The Edge Check

(Ed: I've been posted to New York City for the week and am working ludicrous long hours, so the next few entries might be a bit short.)

Edge is a funny attribute. Edge points are a critical element of a game as lethal as A Time of War, but the Edge Attribute itself is often overlooked. It is the Luck stat, and on occasion I have found the opportunity to use it.

Making a player do an Attribute Check against Edge is something I do when the character is doing some greatly ill-advised, largely do to the player having no idea what's happening. For example, a game I ran a few years ago started with the party waking up on a dead JumpShip. One character started in the engine room, and could feel a control panel. He started pushing buttons. At this point, the character had no idea where he was (except for the lack of gravity implying he was in space) and a limited knowledge of how to use the console even if he could see. I had him roll Edge to determine, generally speaking, if his actions had an effect towards or against what he was hoping for.

Similarly, Edge makes a good Gambling check (unless the players are trying to use prestidigitation to alter the odds.) This is especially true if the player is new to the game and doesn't have a sufficient grasp of the strategy to affect their results.

Edge is also handy when the player is doing something exceedingly random and hoping for a good result -- blind hyperspace Jumps, for example. Grabbing a passerby off the street. Sometimes, I'll even make a GM Edge check for enemy force composition -- it tends to skew the luck of the party according to their Edge, but is invisible to them. I'm not convinced that doing it that way buys me anything, especially since these games are one-off runs, but when I'm starting at Random Allocation Tables and the Master Unit List, rolling 2D6's can make me feel like I'm at least getting something done.