Per Failure Effects

By edwardavern, in Star Wars: Edge of the Empire RPG

Hi all

So, RAW never, as far as I can see, applies effects "per failure". So, whereas a gun does base damage +1 "per success", there doesn't seem to be an equivalent for failure.

My question is: is there a reason for that? I want to add a dangerous Athletics check to my game, and I was toying with the PCs taking 1 wound per net failure if they fail the check. That seems reasonable to me, but am I missing something and somehow breaking the game by doing this?

Thanks in advance.

I suppose it's more the feel the developers wanted than a mechanical balance. The game was really designed to generally favor the odds of the players, or succeeding, so having failures add up to a negative effect would be unnecessarily harsh. I can't think of where I've seen them, but some adventures and suggestions mention using multiple threat or despair to inflict wounds or even critical injuries.

The way I would show that a task (like your Athletics check) is suitably dangerous on failure is upgrade the difficulty and inflict a critical injury on despair. That's generally how the adventures and such would run it.

Dangerous in what way? There are already rules for falling.

From my reading of dice interpretation I would let failure be a failure but any threat or despair equate to a nasty result.