There are also familiar things to a longtime tabletop gamer - the way Hull Threshold, Armor, and the damage from Vehicle-scale weapons corresponds to Wound Threshold, Soak, and the damage from personal weapons is very much like Palladium's SDC and MDC, notably from the Rifts series.
There are a couple of overarching points I wanted to muse on, though, beyond little things that I can get into later in more detail.
Running this game is fun
Well, duh. If it wasn't, who would do it? It's very fun to see a group of enthused players really get into their roles in the universe you paint for them; setting be damned on that one, too. This is a pretty universal truth.Star Wars holds a few unique things, though. Picking up your first serious magic weapon in D&D is good, but not as glee-inducing as a player finally constructing that iconic, glowing menace that is the lightsaber. Few moments in gaming beat that sensation of finding the right parts, acquiring a crystal to fit, and turning on your very own rainbow-hued plasma flashlight. It's just as satisfying from the other side - seeing the player's work pay off in a very real way, and seeing their pleasure at the outcome, can be addicting.
Once you get good at wielding the system, understanding the ins-and-outs of how characters work, creating NPCs virtually off the top of your head can be easy and natural. It's not hard to go from "drug dealer on a corner" to "this guy has a 3 cunning, but only a 1 willpower, and has 2 ranks in Negotiate, Coerce, and Perception". I've done it in seconds. Studying the Adversaries section of the core books is a great way to learn how effective NPCs work - seriously, Stormtroopers are actually frightening in this game. And if they have a sergeant or two with them, directing their fire? Dead PCs can result.
Likewise, it's nice to watch your players get used to the system as well - going from "Uh, what do I roll again?" to "Difficulty 3 with 1 upgrade? Ok...result is 3 successes and 1 threat!" It does become native, and once you get used to them the unique dice are reasonably fun to use, if a bit spendy. They make sense, and work on a wavelength that numbers just don't really relate. Numbers create binary situations - you passed or you failed.
As a GM, the system handles what it needs to, and lets you make up the in-between. Sometimes this is easier than others. Sometimes your players will disagree. Sometimes you will want to run to the existing community for help, despite the fact that they don't know either. Which leads to the next point:
You have to house rule a lot
The system has holes. There, I said it. There are a million little corner cases to be picked out of it. (I'll do some posts on a few of these corner cases and my analysis of them later; I just wanted to touch the subject, for now.)How do you handle attacking from stealth? How do you deal with the bonuses from an off-hand weapon during a paired attack? What kind of semi-permanent (or even permanent) bonuses can a technical skill really give when a Triumph is rolled? The list goes on for a while, I'm sure. I haven't encountered them all yet.
Really, the answer is as I said above - you just have to wing it, mate. Come up with it off the top as best you can, in a way that satisfies as many involved as you can. Searching the Fantasy Flight Games forums for an answer can help sometimes, but usually not because of a ruling by the game devs - more often, you find a post you agree with and just fit that in.
This can be fun, but it can also be very frustrating trying to interpret rules from source material that seems to indicate more than one thing. This is the big issue with paired attacks - ambiguity. Not sure if actually using off-hand weapon for initial attack roll or not.
Some of these holes have been patched in the expanded material, the sourcebooks that have been released to support classes and certain sectors of space. Others have really not been. Only time will tell if FFG will patch these missing rules in, or just leave it up to our discretion.
There's a lot of numbers and sheets
For a game that doesn't use number-faced dice, this game has a real abundance of number data as far as tracking a character goes. WT, ST, Soak, Ranks, XP...a lot. And then there's the sheets. Character sheet, talent tree sheets, Force power sheets, Vehicle sheets, Gear sheets (if you download homemade things); I was thinking of creating a Sheet sheet so you could easily track your sheets on a helpful sheet. But I digress.The game is pretty printer intensive. There are cleaner version of the talent trees and Force power trees available online if you know where to look; maybe at some point I'll do a list of all the homemade stuff I've used, and those will definitely be on it.
This game is pretty adversarial (or: Destiny Points are stupid)
Don't get me wrong, though. I actually quite like Destiny points. Most of the last games I've played in have used an "Action/Drama Point" system that worked very well, and added to the game in positive ways.The bit I hate about Destiny is the back-and-forth nature of the system. The fact that in order for the party to have Destiny Points...I have to be a tool. I have to do things to screw the player party, purposefully. I have to use those points in a manner that fits, which can cost the players quite a bit if it really goes south.
I also have a love/hate relationship with Despair and Threat icons. As a writer, I understand the narrative purpose for them (though some would argue that just being a good storyteller does their job) and use them as I feel I should. But on the other side, they're designed to be 'bad luck' and that's...what a miss is, last I checked. Unlucky roll = no hit, not "hit with negative side effects" or "hit but something crazy happens".
Spending Destiny (as a GM) to upgrade a difficulty dice might not seem that bad, until that red comes up with a Despair, and then you are a double asshole, because that Despair, too, has to do something. Cause an ammo drain, or an effect of some kind that hurts the player party. Action economy is the easiest way; this is the role that "out of ammo" serves if the player has a way to answer that, which is cheap. Damage is not usually that great a response, but having an enemy make an attack or a maneuver can be okay. It's very conditional, and really depends on your personal level of jerk as the GM as to how ugly it gets.
Threat, Despair, and Destiny add up to this rule element that can really ruin a party's adventure in a galaxy far, far away. These icons can be badly misused by a GM who isn't in a team-play mood. Threats can quickly be used to strain a party into submission. Despairs can be used to remove their ways to fight. Destiny points can be used to make players rolls more challenging, more complicated, or just outright worse.(Player rolls can be downgraded with Destiny - because that isn't adversarial at all, no sir!)
Of course, worse things can happen. One side or the other can just...not spend Destiny. The game stagnates a little when that happens, and it is almost always an adversarial choice to do this; "We don't want the GM to have Destiny to screw us with, so we won't spend any." Correct tactical assessment; horrible for gameplay. One, it limits the use of Destiny-consuming talents and specializations. Two, it disallows the players (or GM) from using the pool of points to change the nature of the game, which is what they are meant for.
I've had to think to find ways to spend Destiny and not be a complete jerk with the actions. I've upgraded some difficulties, sure, but I've also used Destiny to have an NPC villain get away clean, I've spent it to have NPCs make PC-level leaps of logic to figure things out, or to implement a new rule on the battlefield (destruction timer, hazard objects, etc). I try to make sure I at least spend as many as I started the game with - now, to get my players to use theirs more...
