I am very new to Edge of the Empire. So far my group has played one session and completed half of Trouble Brewing for the Core Rulebook. I am still learning the rules and reading lots of material for inspiration. In doing so I became stumped on something.

One of my sources of inspiration is the Daring Tales of the Space Lanes line from Triple Ace Games for Savage Worlds. They offer a few free short adventure pdfs and in one of them, Everyone Comes to Trix, it covers Savage Worlds rules for characters tossing items to each other and catching those items, presumably during a brawl or even a firefight.

So, my question is: How would you best handle this in Edge of the Empire? Is there something in the Core Rules covering this that I have missed? Or if not, what are some ideas on how to do this?

Athletics. Assign a Difficulty based on circumstances. Have thrower and catcher roll. Badvthrow, catcher gets some upgrades or setbacks. Good throw some boosts.

...or Coordination. I'd favour Coordination if the objects are light and/or moving fast, because that's an Agility thing. Plus, isn't Ranged Light used for Grenades? Might be as easy as the thrower using Ranged Light, and the catcher using Coordination.

Coordination for catching. If you’re just throwing as far as possible, that would be athletics. Otherwise, go with ranged-light throwing to reflect that throwing and cactching are different skills and match grenades.

Yep, I was thinking any of those three skills. To make it a single check, I had one of two ideas:

1) If the thrower is able to concentrate on the action, she rolls, probably Athletics or Ranged (Light). The difficulty is set by distance, and upgraded if the catcher is interfered with.

2) If the thrower is unable to actually make a coordinated attempt and is just "throwing it away," the catcher rolls Coordination to catch it.

There's also the question of whether this is a game-critical action or just cinematic flourish. In other words, is this like the Muppets, all throwing and catching the Baseball Diamond to keep it away from the bad guys? Or is this a knight cavalierly saying, "Squire! My sword!" and then catching the sword thrown to him from two feet away to look bad***? If it's just for flair, and the character could have just as easily been handed the object as a maneuver, I'd just call it a maneuver. Characters only get one action per turn in structured time, so I wouldn't penalize a more flourish-y throw/catch if players wanted to do it.

45 minutes ago, SavageBob said:

There's also the question of whether this is a game-critical action or just cinematic flourish. In other words, is this like the Muppets, all throwing and catching the Baseball Diamond to keep it away from the bad guys? Or is this a knight cavalierly saying, "Squire! My sword!" and then catching the sword thrown to him from two feet away to look bad***? If it's just for flair, and the character could have just as easily been handed the object as a maneuver, I'd just call it a maneuver. Characters only get one action per turn in structured time, so I wouldn't penalize a more flourish-y throw/catch if players wanted to do it.

Seconded.

On the flip side, of course, if it really is a big deal - if there's a vial of deadly virus that will eliminate all life and the PCs have spent the entire campaign getting here and one of them has got it but they're not going to make it through the door and so they dive forward and throw it and the other PC must catch it...now that probably requires an action or two.

Wow! There are so many ways to handle this.

5 hours ago, SavageBob said:

There's also the question of whether this is a game-critical action or just cinematic flourish.

In most cases I love the idea of just letting it happen without requiring a check. For this one specifically, multiple people all grabbing for the same object, I did want a possibility of failure. The object would just clatter to the ground and then be up for grabs by the person who gets to it the quickest.

5 hours ago, Absol197 said:

Yep, I was thinking any of those three skills. To make it a single check, I had one of two ideas:

1) If the thrower is able to concentrate on the action, she rolls, probably Athletics or Ranged (Light). The difficulty is set by distance, and upgraded if the catcher is interfered with.

2) If the thrower is unable to actually make a coordinated attempt and is just "throwing it away," the catcher rolls Coordination to catch it.

OOH! This may just be what I go with. I do like the single check.

Thanks!

Is there any foreseeable problem in letting the player choose which skill to use in order to make the throw or make the catch? I can see good cases to be made for several different skills. It wouldn't be game breaking to let a player use Athletics even if I was leaning toward Ranged (Light), would it?

5 minutes ago, James0235 said:

Is there any foreseeable problem in letting the player choose which skill to use in order to make the throw or make the catch? I can see good cases to be made for several different skills. It wouldn't be game breaking to let a player use Athletics even if I was leaning toward Ranged (Light), would it?

Yeah, I'd be flexible. If a PC's backstory is that they're a former football player with 3 ranks in Athletics, but then you say, "Sorry, it's Ranged (Light) in this case," that's a recipe for player upset. It sounds like such an epic scene that you'll want as many PCs to be making decent-ish rolls as possible.

I am all for being flexible on this. And I can't imagine it would be a bad thing if one PC wanted to use Athletics and another wanted to use Ranged (Light).

I was momentarily turned off a bit by not being able to figure out how to handle this situation in the system. But, now that I can see there are so many choices, any of which would work just fine. I guess it is just my first brush with the realization of how flexible EotE can be.

That's the whole point (and beauty) of the system. I'd allow every member of a party to roll a different skill (out of the ones mentioned) in this case - whatever they're best at (or worst at, depending on context).