Basically, as the title says: Anyone have any idea as to when physical dice sets (mentioned somewhere along the line as being available for purchase in standalone dice packs) will be available? I know there is a single set coming in the Beginner Box, but for those who would like more, is there any info? Or will they come out at the same time as the completed core book?

Armenius Orson Carrick said:

Not soon enough for some folks?

In all seriousness, it'll probably be around the same time as the final version of Edge of the Empire gets released. Given how comparitively small the print-run for the EotE beta was (5000 copies is pretty darn small), it'd make sense to hold off on the actual dice until the product gets released, much like they didn't release the physical dice for X-Wing until that game was released.

If they think about it at all, and I don't know with EoTE, they will probably pack a set in with the first releases of the book, and then maybe ALSO as a separate item for purchase. A game with such unique dice really should package a set in with the book, just to ensure you don't get to the store, only to find that one group came in, bought a copy of it, and 5 additional packages of dice, and now there aren't any more dice, unless you make your own out of the book.

I frequently have reservations about this game, stemming from the anti-Jedi in Star Wars approach, and also an errata list as long as the book, which makes me question why I spent $30 to buy a book where nothing is still the same, but I can still see something as simple as "the book comes in a slightly bigger box, also containing a thing of dice, and maybe a screen and one or a few blank character sheets, so you can photocopy them, without forcing your book into a copier/scanner" approach. Not sure if they will, but we'll see.

venkelos said:

Uhm… Doesn't the term "beta-test" sort of entail changes and modifications? Doesn't it imply that the game is not finished? I mean, sure, some beta-tests results in less changes than what has happened here, but I don't see a problem with these changes, I joined a beta-test (even if I paid money for it), and I'm part of a community that is improving it, that's a good thing. I joined (ie spent money) knowing that what I got was going to change, improve and not survive being exposed to players, less so than a finished and already play-tested game. I mean, the core mechanics is the same, a lot has changed sure, but the basic structural core remains the same, mostly it has been added to, with a few/lot (of) tweaks and clarifications.

venkelos said:

Well, FFG_Sam pretty much said the final version of Edge of the Empire is going to be a hardcover book. Don't recall which thread it was, but no box set for the EotE corebook.

As for the "did I just waste $30 on a book?' debate, I look at it from this angle.

This is very much what WotC did with the 3rd Edition of D&D in regards to 3.0 and 3.5, where 3.0 was the "beta" for D&D 3rd Edition, while 3.5 was the "final" version.

Main difference is that FFG is being entirely upfront about this being a Beta, even saying on the main page announcing the book that things were subject to change as feedback was received and reviewed.

And as GM Chris noted on Episode 163 of the Order 66 Podcast, where they discussed the Beta, quite frankly the EotE is a self-contained, fully playable RPG in its own right. And if you don't like certain changes that FFG has made to the game in their Weekly Updates, you've got the original version that you can continue to use for your personal games.

I snipped the "anti-Jedi" element as that is a perspective issue that's been beaten into the ground a thousand times over. FFG choose to not make Jedi or other Force-users the primary focus and era setting of the initial book, and though I am a huge fan of playing Jedi characters, I'm quite okay with that. One of the minor quibbles I had with OCR/RCR/Saga Edition was that it took away some of the mystique of being a Jedi in the Rebellion Era; it wasn't so much you earned your stripes like you had to back in the WEG days, but rather got them handed to you as a first level character. But again, that's an opinion piece that's been discussed to death and one I'll pass on resurrecting, thank you very much.

Donovan Morningfire said:

The OP has a point about the Final Copy having some dice come with it. It would INDEED be frustrating as all get out to get a copy of the book but miss out on buying the dice. Of course, the simplest answer to that would be to buy the B-Box (or two or three), but then again, 30 bucks is an awfully steep price if all yer looking for is a set of bones.

As for the "Anti-Jedi" Argument, I come down sort of in the middle. I don't believe any Star Wars game that lumps Jedi in with other character types can truly do them justice, unless it's the grabbastic Jedi scarcity of the Rebellion Era, where Jedi are pale shadows of their former selves. I believe in this regard, FFG was wise in creating a separate book to take them to their true potential. But that being the case, I will expect to see Jedi treated much as FFG treated Space Marines in 40K - beings of an order of magnitude greater power than other PC types, such that to have other PC types working with them you need to "back-fill" them with XP so they're at rough parity. IMO, if FFG doesn't at least move in this direction, releasing a separate book for the Jedi is little more than a cash grab.

MY problem with Edge of the Empire is that FFG has managed to take the "Wars" out of Star Wars. Set the Jedi to one side for a moment, and allow me to say by way of forestalling the inevitable "You could do it if you wanted to" arguments by citing that the Developers clearly didn't INTEND for you to be able to run a Rebellion campaign or Old Republic or Clone Wars or Force Unleashed (which, like or not, is canon, sorry folks) etc. using EotE. I am not a bodger or a kit-basher. I believe in the right tool for the right job, and IMO we've not been given the tools to do that. So, currently, as it stands, we have no Rebels, scant few Imperials, no Clones, no Battle Droids…none of the things that in the movies took center screen. You are - in the main - invited to play the poor sods you see face down in their blue milk in the Mos Eisley Cantina scene in Episode IV. Sort of like "******", Star Wars style.

Now, this can work for a LOT of people, don't get me wrong. And in many ways it forces groups to work harder. When you're a Rebel, or Jedi, your character's mission in life is laid out for her. Your purpose is set. EotE plunks you into a part of the SW universe that's always been sorta murky and says "You set it all up for yourself". Admirable, to be sure:

But in the main (and I cannot emphasize that qualifier enough) it's not Star Wars. It's "Galactic Free-For-All of the Stars", and I am not sure how well it will do.

Remains to be seen. *I* hope it does well because I am waiting for the second core book to come out so I CAN put the "Wars" back into Star Wars - particularly the Clone Wars.

Here's hoping.

That was a well-thought out and expressed post; good. You're very right in a lot of ways - at this particular point it really ISN'T Star Wars - but I'm taking a long view. It's sort of… a prequel to the galaxy we all know and love. I intend to get all the books anyway, so I'm okay with it. I do feel EotE has a certain freaky charm to it; certainly it's something new and different (for SW, anyway)!

I do apologize, I do kind of beat on this game a lot. On the surface, at least to me, it doesn't present as the game I expected it to be. Star Wars isn't Jedi, but it usually has them. If you play a game, they are there, if you play a video game, you are one, or it becomes available, at some point, for good or ill. The games that break that trend, IMO sucked hard, overall, though I don't know all of them, and the biggest one I do has to do with what I like to think of as a not real character, Jango Fett. I am making strides to try and wrap my brain around this game, as it is presenting, and see where it certainly has potential; I just have to get past my own narrow viewpoint, something I readily confess I have. I might try to needily clig to the veneer of a character I would want to play, even if the system might try to make it harder for me, but I have to like my first character, to get into the system which, I'll be honest, I've never seen a system that uses dice like these before. I don't even know what they mean, half the time, and then, occasionally, the errata changes something I thought I had a tenuous grasp on, and there it goes, again.

I am certainly aware that this is a beta, and an updated/finished version is in the works, for the future; I just got a bit grumpy when, with only some exaggeration, I almost can't open the book to a mechanic, and not find that it has been changed; sort of makes me wish it had been a $10-$15 pdf, rather than a $30 book that needs 11 pages of errata. I can wait for said finished copy, though.

As for dice, yes, I will repeat I hope that the book/dice come in three configs: the book alone, a book in a box, preferably packed with a themed screen, a set of the dice, and maybe some loose, photo-copyable characters sheets, and the dice individually packed. I don't particularly care that the book has a sheet of stickers; if I am paying for a set of dice, I'd rather they just permanently be for this game, rather than slowly having wear and humidity cause the stickers to come off, or the glue to let loose, if you printed paper ones out. This way, you can buy the book for your group, but they can get more, other dice to circulate, if they don't feel they also need the book. Here's hoping. Not expecting, of course, but it'd free to hope.

If they tried to put in everything that everyone wants, the book would be huge. You have to draw the line somewhere. And I hope they don't bump Jedi into the stratosphere. I dislike the thought of that. Just so long as they don't become the ubermen they have been in the past. In Saga it seemed that every time I turned around there was another Force power allowing Jedi to nullify the abilities of another class with the use of the Force. Really? Is that really necessary? If that is the idea of Jedi that many have then consider me in the minority.

This is not to say that the designers aren't listening. We may see more rules on the Force with the actual release. We may also see more information on the the Empire. This book seems aimed at the period of the Rise of the Empire, that 20 years before A New Hope. Fleshing out the Force by way of Imperial Inquisitors and Emperor's Hands could be done without delving into Jedi. Remember they were hunting anyone Force-Sensitive, either to kill or recruit. We could very well see stat blocks for these types of characters (or I may just stat them up myself now that I think of it).

Anyways, this is just the beta, so keep the ideas flowing and hopefully what sticks makes for a better game for many.

venkelos said:

We would all have loved a PDF, but that's not going to happen. Ever. The licence that FFG has is a strict no-PDF licence. PDFs are covered under LucasArts/LucasFilm digital gaming licence (or whatever it's called), the same one that covers video games. It's the same reason why WotC didn't put anything out in PDF - they couldn't.

I'm just glad that FFG is doing things the way they are. It gives the fans a real chance to change things for the better. Not everyone is going to like every change, of course, but you can't please everyone all the time, right?

-EF

EldritchFire said:

Very true. I bought the beta book also, but have sort of stopped reading it because of all the errata. But at least I know that, when the final version ships, it'll have been sharpened to a fine point by y'all.

But on the original topic, if FFG release the book in a slipcase with a pack of dice (and maybe, as somebody said, a GM screen), I will definitely buy that version, over the book alone.

Mmm, a similar thing was done with the recent The One Ring rpg. It even used essentially normal dice and the slip-case came on account of the game being two softcovers, but there's no reason a set of dice shouldn't be available for purchase in a package deal with the book. And yeah, I plan on getting the Beginner's Box, but if I wanna start running the game then, I'm gonna be left with only one set of dice, cause I'm sure as hell not forking out for multiple sets of the same content just for more dice. I'm stupid, but I ain't that stupid. So essentially, I am hoping that they will see release in like a blister pack format, ala the X-wing dice, concurrent with the Beginner's Box.

+1 for wanting physical dice. If the general consensus at FFG is that the dice are not going to change, then yeah, I'd like them to make those available to support the beta. The stickers are coming off my dice, even after I varnished them. I have the app, too, but it's a bit more time-consuming to use.

As far as I'm concerned, there's really no substitute for good physical dice with the symbols properly etched on.

Armenius Orson Carrick said:

Also like EotE, The One Ring had their PDF releases stopped due to licensing rights.

mouthymerc said:

The funny thing is that: as badass as Jedi are supposed to be, the movies themselves do a wierd job of showing you how much they can suck, from the many moments where their zen-like-discipline breaks and something makes them hop around like a Tex Avery cartoon (usually when their lightsaber slips out of their hands and they're scrambling around or something) to compensate for it, to the 3rd movie where despite the sheer number of Jedi seen running around the galaxy apparently none of them were precognitive enough to see the whole clone army turning on them happening--and whatever other major events that showed just how exposed/helpless the Jedi were; I don't want to get into lore debates with some Star Wars-philes here, but the reason I bring this up is to demonstrate that force-users are really not so badass as a lot of people make them out to be… Perhaps in many video games they've been given that "uber" bill, but there is a balance to their abilities. Either way, force-users do not need be treated as "unless you play as one then no one else can stack up to you" type of handling. As a side note: I've played a few Saga games, and for whatever reasons, most of the time nobody played as the Jedi, so it usually seemed to work out for us, lol.

I do not agree whatsoever with the approach that FF is taking with Star Wars--they did this with the Warhammer 40K games, and all that made everyone do is dish out more cash to get another set of books (to play a type that did not require a whole new book to be made and also tweak the system around for some reason as well!). Star Wars does not require this method of release: it would be more economic, especially for the players, to release a main rule/source book where everything you would need is included, and then release other books that could expand on the setting and player options, etc.

As for the designers listening to us… I don't know. A lot of people such as myself commented that the dice may need a minor re-design due to their gameplay effects, and you'd think that they would've waited to start making the final dice until the beta was finished , but it seems that they've already made their minds up about that! We know that people wanted more physical copies of the dice (at least by the time the final book is made) but… really? I can only hope that the beta is more about making little changes to rules and some sentences here and there, and actually serving to make major changes as well. Hopefully I'm proved wrong.

WereWes said:

Yeah….see, the 800lb gorilla in the room is the fact that George Lucas can't direct for beans and his writing's not that much better. The three big reasons Episodes IV-VI did so well is (1) Audiences hadn't seen anything like Star Wars in movie theaters for almost thirty years, (2) Lucas lucked out on some very talented actors who could carry his derivative and hyper-simplistic story forward in a way that wouldn't bore the audience to death and (3) The Special Effects.

One of the BIGGEST indicators of this IMO is how the Jedi got treated in Episode III. Because the movie was rushed and because a lot of the acting was so bad, it told its story poorly. You felt like things were happening all of a sudden because there was no ramp-up to it. General Order 66 was a plot device pulled literally from nowhere as if by magic - making a case for its legitimacy is pretty hard in the first place, but once it's enacted, we understand that it's just a pretext to sweep all the Jedi aside in a ham-fisted manner. So, quite literally, for the "Nth" time, Lucas screws himself by making these powerful beings suddenly pushovers. Now, doubtless, arguments can be made as to why so many Jedi were taken by surprise - they trusted, even loved their Clones, they never in a million years thought their Clones would turn on them. They were weary from three years of almost endless fighting and their ability to use certain aspects of the Force (such as the precognition) was compromised. Not all Jedi were as good in a fight, and many found themselves commanding Clones even though they weren't up to the task (the Force doesn't make all Jedi equal - the fans do). But the long and the short of it is that Episode III was a more complex story that wasn't told in a more complex way than Episodes Iv-VI. The'77-'82 movies were basically built on the template of the Buck Rogers Weekly Serial, and it worked because the story was simple and had about half a dozen major plot points - if that - stretched across a trilogy of movies. Episode I was a SLIGHT bit more complicated but very much like Episode IV, but Episodes II and III had plots that should have been a great deal more complex - except they too were shoe-horned into the Buck Rogers Weekly Serial motif - a poor fit.

So, in closing, the Jedi weren't Bad-Ass in the movies because they were jerked around by the guy who created them but who wasn't clever enough to properly make use of them and certainly wasn't clever enough (nor had he time enough) to make their demise convincing.

It's amazing how many points of conflict in the Lucas Universe can be solved if we simply remember that Lucas is a bad director, a bad writer, a clever copycat (which in fairness can be said about many directors) and quite likely the fans have made better use of his own universe than he has.

Corradus said:

That's very true. I agree completely. Lucas needs to f'ing retire and let someone else take over: someone who cares and who knows what they're doing. But that's a different subject for a different forum.

But it still supports the main thing I was attempting to convey, that jedi can still be treated in a balanced manner: you just have to know how to do it. It doesn't require a 3-book lead-up; I can foresee them shoehorning all the classes whenever they get there as: in order to balance out the power level of force-users/Jedi vs. everyone else is to suggest that all classes have some force-influence regardless of class or group niche, it's just that jedi use it for everything or something like that and really focus it. However they do it, It's just cheeky and feels like a major let-down that FF chose to start a Star Wars game out like this.

Boy, this isn't really about dice anymore, is it?

TheSMUSpaz said:

Nope. But it's kinda like a train wreck. You know it's horrible, but you just can't stop yourself from watching

And the beauty of it all is, there is no actual news on the dice. Guys, stop hi-jacking. If you have nothing to add re the actual thread, take the fight outside.

Bump!!

Is there anything new on dice? Because stickers aren't the greatest on sticking to my dice.

Gurby said:

Given how far out FFG announces their products (two to three months at least), the fact there hasn't been any news on the separate sets of physical dice is itself news, as in "they ain't coming any time soon" variety.

There's a thread in the General Discussion sub-forum remarking about "fiddly bits" and lack thereof in contrast to WFRP3e, and FFG_Sam_Stewart posted that the Edge of the Empire mainbook would be a hardcover and with the dice packs sold separately.

I'd call that a pretty strong indicator that the dice won't be for sale until the finalized book is released.

Yeah….see, the 800lb gorilla in the room is the fact that George Lucas can't direct for beans and his writing's not that much better. The three big reasons Episodes IV-VI did so well is (1) Audiences hadn't seen anything like Star Wars in movie theaters for almost thirty years, (2) Lucas lucked out on some very talented actors who could carry his derivative and hyper-simplistic story forward in a way that wouldn't bore the audience to death and (3) The Special Effects.

4) Lucas neither wrote the screenplays for, nor directed, episodes V and VI.

Venthrac said:

He however DID direct Episodes I, II and III, not to mention providing the story for all six movies so, I think my remarks are still valid on their face.

Armenius Orson Carrick said:

You have both an interesting definition of what constitutes a "fight" and an equally intriguing belief that I will take orders from you. Fascinating.