Force Attribute and Revised Force Skills

[atgxtg]

I have been thinking of adding a FORCE attibute for a long time. It would help to differentiate those who are strong with the Force from others who can use it.

-The Force attribute will count as an attribute and is bought with a character's itial attribute dice (although it will start at 1D for most species, so character will now technically be built on 19D).

-Control, Sense and Alter will start at the Force Attribute, (although the character will still eed to be trained to use any power reliably).

-Characters will start with a number of Force Points eqaul to thier dice in the Force Attribute.


Also, I was thinking of mdifying the Force skills so that they refelct the strnegth of a character's connection with the Force as well as the die codes in the relevant Force skills. For example, Acclerate healing would heal a character a number of times that day equal to his Force Dice (instead of two times), enhance attriobute would allow the character to add his Force Dice to the enhanced attribute, and Telekensis would have weight increments based on the character Force attributs (easy would be up to Force x5kg instead of up to 10), and Control Pain could negate a total number of peanlty dice equal to the Jedi's Force Dice. Generally speaking skill would still count to determine the level of finesse and control a character has over the power but Force would apply for determining the magnitude/raw power of the effect.

I suspect that some powers could be simplified by adding the Force Attribute (or even the appropriate Fprce skill code) to an attribute or skill to get the superhuman effects that Jedi get.

How does this idea look?

[cheshire]

Just eyeballing it some of it looks interesting, and some of it looks a little broken. First, I think it's a great idea to try to introduce a mechanic to make someone more naturally in tune with the Force, and giving a greater healing role on Accellerate healing and other such skills. (I'm not sure about the Enhance Attribute yet, but I'll ponder on that a bit.) It makes sense that there should be some people who get a bit of a boost because they're more naturally inclined to learn Force abilities. Though game balance may become an issue, and I'd LOVE to playtest some of these ideas.

I have a bit of a concern about how beginning character builds might look. Remember when you put a Jedi in the party with a RAW build (assuming he spends 3D in attribute dice at the start), he starts off weak, and then picks up momentum. By the time he can get lightsaber combat up with any real regularity he becomes a close-range ninja. With this build, it minimizes the build up time. The same Jedi spends 3D in attribute dice, and now he's got 3D in CSA. (And he's got 3 Force Points. Only one more than normal, so not TOO bad here.) How much less time is there going to be before he takes over the rest of the party in close-range combat?

Honestly, if I had time, I'd playtest this. I'd take two short-term campaigns, one with the RAW character build, and one with this one and see how they compare. Though I would leave out the 19 attribute dice and leave it at 18. Some people aren't going to be Force Sensitive anyway, and giving everyone a bonus doesn't make sense. Giving the Jedi a bonus attribute die makes even less sense, because they're getting more out of their attribute points now than they ever were. We could have Jedi starting off with 5D in CSA... probably a lot more if they really wanted to min/max, and they were just that kind of munchkin.
_________________
__________________________________
Before we take any of this too seriously, just remember that in the middle episode a little rubber puppet moves a spaceship with his mind.

[atgxtg]

[cheshire]

Yeah, I know what you mean about having a functional Jedi character at the beginning, but not having them take over the party. I think pretty much every Star Wars RPG has wrestled with that to some degree or another. But I think the problem that everyone faces is that the Force gives the TV and movie characters super human abilities, and now you try to put that in a game where they try to make all the characters comparable so that everyone can have fun.

It's not easy no matter which way you slice it.
_________________
__________________________________
Before we take any of this too seriously, just remember that in the middle episode a little rubber puppet moves a spaceship with his mind.

[CRMcNeill]

Well, the films deal with it in pretty straight-forward fashion: split the party. Split the Jedi off and give them villains of appropriate level to fight while the rest of the party performs other missions.
_________________
"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.

The CRMcNeill Stat/Rule Index

[cheshire]

And that is something that most GMs have a hard time doing while running a fun and relevant adventure. I've done it, and I've had good adventures, but I've had GMs who will hardly hear of the idea just because it's too hard to make it happen well.
_________________
__________________________________
Before we take any of this too seriously, just remember that in the middle episode a little rubber puppet moves a spaceship with his mind.

[Bren]

[garhkal]

[quote="atgxtg"]
I think 1D makes sense because everybody is alive and has the Force flowing throgh them. It isn't that people with Force 1D would be Force Senstive, just that they would be alive. They would still need training to be able to access and use that 1D. So instead of being trained up to 1D in C, S, and A they would be trained how to use the FORCE attribute. And we could have the odd wild talent who might know a power or two but otherwise not be able to use the Force very much.
[/quiote]

That sounds almost like you are trying to make the force like adnd's wild psionics from dark sun, where everyone has it...
_________________
Confucious sayeth, don't wash cat while drunk!

[ZzaphodD]

Id say that 'old school' Jedis, ie based on ep4-6, are more limited by in-game restrictions. Sure, you can be a combat monster but if you try to take advantage of that by going head on you will soon end up on the dark side.

If you base you view of jedis on the more recent movies and, oh the horror, the EU the Jedis have much more freedom using their more violent abilities. The Ep 1-3 avoids much of this by to a large extent fighting droids (mostly rather dumb ones as well). This avoids many of the moral questions. When they end up fighting living creatures they are mostly 'inhuman' evil insects..

What I mean is that the 'balance issue' depends on what 'version' of Jedis exists in your games.
_________________
My Biggest Beard Retard award goes to: The Admiral of course..

[Bren]

[cheshire]

[CRMcNeill]

You're wrong. Of course we'll find a consensus.




_________________
"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.

The CRMcNeill Stat/Rule Index

[CRMcNeill]

I was toying with a similar idea of having Force Sensitivity as an attribute, but I had non-FS characters at 0D instead of 1D, with 1D-2D being roughly the range of Force sensitives who ended up in the agricultural corps, or were otherwise not adept enough in their understanding of the Force to become Jedi Knights. It seemed to work out fairly well from a balance standpoint, as beginning non-FS characters still out-attributed FS characters, and the potential for min-maxing is easily solved by just setting an arbitrary cap on how much dice the FS can put into his Force skills.

I've also been playing with revising Danger Sense, in that it does seem a bit too powerful for the characters to have a simple binary choice between ignorance and omniscience depending on whether they beat a Moderate Sense roll. I've been batting around a revised version of Danger Sense whereby the character may still sense danger, but still be caught looking in the wrong direction because they misread what the Force was trying to tell them. Higher level masters will still be essentially precognitive, and almost impossible to catch off guard, but lower and mid level characters would still conceivably be vulnerable to a surprise attack as the result of a bad roll.
_________________
"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.

The CRMcNeill Stat/Rule Index

[garhkal]

[CRMcNeill]