I plan in my very first Edge session:

1) the PCs bump into a disgruntled human talking to a Wookie about debt to Jabba as they exit Jabba's town house etc

2) Jabba surrounded by all his goons including a guy dressed head to toe in Mando armour.... talking to a Rodian....

3) an aging human berating a teenager about the current state of their droids, moaning about meeting his mates at Tosche Station...

4) a certain bartender yelling at the droids to leave, if I have any droid players

because once they start zipping around the galaxy there's little chance of them bumping into the iconic characters....except Vader and the occasional Inquisitor

On 9/30/2019 at 8:05 AM, GroggyGolem said:

Had I not retired from running Star Wars, I'd probably alter the stats of any canon character I'd include. Definitely use those as a baseline but I find them to be weak. Several of these extremely powerful characters in canon have lower wound thresholds than your average inquisitor per the Inquisitor building rules. They would go down in a heartbeat.

Agreed. And weirdly low stats in some cases. Mon Mothma has presence 4?? Try 6!

I think it's important to think of the listed stat blocks as a "starting point." The stat blocks were designed to be compared to starting or Knight-level PCs, and if you keep that in mind, you have a relative power level comparison. Likewise, if you look at how named characters have been presented previously (like Lando in Jewel of Yavin), they are always set up from the perspective of what they were there to accomplish within the story narrative. If you take both of these things together, you get the idea that the "complete" stat blocks of any named character in the game (just like the character is in a movie) will change based on the story needs. When you introduce an NPC into the scene, feel free to "power them up" (or down) as you need them to be in order progress the story and keep the tone that you want.

I never introduce an Named NPC into a situation that I didn't have a plan to write them out of, be it socially or narratively, and I tend to keep an idea in the back of mind for how much experience the PCs have on their sheets, and then apply that much experience to the Named NPC's sheet as well to bolster their operation within the framework of their purpose (for a Lando-style gambler helping them with a con-job it will be social manipulation options, for a combat character buffs to stats and talents that increase wounds/strain, etc) and then I always have a "so they went off book, now what?" exit option planned.

The NPCs should serve to move the story along, so unless the idea of the story is "can we kill X?" a Named NPC shouldn't really be kill-able in the scenario unless their death moves the story along. It doesn't HAVE to be expected - unexpected deaths are often very valuable in creating tension and moving the story to a new phase - but if it doesn't heighten the story, it WILL detract from it.

1 hour ago, DaverWattra said:

Agreed. And weirdly low stats in some cases. Mon Mothma has presence 4?? Try 6!

Yoda, Palpatine, and Vader don't get a 6 in anything. Why would Mon Mothma? Her in Willpower is a bit of a reach as it is.

1 hour ago, micheldebruyn said:

Yoda, Palpatine, and Vader don't get a 6 in anything. Why would Mon Mothma? Her in Willpower is a bit of a reach as it is.

I also think those three should have at least one 6 and maybe multiple.

As to the why, two points. First, if MM isn't the greatest leader in the Galaxy I don't know who is, and if stats go up to 6, somebody somewhere ought to actually have a 6. Second, if you can almost make me cry by saying "Many Bothans died," you deserve a 6 in Presence.

6 is pretty godly in this game. A PC has to cheese his way to one. Thankfully, I am glad FFG takes a more grounded approach to their statblocks.

14 minutes ago, kaosoe said:

6 is pretty godly in this game. A PC has to cheese his way to one. Thankfully, I am glad FFG takes a more grounded approach to their statblocks.

Yeah... I remember the old WEG game where the film charaters all god beyond divine stats, with even rookie farmboy Luke getting insane levels of skill while he should have been more on the level of a beginning PC, and Mon Mothma had 10D in the Command skill, which roughly translates into 7 yellows and a handfull of boost dice in Presence/Leadership.

I'd rather have stats that I can use before the players have spent 1000 XP.

7 hours ago, Stan Fresh said:

I'd rather have stats that I can use before the players have spent 1000 XP.

So do I. You can use insanely powerful NPCs in a low XP game, you just have to plan that your PCs almost certainly will lose to them (or be unable to match their ability). This can be a useful thing to have happen depending on the story you want to tell. Sometimes you want to set up the PCs to lose.

Aside from the fact that it's an embarrassment for 1000 XP PCs to be able to beat Vader one on one, it's also inconvenient that the devs haven't given us examples of any NPCs who overwhelmingly outclass mid level PCs. My game is at 1050 XP, and if I want a boss I always have to make one from scratch.

9 hours ago, micheldebruyn said:

Yeah... I remember the old WEG game where the film charaters all god beyond divine stats, with even rookie farmboy Luke getting insane levels of skill while he should have been more on the level of a beginning PC, and Mon Mothma had 10D in the Command skill, which roughly translates into 7 yellows and a handfull of boost dice in Presence/Leadership.

I disagree with this last bit about what 10D equates to. The highest level of just skill points in D6 (not including the base attribute) is 15 Dice. IF you compare that to the highest value of skill ranks in this system (5 ranks) that means that every three dice in a skill in D6 = 1 rank (rounded up) in a skill in FFG SW.

Now, if you compare the attribute values between D6 and FFG, They equal out pretty much exactly one for one. This is because in both systems, the highest level of attributes of a standard character is 6 dice.

Thus, if Mon Mothma's skill Dice alone in D6 was 10D in Command, that would translate to only 4 ranks in Leadership . However, if you look at her stats, that 10D is her total skill including her attribute dice , not just the level of the skill itself. Her actual level of skill in Command is only 6 D (according to the Movie Trilogy Sourcebook , she has a Presence of 4D so 10D-4D=6D in the actual skill). That means she'd only have 2 actual ranks in Leadership. That means she'd be rolling YYGG for Leadership, not seven yellows plus Boost dice.

4 minutes ago, Tramp Graphics said:

I disagree with this last bit about what 10D equates to. The highest level of just skill points in D6 (not including the base attribute) is 15 Dice. IF you compare that to the highest value of skill ranks in this system (5 ranks) that means that every three dice in a skill in D6 = 1 rank (rounded up) in a skill in FFG SW.

Now, if you compare the attribute values between D6 and FFG, They equal out pretty much exactly one for one. This is because in both systems, the highest level of attributes of a standard character is 6 dice.

Thus, if Mon Mothma's skill Dice alone in D6 was 10D in Command, that would translate to only 4 ranks in Leadership . However, if you look at her stats, that 10D is her total skill including her attribute dice , not just the level of the skill itself. Her actual level of skill in Command is only 6 D (according to the Movie Trilogy Sourcebook , she has a Presence of 4D so 10D-4D=6D in the actual skill). That means she'd only have 2 actual ranks in Leadership. That means she'd be rolling YYGG for Leadership, not seven yellows plus Boost dice.

You're working of the completely false assumption that the maximum skill level in D6 and the maximum skill level in FFG let you do equivalent things. This is not the case.

And no, she has 10D in skill ranks, not 6D + 4D in Perception. You don't roll skill + ability in D6. Instead, if you have 4D in Perception (the maximum for humans) you get a free 4D in all Perception skills.

1 minute ago, micheldebruyn said:

You're working of the completely false assumption that the maximum skill level in D6 and the maximum skill level in FFG let you do equivalent things. This is not the case.

And no, she has 10D in skill ranks, not 6D + 4D in Perception. You don't roll skill + ability in D6. Instead, if you have 4D in Perception (the maximum for humans) you get a free 4D in all Perception skills.

She has a total skill of 10D. I played D6 SW for several years, and own most of the books , I know how that system works. A character starts every skill at just their base attribute . Then they increase that skill (three pips per skill die) above that as they advance said skill. That means the total number of dice rolled equals their base attribute plus any additional skill dice they put into the skill. As such, that 10 D Mon Mothma has in D6 is the base attribute of 4D plus D6 in additional skill Dice . So yes, you do essentially roll attribute plus skill. They just did the math for you by having the skill value already include the attribute in the total number of dice. You'll note that Force skills in D6 don't include attribute dice. This is because they aren't controlled by an attribute. They're stand alone skills, and they only go up to 15 Dice as no character in D6 SW has any of the three Force skills of more than 15D. Thus, once again, 3D in skill under D6 equates to 1 Rank of skill under FFG.

And no, I'm not working off a false assumption that the two do equivalent things. They do indeed accomplish equivalent effects . you get a lot more "bang for the buck" per die in this system because it requires fewer dice. As such, one die does more in FFG than WEG. However, one rank in an attribute is still only one rank in an attribute. And 1 die in an attribute is the same in either system. The only difference is in the skill ranks and how they convert from one system to another. And that comes up to a 3:1 WEG to FFG ratio. The only difference between the systems is that in D6, the skill dice add to the attribute dice total, whereas in this system, the skill ranks upgrade the attribute dice.

2 hours ago, DaverWattra said:

So do I. You can use insanely powerful NPCs in a low XP game, you just have to plan that your PCs almost certainly will lose to them (or be unable to match their ability). This can be a useful thing to have happen depending on the story you want to tell. Sometimes you want to set up the PCs to lose.

Aside from the fact that it's an embarrassment for 1000 XP PCs to be able to beat Vader one on one, it's also inconvenient that the devs haven't given us examples of any NPCs who overwhelmingly outclass mid level PCs. My game is at 1050 XP, and if I want a boss I always have to make one from scratch.

I don't have a problem with a PC with 1000-XP defeating Vader in a hard-won and dramatically appropriate fight. Insofar as the player was biting their nails down to the end and Vader goes down in a blaze of glory that no one will ever forget I don't see any cause for embarrassment. If you look at the films he isn't the force of nature fans have fantasized him into. Scary and the Big Bad? Absolutely. But not a god. His primary opposition was a smuggler, princess, and farm-boy turned greenhorn Jedi. The argument can be made that Obi-Wan was playing a deeper game and let Vader kill him in the original film. And the first time he fought Obi-Wan no punches were pulled and he lost. He's not the unbeatable foe he's been made out to be. We have a three-tree Jedi who has fought Vader to a mutually bloody stand still and, had the dice fallen slightly differently, one of them would have been dead. I'm not really sure which one. In the end the players obtained their objectives so they "won." It is one of the most memorable sessions we ever had. I would go so far as to say the rule that inquisitors get two actions per round should only be applied against multiple opponents. Mano-a-Mano? I only give one action per round. Even if its Vader.

1 hour ago, Tramp Graphics said:

She has a total skill of 10D. I played D6 SW for several years, and own most of the books , I know how that system works. A character starts every skill at just their base attribute . Then they increase that skill (three pips per skill die) above that as they advance said skill. That means the total number of dice rolled equals their base attribute plus any additional skill dice they put into the skill. As such, that 10 D Mon Mothma has in D6 is the base attribute of 4D plus D6 in additional skill Dice . So yes, you do essentially roll attribute plus skill. They just did the math for you by having the skill value already include the attribute in the total number of dice. You'll note that Force skills in D6 don't include attribute dice. This is because they aren't controlled by an attribute. They're stand alone skills, and they only go up to 15 Dice as no character in D6 SW has any of the three Force skills of more than 15D. Thus, once again, 3D in skill under D6 equates to 1 Rank of skill under FFG.

And no, I'm not working off a false assumption that the two do equivalent things. They do indeed accomplish equivalent effects . you get a lot more "bang for the buck" per die in this system because it requires fewer dice. As such, one die does more in FFG than WEG. However, one rank in an attribute is still only one rank in an attribute. And 1 die in an attribute is the same in either system. The only difference is in the skill ranks and how they convert from one system to another. And that comes up to a 3:1 WEG to FFG ratio. The only difference between the systems is that in D6, the skill dice add to the attribute dice total, whereas in this system, the skill ranks upgrade the attribute dice.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to read a text that has half the words randomly bolded?

5 hours ago, DaverWattra said:

So do I. You can use insanely powerful NPCs in a low XP game, you just have to plan that your PCs almost certainly will lose to them (or be unable to match their ability). This can be a useful thing to have happen depending on the story you want to tell. Sometimes you want to set up the PCs to lose.

Or I could allow for the players having a reasonable chance to succeed? Predetermined outcomes are boring.

I had my characters in one campaign encounter Grand Admiral Thrawn, but not in person.

They came across the Chimera which was at the head of an encounter against some rebels they had been associated with. One member of the party was a super-fan of Thrawn so when I described the scene and mentioned a ship which identified itself as the Chimera over the comms when it was demanding unconditional surrender, he knew exactly what was going on.

They didn't have to compete with just his stats, they had to compete with a star destroyer being commanded by him and run by his crew, which is much more lethal.

It's true that if you stat it then they'll try to kill it, but the point is more about using the narrative and fear mechanics to get across to the party just how seriously bad this situation is. Also, when the BBEG is accompanied by a cohort of underlings, players are much less likely to engage without an elaborate plan. I very rarely let players face a single enemy these days, because it's just not a serious threat once they've earned some XP and specialized a bit.

17 hours ago, micheldebruyn said:

Do you have any idea how hard it is to read a text that has half the words randomly bolded?

They're not randomly bolded. The bolded words and phrases are specifically chosen for emphasis.

On 11/8/2019 at 1:27 AM, Tramp Graphics said:

She has a total skill of 10D. I played D6 SW for several years, and own most of the books , I know how that system works. A character starts every skill at just their base attribute . Then they increase that skill (three pips per skill die) above that as they advance said skill. That means the total number of dice rolled equals their base attribute plus any additional skill dice they put into the skill. As such, that 10 D Mon Mothma has in D6 is the base attribute of 4D plus D6 in additional skill Dice . So yes, you do essentially roll attribute plus skill.

This is staggering display of misunderstanding even for you, Tramp.

The point was that you can't equate Mon Mothmas 10D to a simple skill rank, as the skill rank does not take the base attribute into account, while the 10D does. 10D would have to be compared to her complete dice pool , rather than just the skill rank. That means that you'd also might have to take some talents and abilities into consideration. While separating out the "skill dice" from the "attribute dice" like @micheldebruyn is not how you do it in the D6 system, it makes more sense to use as basis of comparison as skills and attributes interact quite differently with each other in both systems. A simple one-for-one translation will be inaccurate. By your logic, a character with 3D in their attributes (average for D6 starting characters) in the WEG system would not only have a 3s in the corresponding FFG scores, but also 1 rank in every skill, regardless if they put in any training or effort at all into it.

Also, the assumption that both systems would use the same arbitrary upper limit is just completely baseless.

On 11/8/2019 at 9:01 PM, Tramp Graphics said:

They're not randomly bolded. The bolded words and phrases are specifically chosen for emphasis.

Fine, randomly emphasized if you want to nitpicky about it.

It still makes you sound like a raving lunatic, which I assume is unintentional, trolling or surprisingly self-aware.

3 hours ago, penpenpen said:

This is staggering display of misunderstanding even for you, Tramp.

The point was that you can't equate Mon Mothmas 10D to a simple skill rank, as the skill rank does not take the base attribute into account, while the 10D does. 10D would have to be compared to her complete dice pool , rather than just the skill rank. That means that you'd also might have to take some talents and abilities into consideration. While separating out the "skill dice" from the "attribute dice" like @micheldebruyn is not how you do it in the D6 system, it makes more sense to use as basis of comparison as skills and attributes interact quite differently with each other in both systems. A simple one-for-one translation will be inaccurate. By your logic, a character with 3D in their attributes (average for D6 starting characters) in the WEG system would not only have a 3s in the corresponding FFG scores, but also 1 rank in every skill, regardless if they put in any training or effort at all into it.

Also, the assumption that both systems would use the same arbitrary upper limit is just completely baseless.

Fine, randomly emphasized if you want to nitpicky about it.

It still makes you sound like a raving lunatic, which I assume is unintentional, trolling or surprisingly self-aware.

No. A character with 3D in a given attribute with have a 3 in the corresponding attribute in FFG, but no ranks in any skill.

As for Mon Mothma's 10D representing her complete dice pool, thank you for making my point for me . That is exactly what I said from the beginning. The 10D Mon Mothma has in Command includes her attribute. the attribute, Mon Mothma's actual skill dice ( just the skill dice themselves, not including the base attribute ) are 6D. That is what would be converted into Proficiency dice in this system.

This is certainly a fruitful tangent you're on and not just text-based cosplay of a dog with a bone.

1 hour ago, Tramp Graphics said:

No. A character with 3D in a given attribute with have a 3 in the corresponding attribute in FFG, but no ranks in any skill.

As for Mon Mothma's 10D representing her complete dice pool, thank you for making my point for me . That is exactly what I said from the beginning. The 10D Mon Mothma has in Command includes her attribute. the attribute, Mon Mothma's actual skill dice ( just the skill dice themselves, not including the base attribute ) are 6D. That is what would be converted into Proficiency dice in this system.

Well, that's my mistake for mixing up your posts.

Which still makes your comparison somewhat... Well, if you think that a stat of 10D, which is quite godly by PC standards, reasonably translates into an attribute of 4 with 2 skill ranks, you've just convinced me that you're not as out of touch with reason and common sense as I thought when I wrote the previous post. It's worse.

Still doesn't adress the point that a strict one-for-one conversion formula is bound to fail.

Or, you know, the lunacy. Interesting that you let that one slide. Concession accepted?

11 minutes ago, penpenpen said:

Well, that's my mistake for mixing up your posts.

Which still makes your comparison somewhat... Well, if you think that a stat of 10D, which is quite godly by PC standards, reasonably translates into an attribute of 4 with 2 skill ranks, you've just convinced me that you're not as out of touch with reason and common sense as I thought when I wrote the previous post. It's worse.

Still doesn't adress the point that a strict one-for-one conversion formula is bound to fail.

Or, you know, the lunacy. Interesting that you let that one slide. Concession accepted?

First, I don't consider 10D to be all that "godly" regardless. This is particularly true given that there are some characters with a total skill ( including attribute ) in the 17D-18D range. Paplatine had Force skill dice at 15D in one of his Force skills (I'd have to look up which one), and that's the highest pure skill ranking of any character in that system . 10D total is mid range level.

48 minutes ago, Tramp Graphics said:

First, I don't consider 10D to be all that "godly" regardless. This is particularly true given that there are some characters with a total skill ( including attribute ) in the 17D-18D range. Paplatine had Force skill dice at 15D in one of his Force skills (I'd have to look up which one), and that's the highest pure skill ranking of any character in that system . 10D total is mid range level.

Well, that is certainly not indicative of insane power creep nor your lack of judgement for using it as a reasonable comparison.