I agree with Lorne... it's Donovan's suggestion, but with less ambiguous names...

And instead of Supreme Parry and Supreme Reflect, just rename them Improved Parry and Reflect since they only reduce the strain cost to 1 if you didn't attack last action.

Looking at it again, and trying to simplify the math, just drop the leading one?

e.g.: For Parry: reduce damage by 1/2 brawn (rounded up) + ranks in Parry

I liked adding the Force Rating in there for (D|R)eflect as it represents those more attuned to the Force being better at it...

To clarify: I didn't mean the lightsaber skill -- just the characteristic that could be used for the skill -- Ataru Technique would allow one to use Agility, Shien Cunning, etc...

I don't think it needs to get this complicated or powerful.

On thing I have noticed you guys may have missed is that Sense gives you the ability to force you attackers to get up to 2 upgrades to the difficulty to attack you. That will give you a lot more threat and despairs.

It's been discussed.

On thing I have noticed you guys may have missed is that Sense gives you the ability to force you attackers to get up to 2 upgrades to the difficulty to attack you. That will give you a lot more threat and despairs.

It's been discussed quite a bit, particularly by others as justification for having Improved Parry/Reflect require 3 Threat or a Despair to trigger, almost to the point where it's nearly a default assumption that every character that takes a LS Form spec is going to automatically have the Sense power and grab the defensive Control Upgrade, Duration Upgrade, and Strength Upgrades for that power.

And while it does help by applying one or more difficulty upgrades to an attacker's difficulty, I'm not enthused about the idea of a PC having to spend even more XP just to make those two talents more viable. It may be completely foreign to some, but there are probably Force users that are looking to venture into the LS Form trees and that no intention of ever picking up the Sense power.

I'm not enthused about the idea of a PC having to spend even more XP just to make those two talents more viable.

What changed in the Beta Update 1 for the improved Parry and Reflect other than adding incidental to the type for the talent? I don't see any differences....

I think they simply changed the ordering of the wording to make it a little more clear and consistent with word usage throughout the game.

It only clarifies that the 1 Despair or 3 threat are spent to activate the Imp Parry/Reflect.

Here's Parry (Improved):

Original F&D Beta:

"When the character suffers a hit from a Brawl, Melee, or Lightsaber combat check that generates μ or Σ Σ Σ and the character uses the Parry incidental to reduce the damage from that hit, after the attack is resolved, the character automatically hits the attacker once with a wielded Brawl, Melee, or Lightsaber weapon. This hit deals the weapon’s base damage plus any damage from applicable talents. This ability may not be used if the original attack disables the character."

Beta Update 1:

“When the character suffers a hit from a Brawl, Melee, or Lightsaber combat check and the character uses the Parry incidental to reduce the damage from that hit, after the attack is resolved, the character may spend μ or Σ Σ Σ to automatically hit the attacker once with a wielded Brawl, Melee, or Lightsaber weapon. This hit deals the weapon’s base damage plus any damage from applicable talents or abilities. This talent may not be used if the original attack incapacitates the character

It also puts agency in the player's hand to spend those threat/despair, which some GMs do not allow for their NPC's.

I haven't yet read the whole thread, but I would be quite happy with the changes in the OP.

Excellent job, Donovan. Well done.

Having now read the whole thread, I still feel this is an excellent piece of work and a good discussion.

I don't like the idea of extra rolls when using Improved versions to determine if Improved activates (and hits, in some cases).

I agree with Donovan that three threat is a very high barrier though, and should probably be lowered to two. Obviously a Despair is sufficient. I also like the idea of allowing a Destiny Point as a third option to trigger the hit.

NB: If players start arguing over who's spending too many Destiny Points, they aren't working as a team and will need to create new characters "until morale improves".

I have to wonder. Are they really going to take our suggestions? I felt like AoR was pushed through without any changes and any suggestions we made were put in other products. I hope this Beta isn't just to get extra revenue and they really do listen to your ideas because they are sound.

Eh, maybe it'll make it into the Tapani Sector splatbook.

I have to wonder. Are they really going to take our suggestions? I felt like AoR was pushed through without any changes and any suggestions we made were put in other products. I hope this Beta isn't just to get extra revenue and they really do listen to your ideas because they are sound.

Time will tell. And actually, a couple changes were made in AoR based upon feedback during the Beta, two of those being the Massive quality based upon feedback that HappyDaze provided and changing Knowledge: Galactic Civil War to the much broader Knowledge: Warfare skill. X-Wings were also dropped from Armor 5 to Armor 3, but the TIE Defender was left as a sensible craft instead of being changed to a twink-gamer's wet dream.

offtopic, I'm disapointed the tie defender doesnt have a tractor beam anymore. a Master Pilot should have been able to have a lot of fun with that one.

I have to wonder. Are they really going to take our suggestions?

I pray to the Force that they do.

More to the point, I hope they treat this more like the EotE beta -- there's so much that's new from a purely mechanical sense, so much game-changing material from the contributors assembled here.

Looking at the rules for dodge I suddenly had an idea. What if adding the reflecting of blasters back at an opponent was dependant on whether you took damage or not. So if you manage to reduce the damage to 0 using reflect/parry along with your soak you get to redirect the attack back at the attacker. Improved reflect/parry allows you to direct the attack at someone else and supreme makes it cheaper, say you can take up to the lightsaber form stat that you're using damage and still get the reflect option.... I dunno, it's a suggestion.

problem is (I made this suggestion myself based on the protect power) that Dono pointed out, is that to get the damage to 0 is pretty hard with just reflect/parry.

Take a "minor" blaster rifle hit of one success. that is 10 damage. so you'd need... 8 ranks?, or 5 ranks under the doubled progression suggested (of which I am not a fan).

That's a pretty hard core level of character. Not an easy sell.

I think the problem here is that things like sense/sidestep/dodge are being viewed as requisites when they aren't. Certainly whithout them it's not easy to trigger improved reflect, but it is possible. These talents/abilities DO synergize very well, becoming exponentially more useful as they stack. Which can look like a requisite. But it is not.

It's a pattern of thinking that is dangerous. It's like saying toughened without enduring is next to useless because they're not as effective in a vacuum. (and I don't mean dangerous like people are going to die. just dangerous in that we want Jedi to be so good that we view their advantages as minimized strengths, like these are some disenfranchised career choices that are more unplayable than the scout)

Another thought on my part to shake this out:

What if Reflect didn't just duplicate Parry, what if it was just an enhanced talent like Improved or Supreme and enhanced Parry?

Parry gives you the chance to reduce damage of an incoming Brawl, Melee, Lightsaber hit (going back to 2 + ranks in Parry).

Reflect then enhances that to include being able to reduce damage from a Ranged (Light), Ranged (Heavy), or Gunnery hit. Reflect is no longer ranked, however it does require a Force Rating (duh).

Improved Parry, Supreme Parry, Improved Reflect, and Supreme Reflect go on being what they are, and how they are.

By making Reflect a non-ranked talent, it allows us to tweak some of the trees to drop in Improved Reflect, and maybe change a Reflect, or two, into more ranks of Parry.

Example: Soresu Defender.

Row 2, Col 2 -- Parry.

Row 4, Col 2 -- Reflect.

Row 4, Col 3 -- Improved Reflect

This definitely ups the power of Parry for Force Sensitives, and at a reduced cost (they don't have to pace their Parry ranks with their Reflect ranks to stay equally proficient).

+0.02

;-j

I think the problem here is that things like sense/sidestep/dodge are being viewed as requisites when they aren't. Certainly whithout them it's not easy to trigger improved reflect, but it is possible. These talents/abilities DO synergize very well, becoming exponentially more useful as they stack. Which can look like a requisite. But it is not.

It's a pattern of thinking that is dangerous. It's like saying toughened without enduring is next to useless because they're not as effective in a vacuum. (and I don't mean dangerous like people are going to die. just dangerous in that we want Jedi to be so good that we view their advantages as minimized strengths, like these are some disenfranchised career choices that are more unplayable than the scout)

Not a good comparison. Enduring works. Toughened works. They don't require anything other than your having purchased the talents, but Improved Parry/Reflect requires your enemy generating 3 threat or 1 despair. Normally, they'd be rolling against a defense of PP for Parry, or P, PP, or PPP for Reflect. First off, you can't generate a despair on any of these without either spending a Destiny point, or picking up some other talents/powers. Second, It's impossible to generate 3 threat on a single die, so right away, short range shots are impossible to Reflect. Then, on a difficulty of PP it's very unlikely that you're going to both roll 3 threat to begin with, and even less likely for all of those to go uncancelled. Thus, we have talents that require a Destiny point to be spent to even have a 1/12 chance of activating, or are simply incredibly unlikely to occur.

That's part of the reason I suggested allowing the usage of a Destiny point as a 3rd built-in option: rather than spending a DP on the hope of generating a Despair (or increasing your odds of netting 2 threat), you can spend it to activate the talent.

Besides, offensive abilities generally scale faster than defensive ones in this game, so it becomes difficult to keep your defenses high enough that you are likely to be generating and keeping 3 threat with any sort of regularity.

I don't disagree with the destiny point idea. In fact, i also have suggested that. twice now.

Since improved reflect isn't a ranked talent, the investment in making it better is in other abilities. You can't buy up multiple ranks to lower the threshold for redirecting shots, so if you want to be the best redirect-er possible, you need to invest in other abilities to make that happen.

How is that different from most any other ability? If I want to be the best blaster shot in the game, I can't just pump one ability... need a diverse range of talents, skills, and external factors to aid my quest for bestness.

The question I ask my self is, "for the character with the minimum possible investment, how much reflection should I expect?"

the answer is not much. For me. A character with NO other defensive abilities will geneate 3-4 threat on 10% of medium range rolls. now there is some funny conditional statistical math that I have neither the patience or ability to do right now, but gut check... I'd say 4-5% of medium ranged can be redirected. that's not great, but it's not bad.

but that is the absolute minimum. 40 xp. I wish I could capitalize numbers, but in lieu... FORTY XP!!!!!!! that is NOTHING in xp terms! and for 5 more, they can get defensive training. now the chances of drawing at least 3 threat are 18% at medium, and about 5% at short (again, about half with all the conditional probability of the other dice). A quick dip into sense (40 more xp) and that becomes 2 challenge dice and a setback, which is a 54% chance at medium, and 31% at short, plus at short there is also the chance of despair, as well as higher cumulative despair chance at medium.

And that is for so little xp that a Human could still do a stat bump. as a starting character.

So yes. Improved reflect by itself is not great, but I don't think there is a set of talents/abilities that synergize better than improved reflect and "defensive" talents. Nor should Improved reflect be great on it's own. It should take actual investment.

Also, it's a little moot how offensive abilities scale in the game. That is up to the GM, and most enemies have a range of 2 prof to three prof dice. So you can base most projections around that, with outliers for special battles.

Again, I agree that the ability to redirect should be more in the hands of players. I like the destiny point idea. but just because improved reflect synergizes better with non-reflect talents doesn't mean it's bad design, or needs improvement. it mostly just means that you need a diverse character to be good at kicking butt.

Another thought on my part to shake this out:

What if Reflect didn't just duplicate Parry, what if it was just an enhanced talent like Improved or Supreme and enhanced Parry?

I like this idea. Very sleek.

The issue is this: How many talents can you think of that work 10% of the time, or less, in the situations they were designed for ?

If you want to talk about being good with a blaster, you're taking a weapon and then investing on improving that, but each talent you pick up toward that goal benefits it directly, and functions on its own. True Aim doesn't require other talents to function. Deadly Accuracy is probably the closest to a talent that requires other investments to make it work, but those investments (skill ranks in the skill you're going to be using) are along your natural developmental path. It's an obvious choice, and Deadly Accuracy spells out in its description that you're going to need those ranks in order for the talent to be effective.

Now look at Improved Reflect/Parry. They state that they requires Reflect/Parry. Okay. But the talents don't mention that they're going to be almost worthless without investing in several other talents, many of which aren't even in the same tree. Improved Reflect/Parry also aren't improving upon something you're otherwise investing in (not directly anyway), they're granting you a new ability. Most talents that do this either simply work , or they spell out that you need to invest somewhere else (for instance, The Force Is My Ally clearly doesn't do anything unless you have at least one Force power, but once you do, it functions as expected).

And as for offensive abilities scaling faster, that is relevant if you want to look at uncancelled threats. If you invest 100 XP to have a defense of RRBB, and the guy attacking you has invested 100 XP to have YYYGB, how likely is it that you're going to get that many uncancelled threats? You can also be looking at, for the same XP, something more like YYYYGB. Plus, if you do end up with all that threat, it probably means that your opponent rolled a lot of successes, which means you're going to be getting hit hard , and Improved Reflect/Parry may not work in that case, if the attack incapacitates you.

The one (albeit minor) concern I see with allowing Improved Parry/Reflect to trigger off a Destiny Point is those situations when the Destiny Pool is rather short on Light Side points. If the GM is doing their job and keeping the pool fluid, it shouldn't be that big a concern, but it could be seen as such for some groups, particularly if the 'saber-monkeys are 'hoarding' the Destiny Points by constantly using them each round to trigger Improved Parry/Reflect.

Like I said, it's not a huge concern, and having the option to trigger Improved Parry or Improved Reflect with a choice of 3 Threat, 1 Despair, or flipping a Destiny Point would address the biggest concern (being able to reliably use said talents) without requiring a major reworking of the entire structure. With the base Parry and Reflect talents, mechanically those operate fine, and frankly the only reason to really change how the damage mitigation value is calculated was to account for swapping out some ranks in those two talents to make room for other talents as discussed in the initial post.

If the prior Betas are anything to go by, most of the talents are pretty well "locked in" in terms of how they operate, with Beta Updates allowing for fairly minor changes in wording rather than complete and total revisions of the nature that some folks have suggested. It seems pretty clear that the design team is pretty happy with the core structure of how these talents work, so any sweeping changes like the ones that JediHamlet has suggested aren't likely to be implemented. There were a lot of folks all but demanding some pretty broad and sweeping changes in to the game during the EotE Beta, ranging from total re-working of several talent trees to throwing out the entire "narrative" dice mechanic. That the number of changes from each Beta + Updates to the final product were fairly small suggests that the Beta testing is more about fine-tuning the product than making any radical updates.

Yeti: Knockdown comes to mind. I can find more for you later, but knowledge specialization is another one.

Those are talents that require triumphs, so you are "required" to have skill investments in those to make the most (or any really) use from them, and their effects are pretty lame compared to improved reflect.

There is a general current (not you specifically Yeti) of Jedi power creep, and how we think these things should be reflected in the game. But for game balance first and foremost I think improved reflect is well designed (Aside from the fact you can get it without actual getting reflect, which is problematic at best). With the exception of adding a destiny point option somewhere to give more control to the players.