52 minutes ago, edwardavern said:

So, I don't really want to get into this too heavily...but no, I'm not. I'm running a game. And while I want that game to evoke a sense of the movies, and draw on the lore and themes and flavours of the movie, I am not making a movie, or telling a story, or whatever. For me, there is a very concrete difference between those two experiences.

Aye, I was presenting you with how my group does things just to offer the example; though the fact you or they are not telling a story is somewhat concerning. Roleplaying is all about telling stories; whether it's more like Firefly where there are a series of contained episodes with an overarching theme or a grand epic in which your players go from unwilling bystanders to heroes of the McGuffin like the next Lord of the Rings. I am sure this is but a difference in concept as to what a story is or isn't, but if you're not telling any stories and your players aren't telling a story, has no desire for advancement or interest to advance within the world; where is the roleplaying in that?

Just a musing that's all from a curious mind. ^___^

Though more practically the technique of "roll sticking" is more practically speaking what I use. Otherwise you get the situation of omipotent all achieving PC's and if there's one thing I have learnt; hungering for a long term goal is a good motivator for a player (though stringing that goal out too long achieves the inverse. One of my PC's actually gave up on his goals because the GM kept bringing up and changing the circumstances behind one character's patients murder by literally every inquisitor he met; the character literally got fed up of every dark side user yanking his chain and thus simply gave up ever finding the truth.)

19 hours ago, Daeglan said:

I see that as a more he did not have the skill and force points to pull it off on a silhouette 3 object. You can have all the time in the world but if you are rolling 1 force die and and only have one strength upgrade....

There's also Luke pulling his saber out of the snow when he's hanging upside down in the cave. While there was arguably some time pressure there (the thing could come back at any moment), he *was* able to keep trying over and over. It definitely wasn't a case of "you tried once and failed, so you can't do it at all, ha-ha!"

13 minutes ago, Garran said:

There's also Luke pulling his saber out of the snow when he's hanging upside down in the cave. While there was arguably some time pressure there (the thing could come back at any moment), he *was* able to keep trying over and over. It definitely wasn't a case of "you tried once and failed, so you can't do it at all, ha-ha!"

Stop thinking of every attempt as a different roll. This system is not a every attempt is a roll. Just like every roll is not a single trigger pull

7 minutes ago, Daeglan said:

Stop thinking of every attempt as a different roll. This system is not a every attempt is a roll. Just like every roll is not a single trigger pull

True in this system. The Wampa scene could be just setbacks taken as strain.
And I still think you are ignoring the point. The point that "people don't stop trying just because the fail once" remains.

Think a scene over in with some character who keeps trying over and over to get over a wall, while the other characters do lots of other stuff. This seems somehow a lot less fitting to deal with a single roll solution. It still works for sure, but it seems odd to have the other characters do several rolls on different things, while one character keeps trying to climb that stupid wall, just because his character is stubborn in nature and does not give up easily.
At the other hand it would seem odd as well if one player keeps rolling 5 times in a row, while the rest of the party just stands there and watches the fool.

I'm so leery by now of shoe-horning every scene into the game mechanics. It's never really illuminating.

12 minutes ago, SEApocalypse said:

True in this system. The Wampa scene could be just setbacks taken as strain.
And I still think you are ignoring the point. The point that "people don't stop trying just because the fail once" remains.

Think a scene over in with some character who keeps trying over and over to get over a wall, while the other characters do lots of other stuff. This seems somehow a lot less fitting to deal with a single roll solution. It still works for sure, but it seems odd to have the other characters do several rolls on different things, while one character keeps trying to climb that stupid wall, just because his character is stubborn in nature and does not give up easily.
At the other hand it would seem odd as well if one player keeps rolling 5 times in a row, while the rest of the party just stands there and watches the fool.

You are right. But this is not the roll until i gwt what i want system. As others have noted a reroll generally requires a talent or a change in situation.

22 hours ago, LordBritish said:

though the fact you or they are not telling a story is somewhat concerning. Roleplaying is all about telling stories; whether it's more like Firefly where there are a series of contained episodes with an overarching theme or a grand epic in which your players go from unwilling bystanders to heroes of the McGuffin like the next Lord of the Rings. I am sure this is but a difference in concept as to what a story is or isn't, but if you're not telling any stories and your players aren't telling a story, has no desire for advancement or interest to advance within the world; where is the roleplaying in that?

Ah man, I'm really going to annoy some people on this one...

First up, roleplaying games (as opposed to pure roleplaying) are not "all about" anything. They are about lots of things. Depending on which researcher you ask, people play games for 6 different reasons, or 9, or 13, and they use terms like "immersion" and "mastery" and "creativity" and "achievement" and that sort of thing - that applies to games in general, and roleplaying games are no escape from it. Although admittedly the "mastery" people tend to end up being GMs, rather than players.

Second up, my point was in response to your point about how I should let things be like the movies. Except I'm not in the movies. And simply allowing things because that would be good in a movie is a terrible reason to allow them in a game. For example, most movies have a main character, around whom everything else happens...good luck trying to explain to the other players why their character got killed off in order to provide emotional resonance for the other guy. Or, let's take your example of LotR. That's a great trio of movies based on a fine book, but trying to run a game with 9 key characters who split up into (by the beginning of #3) four separate parties who don't interact with one another for significant periods of time, and many of whom get no "screentime" for well under half the second movie, and even when they do it's basically just talking to really boring trees...well, if you can make that fun for everyone at your gaming table you're a better man than me. (I'm open to the possibility that you are a much better man than me, by the way. It does happen, from time to time.) (Additional note: take a listen to the recent Order 66 episode, where GMs Chris, Dave and Phil, the stalwort defenders of FFG and EotE, stand up and admit that trying to run space combat like it works in the movies is a terrible idea. Took them a few years, but it's nice that they got there).

Third down, I never said my players aren't telling a story. Those are your words. What I said was that I wasn't telling a story. If I wanted to tell stories, I would write a book (which, in fact, I am doing, but that's by-the-by). But I have instead chosen to run a game. Which means I create a world and a tone and provide goals and adjudicate rules and narrate actions and make suggestions and, from time to time, push the narrative forward, but at the point at which I start telling a story I might as well let my players go home. The stories that arise from the game are the players' stories. The GM is just the architect; the players are the ones who get to live in the house.

Fourth across, the One Ring was not a McGuffin. Or a MacGuffin. Learn to spell it, look it up, then come back to me.

Fifth slightly-diagonal-up-the-right, and here's the kicker, but an RPG is not a story. The reason I know this is that it has dice. Dice represent random chance. And random chance has absolutely no place in story structure. ( Man in the High Castle is the exception that proves the rule). Now, stories will, should and do arise from a well-run game, but the game ≠story . If it did, we would need the dice. Or the rules. Or the points. We could just sit around and make up a story together. Which sounds great. But it's not playing a game. And I like playing games. So do my players. That's why they're players.

Man, I did not mean for that to go on that long. It may be a bit repetitive. And rant-y. And a bit troll-y. Sorry. I'm really tired. Pulled a 17-hour shift yesterday and back at work today. And I've just spent like an hour writing this and so I'm an hour behind on my work today...

I need coffee. I'm going to get some coffee.

14 hours ago, whafrog said:

I'm so leery by now of shoe-horning every scene into the game mechanics. It's never really illuminating.

Ah. So, this was a much quicker way of responding to the other point. I really should have just said this. It would probably annoy far fewer people. And I would have been able to get some work done.

Coffee. Now.

2 hours ago, edwardavern said:

But I have instead chosen to run a game. Which means I create a world and a tone and provide goals and adjudicate rules and narrate actions and make suggestions and, from time to time, push the narrative forward,

Without getting too "semantical", I would call that "telling a story". Providing goals and pushing the narrative forward are, imho, key aspects of storytelling. It doesn't have to be defined to the level of a novel, but anything that provides the players a reason for their PCs to care about the outcome is storytelling.

Last campaign my story was this: the Empire is taking over the PC's planet, and the key players are X, Y, and Z. That was essentially the entire backdrop, which sounds kind of boring, but once you add in unique system factors and a few local NPCs it takes on a life of its own. This basic story of conquest was going to happen (almost) regardless of what the PCs do, but they can alter timing and other aspects. Key thing I did *not* do was frame the story that way to the players, in fact for most of the sessions they had no idea the Empire was behind the local political corruption and the crimes they found themselves solving, was chasing a hapless grad student ally who was researching ancient ruins, etc. The PCs started off dealing with local issues, and these larger elements only emerged slowly. By the time the players were aware of the larger story, their PCs were invested in the outcome because of its impact on their local affairs.

The great thing for me was every time they used the narrative dice to inject a narrative element, I was able to string a line back to the main plot. So the players did as much storytelling by introducing new NPCs, subplots, etc., and occasionally by diverting the initial trajectory of the key NPCs X, Y, and Z.

I didn't script lines, but my NPCs had their goals and clocks, like Sauron and Saruman in LotR. Without PC interference, those goals would have come to fruition within a certain timeframe. The PCs interfered with those plans, like when Aragorn showed himself and the sword to Sauron through the Palantir, and Sauron overreacted. But unlike LotR, the purpose wasn't clear, or even on the radar, in the initial stages of the campaign. Heck, early on the PCs helped defend Imperials from pirates (making an in-encounter choice that could have gone either way) and earned themselves the Civilian Medal of Merit. This gave them a bit more freedom to move about and gather information; had they helped the pirates the ripple effect would have been quite different.

So, isn't that storytelling?

1 hour ago, whafrog said:

So, isn't that storytelling?

Yeah, maybe. But not in the way that I felt was being implied, which I guess was my point. It's not doing things "because movie" or "because story" or "because beautiful wonderful narrative game where nobody must ever abide by the rules", etc.

21 hours ago, Daeglan said:

You are right. But this is not the roll until i got what i want system. As others have noted a reroll generally requires a talent or a change in situation.

You fail with your athletic check.
I make a education check to see why.
I fix the reason and try again. ;-)

"Your emotions cloud your connections to the force. You may give into your anger and acquire some conflict and use those darkside pips or fail the check." - "My character calms himself and controls his emotion. I roll a discipline check. May I try again?" ;-)

Change of scene is something fundamentally different than change of situation, because a good scene has has a change of situation for sure anyway. A bad scene would be "You fail to climb the wall and go home."
(I am speaking from a purely dramatically and tension perspective here.)

15 hours ago, SEApocalypse said:

You fail with your athletic check.
I make a education check to see why.
I fix the reason and try again. ;-)

"Your emotions cloud your connections to the force. You may give into your anger and acquire some conflict and use those darkside pips or fail the check." - "My character calms himself and controls his emotion. I roll a discipline check. May I try again?" ;-)

Change of scene is something fundamentally different than change of situation, because a good scene has has a change of situation for sure anyway. A bad scene would be "You fail to climb the wall and go home."
(I am speaking from a purely dramatically and tension perspective here.)

Aye, the one thing that should be considered is that what interesting consequences for failure could there be? Which I guess depends on the nature of which the check is preformed; failing an athletics check might not be failure to climb over a wall, but to be to be too slow, get spotted by a patrol or otherwise fall one step behind in a chase. E.g. in a cinematic chase of two people on foot; having the greater number of success allows one to gain one distance band; failing the check completely might make one fall two steps behind instead of just the one and so fourth.

And in regards to the force? "You repeat the check, the force is still clouded. It seems this area is much too rich in life to isolate it's source; by then it might be too late.


As for the large post I'm only going to respond to parts of it as I was genuinely curious for clarification; which you have provided. Personally though I never respond to to posts I am feeling emotional about until I have had time to digest it's contents greatly. Indeed I might have seemed a bit sharp in my initial response as I generally chose to type very short posts as to be time efficient with the other things I have going on atm. I apologise if that set you off.

In regards to scene setting, movie vs game vs roleplay; it is true that there are many things that it could be, but I for one feel that some element of roleplaying is needed, some desire to collaborate a story between the GM and the PC to make edge interesting because this roleplaying system is thankfully very simple bar a few extra facts. It's super easy to optimise a character compared to most systems, especially in edge where with just 150/200 xp the ultimate sweeper. As such, more so then games like Shadowrun and DnD the aspect that the PC's are part of a living, breathing universe needs to be enforced. You miss understood me on the basis of story telling; I had intended to say that roleplaying in itself should generate stories from all parties around the table with both the players providing information and hooks and the GM being able to accommodate those. I did not intend to indicate that you had to be the sole provider of those hooks and angles, but I would expect a table to be producing stories as part and parcel of the fun activity we are all engaging on. It's clear that your players are a great contributor to the ongoing collaborative thread so that essentially we are in agreement on that front; story telling is a table wide process, not a GM reading from a script.


I for one believe that story telling and the fun adventures within this game is a responsibility held by both the players and the GM unlike with most systems. Personally, if I wasn't role playing within the setting I wouldn't really care that greatly for Star Wars myself and I don't find myself analysing the movies all that closely for RP elements. Scene setting however, is quite important. Who is in this scene? are there any time constaints that could stop the character making repeated checks? Would this NPC only talk to one, or multiple members of the party? Or would they get quite irritated if each and every member of the party tried a charm check "just because the main party face failed". When a check is rolled there must be an action that accompanies that.

Your initial question was "Is there any restrictions to players just rolling force checks" and technically there is not, beyond using an action. Encounters however, put an company on that action. If A force user is attempting to track someone going through the city, then using seek to detect that person is an action, it would be their primary activity. An encounter can last from as short as 6 seconds to several minutes to an indeterminate amount of time depending on exactly what the context of the encounter is, so yes there are restrictions to seeking, that once they fail their intial check they must undergo the entire process again, consuming time,. There are also mechanical reasoning as to why someone would be unable to detect someone; Yoda hid on a planet strong in the darkside of the force; and Luke hid where the force was strong and thus was undetectable within those environments. Likewise; if the character somehow has an abundance of free time, then using a force check to move a boulder in a time of rest is quite a trivial thing; yet moving an X-wing in the span of a single check was impossible to Luke at this point, Luke failed infront of Yoda, made the situation worse and became dissonant, that was the result of his move object check within that situation.

Likewise, one could mediate on Seek until the cows come home and find anyone they want in the galaxy; if you consider it to be something they can do trivially, it can be. Otherwise there might be times that due to conflict within the force at this point that it is cloudly enough to only generate one shot at this; if they fail then attempting it again would only generate the same result. This isn't necessarily GM fiat, just as with most settings magic follows a particular set of guidelines that doesn't necessarily make the best bit of sense; on one hand you get Lord of the Rings where magic isn't nailed down to a description, and other settings such as the Dresden Files series where magic is a defined set of rules as to what it can and can't do. Star Wars firmly sits in the former category in that it is extremely vaguely defined; it can do anything to skim minds, change minds and shoot lightning in extreme cases and as such it's generally dealt with in a vague manner; beyond a handful of vague sayings "weak minds are easily swayed". Though it did try and slip more towards the latter camp with the introduction of Midacholorians and the introduction of species completely immune to mental manipulation; but that's another story entirely.

The key take away message is that the force is generally a bit unreliable and cryptic at times and as such it's easy enough to either impose a narrative restriction on the number or checks or not; both answers are equally valid. Personally I am not one of those people that goes looking through scene by scene; just I'm a cynic who would rather that random checks were kept to a minimum for the sake of funnier things, like actually going out and digging up information on this person they are tracking and getting other people involved. That way here are value in having skills like knowledge underworld, streetwise and the like that would be usually used to track someone down. Out of luck on both fronts? Well maybe the streetwise vendors don't know or are otherwise unwilling to inform on the target; but for a tiny favour.... It's almost as if this improv investigation is turning into a tale of it's own without ever intending to be.

In short, yes and no. Yes because Seeking consumes actions within encounters, the entire framework on which this game operates and thus requires the PC's undivided attention to do it, and the force is prone to being really fickle, otherwise if it's quite a trival target then it just auto succeeds.

As for the one ring. Mcguffin/Macguffin probably was the wrong description. Completely my bad on that one.


This reply took me about an hour; Hopefully it is more satisfactory then the singlar paragraph response I posted earlier.