Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, Beta (Week 5)

Fantasy Flight Games (FFG), the publisher of the latest Star Wars RPG, is now into their sixth week of this Beta release. Each week FFG has taken feedback from the players in the open beta and put out updates to the game. The first week was minor updates to the various species to fix minor issues. The second week included updates to the Force Exile Career and the specializations available. The third week’s update was minor fixes to the various weapons, mostly lowering the damage and adjusting the prices.

Week 4 was the biggest change to the system. Gone is the limitation of only 3 specializations at a time for a character and the costs to gain a new specialization rise as the player adds specializations. Also changed was the cost of skills. Previously skills were 5 times the new rank in XP to raise Career skills and 5 times new rank plus 5 for non-Career skills. The new cost structure is 5 times the new rank in XP for Career skills and 10 times the new rank in XP for non-Career skills. Under the old structure, maxing out a non-Career skill cost 135 XP. Under the new setup maxing out that same skill would cost an additional 75 XP, for a total of 210 XP. This cost structure makes skills cost the same as raising Characteristics, which is only allowed during character creation.

After character creation, Characteristics can only be raised by picking up the Dedication Talent that is only found once in each Specialization, hidden in the final rank of Talents, and costs between 75 XP to 150 XP depending on which Specialization tree the character is on. With the loss of the 3 Specialization limit, players might think that they have to branch out further to pick up more and more of those Dedication Talents, but this seems to stem more from an error in perception than in valid game mechanics.

Since Upgrading dice is based on the lower of the attribute or skill rank, getting to six ranks in a skill is just as good as getting to 6 ranks in the associated attribute. Something that has been noted from Beta testers is that getting more dice (whether they be Ability dice or Boost dice) add more to the result than Upgrading a die from Ability to Proficiency.

* Result column

1. a = Advantage
2. s = Success
3. T = Triumph
4. Since Triumph counts as a Success, both a Triumph (T) and a Success (s) are shown for the result.

An Ability die plus a Boost die has a significantly reduced chance of rolling no result (4.15% vs. 12.42% or 8.35%) and provides for a wider spread with a chance at more Successes or Advantages than is offered by an Ability die or a Proficiency die. Since most Talents that provide dice do so by providing Boost or Setback, these are the best things for Players to pick up rather than focusing on getting to the “seemingly all important” Dedication Talents to boost Characteristics, which just provides an Upgrade to an Ability die.

With this new skill cost structure, it becomes far more worthwhile for players to pick up extra Specializations even if just to make a few more skills as in Career rather than out of Career for pricing. And since they’ve already picked up the new Specialization, now they might as well dig to get that next Dedication. I would rather see the old cost structure put back in place (with or without the Specialization limit) to reduce this need on the part of the player to spread out their characters more thinly for skills.