Star Wars: Force and Destiny

General questions, debates, and rants about RPGs

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Longes
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Post by Longes »

Mobility Force powers are for the melee lightsaber goodness. With a blaster you don't need mobility. The true Force king is the Sense tree. At the top you get 0-4 extra Defense dice, which is more than anyone else has, and upgrade 0-4 of your attack dice to yellow (or get extra dice). Pimped out Sense allows you to use any weapon/turret like a pro, and also be a good pilot.
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Post by shlominus »

i'm pretty sure that's not how it's supposed to work and i am also pretty sure that you already know that. ;)

i've reread the power and it's true, you can read it your way. but the seperation of upgrades into strength and duration heavily implies that when fully upgraded the power is supposed to give you 2 upgrades for 2 different attack rolls.

you're just exploiting slightly sloppy wording.
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Longes
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Post by Longes »

shlominus wrote:i'm pretty sure that's not how it's supposed to work and i am also pretty sure that you already know that. ;)

i've reread the power and it's true, you can read it your way. but the seperation of upgrades into strength and duration heavily implies that when fully upgraded the power is supposed to give you 2 upgrades for 2 different attack rolls.

you're just exploiting slightly sloppy wording.
Control 1 allows you to commit a white die to upgrade one die of one defense roll.
Duration 1 allows you to commit a white die to upgrade one die of two rolls.
Strength 1 allows you to commit a white die to upgrade two dice of two rolls (since Duration 1 is a prerequisite).
Control 2 allows you to commit a second white die to upgrade another two dice of two combat rolls.
So, if you have a full branch and rolled two force pips, you can upgrade two dice of two defense dicepools and two dice of two attack dicepool, or upgrade two defense dicepools by four.
Last edited by Longes on Wed Aug 05, 2015 12:26 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Aryxbez »

Silent Wayfarer wrote: Also, to stay relevant, I'm new to EotE and I want to twink a Wookiee, how do I do this? Max Brawn, melee weapons? Get shot and never die? Break everything? Why not be a Trandoshan instead?
For good meleeing, I recall the Doctor path had a "Nerve strike" like attack. Where it was a weaponless unarmed attack that added your medical skill, does stress damage, and ignores armor, if I recall right. Although if they errata'd that, or some other class gets it now/faster I wouldn't know.
What I find wrong w/ 4th edition: "I want to stab dragons the size of a small keep with skin like supple adamantine and command over time and space to death with my longsword in head to head combat, but I want to be totally within realistic capabilities of a real human being!" --Caedrus mocking 4rries

"the thing about being Mister Cavern [DM], you don't blame players for how they play. That's like blaming the weather. Weather just is. You adapt to it. -Ancient History
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Pixels
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Post by Pixels »

The talent you're thinking of is Pressure Point. It is hilariously better than other melee or brawl attacks, but you should carry some brawl weapon as a backup for use on droids.
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Post by Longes »

Pixels wrote:The talent you're thinking of is Pressure Point. It is hilariously better than other melee or brawl attacks, but you should carry some brawl weapon as a backup for use on droids.
Droids are still subject to strain damage.
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Post by Marisel »

OgreBattle wrote:What's a good alternative system for playing Star Was with then? Shadowrun 4e with Adept Jedi and jet pack bounty hunters?
Hilariously Archmage and I tried our hand at designing something like this for a bit. We eventually kind of lost interest but it mostly worked. You just map Jedi to mages and cut down on the amount of available cyber/bio stuff.
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Post by Orion »

Adept Jedi could work but even to do Eps. 4-6 would require a lot of new powers and/or for existing utility powers to not be terrible. Jedi probably need to get sorcery off a very restricted spell list.
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Post by Pixels »

Longes wrote:
Pixels wrote:The talent you're thinking of is Pressure Point. It is hilariously better than other melee or brawl attacks, but you should carry some brawl weapon as a backup for use on droids.
Droids are still subject to strain damage.
Yes, but Pressure Point specifically only works on living opponents. Droids do not qualify.

On that thought, I'll note that Droid is also worth considering if you're going for a soak-centric character. They're far less rounded than a Wookie in their stats, but get a free rank of Enduring (+1 soak) and don't have to worry about things like suffication, vacuum, or poison. If you only care about the 5 in one stat then you also get more starting experience to throw towards talents or skills.
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Post by shlominus »

Longes wrote:
shlominus wrote:i'm pretty sure that's not how it's supposed to work and i am also pretty sure that you already know that. ;)

i've reread the power and it's true, you can read it your way. but the seperation of upgrades into strength and duration heavily implies that when fully upgraded the power is supposed to give you 2 upgrades for 2 different attack rolls.

you're just exploiting slightly sloppy wording.
Control 1 allows you to commit a white die to upgrade one die of one defense roll.
Duration 1 allows you to commit a white die to upgrade one die of two rolls.
Strength 1 allows you to commit a white die to upgrade two dice of two rolls (since Duration 1 is a prerequisite).
Control 2 allows you to commit a second white die to upgrade another two dice of two combat rolls.
So, if you have a full branch and rolled two force pips, you can upgrade two dice of two defense dicepools and two dice of two attack dicepool, or upgrade two defense dicepools by four.
nope.

you can never have the same ongoing effect apply twice at the same time and the 2 upgrades do different things. strength adds dice and duration allows you to use the power a second time on a different attack. to get 4 dice you'd need 2 more (hypothetical) strength upgrades, cause adding dice is what that upgrade does. i don't know what you mean by "if you roll 2 pips", cause you don't roll any dice when commiting.

this topic has been discussed on the official forums before and your interpretation hasn't convinced anyone.
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Post by Longes »

Well, I looked at the F&D beta. You technically can be a dark side user, but you really can't. It makes your strain track shrink, and you directly hurt the party just by comming to the session - GM gets more Edge equialent and party gets less. The party of three dark siders is basically guaranteed to be the galactic three stooges.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Longes wrote:Well, I looked at the F&D beta. You technically can be a dark side user, but you really can't. It makes your strain track shrink, and you directly hurt the party just by comming to the session - GM gets more Edge equialent and party gets less. The party of three dark siders is basically guaranteed to be the galactic three stooges.
Do they do anything to tempt players to use the dark side at all then? I thought the entire point of the Dark Side in Star Wars was to corrupt people with an easy path to power.
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Post by Longes »

OgreBattle wrote:
Longes wrote:Well, I looked at the F&D beta. You technically can be a dark side user, but you really can't. It makes your strain track shrink, and you directly hurt the party just by comming to the session - GM gets more Edge equialent and party gets less. The party of three dark siders is basically guaranteed to be the galactic three stooges.
Do they do anything to tempt players to use the dark side at all then? I thought the entire point of the Dark Side in Star Wars was to corrupt people with an easy path to power.
Nope. As a dark sider you can use black force pips instead of white, but that's a mixed blessing. There are more sides with black pips on the force dice, but those sides have less pips on them. What this means is that dark siders have easier time activating powers, but are on average weaker in their use.
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Post by Longes »

Oh my, it gets better. So, instead of Duty and Obligation jedi have Morality. Morality has two narrative parts - Emotional Strength (like Love, Pride, Mercy, Ambition) and Emotional Weakness (like Anger, Arrogance, Fear, Greed) and a numeric part - overal Morality score which goes from 1 to 100. If you have 70+ - you are a paragon of Light Side and get larger penis strain track, if you have 30- - you become a dark sider.

But here's the thing: your emotional strength and weakness don't factor into the change of your morality. They only trigger when GM wants to force you into a certain course of action. Morality value changes at the end of the game based on a number of Conflict you got.
Player Characters earn Conflict in several ways:
• Using dark side results to generate Force points
when activating a Force power or Force talent.
• Performing certain narrative actions.
• Generating certain results when failing a fear check.
Any time a character uses one or more Dark Side results to generate Force Points , he accumulates 1 Conflict per Dark Side result used (in addition to any other penalties, such as strain, that the character may accrue).
The character can also accumulate Conflict for performing immoral actions, as determined by the GM. Extreme actions, including taking lives, can give a PC a significant amount of Conflict. However, the GM should always inform players if their characters are about to perform an action that would cause them to earn Conflict. The GM does not have to tell players the exact amount of Conflict their characters would earn but should give them an idea of the severity of the penalty. More information on earning Conflict by performing actions can be found on page 220.
When a Force-sensitive Player Character fails a fear check, the GM can choose to have the PC suffer a number of Conflict equal to the difficulty of the check instead of the normal penalties. Generating [symbol] on a fear check may cause this to happen automatically, and it may have other effects as well.
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Post by silva »

Force and Destiny introduces the Morality mechanic for Force users. You have a moral strength and a moral weakness, such as Compassion or Vengefulness, and then a Morality score. When you do something questionable, something that might run counter to your nature or to the Force itself, you feel Conflict. At the end of a game session, you total up how many times you felt Conflict, and roll a d10. If you roll over, you gain as much in Morality as your roll exceeded your Conflict total. Roll under, and you lose that much. On a scale of 1-100, there's a lot of room for ups and downs while you're pursuing your character's destiny. But most important for me, there's no direct judgment in the language of the mechanic. "You feel conflict" seems so much more Star Wars and so much more palatable to me than "You / your character did something evil! Ten more and your character is irredeemable!"
The traditional playstyle is, above all else, the style of playing all games the same way, supported by the ambiguity and lack of procedure in the traditional game text. - Eero Tuovinen
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Post by Longes »

"You feel conflict" seems so much more Star Wars and so much more palatable to me than "You / your character did something evil!
Go fuck yourself. I've posted rules for earning Conflict and they literally say:
The character can also accumulate Conflict for performing immoral actions, as determined by the GM
You very literally earn conflict for doing something evil, failing a fear check, using black force pips, or when GM feels like it.
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Post by Fucks »

That's only an issue when your GM is a jerk.
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Post by Longes »

Fucks wrote:That's only an issue when your GM is a jerk.
No, the issue is that by the rules the party must be pacifists who never kill enemies or they fall to the dark side. You get conflict when:
* You do evil actions (RAW example: killing people)
* You get scared
* GM feels you should get conflict

The introductory adventure gives everyone 1 conflict for agreeing to work with an imperial officer, because he's secretly evil. He's not evil in the context of adventure. He doesn't do anything evil in the adventure. He just has undefined evil plans and working with him is bad, m'kay?
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Post by Longes »

Oh, and another great thing about FFG jedi. For the majority of your career you have a 42% chance of activating your force powers.
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Post by silva »

Longes doesnt like the game. We got it.

Tea at 11.
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Longes
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Post by Longes »

Silva, you had one meaningful post in the thread, and it was a lie.
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Post by silva »

And you had various lies in this thread, all corrected by Shlominus, and none of them were meaningful because at this point it's clear to everyone that you just want to bash the game.
Last edited by silva on Sat Aug 08, 2015 5:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.
The traditional playstyle is, above all else, the style of playing all games the same way, supported by the ambiguity and lack of procedure in the traditional game text. - Eero Tuovinen
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Post by Fucks »

Longes wrote:
Fucks wrote:That's only an issue when your GM is a jerk.
No, the issue is that by the rules the party must be pacifists who never kill enemies or they fall to the dark side. You get conflict when:
* You do evil actions (RAW example: killing people)
* You get scared
* GM feels you should get conflict
That's oversimplified. But who cares? You don't like the game, we got it.
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Post by RadiantPhoenix »

Longes wrote:The introductory adventure gives everyone 1 conflict for agreeing to work with an imperial officer, because he's secretly evil. He's not evil in the context of adventure. He doesn't do anything evil in the adventure. He just has undefined evil plans and working with him is bad, m'kay?
Longes wrote:Oh, and another great thing about FFG jedi. For the majority of your career you have a 42% chance of activating your force powers.
Wow, this RPG sounds fucking terrible.
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Post by shlominus »

RadiantPhoenix wrote:
Longes wrote:The introductory adventure gives everyone 1 conflict for agreeing to work with an imperial officer, because he's secretly evil. He's not evil in the context of adventure. He doesn't do anything evil in the adventure. He just has undefined evil plans and working with him is bad, m'kay?
Longes wrote:Oh, and another great thing about FFG jedi. For the majority of your career you have a 42% chance of activating your force powers.
Wow, this RPG sounds fucking terrible.
the morality rules definitely have some issues, and some of the examples in üublished adventures seem to be silly, but your claim that killing always causes conflict is not true. killing an opponent in a fight is totally ok, but if you want to play a "good" force user, you are simply not allowed to make violence your primary problem solver.

killing several of jabba's guards during a fight for your life - no morality issues

killing a tribe of tusken to avenge your mother - your morality will suffer

your chance to activate basic powers is of course a lot higher than 42%, even for a starting character. as long as you don't use any upgrades and are prepared to suffer small strain and morality hits for using dark side blips your chances to succeed are exactly 100%. some powers don't need to generate light side pips at all (like sense or seek), so they are also guaranteed to work (and also safe to use). you distorted the truth to score points in an elfgame argument - gain 2 conflict!

you have to realise that a starting character in most of the force sensitive "careers" can be compared to luke before he started training with yoda. he could do some minor stuff and even a "mundane" task might be beyond him sometimes. think of luke in the cave on hoth, trying to grab his lightsaber with the force. thatÄs force rating 1 and the basic move power. the system models stuff like that pretty accurately. once you reach force rating 2, which is still very low (considering it goes up to 7, if i am not mistaken), you can pull off some impressive stuff. some argue that you can do too much one you reach that point.

ps: "majority of your career"? it takes 95xp to reach force rating 2. if you wanted, you could do so at character creation.

it's not that hard to find flaws in the ffg system (i think it works fine). i don't see why you'd feel the need to make any up.

edit: you need a destiny point to flip a dark side pip, so 100% is only true if there is at least one left.
Last edited by shlominus on Sun Aug 09, 2015 7:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
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