Here is a thread for After Action reports of your first few games.
So you want to play EotE? Well you should, because it's Star Wars, and it's a blast. I am going to divide this report into two parts, the recounting of what the characters did, and the mechanical aspects of the game.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What Went Down:
Our party consisted of four players.
A Wookie doctor named Lowryyhn who struggles with a drug addiction. He has a deep desire to help the needy, but it is almost buried under his strong addiction for medical drugs that he has developed. This has led to him working in the out rim, since it is the only place where there are people desperate enough to employ him, and it allows him easy access to the drug trade.
A Human Replica Droid Bodyguard named Cory. He was an experiment by one of the core world megacorporations in comparative droid psychology. He was led to believe that he was human, and then his droid nature was deliberately exposed. Of course Cory was devastated, and promptly escaped and fled to the outer rim.
A human slicer who goes by the code name Slash (for / not for slashing). A savant in computing, Slash was just beginning his career as a white collar criminal when got careless and was traced. A rather impressive bounty was placed on his head and he had to flee to the outer rim.
And an unnamed human trader. After his best friend died, this man experienced a psychological shift, and began to become obsessed with finding rare and valuable items. However, this obsession has gotten him into debt with some rather powerful people, and now he is stuck in the outer rim until he can work it off.
All four of them had just arrived in town, with only the trader having more than 5 credits to rub together. Chalmun's was a universally recognized play to find work for desperate people, and this particular day was where Geen, a low level broker for the local cartel (Jabba) was having drinks. While the players were relaxing a party of bounty hunters busted in, looking for Slash. Slash immediately ran a program to dim the lighting and headed for the back door. However, the bounty hunter commander was fast, and managed to come around the other way and shoot him in the gut (Critical wound on the first attack role of the game. Good times!) Geen, who was actually there to meet with Slash, quickly called in some reinforcements to drive the hunters off, and then enlisted the help of the closest doctor (Lowryyhn) to get Slash back on his feet. They dragged him into a back storage room to tend to his wounds. Cory, attracted to the idea of perspective employment, and the trader, motivated by Geen's mentioning of the debt he was owed, also came into the back, where Geen made them a business offer.
The engineer who designed the special security systems used at the Mos Esiley imperial garrison had turned traitor and is willing to sell the information he had to the highest bidder. However, Jabba is already mad due to the Imperial interdiction of the planet that just started a few days ago after Han Solo shot his way out of the spaceport with something important. He doesn't have time to waste bartering, and wants the information now so he can get his business back up and running as soon as possible, which might mean driving off the imperials as best he can. Geen offers the players 15,000 credits if they can track this man down. Of course 15,000 credits is quite the motivation, and all of the cash strapped PC's agree to look around.
All that is know of this man's whereabouts is that he is hiding out in the desert. The PC's decide that he has to eat somehow, and after asking around, discover that a local salvager has been buying lots of emergency rations before heading out into the dune sea to forage for wrecks. They get hired on as muscle during the next haul, and head out into the waste.
After spending the day salvaging what they could from a recently and violently abandoned rebel base, they had no engineer to show, but did find some useful gear, and an encrypted data disc the rebels accidentally left behind. As they were finishing up their work for the day a group of Sandpeople raiders ambushed them from the top of a canyon. A lucky shot by one of the raiders disabled the cargo skiff they were using, but Slash was able to get it running again, while Cory inflicted heavy casualties on the attackers.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ok, now onto mechanical stuff.
1. Did it feel like Star Wars?
It sure as heck felt like the outer rim. I opted to start with everyone not knowing each other, so opening the game with one of the characters being hounded by bounty hunters was interesting, because no one else really felt inclined to help him out. It felt desperate, very much kill or be killed kinda vibe going on. Which is very good. I love the critical hit mechanic! It's amazing in how it allows a player to be wounded badly, but still survive to live another day.
2. Did the rules help the game along, or make it needlessly complicated?
This question is hard to answer in one playthrough. Of course there was a lot of slowdown because we were all learning, but I feel that most of that slowdown was on my end as the GM. The players were able to pick up the base mechanic very quickly, but I had a lot to keep track of, as I am coming from a lot of d20 GMing, and all of this was very new.
3. Were the player's options too limited?
Honestly, I am the kind of person who likes to put interesting limits on things and then see what comes of it. There was some complaining about the races, which is something that I can agree is to limited. Two or three more races would be nice, and a lot of iconic races are missing even though they fit right into an Outer Rim setting. No one complained about the classes, and everyone felt very crunched in their gear selection. Only one person took extra credits in exchange for obligation (the trader) so everyone else could just about purchase a blaster and that was it.
Other general thoughts.
On a first playthrough what can you really know eh? From what I experienced, I loved it! The dice mechanic is amazing to me. The dice tell you things. They speak to you. What happened when the player got a bunch of advantage on that role to slice the computer? Oh, he managed to recover the credit pin of a local merchant. When the player roles a success with lots of disadvantage it is really fun to see the warring emotions of triumph on their face when the shoot that sandperson in the face, but also hilarious despair when they slip on a rock and fall prone out in the open because they were lining up their shot while trying to move.
Of course I felt that a lot of the rules were mushy and unclear, but for now I am putting that up to a first time playthrough, which is totally reasonable. Now it is very late here, and my brain is tired. Post your runthroughs below, and splay your thoughts across the wonderful universe of information that is the internets…
Add more if you can, as it most certainly helps.