Over a decade - the system first came out in 1987 and the company folded in 1999, and it would have kept going if the parent company hadn't been borrowing money against WEG to keep their italian shoe company afloat. If they had just stayed in business a few months longer, they no doubt would have been able to ride the Prequel Hype Wave for who knows how long.

So yeah, I'm not sure where this "D6 Star Wars didnt have staying power" thing came from.

Now I never said D6 didn't have staying power, I said WEG didn't have it. I agree 12 years is a long time, but not as much as the 40+ that D&D has been going (not with standing their version changes and company buyout by WotC). And I agree we'd probably all be playing some version of a WEG Star Wars RPG right now if they could have survived till the prequels came out. Platt's Smugglers Guide is still one of my favorite sourcebooks across all versions of the SW RPGs. I know the WEG material will live on for quite awhile in a large number of people's Star Wars games, whether their playing a D6 version or not.

Well, if we're talking just about the company - WEG was founded in 1974, so nearly 30 years (well, 26 if you're a total stickler for accuracy) is still pretty solid in the "longevity" category.

I played the hell out of WEG version back in the early 90's. In many ways it was responsible for so much of what we know as the EU. As I understand it, they sent Timothy Zahn a bunch of WEG products as background for his Thrawn stories, which many still consider a high watermark of SW fiction.

But I wouldn't go back to it now, as much as I enjoyed it. From the funny dice to the lack of intrusive character stats, the FFG game fits my style like a glove.

But I understand why it still has fans, as much as Warhammer FRP and AD&D still have devoted aficionados.

but the suits and bean-counters at Hasbro only saw those profit margins as being a marginal success, and even that likely based more upon the sales of their collectible minis than the RPG books themselves.

Which is what we're seeing with D&D today, of course - the RPG kept alive on life-support to push poor-quality minis sales and their MMO.

We're behind X-Wing/Armada, the card game and Imperial Assault in terms of FFG SW stuff, but there seems to be a real desire to support the RPG (even if things have dried up a bit of late).

But I wouldn't go back to it now, as much as I enjoyed it. From the funny dice to the lack of intrusive character stats, the FFG game fits my style like a glove.

Exactly. I love the hell out of it, played it since it came out in '87, was my first real RPG, and I still use the books to this day. But yeah, I cant go back. Pandora has opened the Multiple Access of Success and Failure box

Oh, I believe there are coincidences, but the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego is taught in every Sunday School in every church in every Christian denomination around the world.

Not in any Sunday school I have ever heard of.

I learned it in Sunday school or maybe it was weekday school (up to second grade I went to a Baptist school in Georgia, I wasn't a Baptist it's just that most Christian schools in Georgia were Baptist, then my parents got divorced and I moved to NY state where most Christian schools were Catholic )

Pandora has opened the Multiple Access of Success and Failure box

That's the reality of it right there. I've played a ton of games but this one holds my interest the most because of this mechanic. I find myself theorizing how to port just that simple little bit to other systems, old and new.

Pandora has opened the Multiple Access of Success and Failure box

That's the reality of it right there. I've played a ton of games but this one holds my interest the most because of this mechanic. I find myself theorizing how to port just that simple little bit to other systems, old and new.

in d6 you could say that every 6 is an advantage and a 6 on the wild die is a triumph (which when you reroll it gives you an opportunity for another triumph), 1's are threats, a 1 (including on rerolls) on the wild die is a despair, so if you got a 6 on the wild die initially and then rerolled it and got a 1 you would have a triumph and a despair.

cortex and dice pool systems in general can pull off the same kind of thing (and rolling a 1 on a die is kind of like a threat anyway because it gives the GM an opportunity)

As to further speculation,

We have:

Bormo the Abednedo Colonist

Fira Bon the Human Soldier (with kickass art)

Mhar'li the Human ???

??? The Human Explorer

So, apart from the soldier, all careers are Edge of the Empire. However, I suspect that Mhar'li is a pilot. Maybe a variant Kanjiclub human.. Then the players can tell it to her.

As I have never been a fan of Force abd Destiny, If there was a new line, I would be ecstatic. Not to mention, even if there are repeated careers, they Could make new specialties. Considering the Jakku setting, I suspect a "scavenger" specialty with rules for such.

Squee!

This character should be Mhar'li, first name Bob.

in d6 you could say that every 6 is an advantage and a 6 on the wild die is a triumph (which when you reroll it gives you an opportunity for another triumph), 1's are threats, a 1 (including on rerolls) on the wild die is a despair, so if you got a 6 on the wild die initially and then rerolled it and got a 1 you would have a triumph and a despair.

cortex and dice pool systems in general can pull off the same kind of thing (and rolling a 1 on a die is kind of like a threat anyway because it gives the GM an opportunity)

Doesn't that really just mean you can succeed with Advantage or fail with Threat, but not the other way around?

As Desslok says, the non-binary way of determining success is what really stands out in this game. (And is actually ideal for a pulp setting, where good and bad things often happen at once).

Games like 13th Age tried to get away from this pass/fail binary, but came across as arbitrary, because they were stuck with the binary d20 system. For example, they say that a 'failed' Charisma roll might be interpreted as a success, but with caveats. However, this system makes it clear when you've succeeded or failed on your own (Success/Failure) but also throws in a wild card with Advantage/Threat, regardless of whether you succeeded or not. The Charisma example here might well be read as 'Success with Threat' or 'Failure with Advantage'.

in d6 you could say that every 6 is an advantage and a 6 on the wild die is a triumph (which when you reroll it gives you an opportunity for another triumph), 1's are threats, a 1 (including on rerolls) on the wild die is a despair, so if you got a 6 on the wild die initially and then rerolled it and got a 1 you would have a triumph and a despair.

cortex and dice pool systems in general can pull off the same kind of thing (and rolling a 1 on a die is kind of like a threat anyway because it gives the GM an opportunity)

Doesn't that really just mean you can succeed with Advantage or fail with Threat, but not the other way around?

if you were rolling three fair six sided dice you would have a 1-(1-1/6)^3= ~0.4213 (~42.13%) chance of getting a 1 and the conditional (upon getting at least one 1) mean is approximately 8.4392 and a conditional probability of the mean being at least an 8 of about 0.6593 (65.93%). (I had the computer roll 3d6 2^27 ~134 million times and took the mean of the sum of the 3 dice for all rolls with at least one 1, and counted how many times that occurred and how many times the sum was at least an 8). so if you're rolling 3d6 against a difficulty of an 8 you have a ~42% chance of getting at least one 1 and supposing that you do, you still have a ~66% chance of succeeding on the roll (and this is without factoring in the effect of the wild die which increases the chance of success)

Over a decade - the system first came out in 1987 and the company folded in 1999, and it would have kept going if the parent company hadn't been borrowing money against WEG to keep their italian shoe company afloat. If they had just stayed in business a few months longer, they no doubt would have been able to ride the Prequel Hype Wave for who knows how long.

So yeah, I'm not sure where this "D6 Star Wars didnt have staying power" thing came from.

Now I never said D6 didn't have staying power, I said WEG didn't have it. I agree 12 years is a long time, but not as much as the 40+ that D&D has been going (not with standing their version changes and company buyout by WotC). And I agree we'd probably all be playing some version of a WEG Star Wars RPG right now if they could have survived till the prequels came out. Platt's Smugglers Guide is still one of my favorite sourcebooks across all versions of the SW RPGs. I know the WEG material will live on for quite awhile in a large number of people's Star Wars games, whether their playing a D6 version or not.

I would absolutely not be playing WEG's d6 Star Wars game. I hated that system and would rather sit out of a game than subject myself to the "unluck" die again.

In the instances where my group played a game set in the Star Wars universe, we used TSR's Alternity system. All the fluff of a Star Wars campaign, but with much more fun and interesting game mechanics.

if you were rolling three fair six sided dice you would have a 1-(1-1/6)^3= ~0.4213 (~42.13%) chance of getting a 1 and the conditional (upon getting at least one 1) mean is approximately 8.4392 and a conditional probability of the mean being at least an 8 of about 0.6593 (65.93%). (I had the computer roll 3d6 2^27 ~134 million times and took the mean of the sum of the 3 dice for all rolls with at least one 1, and counted how many times that occurred and how many times the sum was at least an 8). so if you're rolling 3d6 against a difficulty of an 8 you have a ~42% chance of getting at least one 1 and supposing that you do, you still have a ~66% chance of succeeding on the roll (and this is without factoring in the effect of the wild die which increases the chance of success)

Now, how do those chances shake out when there are dedicated dice for them? The odds seem pretty different in your example to what I recall reading about the dice analysis some time ago, but my memory is fuzzy on the subject.

if you were rolling three fair six sided dice you would have a 1-(1-1/6)^3= ~0.4213 (~42.13%) chance of getting a 1 and the conditional (upon getting at least one 1) mean is approximately 8.4392 and a conditional probability of the mean being at least an 8 of about 0.6593 (65.93%). (I had the computer roll 3d6 2^27 ~134 million times and took the mean of the sum of the 3 dice for all rolls with at least one 1, and counted how many times that occurred and how many times the sum was at least an 8). so if you're rolling 3d6 against a difficulty of an 8 you have a ~42% chance of getting at least one 1 and supposing that you do, you still have a ~66% chance of succeeding on the roll (and this is without factoring in the effect of the wild die which increases the chance of success)

Now, how do those chances shake out when there are dedicated dice for them? The odds seem pretty different in your example to what I recall reading about the dice analysis some time ago, but my memory is fuzzy on the subject.

could you explain what you mean by "dedicated dice"? I had the computer roll 2^27 sets of 3 dice and compared each set as an inseparable unit... I wasn't mixing and matching dice from different sets.

if you were rolling three fair six sided dice you would have a 1-(1-1/6)^3= ~0.4213 (~42.13%) chance of getting a 1 and the conditional (upon getting at least one 1) mean is approximately 8.4392 and a conditional probability of the mean being at least an 8 of about 0.6593 (65.93%). (I had the computer roll 3d6 2^27 ~134 million times and took the mean of the sum of the 3 dice for all rolls with at least one 1, and counted how many times that occurred and how many times the sum was at least an 8). so if you're rolling 3d6 against a difficulty of an 8 you have a ~42% chance of getting at least one 1 and supposing that you do, you still have a ~66% chance of succeeding on the roll (and this is without factoring in the effect of the wild die which increases the chance of success)

Now, how do those chances shake out when there are dedicated dice for them? The odds seem pretty different in your example to what I recall reading about the dice analysis some time ago, but my memory is fuzzy on the subject.

could you explain what you mean by "dedicated dice"? I had the computer roll 2^27 sets of 3 dice and compared each set as an inseparable unit... I wasn't mixing and matching dice from different sets.

Sorry, that was not at all clear on my part. I would do a disservice by trying to elaborate on this myself when someone has done much better work already: http://maxmahem.net/wp/star-wars-edge-of-the-empire-die-probabilities/

Ok... first of all I am going to criticize that website because it doesn't address the dependency between different types of success failure... e.g. obviously you can't roll a triumph and advantage on the same roll of the same die, but there is also partial exclusivity of advantage and success, except on the die faces that share 1 advantage and on success symbol, but then that means you aren't going to get 2 advantage or 2 success on that roll of that die... the partial exclusivity is what makes a lot of success negatively correlated with a lot of advantage, and a lot of success positively correlated with a lot of threat, and a lot of failure positively correlated with a lot of advantage.

BTW I got my PhD doing Uncertainty Quantification of volcanic landslides using simulation thereof. UQ is kind of like statistics with less emphasis on data and more on developing efficient algorithms to compute values for the statistical quantities of interest. (I am trying to explain this in a way that is accessible to someone without a strong background in statistics)

your intuition (though poorly phrased) that adding advantage, threat, triumph and despair to d6 by bad stuff on d6=1 and good stuff on d6=6 would make success positively correlated with advantage and failure positively correlated with threat is correct, i didn't say it wasn't, the numbers/probabilities I provide were simply to show that success and threat weren't mutually exclusive and weren't even unlikely to occur together with as few as 3 six sided dice.

But if you did want the advantage threat, triumph and despair, generated on d6=6 or 1, add on to weg d6 star wars to play more like it does in FFG star wars THEN you would want advantage to be generated on d6=1, threat to be generated on d6=6, triumph to be generated on wild die d6=6 (not a typo) and despair to be generated on wild die=1

And in the analysis I did I was talking about "conditional probabilities" meaning accounting for dependencies, so IF you rolled at least one 1 on 3d6 what is the probability of the sum of all three dice being at least an 8, and as I said/implied when you have multiple TYPES of qualitative "success" "failure" then dependencies matter (something noticeably missing from the analysis you linked to).

also the dice mechanics are completely different, in FFG star wars they have different types of dice with different odds for different outcomes and positive and negative dice. in d6 you only have 2 types of dice, a regular d6 and the wild die (which is a d6 that you reroll on 6's and add the new roll to the existing total). So the stats aren't going to be the same and the value of what you can buy with the cost in terms of advantage threat triumph and despair would have to be re-calibrated if you were to add advantage/threat triumph/despair to d6. The point I was making was it was possible and not even terribly difficult, it would be QUALITATIVELY but NOT QUANTITATIVELY similar to advantage/threat triumph/despair in FFG.

EDIT and some tips to anyone who wanted to try adding advantage/threat triumph/despair to d6. in the d6 version I would have advantage and threat NOT cancel (the way that triumph and despair doesn't cancel in FFG star wars) and the frequency of triumph/despair would not increase with "better" dice pools in d6 so you should be able to buy more with each d6 triumph/despair than you could with a FFG triumph despair

"Huh" indeed.

We all figured there would be a TFA tie-in somewhere, but I'm not sure this is what I personally expected.

I doubt that there's enough material to fill more than one sourcebook about TFA so far.

I'm guessing we'll get the Abednedo in one of the future class sourcebooks, just like most of the other races we have so far.
POSSIBLY it will be in the inevetable TFA era sourcebook, but there's other species that might take precedence.


As a sidenote, you have no idea how weird it sounds to an atheist Swede like me when people talk about sundayschool and other religious schooling as if it was an everyday thing.
To me it sounds like some fanatic religious country :/
(That said, I'm not starting any religous discussion, just pointing out how alien and strange it seems to someone as secularised as me.)

As a sidenote, you have no idea how weird it sounds to an atheist Swede like me when people talk about sundayschool and other religious schooling as if it was an everyday thing.

To me it sounds like some fanatic religious country :/

(That said, I'm not starting any religous discussion, just pointing out how alien and strange it seems to someone as secularised as me.)

no offense taken by me for your comment... but if it seems weird/alien to you then may you could use it for inspiration for an alien cultural practice in your game.

tangential discussion about the relative merits of private religious schools vs the public education system based on standardized test scores. not a discussion of religion itself but of performance statistics of groups of schools delineated/categorized by whether or not they are affiliated with a religion and regions of the country. In a spoiler block for the convenience of people not interested in the discussion.

As a sidenote, you have no idea how weird it sounds to an atheist Swede like me when people talk about sundayschool and other religious schooling as if it was an everyday thing.

To me it sounds like some fanatic religious country :/

(That said, I'm not starting any religous discussion, just pointing out how alien and strange it seems to someone as secularised as me.)

no offense taken by me for your comment... but if it seems weird/alien to you then may you could use it for inspiration for an alien cultural practice in your game.

tangential discussion about the relative merits of private religious schools vs the public education system based on standardized test scores. not a discussion of religion itself but of performance statistics of groups of schools delineated/categorized by whether or not they are affiliated with a religion and regions of the country. In a spoiler block for the convenience of people not interested in the discussion.

BTW the quality of private (including christian) schooling is generally much better in an objective sense than the public (free) education for children in the united states. For instance, based on standardized test scores, the "typical" Catholic school is rated in the top 15% of schools nation wide. And when I attended them in my youth I had a number of classmates who weren't Christian but were there because their parents were willing to pay a lot of money for them to get a better. One thing to note is that private schools (in particular religious schools which legally must be private schools) are not subsidized by the government, so they are generally pretty expensive for parents, the teachers get paid a lot less than public school teachers, and their equipment and facilities are generally a lot worse than public shools (which have much bigger per student budgets because they are state funded by taxes). What makes the difference in student performance on test scores appears to be the motivation of the teachers and parents who are willing to work harder and get paid less/pay a lot more because perhaps as you said they are in some sense "fanatics".

Note that in some states such as Florida, the public school education system is very good compared to national averages point of view, so I would doubt that many secular parents in Florida would pay for a parochial (private religious) school education for their children there, and that in such places an circumstances many Catholic parents would not be willing to pay a lot of money for a private/Catholic education that probably isn't much better than the public education system.

I work at a private school, so I know all about it.

And I've steered clear of overtly religious themes in my adventures, but having a religious setting in one might be a fun thing for my players (also all from the very secularised Sweden, a few of which are actually pretty aggressively anti-religion)

your intuition (though poorly phrased) [...] is correct.

What can I say, I turned off my targeting computer and used the Force. Good analysis, far more in depth than I am able to do!

I do like how Dungeon World (and many other systems, but their implementation in particular) uses degrees of success, and I think that would be a good way to bolt it on to another system, but without at least 2 dice it all falls apart. One thing I've tried and liked is making success automatic and a roll determines the degree of success, be that success with Threat or Advantage. Taking the extremes as Despair and Triumph, it seems like this could be bolted on reasonably well.

in d6 you could say that every 6 is an advantage and a 6 on the wild die is a triumph (which when you reroll it gives you an opportunity for another triumph), 1's are threats, a 1 (including on rerolls) on the wild die is a despair, so if you got a 6 on the wild die initially and then rerolled it and got a 1 you would have a triumph and a despair.

cortex and dice pool systems in general can pull off the same kind of thing (and rolling a 1 on a die is kind of like a threat anyway because it gives the GM an opportunity)

Doesn't that really just mean you can succeed with Advantage or fail with Threat, but not the other way around?

In Pool Systems you need usually a target number of successes for a successful check, so just rolling a few advantages is not automatically a successful skill check. Same for Threat. D6 was iirc adding the total numbers, so a single 6 is for sure not a successful check and systems like shadowrun take iirc 5 and 6 as a single success. And if you roll more than half ones you have a despair. hand out disadvantages for each 2 and advantages for each 3 and 4. Each 6 gives you the chance to re-roll for a triumph on a another 6. Done.

star Wars RPG TNG

Just want to add, the only reason I still have my bible is indeed as an inspiration for names. The part in the beginning where it just lists fathers and their sons and so on for twenty pages was especially helpful, as are the prophets and kings. Might pick up a koran for the same reason (there are people handing them out for free on the streets), don't know the names might be too obviously arabic

I can only recommend it, change one or two letters and voilá!

I suck at inventing names, and rerolling name generators takes away too much of my time because suddenly a random name inspires a completely new character that needs a new character sheet and of course it's nice if you can add a picture for your character as inspiration but then you find another awesome picture that turns into another character that needs a name and suddenly the sun reminds you that there is something that people call "work" that starts in a few hours.

and on catholic schools and why I own a bible:

I picked up a book of baby names years ago and use that for name generation when I'm stuck. The one I have supposedly has 20,001 names* so that should be sufficient.

Not that it's a tremendous help for Star Wars names...

*They could be lying about how many names are include - I haven't actually counted. It's a thick book.