One thing to keep in mind is this: Ordinarily, the GM should never force Obligation on their players. Undertaking additional Obligation should be a player choice. Now, with Escape from Mos Shuuta, as it's just a beginner module and it's mostly on rails (and since Obligation isn't a thing), the players don't really have the choice on whether or not to steal Trex's ship. I say, if you're running full core rules with the Escape from Mos Shuuta scenario, have the ship be part and parcel of the group's starting Obligation, since it's a foregone conclusion that they're going to have it pretty much right out the gate.

Built-in items still count against encumbrance, since there's still weight to deal with and all that. The benefits of having equipment built in are mostly narrative in nature, such as never needing to worry about 'forgetting' to bring something, or perhaps being able to justify a piece of equipment being harder to find (if not impossible to find) in a search, like with a commlink built in as a transmitter within the droid's head.

To further back this up, the two published adventures (in the core rulebook and GM Kit) both indicate giving out XP at the end of a session, and not during.

One of the key rules of GMing is as follows: never roll dice for something that doesn't add to the drama of the game. If the outcome is a foregone conclusion (e.g., pulling the trigger when you've got a blaster pointed at the head of someone who's tied up), don't roll the dice, because if you do get a bad result, you're left having to suspend the disbelief of everyone at the table by finding some way to have things go wrong.

The implication is that Ota, the Bothan spy, has contacts that will get the credits through the Bounty Hunters' guild that Teemo put the bounty order through. It's not so much that he had the cash physically on-hand, but rather had to front the payment in case anyone came calling to claim it. The 10,000 credits in Hutt Cartel tokens is worth just that--10,000 credits. The conversion for value has already been done. That cash find is just a bonus, if the PCs happen to find it, look for it, or hear about it from Thweek.

I dunno about the mechanic being something as a Light Side vs. Dark Side element. Obligation has a whole slew of different forms it can take. Duty sounds like it will be the same. Simply making it a "Balance" or "Light vs. Dark" thing makes it just a binary score, with only one real option, and that seems pretty boring from a game design perspective. Also, just because the book is called Force and Destiny, I don't think the game is going to be all about "everybody is a Jedi or Force-user all the time always." Having the core 'hook' mechanic being about the different sides of the Force doesn't feel like it'd fit well in a game that needs to support multiple character types.

It's been mentioned tangentially here, but the distinction between 'base starting YT-1300' and 'Millennium Falcon' is actually a fairly significant one. In Saga Edition, light freighters needed to get a special 'combat thrusters' upgrade in order to allow it to perform starfighter tricks. In Edge of the Empire, the same thing is obtained by boosting your thrusts to Speed 4 instead of Speed 3. This is a feature, not a bug. Things like this represent having a tricked-out, dogfight-capable freighter that stands apart from the run-of-the-mill 'space truck' that most other ships of that make wind up being. If you were playing an RPG along the lines of The Fast and the Furious and one of the players wanted to be a hotshot racer, they're going to be disappointed when they're stuck in a used 1987 Plymouth Reliant. Same thing with the hotshot pilot here in Star Wars--to shine, they need to vehicle to match, and thankfully, it's not that tough to get that vehicle tricked out enough to do the job.

I agree with every part of this except for the part where you call out the talent's name as justification. Fluff descriptions, by and large, shouldn't override rules. There was the whole debate about Convincing Demeanor and Skulduggery a while back, with people citing the word 'demeanor' as justification for not allowing the talent to do what it was specifically worded to let you do.

There doesn't appear to be any such rule. The old Saga days of "convert all of the cargo space that you're never going to use anyway into making any ship a miniature battleship" are gone, it would seem.

From the core rulebook itself, page 53: "In other words, no matter how much he gets caught up in politics, military campaigns, or rescue missions, Han Solo will always be a Smuggler."

I think this is just a matter of the scope of the skills. Being able to look up a cantina's address in a directory, once you know its name, is one thing. Knowing which cantina is a front for Black Sun? That's a whole different thing. That knowledge is not going to just be on some computer directory. That takes a Streetwise check. (Related: once the successful Streetwise check gets the PCs the name of the underworld cantina they need to know, don't then also make them roll a Computers check to look up the address. That's a waste of dice rolling and isn't something that needs to be adjudicated by a check.)

That's weird. My table 5-11 lists the cost as 50 credits, in line with the text. Anyone else have this discrepancy in their book?

I never listen. I've been never listening for years! Highly recommended.

Looking at page makes me feel like I'm ANGRY!

I keep seeing people say this, and I haven't heard anyone say why they think they're silly or broken or wrong. The devs have said that a) encumbrance is a factor of both weight and unwieldiness, and b) that a crate of 20 blaster rifles does not have an encumbrance value of "blaster rifle x 20", which is where I think a lot of the disconnect is coming from.

I ran The Long Arm of the Hutt mostly as-written (for a very experienced group of players) and it ran 99% without a hitch. The outline for the adventure itself is pretty solid, and if the PCs go 'off-rails' at all, the module does a good job of describing what's going on behind the scenes so that the GM can plan for contingencies.

Well, in canon, the Empire first tries to blame the destruction of Alderaan on the Rebellion; when that doesn't fly, the Empire paints Tarkin as a rogue who acted without authorization. I can easily see a compelling story born from the idea that Tarkin is a power-mad leader with a planet-smashing superweapon going against a galaxy-spanning regime.

Mine says that R2-D2 is a stone-cold pimp.

There are also talents that increase the range at which you can throw weapons. But yes, long story short: thermal detonators are powerful weapons that are very risky to use untrained.

There's a pretty good preview of it here: http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_news.asp?eidn=4180

First off, read page 187. This explains the difference between Attachments and Modifications (yes, they're different things) and how they interact. Attachments cost a number of credits as listed in their entry, and take up a number of hard points, also listed. There is no Mechanics check required (they're designed to simply be attached to the equipment in question). Modifications are made to attachments, not to weapons (this seems to be the thing that confuses people). They provide bonuses and effects as listed in the 'Modification Options' of a given attachment. Their cost is equal to 100 credits times the total number of modifications (so 100 credits for the first, 200 for the second) and so on, and there is a Mechanics check to install them, beginning at Hard (3 Purple) and increasing by one for each additional. If this check fails, that modification cannot be added to that attachment, ever; if Despair is rolled, the attachment is ruined.

The thing with this system, though, is that the difference between one model of blaster pistol and another is purely fluff and flavor, because the game isn't about minutiae, and I think it should stay this way. The old OCR/RCR system had the Arms and Equipment Guide, which would stat out things like a dozen different heavy blaster pistols based on make and model, and it just got asinine. "Hey, this model gives a +3 bonus to damage in exchange for having a slightly worse Break DC! Awesome!" (Find me one group of players that has ever had the Break DC of their weapon come up in play at all. Seriously.) As mentioned above, the book already suggests different models, such as the DL-44 and the Merr-Sonn 434. Feel free to call your heavy blaster pistol whatever you like, but giving them different damage or crit values is going to make for a bookkeeping nightmare and a door to encouraging player min-maxing.

You do realize that the setting - before WEG started publishing - consisted of seven novels and the Marvel Comics run, right? Of course they made a whole bunch of stuff up and pulled stuff out of the air - they had nothing to work with! More to the point, a lot of what we now know as the EU was created by WEG in the first place! I don't think a lot of Star Wars fans really realize that. I dunno, I think that Incredible Cross Sections gave precedent to Star Destroyers having point-defense gunnery, and that was years before Saga. Also, while turbolasers are the Star Destroyers' bread and butter, it doesn't make any logical sense that they wouldn't have defense systems against starfighters.

"Defense" is a specific term that refers to adding setback dice to a roll made against you. Defense can come from sources such as taking cover, wearing certain armor, or using the 'guarded stance' maneuver. Talents like Dodge, Side Step, and Defensive Stance actually upgrade the difficulty of checks made against you (i.e., turning purple dice into red dice). This is separate from Defense, and so stacking concerns do not apply.

"Our freighter can't repel firepower of that magnitude!"