Now, for the sales pitch.
Edge of the Empire is wholly different from the majority of mainstream RPGs that are the usual fare on ENWorld. If you are a lifelong player of D&D or Pathfinder, you are in for a learning curve that some folks have found difficult to surmount. Fair warning.
The key to understanding the way the game works is that it is all about telling a story. Now, before you jump up and down and start yelling "We tell stories in D&D all the time!", let me explain.
EotE truly makes story telling the FOCUS of the game, not just the reason for going out and garnering treasure and killing monsters. The GM and the players work together to tell the story and this is entirely aided by the dice. We've taken to calling it a narrative dice system.
Skill checks constitute building a dice pool made up of dice provided by your basic statistics, any relevant skills you might have, difficulty dice set by the level of difficulty of the thing you are trying to do, plus additional 'negative' dice as provided by details of the scene or situation you find yourself in. Then, the dice are rolled and results come up and are evaluated.
It isn't a binary chop resolution. The dice carry a number of symbols and they interact in interesting ways. You can get results that combine all of the following possible resolutions: Success, Failure, Advantage, Threat, Triumph, and Despair.
Success means you did what you set out to do, with varying degrees of success based on how many turn up.
Failure, the opposite of success, means you didn't do what you wanted.
Advantage means you gain some sort of Advantage in the scene, regardless of any success or failure rolled.
Threat means that you've created an opportunity for something to go wrong, also regardless of any success or failure rolled.
Triumph is, to a certain extent, just like getting a critical success in d20 games, except it is orders of magnitude more impactful and again, is independent of success or failure.
Similarly, Despair is like a critical failure and operates in similar ways to Triumph.
And you can get any of these on any given roll. So, you can, for instance, get 2 success, a threat and despair on a single roll. You did what you set out to do, but something went wrong and whatever it was has a MAJOR effect on how the scene plays out from here.
And the best part is, the players get to narrate how all the positive results play out and the GM handles all the negative effects of the same roll. You tell the story of your results every step of the way.
From FFG itself:
Interpreting the Game’s Narrative Dice
As previously discussed, the narrative dice system used in Edge of the Empire often rewards players with surprising turns of events. Advantage and Threat can add depth to each action that reaches beyond its success or failure, and the Core Rulebook provides examples of how a GM may interpret them.
During a climactic space battle, the players may successfully gun down the TIE fighters that were pursuing them, but if they generate enough Threat, their space battle may still leave them limping through space when they suffer damage to the reverse power coupling. Alternatively, if the players earn enough Advantage while failing to repair the reverse power coupling, they may find the trace signal hidden in the ship’s engine that allowed the Empire to locate them in the first place. Whatever the outcome, the game’s narrative dice advance storytelling throughout your gaming sessions, and this leaves you plenty of opportunity to pursue new angles in your adventures.
Other factors make the game interestingly unique. Players start with something called Obligation. Obligation represents things that characters have hanging around in their backgrounds that are like the Sword of Damacles hanging over their heads. Bad deals, bad loans, dumped cargoes, and other such things that, much like Han Solo and his debt to Jabba, can crop up at inconvenient times to rattle a players cage and make life just that much more difficult for him. There are motivations as well, providing a reason your character is doing what he is doing and why he might react in particular ways in certain situations. In short, character backgrounds and personalities suddenly matter in a concrete way in EotE.
You should note though, there are no Jedi, not yet anyway. Edge of the Empire is the first in a series of three books planned for release in the next couple of years. Jedi are in the last book. Why? Because Edge of the Empire is set just there, at the edge of the Empire, where their reach is weakest and all those fringe type characters hang out. The seedy bars of Tatooine are home to smugglers, scouts, and others who hang out on the fringes of society. The games time frame is that period just after the first Death Star is blown up, but before the events of Empire Strikes Back. After the Jedi Purge. They just aren't around in this time frame. Subsequent books will advance the storyline and, while remaining independent and stand-alone, also be completely compatible. So those Jedi people want so badly, are coming. Just not yet.
Not to say there isn't force use. In fact, the Force is an integral part of each game. Players roll force dice to add light side and dark side points to the destiny pool. Players use the light side to do amazing things, but so to does the GM use dark side to really muck things up for the players. The points flip back and forth as they are used, so, while you can never have more points in the pool than you start each session with, the number of light and dark side points available fluctuate as the game progresses.
I can go on. Instead, I think I will say this: I don't get horribly excited about new rules systems and weird dice and unfamiliar mechanics. Most of it is the same old same old in a slightly different dress. This, however, has me very excited about the way it works and what it is meant to do when played. It is effective and, once you get used to it, elegant to play.
The Core Book releases the first week of July according to FFG. It is 400+ pages of rules, background, setting information and adventure. It looks gorgeous. The system plays brilliantly. And I've had it on pre-order for 4 months now.
Hope that helps.
