I find that using sense and someone goes force active in your vicinity you will pick it up...like quigonn seeing anakin racing and subconsciously using the force and then testing more. If a Jedi isn't actively using the force it should be very tough to locate

The average Clone Wars era Jedi have been taught from a very young age to use the force. It's ingrained in them so much that just switching it off can't be that easy to do. Even Luke's rudimentary training gave him away to Vader ("The force is strong with this one").

I read the Darth Plagueis book recently, and (though it's hardly canon) it described Palpatine as having been trained to mask his presence in the force. Which makes a certain degree of sense to me. I mean, he is obviously a very powerful Sith, but he just stands around Quigon's funeral pyre with the Jedi council looking on and nobody feels anything?

Maybe the shroud talent someone mentioned is supposed to represent this, but it sounds like it's too restrictive (once/session) to be of any real use.

Keep it Narrative...

Having a mechanic for everything gets pathfinderish... DONT.. just dont...

I'm using a house rule for force sensitive player. I give him ten force tokens at the beginning of the session. Five dark side and five Light side tokens (Many thank's for the Beginners Game boxes ). We call it The Balance. Each time he act "like a jedi"[sic] he can flip one dark side token to light side and vica versa. At the end of the session, if he has more dark side tokens than light side tokens, then he lost Morality (we called it Destiny, but we change it Morality now) and if he has more light side tokens than dark side tokens he earn Morality.

The detection part. If i'm curious about that two force sensitive character are sense each other, then I throw secretly a sense or disciple check both of them and I add five minus the difference of they The Balance ratio difficulty. The thing is, if they are the different side of the Force, then they detect each other easier. The rest is always narrative.

This is an interesting idea. I like it, but it also feels very "fiddly".

It's not a bad idea for those that want to slow the rise in Morality, or tie it more directly to good actions the way doing bad is to tied to earning Conflict. Maybe instead of default value though, just have players collect Conflict and some other marker, call it Harmony or something, and then at the end of the session do the math and see which they have more of to determine the direction the Morality bar is moved.

The only reason I like it being narrative is that my players are CONSTANTLY rolling Perception rolls out of paranoia. The funny thing is that I don't pull sneaky-sneaky, death-death stuff much at all! If the Force users had to roll to detect other Force users...oh, boy! But that's for my group so maybe giving optional rules for those who want them would be cool.

+1 on the Palpatine special training to conceal his force abilities/power. In the EU (please please PLEASE don't get that argument going here) there are several instances of a Force user being tracked deliberately by their presence - sometimes across star systems. There's also an occasion or two of a powerful Force user (Yoda) hiding beside a powerful dark side 'stain' to mask his presence (and perhaps meditate on his failures).

Contrariwise, it's exceptionally hard for someone to 'hide' their own presence in the force - Caedus and Ben Skywalker both learn to do so in their training, and it renders them undetectable at range from any force user - even their relatives. However, when one got close to them, there was at least a sense of unease (Lumiya and Luke Skywalker) if not an outright detection of a Force presence.

If it were to come up in my game - and eventually it probably will - I'd say that tracking a particular force user is a use of the Sense power - perhaps give them an expanded range (space versus personal). Whereas picking up a Force user nearby would simply be a passive Perception check - difficulty of 6 minus Force Rating, with boosts for their own Force Rating. (Probably not straight, given how many more are now available - possibly 1=1, 2-3=2, 4-5=3 boost?). How does that sound?

I don't have F&D yet, so maybe it's already handled, but if a FS can be Sensed they should also be able to Hide. Otherwise, Palpatine's capabilities (if not his intentions) would have been blindingly obvious. But there are plenty of times, especially in TCW, where someone like Dooku or Ventress aren't noticed until they spring an ambush.

"Hard to see, the dark side is."-Yoda Besides the Shroud talent that the Sentenel Shadow class can have, I expect that there is some Sith ability that lets them hide from Jedi. After all the Sith had been hiding from the Jedi for centuries, with the Jedi masters not even suspecting that any Sith were around so the Sith must be really good at hiding from the Jedi.

The only reason I like it being narrative is that my players are CONSTANTLY rolling Perception rolls out of paranoia. The funny thing is that I don't pull sneaky-sneaky, death-death stuff much at all! If the Force users had to roll to detect other Force users...oh, boy! But that's for my group so maybe giving optional rules for those who want them would be cool.

Beg your pardon? I could write a long list of the number of times I've been ambushed in your games, so yes, slightly paranoid.

I'll be doing it narrative until it's not. Basically when the PCs enter an Encounter/Combat then rolls with happen, roll types TBD when the final F&D rules come out and based on the actual scene (Probably Sense and/or Seek, and to "extra hide" using Shroud). If a Force Sensitive PC wants to use their Sense ability to find other FUs I'll allow it but I will let them know that any FU with even a little training will know how to mask themselves unconsciously from non-specific scans so that it's not going to be like Professor-X's Cerebro, it's going to require some difficult rolls and that they themselves will show up like a lighthouse on a dark and clear night unless they Shroud themselves. Further I will allow anyone with Shroud who hasn't already to immediately spend a DP to help avoid being detected if such a search happens. This will keep them from being detected for the rest of the session and may disrupt the current search. I'll figure out how when I play around with it, I don't want to nerf the power or make it too effective but I also don't want to force my Players to drop a DP every session just to avoid the off chance of being detected by a random scan. It'll be as fair a trade of risk vs reward as I can manage.

I find that using sense and someone goes force active in your vicinity you will pick it up...like quigonn seeing anakin racing and subconsciously using the force and then testing more. If a Jedi isn't actively using the force it should be very tough to locate

The average Clone Wars era Jedi have been taught from a very young age to use the force. It's ingrained in them so much that just switching it off can't be that easy to do. Even Luke's rudimentary training gave him away to Vader ("The force is strong with this one").

I read the Darth Plagueis book recently, and (though it's hardly canon) it described Palpatine as having been trained to mask his presence in the force. Which makes a certain degree of sense to me. I mean, he is obviously a very powerful Sith, but he just stands around Quigon's funeral pyre with the Jedi council looking on and nobody feels anything?

Maybe the shroud talent someone mentioned is supposed to represent this, but it sounds like it's too restrictive (once/session) to be of any real use.

Yes, the shroud talent to is of little use if trying to replicate palpatine, but aren't most of the talents and specializations, and even the powers in the end a little unable to replicate palpatine? Not only does he have narrative immunity, but i think if he did have shroud, he would have improved shroud, supreme shroud, and shroud uber alles.

I think something like shroud is a good place to see that abilities to defend yourself from prying senses exist, and that anything beyond this is splat territory, or GM fiat (either by home crafted talents, powers, or simple narrative authority).

It's worth saying, being strong in the force doesn't mean being a force user. it would be easy in this system even to make a character with FR 5, and yet choose not to use force powers or talents.

We've been using Sense. If a player has the Sense power and a character is particularly strong in the force, The PC will sense something about that character. Otherwise I will let them use the Sense power as described.

I concur. I've always used it as an application of Sense's basic power, made more accurate via upgrades.

I was wondering after watching the Star Wars Rebels pilot episode whether this could be handled with a variant Perception check.

Instead of the usual 2 difficulty it goes up to 3 difficulty with a success only letting the user realise something is odd, more than one allows them to duck and hide when the person they're looking at makes the same check but fails to get as many successes as they did!

As for Palpatine, I suspect he had help hiding his true nature on those occasions he couldn't use some artefact or talent to do the job for him.

Imagine a ring of misdirection except Palpatine employs it with an otherwise perfectly innocent assistant whose never allowed to meet the Jedi so they don't realise what's really going on...

yes the shroud ability is probably more accurate but the ring of misdirection is just so much fun to consider instead!

i think detecting other force users should be narrative. But I think there needs to be a fair amount of discussion of it in the GM section on how to handle it. What to do when the PCs want to actively try and sense other force users. How would NPC force users sense the players. How does this interact with the talent shroud.

In "A New Dawn" Kanan is faced with this issude in the years after Order 66. He needs to not draw attention to himself, which he does by simply not using the Force (unless it's a life or death emergency).

There's a line something like (heavily paraphrasing) "The Force could do many wonderful things, speed up your reflexes, enhance your muscles, even move things at a distance. The one thing it couldn't do was turn off, even if you wanted it to".

So if someone (an Inquisitor eg) was actively using Sense to find a Force user nearby, it would be harder if they were not doing anything, but Force use on their part would act like a radar ping. The more powerful use, the bigger the ping.

In "A New Dawn" Kanan is faced with this issude in the years after Order 66. He needs to not draw attention to himself, which he does by simply not using the Force (unless it's a life or death emergency).

There's a line something like (heavily paraphrasing) "The Force could do many wonderful things, speed up your reflexes, enhance your muscles, even move things at a distance. The one thing it couldn't do was turn off, even if you wanted it to".

So if someone (an Inquisitor eg) was actively using Sense to find a Force user nearby, it would be harder if they were not doing anything, but Force use on their part would act like a radar ping. The more powerful use, the bigger the ping.

Yes. The Force flows through everything and as such creates a lot of background noise, sort of like in a room full of people talking individual voices only stand out when people shout.

In Kenobi however, now that he is on Tatooine he is not concerned at all, as far as I can tell, of having his Force use being detected by other Force Users but instead is very careful to not have people see any outward displays of his Force use. This could be because he feels he is too remote but regardless he never mentions that he is masking himself. this doesn't mean he isn't but I don't get the impression he is because of his meditations (Spoiler: he regularly tries to communicate with Qui Gon).

This I think is why it is best to keep it narrative.

Consider this, if you will: The Force might have a will of its own, a tremendously important NPC, if you will. If it reveals something to you, it is for a purpose. However, the Force is not always impartial. Sometimes it reveals the presence of others to you, sometimes it doesn't. Since it is a NPC, it can freely give information to those who are sensitive to it if it wants to. It can also withhold information, but then the Force User gets a feeling that the Force isn't as forthcoming as it usually is. Yoda's description of the "dark side clouding everything" is a prime example for the latter; Ezra sensing Kanan - even though he's utterly untrained and they don't know each other! - is an example for the former: The Force is giving him a hint that his and this stranger's destiny are intertwined.

Does the Force want the surviving Jedi in hiding to be found? That is for the GM to decide. But consider that even the Emperor was not able to foresee his - literal - downfall.

The Force is a fickle mistress. On the other hand, "trust the Force" may not be the worst strategy - it could very well be on your side.