I'm afraid the talents Parry and Reflect, by RAW, could lead to a power creep since they all stack... so you could have 21 Parry or 11 Reflect (for the right price) for only 3 strain each. I think the strain cost should increase with the potential soak gained, much like dodge or sidestep or defensive stance need to spend 1 strain per rank to upgrade opposing difficulty check.

Did you catch that Knight level droid who can tank lightsabers with his face? (the build posted was 11 soak, but simply giving it Superior laminate armor brings it to 12 while staying well within knight level funding, and there's another Enduring in gunner, plus the entire marauder tree, and a dedication for 6 brawn, for far less points than grabbing all the parry and Reflect talents. (and no strain at all)

He could practically tank a vehical blaster cannon.

You've got to remember that Jedi Characters cannot have a better power curve then the other careers from EotE or AoR. So you can't put too much power into one skill (lightsaber) to reduce the number of talents the character has to buy to become more able.

I'm afraid the talents Parry and Reflect, by RAW, could lead to a power creep since they all stack... so you could have 21 Parry or 11 Reflect (for the right price) for only 3 strain each. I think the strain cost should increase with the potential soak gained, much like dodge or sidestep or defensive stance need to spend 1 strain per rank to upgrade opposing difficulty check.

did you notice i wrote in the middle of my skill text that damage reduction cant exceed [value] that value is what you guys think is fair for the ability so jedi dont get a powercurve that is too high.

....As well as the fact that most of the Jedi that died at Geonosis at the start of the Clone Wars were Niman practitioners, thus proving that while the Form was fine for when Jedi were simply keepers of the peace, it was sorely lacking when forced into intense combat situations.

where is that written? im not aware of any official cannon source that delineates the dead at geonosis by their technique.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Form_VI:_Niman

It's buried towards the bottom, but its from an article on Starwars.com "Fightsaber". Official enough for most.

maybe we are going about this all wrong, on page 193 first paragraph under "the force in force and destiny" sentence 3 onward leads me to believe that all the careers and specializations in F&D dont represent jedi or jedi in training, just scraps of whats left of their beliefs and following any combination of those specializations or careers wont make you a jedi, just jedi like. maybe FFG is planning on making "the jedi sourcebook" later with actual jedi careers and specs rather than the "im learning this as i go" careers and specs of F&D? just a thought, would also explain why some but not all of the specializations have reflect. when i read the careers and specializations by themselves i was hoping the ones that didnt have reflect in them represented a different tradition of force user than jedi, or a jedi that had branched from saber slinging into something else.

maybe FFG is planning on making "the jedi sourcebook" later with actual jedi careers and specs rather than the "im learning this as i go" careers and specs of F&D?

Listening to Sam Stewart yesterday on the Order 66 podcast explain the design philosophy for the careers in F&D did not give me that impression at all. To put it another way, if that is their plan, then Sam is the last guy on the planet you'd ever want to play sabbac with...

maybe FFG is planning on making "the jedi sourcebook" later with actual jedi careers and specs rather than the "im learning this as i go" careers and specs of F&D?

Listening to Sam Stewart yesterday on the Order 66 podcast explain the design philosophy for the careers in F&D did not give me that impression at all. To put it another way, if that is their plan, then Sam is the last guy on the planet you'd ever want to play sabbac with...

Paragons and Renagades, a sourcebook for the light and dark. more split force powers, advice for non-force users and morality *coughmasseffectcough* and advice on darksider campains.

conceeded. thanks for the clarification guys.

Paragons and Renagades, a sourcebook for the light and dark. more split force powers, advice for non-force users and morality *coughmasseffectcough* and advice on darksider campains.

"I'm Commander Shepherd, and this is my favorite splatbook on the Citadel!"

Paragons and Renagades, a sourcebook for the light and dark. more split force powers, advice for non-force users and morality *coughmasseffectcough* and advice on darksider campains.

"I'm Commander Shepherd, and this is my favorite splatbook on the Citadel!"

That's 1 conflict for lying for personal gain

As far as the remark about the Lightsaber Form specs being more powerful than other FaD specializations, I think that's already been avoided for the most part.

But I also think that to some small extent, the FaD careers and specs are meant to be a little more powerful than EotE or AoR characters would be. Heck, even the AoR careers are more potent (or at least generally more capable in combat) than many of the EotE careers, on top of AoR's Duty being a positive thing (bonus to Wound Threshold, free goodies when you reach 100) where most PCs in EotE want to find ways to reduce their Obligations once game play begins. As the designers get a better feel for what does and doesn't work in this system, new specializations are going to be just a little bit better than prior specializations. Compare the new specs for the Hired Gun in Dangerous Covenants to three base specs in the core rulebook. Or the new specs in Far Horizons to the three base Colonist specs in the EotE core rulebook.

As for my proposed revisions, for most of the Form specs, the revised bonus to Parry and Reflect really isn't that different from what many of the specs offer already, with Soresu (a highly defensive Form) and Makashi (melee dueling Form) being the primary exceptions, while Shii-Cho actually gets a reduction in Parry in exchange for a bit of Reflect (but still no Improved Reflect). And if a PC wants to take additional Form specs to further boost up those bonuses, they're not only having to deal with the non-career increase to the XP cost, but the fact that most of these don't offer the Force Rating talent, which itself gimps many of the higher end talents of these specializations, again a balancing factor inherent to the Form specs.

Here is where I see reflect and parry being too powerful. Strain as a resource is easily recovered compared to wounds, especially with wounds having a sort of finite recovery period through the day via stims.

On a basic level, a character can not take more wounds than WP + 15. this is modified by good medicine checks and other etcetera.

reflect and parry convert wounds to strain, often on a better ratio that 1:1, and ther eis no additional cost (it's an out of turn incidental, so it doesn't cost maneuvers or actions, and it is not all or nothing like defensive incidentals such as dodge, nor does it require a destiny point). With rapid recovery, balance, and using advantage to remove strain, reflect and parry become a sort of uber talent, RAW, dramatically increasing survival of characters and reducing the need to care about resources such as wound recovery.

Increasing the rate of increase simply compounds that power, even if the talent totals are reduced, further magnifying the benefits.

Essentially, if given the option to choose at most any given point, between parry/reflect, or toughened, enduring, or grit, I would choose parry/reflect 80% of the time, with enduring coming up as about 15%. and that is as they are written.

Here is where I see reflect and parry being too powerful. Strain as a resource is easily recovered compared to wounds, especially with wounds having a sort of finite recovery period through the day via stims.

On a basic level, a character can not take more wounds than WP + 15. this is modified by good medicine checks and other etcetera.

reflect and parry convert wounds to strain, often on a better ratio that 1:1, and ther eis no additional cost (it's an out of turn incidental, so it doesn't cost maneuvers or actions, and it is not all or nothing like defensive incidentals such as dodge, nor does it require a destiny point). With rapid recovery, balance, and using advantage to remove strain, reflect and parry become a sort of uber talent, RAW, dramatically increasing survival of characters and reducing the need to care about resources such as wound recovery.

Increasing the rate of increase simply compounds that power, even if the talent totals are reduced, further magnifying the benefits.

Essentially, if given the option to choose at most any given point, between parry/reflect, or toughened, enduring, or grit, I would choose parry/reflect 80% of the time, with enduring coming up as about 15%. and that is as they are written.

I think you're looking at this in something of a vacuum.

Look at these in encounters where you're spending strain to take extra maneuvers and to activate talents, maybe where you're taking strain due to Threat generated, or incoming stun damage. And look at what a typical character's ST is likely to be--maybe 13 or 14 for many characters. That means you can Parry/Reflect 4 times before you're out of resources, and that's assuming you're not using or taking strain for any other reason. If a character has Dodge, Defensive Stance, or similar abilities, they're probably also spending train to try and avoid an attack altogether (which is better than simply reducing damage in nearly every instance), so that's more strain being used.

Then, if you're spending Advantage on recovering strain, you're not spending it on critical hits, passing along Boost dice, negating defense, activating weapon special qualities, talents, etc...

On my character, before F&D came out, I was getting down below 5 strain fairly regularly (with a ST of 15), using Intense Focus and taking a second maneuver almost every turn. The only reason I wasn't in more danger was that my GM doesn't use stun damage enough, but there were situations where I was too low on strain to take a second maneuver, where that was important. If I were to add Block/Reflect to the mix, it would hamper my other abilities, or I'd be in even more serious trouble.

The Wookie in our group has, I think, 3 ranks of Dodge, and has found himself in a bad position on a couple of occasions where he's drawing fire, but can't afford to take more strain damage until he generates some Advantage.

Both his character and mine (and most of the rest of the group), frequently begin encounters at less than max ST, and I had Balance (FR 2), a Discipline of YGG, one rank of Rapid Recovery, and the Healing basic power from Ways of the Force (once per day, could recover 3 strain per target).

It's not an irrelevant resource concern until you get to very high strain thresholds, or unless you don't use strain for anything else, and your GM doesn't ever throw stun damage at you. He/she should be.

Even using your own example though, had the GM used stun damage, reflect/parry would reduce strain taken, since you can use the talents to reduce damage (from a stun weapon), essentially giving you damage reduction on stun weapons past your first rank.

What I see from a defensive talent standpoint, is the parry/reflect as currently written are already the two most powerful talents as they allow you to convert a limited resource pool (wounds) into a functionally unlimited/easily recoverable resource pool (strain) and have no margin for error. they are predictable, efficient and are not based on estimated enemy activity (as opposed to defensive stance and dodge, which require predictive activity to gauge if the enemy will hit).

The scenarios I ran were in a vacuum, yes, but that was to estimate to myself how meaningful the changes were is extreme scenarios.

For reference, the scenarios I ran were a table set up of various damage attacks (5-13) inflicted on characters with variable soaks (0-7) with wounds ranging from 12-16, based on strain thresholds of 10-16.

I also ran some scenarios assuming 2 hits per pc in several "encounters" over the course of a session, with strain recovery at various units (2.5 strain being the default for a FaD character with 2 prof and one ability die in the discipline pool).

What I see is a vastly different adventuring curve than prior books, with marked increases in survivability simply by possessing one rank. With Donovan's suggestion, the survivability increases on another order of magnitude, and I just think that tips the talents from being "good, but representative of the jedi," to "too good, why would I ever not take these."

Again, I'm clearly in the minority, but I think donovan's change places too much advantage in the LS user category.

I think the comparison that has to be made is between Parry/Reflect and Enduring.

As written, after the first talent Parry/Reflect adds 1 point of mitigation that:

1. must be activated by gaining strain

2. only affects melee/ranged (respectively) attacks

3. works post-soak

4. must be holding a lightsaber (or melee weapon in parry's case)

Enduring adds 1 point of mitigation that:

1. is always active

2. requires no equipment or special circumstance

3. can be bypassed by Pierce or Breach (more likely Breach, as few weapons have enough Pierce to get through both Brawn and armor let alone spilling over into Enduring soak)

I think the key features to weigh in for the discussion are 1 and 3 for both. How much value is lost by Parry/Reflect being strain-activated, and how much is gained by being applied post-soak?

The other thing to consider is the strain cost. If the ability is becoming too powerful, should the cost be adjusted to 4 strain?

Having actually played FaD characters with Parry and Reflect at GenCon, the talents are not anywhere near as powerful as they look on paper. In many cases, the best you can hope for is to mitigate up to 5 points of damage from an attack, and if you have a couple of enemies gang up on you in a single round, that strain cost adds up fast , and in may instances you're still taking some damage, particularly from high-damage melee weapons like thermo-axes, electrostaves, and blaster rifles, and there's the fact that if the attack hits, then any activated qualities the weapon might have (like the thermo-axe's Burn quality) can still be triggered, and even if you reduce the damage to a single point, that still means you're at risk of suffering from a critical injury since that only needs a single point of damage to sneak through. So even under my proposed revision, they're not the end-all and be-all of defensive options, since you're generally better off not getting hit in the first place.

And Advantage spent to recover strain is Advantage that's not being spent to pass along boost dice or activate weapon qualities like Sunder or even trigger a critical injury.

Having actually played FaD characters with Parry and Reflect at GenCon, the talents are not anywhere near as powerful as they look on paper.

I have to agree 100%. Even a character with no ranks in lightsaber rolling against a target with 5 ranks of parry is still going to take some damage. It may only be 2 to 4 wounds a hit but that adds up fast.

Having played FaD in my house with my friends, I have to say Dono is right... except that that is damage that was blocked and suffered as strain INSTEAD of as wounds. So that is a conscious character able to help out and contribute to the combat long after a character with an equivalent enduring talent may have gone down (and suffered critical injury, and reduced the parties capacity to fight back).

Then after that combat, a quick discipline check can recover strain, where as without the talent that would ahve been wound that a simple check could not have recovered. Additionally, if a party mate performs first aid, the effects synergize, as now you can prevent damage as strain, recover strain with a discipline check, and recover the reduced damage through first aid.

To be clear, I'm not saying the Talents are too good, just that they are good enough and need no improvement (other than the fact that reflecting an attack back should be more possible or player controlled some how).

People often forget that Stimpacks are pretty useful in a fight... starting at 5 wounds, you can heal for a total of 15 wounds with a few stimpacks. You don't have something has usefull refueling strain, except advantages on dice rolls... So trading wounds for strain isn't always the best option....

For a quick fight, Parry and Reflect are superior to other defense talents, but in a long fight, you'll probably run out of strain...

I'm tweeking the Forms talent trees... still got a few to go but looking good so far... I used Donovan's idea of "1 + 2 per rank" with fewer ranks per tree. But I need to good talents to fill the trees now...

I was thinking....

Shouldn't Shien Expert be with the Warrior Career and associated with Brawn instead of Shii-Cho ??

I was thinking....

Shouldn't Shien Expert be with the Warrior Career and associated with Brawn instead of Shii-Cho ??

I imagine there's a "cunning warrior" joke in there given Anakin's style was Shien.

Everything in the Shien Expert talent tree screams for Brawn has main attribute for the Lightsaber skill.

Everything in the Shien Expert talent tree screams for Brawn has main attribute for the Lightsaber skill.

That's because Shien Expert is divided in half between Shien and Djem So. Djem So is the brute force form, so that's what side the Brawn talents are on. Shien has Disruptive Strike and good reflecting abilities. I don't like the tree myself. Neither side gets enough identity, and it confuses people.

I knew the Order 66 movie moment will come. Nevertheless, that was a plot device. What I want to highlight is that there are a few iconic things from a Jedi, two of them are their ability of parrying and reflecting blaster fire, and the lightsaber duels between two Jedis.

Within the mechanics of this game system, you can simulate this in two ways:

1) Parry and Reflect talents add a lot of negative dice to the attacker's dice pool

2) Parry and Reflect talents add soak

Although I am no fan of damage soak mechanics in rpgs, I think option 2 is the way to go. I have played warhammer 3 where dice pools can become huge and it makes the game very cumbersome. Said that, if you want to have cinematic lightsaber duels between Jedi Knights that last for more than two rounds, better the Parry talent provides a lot of soak. Similarly, if you want your Jedi Knight to survive the first Stormtrooper squad with a heavy blaster rifle sent against him, better Reflect provides a lot of soak.

I've testing the parry effectiveness facing a warrior/shi-cho knight vs a hired-gun/marauder, using the same amount of exp (110).

Apparently, look very balanced, the marauder has a clear advantage in damage output and raw resilience, but the shi-sho knight has a very good level a soak capacity, with a useful application of "sum-Djem" to delay the marauders offensive potential.

In fact, the parry skill give the Shi-sho Knight an unexpected good survival margin, but it makes him too specialized in melee combat.

In conclution, so far, the soak mechanics works, but it's true that the use of strain to fuel the ability seems to make the force user too vulnerable to more than one opponent, 3 strain is very taxing against repeated attacks, maybe the cost might be revised to 2 strain, to make the talent useful against at least two opponents.

In conclution, so far, the soak mechanics works, but it's true that the use of strain to fuel the ability seems to make the force user too vulnerable to more than one opponent, 3 strain is very taxing against repeated attacks, maybe the cost might be revised to 2 strain, to make the talent useful against at least two opponents.

Maybe instead of reducing the Strain down to 2, they just add a +1 Strain per additional attack a round. 1 attack 3 Strain, 2 attacks 4 Strain, 3 attacks 5 Strain, etc...