No matter how agile you are, the shots are too hard to place in the moment.įailures on the Challenge Dice: The placement of the troopers and their training make your shots go wide. The stormtroopers are too far away and at a bad angle. Because they are focused on your teammate, their next action will be hindered (with Setback Dice) while their attention is turned.įailures on the Difficulty Dice: The shot is simply too difficult. You fire at just the right time, hitting the group of enemies.Īdvantages on the Ability Dice: As you fire just as the troopers stand, you knock them back and away from their cover, and they’ll lose the Setback Dice they get for being behind cover.Īdvantages on the Proficiency Dice: As you hit the troopers through the gaps in their cover, your volley of blaster fire acts as cover fire, making any combat check the stormtroopers make harder (Setback Dice).Īdvantages on the Boost Dice: As the troopers are distracted, you hit them.
Successes on a Boost Die: Just as you go to fire, the stormtroopers are distracted by your teammate and turn, leaving you an opening.
Successes on the Proficiency Dice: Your training in how to fire the blaster pays off, and despite the cover that the troops have, you find cracks in their cover and hit them as they try to hide. Successes on the Ability Dice: Your natural agility kicks in and the shot is much easier than you think as several stormtroopers pop up from cover right when you go to fire. They are taking some cover behind some large barrels. You stand up and fire at them with a volley of blaster fire. Situation: You are pinned down by a group of stormtroopers. With this column I’ll examine two situations you might be in during your games, and how all the symbols and all the dice might inform the situation, and what you might narrate. So to help remind myself, and hopefully some readers, let’s look at what the narrative dice can do. I’m just fine making up all sorts of advantage, threat, triumph, and despair, but I don’t add the “why” factor. This is something I think most players are aware of, but I wonder how many actually, consistently, do this. The idea is to pay attention to the narrative dice, and which symbols appear on which dice, and that will inform what you can say about the result. That is to allow the dice to not just tell you if something good or bad happens, but why it happens. However, there is one tip that the core rulebooks also mention, and one that the game designers suggest, that I have to be honest… I don’t do enough.
It’s fantastic and it’s the reason I dove into this system with both feet and came back to the hobby. RPG’s with d6 or d20 mechanics lean on the GM and the players quite heavily to provide the narrative, whereas the narrative dice system from Star Wars literally pulls it out of you. They offer creativity where, in a d20 game, it might not exist.
The dice just about force your players to roleplay more, and to roleplay better.
Star Trek Adventures, beautifully reviewed by our own Linda Whitson (also designed by Jay Little), is one example. I truly believe that Jay Little and FFG changed the game and that we’ll see a lot of non-d20 RPGs coming out. It aims to assist new GM’s by examining what worked, didn’t work, and what failed miserably as he spins up new campaigns, modules, encounters, and adventures for his friends and family in Fantasy Flight Games’ Edge of the Empire/Age of Rebellion/Force and Destiny system.Įver since my first read through of the dice mechanics around the Star Wars RPG lines from Fantasy Flight Games (and now Genesys), I realized how powerful the narrative dice system was going to be in regards to story telling.
This series follows the trials, tribulations, successes, and failures of a fairly inexperienced GM who has recently picked up the hobby after a long time away.