Understanding the Edge of the Empire attribute sytem

Many contemporary games (at least those I'm familiar with, Wizards products, Alternity, Warhammer Fantasy, West End's d6 Star Wars,etc) use a set of 6 numbers to represent the inherent , baseline physical, social, and mental characteristics of an individual.  I don't know why 6 has been chosen so frequently; whether its tradition, the minimum number needed to get the appropriate fidelity, its just convenient, whatever, it always seems to be six.  Unofficially, these attributes are typically subdivided into physical 'hard' attributes and mental and social 'soft' attributes.

FFG's new Star Wars RPG, Edge of the Empire, is no different.  Characters in this system have the following characteristics:

• Brawn
• Agility
• Intelligence
• Cunning
• Willpower
• Presence

At first glance, my friends and I thought these seemed similar to WotC's classic Str, Dex, Con, Int, Wis, Cha, which we're all very familiar with from d20 games.  Constitution was combined with strength, and cunning was... something between dexterity and int? Alright, no big deal, they found constitution to be redundant (many people do) and added cunning to get to that nice happy number 6.  Cunning sounded good, right? Thats what Han Solo was crazy good at, that devilish scoundrel.  Basically, 2 hard attributes, and 4 soft.  We can work with this, everything else just translates, right?

Thing is, as we got deeper into the system, it didn't feel right... Skills were paired strange attributes, like skulduggery (Thievery, slight of hand, etc) was cunning, instead of agi, perception was also paired with cunning.  Vigilance, a willpower skill, can be used to see if I remember equipment?  Coerce is a willpower skill? And the two initiative skills (wait, 2 initiative skills?), cool and vigilance, were paired with soft attributes, presence and willpower, respectively; They had previously been (almost) exclusively the realm of hard stats, dexterity in particular.

As I started reading and thinking about how this had been designed, I think I figured how how to view this new set of attributes.  Instead of splitting them as "hard" and "soft", it helps to better understand them if you split them into 3 groups, representing different kinds of resources:

• Physical, contains brawn and agility
• Mental, contains intellect and cunning
• Social, contains willpower and presence

The physical group involves tangible resources, e.g. weapons, the character's body, rocks, etc.  The second involves information resources, e.g. book knowledge, habits of criminals, etc. in addition to perception abilities.  The last group is a bit harder to define, largely because of bleed between stats in previous systems.  Social resources include not only other individuals and a character's ability to interact with them, but also a character's sense of self, identity, and beliefs.

The first aspect listed in each of these groups (brawn, intellect, and willpower) reflect the character's physical, mental, and social resources, respectively.  For example, brawn represents physical potential and ability to resist physical forces, and willpower represents an individuals social resources, a strong sense of self, and ability to resist social manipulation.  The use of these attributes, and the skills associated with them, represent the "blunt force" application of these resources.  These attributes and skills tend to be more reactive in their applications.

The second aspect of these groups (agility, cunning, and presence) represent the character's ability to manipulate physical, mental, and social resources. The resources being manipulated may be either internal (e.g. knowledge) or external (e.g. personnel, or a weapon) to the character. The use of these attributes, and their skills, represent the "fine manipulation" of these resources.  These attributes and skills also tend to be more proactive in their applications.

This extension makes understanding how skills are paired with attributes make substantially more sense.  And there are notable expceptions (e.g. active and passive perception are handled by intelligence and cunning, respectively).  

While there are an unlimited number of changes when comparing systems, there are two I'd like to draw attention to for those familiar with the Saga edition (or other d20 systems).  I think both the changes are good, as they both pull some power away from the agility attribute, which seems be historically more important than other attributes.  In the current system, there does not appear to be any outstanding "super stats", but that may change as beta contiunes and we learn the system better.

Initiative

With one exception, initiative in WotC and TSR systems has been the domain of agility/dexterity, representing an individuals quick nerves and reaction time.  It is now governed by two social skills, cool and vigilance.  I think FFG's reasoning here is that combat, albeit adversarial, is still a social interaction, involving a number of individuals. The ability to use social skills (reading faces, anticipating actions) is important to secure a favorable slot in the action queue.  By un-linking initiative from a physical characteristic, It can also explain the flexibility of initiative order.

Manual Dexterity vs a Devious Mind

While agility retains the skills for piloting, ranged combat, stealth, and acrobatic ability (and as I write this I go back to wondering if agility isn't still a little too useful...), Cunning is now the skill used for skullduggery, the skill governing the picking of locks and pockets, in addition to figuring out how to break into secure locations.  This is no longer in agility (as it is under d20 systems) because the dev's are acknowledging the need for a quick mind in addition to quick fingers to accomplish these tasks.

I hope that this helped and the system makes a little more sense... Next I'm thinking I'll talk about dice mechanics of the system.

/endofline

[EDIT: changed the name of the Manual dexterity" section.  On my first read-through I thought they had included "fine motor skills" in Cunning, but was mistaken, Dexterity and Agility are still lumped in one stat].