Obligations don’t really work at all unless you’re playing every session as a self-enclosed thing. If you roll every session but you’re mid-flow in things, that’s really awkward. Paying them off is … okay, I guess, maybe a little too discretionary? I dunno. I played a bunch of EotE with two different groups and both times there was something about Obligations that just didn’t click with them/me. I should go back through my pre-collections posts and refresh my memory.

Motivations are incredibly weak sauce, just a bonus XP source? Eh. Boring way to shape play. Also, the Motivation tables, if you’re using them, are weird and don’t really map well across character classes. I’d probably ditch it or do something more nuanced with Destiny points. I have no idea what that looks like, other than something where you can generate Light/Dark points, maybe, via your choices. It’d be a major rewrite/superhack.

That said, EotE is my current leading candidate for space adventure right now.

FATE: I very much enjoy mechanics that encourage behaviors. I don’t like how FATE does it. Nobody I play with really feels the compel mechanism is that interesting. There’s a lot of fiction-stretching bonus-grubbing via traits. The final roll doesn’t feel that meaningful beyond a modifier threshold. Honestly I think Cortex Plus is a better implementation of what FATE does. I’m probably in the minority on that, and I really don’t want to start a fight with the FATE fans.