Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Enter the unknown.

I have mixed feelings about Enter The Unknown.
Cool new RP stuff. It's always nice to have more suggestions and hints toward what is possible for those of us who aren't as spontaneously creative.
All three of the new Races are kind of weaksauce. The chiss get an ability that anyone (including the chiss themselves) can have a better version of for the low cost of 250 credits by simply buying a pair of electrobinoculars.
The bonuses provided to the Duros are ok.
Toydarians. seriously? they can still fall to their deaths even though they can basically FLY. and no mention of any force resistance at all.

Archaeologist is a neat career tree. I can see it being fun in more narrative role play and problem solving games. It has one or two combat-ish oriented talents that are cool but just seem out of place.
Big Game Hunter seems really cool except that it makes NO sense in the explorer career. sure, you can track a thing down but then what... explorers will have to spend lots of xp elswhere to be able to do anything once they actually do catch that prey. Also, hunter's quarry shouldn't have been limited to a specific range band.
Driver talent tree. seems familiar... seems like i saw something like this before, hmmm.. Oh yeah.. they already did this tree. Its called PILOT. ok, so pilot may be more geared toward space where as driver is geared toward planetary.. but it seems like there is TOO much overlap.

Love the idea of signature abilities in general.
Love the mechanics for gaining and 'attaching' signature abilities.
disappointed that they ONLY introduced signature abilities for the Explorer tree. Its a huge new mechanic.. would have been nice to introduce at least one for each existing career tree instead of presumably making non-explorers wait. I feel bad for those playing whichever career doesn't get a supplement book until 2014, i hope they don't really have to wait that long to see their first signature abilities.
I get that these abilities are super powerful and so you want to limit their use, but it annoys me that they use destiny. It means that if i use MY signature ability, I'm likely depriving a fellow party member of their ability to do so and that's kind of lame.

Most of the weapons are decent and interesting.. but. whats with the vibrosaw? why include it. It's worse in almost every way that the vibroaxe and in the description it even says its not supposed to be a weapon! if its a tool and not a weapon, why would you even include it in here... you could have used that space for a different Actual weapon that would have been useful to someone.
Most of the gear and equipment is cool. at least the stuff that isn't as mechanically awesome is still thematically appropriate. No complaints here.
New ships is always a good thing. Most of it is good. As you may have noticed from my shipyard entries, i rather like having more ship options. This book even released official versions of a couple ships i had already done up custom works for. My only complaint about the ships that fantasy flight has put in their books is not so much about the ships themselves but about the abstract system they use. I feel like they are just pulling speeds, silhouettes and encumbrance values out of a hat. that said, Enter the Unknown still has a decent selection of interesting ships.

Last thought on this supplement. for $29.95 I'd like to see more than 100 pages in the next one.
For value comparison.
This supplement was 93 pages of material. that means it costs  ~32.3 cents per page of material.
The Core edge of the empire rule book is $59.95 and rings in at 446 pages of material (including character sheets in the back) and while the sticker shock is bad, it seems like quite the bargain at only ~13.4 cents per page of material.
That means that Enter the Unknown was actually 240% more expensive than the core rule book!!

I love new material, and I have a lot of faith in FF games.
I just hope that the next supplement can provide a little more bang for my buck.


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