Feats/Talents to Advantages

[Law]

I posted how our group handles martial arts in the "How do you handle martial arts..." thread and mentioned we were working it with advantages. Here's the list of advantages and rules we are using based on d6 space. Alot were converted over from saga edition talents and feats, to give the characters some extra descriptive flavor backed up with rules. All can be bought with (x) cp at any time after discussion with the gm. We haven't set a limit on how many you can purchase and so far it has just evolved naturally.

All characters in our campaign start with 20 cp worth of advantages in addition to the standard starting package for 2E R&E. We based this on Force Sensitivity requiring 20 cp in this advantage system.

For the most part, when deciding on what advantages to use and how to implement them, we tried to stay away from adding "+x dice or pips" to a group of or specific skills. It seemed like this was just another way to increase a skill itself through the normal advancement mechanism and would just eventually give a character a means of raising a skill for a lower cost for all intents and purposes once a certain skill level was hit.

Like I said, most were converted from the saga talents/feats, some I believe were straight out of the d6 space book if we thought they fit (don't recall which at this point) and 1 or 2 might be our own creation but I honestly don't recall since we made these up a while back. I should also point out that we use some of the d6 space rules and that may be evident in some of the descriptions. Anyway...

Ace Pilot (10): Reroll one piloting check per round. The second roll must be taken.

Armor Familiarity (10): Reduce the armor penalty to skills by 1 pip.

Armor Expertise (10): Reduce the armor penalty to skills by 2 pips. Requires and replaces Armor Familiarity.

Armor Mastery (10): Reduce the armor penalty to skills by 1d. Requires and replaces Armor Expertise.

Connections (10): Can obtain items normally requiring fees, permits or licenses without documentation. Blackmarket and illegal items have reduced markup. Requires a beuraucracy or streetwise (blackmarket) roll...Easy (08) < 250 cr; Moderate (13) < 500 cr; Difficult (18) < 1,000 cr; Very Difficult (25) < 5,000 cr; Heroic (31+) > 5,000 cr. The difficulty is the roll to find a seller for the item. Items still require the funds to purchase.

Deadeye (10): Reduce called shot penalty w/ character scale ranged weapons by -1d. (May be applied to other weapons at gm discretion.)

Fool's Luck (10): 1/day reroll any one skill, attribute, damage or reaction roll. The second result must be taken. 1/round you may reroll one gambling check. The second result on any reroll must be taken.

Force Sensitive (20): Per normal rules. Must be taken at character creation.

Hold it Together (10): Once per encounter you may reduce the damage effect of a vehicular attack by one level with a moderate (13) piloting check on a vehicle you pilot.

Know-How (10): You may attempt any non-force skill untrained. 1/day you may add +1d to an untrained skill check.

Martial Arts (10): Your Brawling skill is now considered Martial Arts. Martial Arts is not a specialization of Brawling. Unarmed strength damage (per d6 space) is figured using your Brawling/MA skill instead of strength attribute.

Quick Healer (10): +1d to strength for all natural healing attempts. A "1" on the wild die is not a critical failure.

Quick Draw (10): +2 to perception for initiative rolls. You may draw a one-handed weapon as a free action.

Endurance (10): A mdoerate (13) strength roll allows the character to ignore all stun effects affecting him until the end of the encounter. Stun levels (see note below) are still accumulated normally. At the end of the encounter all stund levels take effect. During the encounter, all actions suffer a -1d penalty. Additionally, no roll is necessary to continue acting when incapacitated.

Tough as nails (20): You receive one extra "stunned" and "wounded" level. Penalties become "wounded" (-2), "wounded x2" (-1d), "wounded x3" (-2d).

In our campaing, we have been using stun levels and stun settings on weapons slightly differently. I don't recall if this is something I came up with on my own or if I borrowed it from somewhere (noticing a pattern here?). Maybe a combination of both.

Stun Levels: A character has a number of stun (or stunned) levels equal to his full number of strength dice +1. So a character with a strength of 3d+2 has four stun levels. A character suffers the normal effects of stun every time he receives a stun level in damage. When weapons are "set to stun" they inflict damage as follows: "stunned" result = 1 stun level; "wounded" result = 2 stun levels; > "incapacitated" = stun damage equal to the character's remaining levels plus one level of damage as if he were "wounded". Once all stun levels are inflicted, the character falls unconscius for 2d minutes as normal.

*EDIT* Looking back through the rules it would seem the main difference in our stun rules is the addition of an extra stunned level and how we implemented stun damage from weapons. Again, we just started back up and it's been a while since I looked over this stuff. Been playing too much Rifts...

[garhkal]

So they get these 20cp to spend for free? OR do they have to take disadvantages to off set them?
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Confucious sayeth, don't wash cat while drunk!

[Law]

We were giving them for free in our campaign to give the characters without force-sensitivity some form of bonus. We also converted over from Saga (or back over from Saga), so the characters weren't really brand new in that respect.

D6 Space has some disadvantages listed for anyone interested in using them to off-set, but it didn't really seem necessary in our case.
_________________
"Mister, we deal in lead."
-Vin (Steve McQueen) The Magnificent Seven

"Nothing wrong with a little shooting, as long as the right people get shot."
-Turk (De Niro) Righteous Kill

[garhkal]

Since force sensitivity is a choice at Cha creation, i just am not seeing why those who CHOSE to not be force sensitive, should get rewarded.
_________________
Confucious sayeth, don't wash cat while drunk!

[Law]

I'm not saying you need to just give the advantages to your players without using a balancing disadvantage. If you want to adopt any of them for your own campaign you could easily just let them buy them with cp.

In our campaign we gave each character 20 pts for free because the characters had already been established and all of the force-sensitives were effectively minor jedi. So we didn't have any characters who were "just force-sensitive" because that is how they wanted to rp their character.

Additionally, we had noticed in games that most of the characters were generally "good". So taking force-sensitivity for free, with an extra initial fp and unlimited potential for future fp would actually be a no-brainer as the vast majority of the time the penalty of more easily aquired dsp would not be an issue.

So don't get me wrong, I'm not implying everyone should institute the free 20 cp advantage system in their campaign. We used it that way because we were balancing standard characters against converted jedi with force skills whom we didn't want to penalize their attributes because they had already taken certain perceived qualities based on their attributes in the previous system. Most of the characters had some of these advantages in the form of feats or talents and liked the descriptive flavor it gave the character. We wanted to keep this in d6. If we had just started over with fresh characters and wanted to use the advantages, I probably wouldn't have given them 20 points worth "just because".

Think of the post more as "Here are some advantages we are using in our campaign to add some edge to our characters. They have a cp cost we decided fit the benefit. You can either pay the cost or implement the disadvantage system used in d6 Space. We gave everyone 20 for free in our campaign to help with some balancing issues when we converted our characters over.
_________________
"Mister, we deal in lead."
-Vin (Steve McQueen) The Magnificent Seven

"Nothing wrong with a little shooting, as long as the right people get shot."
-Turk (De Niro) Righteous Kill