All my players LOVE playing EOE and tweeking their characters. As such, when it comes time to make dice rolls, some of the pools are just off the charts. Inevitably, there is at least once, maybe twice in a session when I get rolls like:

" I got a success with 5 disadvantage."

"I got a failure with 4 advantage." and so on.

How do you interpret those? I have basically looked at those wild extremes of dice rolls as essentially "plucking victory from the jaws of defeat and vice versa." Essentially, for the first one, the player completes the task but it take them an ungodly amount of time- like 2 hours to reload a blaster- to the point of well, you succeed but it took so long that you might have well just as failed as we cannot wait that long. Generally with the other extreme (fail with 4 advantage), the character whips through the task way too quickly or trips or something and there is enough time remaining to try another roll.

Curious how some of you interpret these types of results- has anyone ever "failed" someone on a "success with 5 disadvantage" or given them a "succeed" result going the other way?

Keep it silly

CC

I think we've done a few disguise rolls like that. Failure with triumph meant the enemy recognized my character, but was friendly enough I got to make a charm roll to convince them not to rat me out.

Successful charm rolls, but with a dispair meant that NPC fell madly in love with the PC and made a nuisance of themselves. And we yo-you with strain a lot at our table.

I'm recreating this from an old memory, so its a bit hazy for me, but I had a situation like this at the table. It was quite possibly one of our groups most spectacular experiences with EotE and is probably the chief reason why our group loves the system (despite the game also being one that permanently fractured our gaming group, but that is a story for another time).

Alright, so the players were uncovering a series of clues, and realized they needed to explore a location on the surface of Duro. The planet's surface is off limits and is patrolled by the empire to prevent entry. So the first thing the players do is attempt to work out a plan for how to sneak past the patrols, using sensors and other information to make sure its even remotely possible (can't remember the exact check I had for this). They did succeed with some advantages and they were informed of its relative difficulty, and the advantages got a boost die for when they tried to do it.

Then they attempted a stealth check. They failed, but had some advantages. The failure was that they were detected, and a patrol wing of tie fighters was coming to investigate, but the advantages were that there was some distance, as well as the ties were not immediately hostile.

They were contacted by the wing leader, and ordered to divert course and submit to an inspection. The players attempted to fast talk their way out of this, claiming a ship malfunction and being forced to land. They rolled a net failure, but again, multiple advantages. In this case, I ruled the advantages as them having a bit more time before things got worse, but the failure was that the patrol leader wasn't buying it.

So the mechanic in the group had the bright idea of trying to add more "evidence" to the situation, and attempted to make a mechanics check to cause the appearance of a serious ship malfunction, while also obviously not causing actual damage to the ship. I liked the sound of this, but wanted to heat things up, so I boosted difficulty with a force point. They rolled a net success, with a triumph, a despair, and a whole lot of threat. Ruled the success as there indeed was the appearance of damage, the triumph as the patrol leader actually believing it without question, the threat as resulting in a pile of system strain for the ship, (and my favorite) ruled that the despair, combined with the triumph, was that they just happened to find the one "good guy" tie fighter pilot in the entire sector, and by hell, this pilot was going to do -anything- to save this crashing vessel. Any hope of a stealthy arrival was off, as the pilot was sending requests for rescue ships to come pick them up. It got to the point where the tie fighter was actually attempting to fly under the players ship to help them gain altitude.

I can't quite remember how it ended from there, but they did manage to jam the comms to prevent more imperial activity, and eventually atmospheric conditions caused the tie fighters to break off. But the despair caused the players to lose a lot of time trying to evade the rescue party and had a sizable impact upon the pacing of the narrative (they were in more of a hurry now as they were lagging behind the actual villains in chasing down the MacGuffin).