4 hours ago, Maelora said:

Yay! Shut up and take my money, FFG!

Thanks, Mister Pirate, sir. I've escaped from worse!

(srsly, life's been using me as a punching bag for a year now, and my gaming group was sorely tested, along with my sanity. But I think we came out the other side.)

Sanity is overrated.

6 hours ago, Maelora said:

... Because srlsy folks, is the Empire that dumb to leave a 'Shoot Here To Blow Me Up' port on their Giant Space Marble?)

Cannon (Rogue One) would have you believe it was not stupidity, but a master stroke of genius from a man bent on revenge.

7 minutes ago, ThreeAM said:

Cannon (Rogue One) would have you believe it was not stupidity, but a master stroke of genius from a man bent on revenge.

Those cannons! An unapologetically revisionist lot, they are.

Get with the program, huge ion cannon. Nobody takes you seriously with your "Oh, the Death Star was an inside job" malarky.

Did someone say Cannon?

My bad. *Canon

I'd edit my post but it'd ruin @awayputurwpn and @Desslok 's joke.

3 minutes ago, ThreeAM said:

My bad. *Canon

I'd edit my post but it'd ruin @awayputurwpn and @Desslok 's joke.

Thank you... After an insane couple of days I needed this

First thing that made the rounds among the group upon seeing that they'd given the Death Star stats was the Ace-Hotshot player in our last Age game wondering what it would look like if you managed to roll a successful piloting check using the Showboat Talent. The GM for that Age game started whimpering.

On 9/26/2017 at 4:51 PM, Concise Locket said:

Sooooo... outside of a non-canonical game, is there actually a gaming utility to writing up Death Star stats?* Even the West End Games Death Star Technical Companion flat out admitted that using the DS as-written was unlikely to be encountered in most games. Rather, the book was also intended to be useful for GMs who wanted examples of Imperial military architecture and NPCs not found in the core books.

Woe to the table whose GM introduces his wholly-original existential threat to the campaign, the Death St Termination Sun!

*Other than providing fuel to online arguments.

Somewhere I read up on the amount of hardware and number of personnel that was on the DS I when it went titZ up, may have been the Haynes Owner's Manual or WEG d6 sourcebook... yeah you can see why Palpatine was pished

If you're playing an Imperial group in an AoR campaign, you might get your contribution rank high enough to request command over the Death Star. It almost worked for Krennic...

Krennic lacks quite a few XP for that.

16 minutes ago, MonCal said:

Krennic lacks quite a few XP for that.

Contribution Rank is not tied to XP, but to Duty. It's possible to advance one without the other keeping up.

On 9/25/2017 at 7:07 PM, Daeglan said:

They are spacefaring on cobbled together stolen ships. Think something like a spacehulk from 40k. They put themselves in between legs of a hyperspace route.

So who could these guys be. They're small. Good with scavanged tech. Like to conceal their identities. Well, we never have seen what's under a Jawa robe ...

Squibs

14 minutes ago, Daeglan said:

Squibs

Definitely. Squibs are the ultimate Space scavengers.

5 hours ago, Edgookin said:

So who could these guys be. They're small. Good with scavanged tech. Like to conceal their identities. Well, we never have seen what's under a Jawa robe ...

Tiny clone troopers, genetically modified.

I was waiting the Dawn of Rebellion book with my mouth watered. Now, after that preview article, I feel disgusted. Stats for plot device?

Foul mouthed language and abrupted opinions:

Clean version (in case the spoiler tags work): DS silhouette was given as 10 in EotE Core book (page 224), why was it changed here? Why is FFG retconning things to worse?

FFG: Please, get your set together, we love your product (8 - 10% market share should tell you something), but sometimes we feel that you are neglecting us. Also, remember that from marketing point of view, it's 7 times cheaper to sell to existing customer than to new customer.

Now, let's see if spoiler tags work.

42 minutes ago, kkuja said:

I was waiting the Dawn of Rebellion book with my mouth watered. Now, after that preview article, I feel disgusted. Stats for plot device?

Foul mouthed language and abrupted opinions:

What the f is this bull FFG? WHY? (Ok, I know that commercial interests were the reason.) Still, I beginning to feel that FFG is losing its edge with the game. One reason I fell love with the FFG, was the lack of power creep in splat books, and other was the balance of game. But recent books have had power creep, and broken the balance, at least in my experience. And now, whole horrific death star is reduced to few clinical numbers. Which also look silly (Handling only -5? PC in my group can almost fly it without setback dice... You can actually fly it around? WTF?). And change existing rules ("Silhouettes range from 0 to 10." Wasn't the ******* death star considered when original rules were designed? Oh, it was, and this new **** breaks it: "Silhouette 10 is reserved for the very largest of space stations or starships, such as the Death Star." (source: EotE, page 224). So, giving it silhouette 20 is stupid.). And are bull. In my future games that stat block is absolutety invalid, and who ever wrote that will be in bad authors list. If I have to start to use house rules to fix the game then I will find a new game, which is not so broken it needs to be fixed. Been there, done that. I have bought EVERY published FFG star wars book, so if FFG will lose many customers like me, they will feel it.

Clean version (in case the spoiler tags work): DS silhouette was given as 10 in EotE Core book (page 224), why was it changed here? Why is FFG retconning things to worse?

Now, let's see if spoiler tags work.

Over the top maybe? Gotta be honest, seen people lose their **** over things in the game but silhouette size is fer shur a new one.

Why you ask are they retconning? Simple, they aren't, Disney is, although retconn is the wrong word, the IP and what's in it aren't static. Here's a picture. Disney is adding ****/ships to the universe that requires more silhouette numbers unless we are going to have sil 9.3s and such to make room.

Of course you can pilot the Death Star? It has to reposition somehow.

It's Speed 1, and given the obscene size, trying to navigate it through anything but clear open space should require a pretty absurdly difficult roll (not sure off the top of my head if Silhouette factors into difficulty of moving through terrain, but that's something the GM should definitely implement if not, it makes narrative sense).

I really don't get what the big deal is here. Sure, it's a plot device, but with those stats, what GM is going to use it as anything but? I mean, sure, you could argue that it's a waste of developer time, but I highly doubt drafting up that stat block took up a significant chunk of developer resources. And it's not gonna occupy much page-space either.

1 hour ago, kkuja said:

I was waiting the Dawn of Rebellion book with my mouth watered. Now, after that preview article, I feel disgusted. Stats for plot device?

Foul mouthed language and abrupted opinions:

What the f is this bull FFG? WHY? (Ok, I know that commercial interests were the reason.) Still, I beginning to feel that FFG is losing its edge with the game. One reason I fell love with the FFG, was the lack of power creep in splat books, and other was the balance of game. But recent books have had power creep, and broken the balance, at least in my experience. And now, whole horrific death star is reduced to few clinical numbers. Which also look silly (Handling only -5? PC in my group can almost fly it without setback dice... You can actually fly it around? WTF?). And change existing rules ("Silhouettes range from 0 to 10." Wasn't the ******* death star considered when original rules were designed? Oh, it was, and this new **** breaks it: "Silhouette 10 is reserved for the very largest of space stations or starships, such as the Death Star." (source: EotE, page 224). So, giving it silhouette 20 is stupid.). And are bull. In my future games that stat block is absolutety invalid, and who ever wrote that will be in bad authors list. If I have to start to use house rules to fix the game then I will find a new game, which is not so broken it needs to be fixed. Been there, done that. I have bought EVERY published FFG star wars book, so if FFG will lose many customers like me, they will feel it.

Clean version (in case the spoiler tags work): DS silhouette was given as 10 in EotE Core book (page 224), why was it changed here? Why is FFG retconning things to worse?

FFG: Please, get your set together, we love your product (8 - 10% market share should tell you something), but sometimes we feel that you are neglecting us. Also, remember that from marketing point of view, it's 7 times cheaper to sell to existing customer than to new customer.

Now, let's see if spoiler tags work.

I mean, you can STILL use the Death Star as an abstract set piece. It having official stats doesn't forbid anyone from doing so.

I'd argue that a regular Star Destroyer works better as a set piece than a statted enemy to take down. That doesn't make me damand they be scrapped from the books though.

And making house rulings at some point is pretty much unavoidable in any game. That's basically what interpreting rulings on any level is anyway...

That doesn't make the entire system invalid...

Honestly if you refuse to support any system that requires house rules to work ideally, you'd better give up on RPGs entirely. I've never played a single one that worked perfectly out of the box without some GM fiat or houseruling, and that's before you even add the complexity of splatbooks.

Nearly all of the games I've run haven't required house ruling. However, we have had group discussions that were along the lines of, "When the game developer said blah, what did that mean?"

Remember that FFG uses several guest writers that come and go. So, who wrote the information found in Edge of the Empire CRB, who is working on this book, and were they aware of that information?

Hiccups like this are unavoidable when you have that many writers, for better or for worse. I mean, the CRBs use astromech droids as an example of silhouette 0 options, yet none of the astromech droid adversary profiles are listed as silhouette 0.

I wish they would employ a fact-checker. I am available for such a position.

4 hours ago, RicoD said:

I mean, you can STILL use the Death Star as an abstract set piece. It having official stats doesn't forbid anyone from doing so.

I don't believe anyone is making that argument. The anti-stats argument is: Books have limited word counts so why are writers spending those counts on a set piece vessel that the majority of gaming tables will never encounter?

If there's a singular message about Star Wars RPGs it's that the Galaxy is a big place and there is plenty of room for other stories. The Death Star is one of the most iconic images in 50 years of popular culture, right up there with the Superman "S" shield. A Death Star was a major plot point in four of the eight films and was referenced in two of the prequels. Is there actually a Game Master out there who is going to have a unique take on destroying or using this thing?

I'm guessing, no.

If you're in a non-canonical game where the players have assumed the roles of the film characters, there are only two, very predictable, ways that the campaign ends:

1. Death Star blows up. Cue hugs and victory parade.
2. Death Star kills PCs. Death Star blows up the Alliance. Game over.

Snore.

I'd like to think that most tabletop gamers are more creative than this. Otherwise, why not just play one of the dozens of board or video games that do a better job of simulating the Battle of Yavin?

There is a picture of a green-skinned female Twi'lek in that book that I really hope isn't supposed to be Hera. The face is so wrong it kind of bugs me.

26 minutes ago, Archlyte said:

There is a picture of a green-skinned female Twi'lek in that book that I really hope isn't supposed to be Hera. The face is so wrong it kind of bugs me.

I don't think it is, I think they're just random dissidents on Ryloth.

The image of "Kanan" on the cover bothers me, though...