco.

What are you missing?

What is the plot? What are the complications? how will the players be challenged? Skill checks, lack of information, combat challenges.

You're using a strict physics ranges to the meter approach in a game system that works in terms of Obligation, Backgrounds, motivation, and yeah there's guns and ships.

The difficulty of this was pointed out to me long ago in the 90s, when i was in college, after the military.

We played FASA Mechwarrior, ad when there was a battle, we played Battletech. So many times, the players did not want to do a battle...Because they liked the narrative of the Mechwarrior 2nd edition rules better, and if we did a battle, there'd be this big combat, big maps, massive setup and 6 turns of play taking 6 hours, that simulated roughly one real world minute of battle.

Some days, players would just balk and say yeah run my guy, I am in it for the story.

In those days the only Realy Narrative push game that was out there was Star Wars d6 by West end games, which started the break from you are on a grid you can do X per turn to a narrative. as you some up the hill in the snow you see massive crates of power converters, if you can hit them from here it will be a big explosion that will destroy the AT AT.

Take three rounds to try and hit, if yes big explosion, good guys rally if no good guys getting wiped out. Not tied to a grid, tied to a story.

Just like One Ring RPG, love that game. No grid, just range bands and narrative.

Traveller has ranges and gritty crunchiness. I love it too, for the right players. Engineering guys who like to design the ship with a spreadsheet. A woman who is a great roleplayer who loves the lifepath and all the contacts you can develop.


Edge of the Empire is for Narrative style players who can think in terms of a story plot and narrative, and challenges and character and motivation.

You can run a battle but it is a battle that is flavored by whats the flow of the scene, not the real or fictional physics.

Jump into the speeder take a few shots and zoom off. If the story is that that guy MUST be captured, steal a speeder and go after him. or the group chooses to let them go.

How does a priest describe the Big Bang, and how space inflated. How it expands?

How does a Physicist do it?

Are either of them even correct? At most it's an approximation. And we all agree upon a shared world experience, yet we all live in a world where each person's experience is very different based on our culture upbringing, and how we percieve it.

Any rules set sort of tires to do that. Some are better than others at approximating certain situations.

You can use a hammer as a screwdriver and vice versa, But it's more difficult.

As others have suggested, SAGA might be a better fit if players are arguing or asking about exact ranges and so forth.

There are ranges here, but they exist to have a common language, and limitations to weapons.

Can a fictional blaster hit a fictional Trooper at Short Range? What does the group agree on?

Can you spot a base on the horizon at 30 KM away? What does the group agree on?

Does Hyperspace Travel exist? Can space slugs exist in a vaccum on an asteroid, where a princess, to not suffocate, puts on a breath mask, and she's good to go?

What did Lucas decide, what do 60 years of pulp sc fi convey to us as the convention?

Flying through Asteroid fields, are they really like giant tumbling boulders?

More like tiny grains and pebbles miles apart, but flying through tiny grains and pebbles is not as exciting as dodging and weaving, and imagining the bad guys in tie fighters clipping one, and spinning out of control while your heroes escapes because he's just that cool. Then escaping by getting close to the bigger one, then getting swallowed whole by a space slug, then rocketing the hell out of there as the giant space slug teeth close.

That's why I play star wars. It's cool.

Arguing about planetary ranges is not cool. Decide what's cool, what makes sense in the situation, according to the agreed upon fictional reality and go with it.
You can say the rules are the GM or you use the rules to GM or you can make the call every time.

What keeps the story going, what makes for a batter story, no dead air fast moving frying pan into the fire.

Stuff Blows up! you narrowly escape! Oh look out here's something new and difficult! OMG OMG the GM just told us "We had a bad feeling!"

"We check our guns, looking out into the bushes, ready for anything."

"A crash and thumps as the ground shakes, the trees part to reveal..."

That's how I like to run Star Wars.

You can appear and say the rules do not do X or the rules do X wrong. Then you can ask if you want to sell off your books, because you got ripped off.

I like the guy that offered you 50$. Same offer. It' impossible to get hardbacks in Thailand. I had to bring all three of my books on the plane when I moved here.

It's all fictional. Sell your books if you want, or argue rules don't do X, or run Star Wars.

Like you tell the players "This is the situation, what are you going to do now?"

??????

I think Etarnon replied to every single post in this thread at once.

Quite an undertaking...not for the faint of heart.

does it make sense?

Can't say it does.

If this was a TV show or the movies, that's what we're trying to convey....................................................Like you tell the players "This is the situation, what are you going to do now?"

Yes,...but,.....did Adam and Eve have belly buttons?...................

It's like EE Cummings came back to life and suddenly started playing Star Wars

According to most Christians and art work they did. It took centuries before anyone noticed they had them on the Sistine Chapel painting! That Michelangelo was one sly guy!!!

It's like EE Cummings came back to life and suddenly started playing Star Wars

Too much punctuation