Was running the first half of "Lost Knowledge" last night, and had this scenario come up.

One of the PCs is a Gand Findsman (Seeker/Hunter) with the Foresee and Seek powers. The player asked if using Foresee and triggering a Strength Upgrade was enough to warrant him as having "encountered" the person he'd clearly seen in his vision.

I made a GM judgement call to allow it (especially as I'd built the character for my friend in the first place), but that got me thinking if that sort of interaction was fully intended on the design team's part? If so, it would certainly make the first half of Seek's basic power a lot more useful, particularly for someone like a Findsman.

If using Foresee isn't meant to count as having "encountered" the prospective target of Seek, that may need to be addressed within the rules, as I can't be the only GM that's run into this particular situation within the rules.

Well, the Strength upgrades only let you pick out a few specific details from their entire 'vision' of the future, right? If they were able to pick out enough specific details of the person I think I'd make it easy for them to recognize them if they were in their presence, but I don't personally think I'd let it count as having "encountered" them. I don't think that's necessarily how it was intended to work, so perhaps it does need a little clarification. But who knows.

From a GM perspective I think that could kind of ruin certain plot situations. "Ah, I saw that in 2 days time you're going to be murdered by this guy with 6 fingers on his left hand. Lets go beat him up, I know exactly where he is even though we've never met before!" :-P

Seems a liiiittle lame to me. But that's completely subjective.

Personally, I wouldn't. For one, it just opens up a door to abuse, where you have players trying to cut corners every way possible - "I'm looking for X, I want to look into the future to when I have X, and use that to Seek it and head directly over there to get it".

So instead of using Foresee to glimpse into his potential fate, possibly to change it, or possibly to gain some sort of small hint towards following that future, they're basically using Seek to just start blindly and easily moving towards whatever their goal is.

Then there's just the narrative aspect of it, where I personally see that the tracking aspect of Seek is more about re-linking some sort of past connection between the force user and whatever they're looking for, and essentially trying to reconnect to it. Whereas allowing it through Foresee where Seek sort of becomes something where your character just needed to see it in some shape or form and they're just sort of locking onto it; like as long as it simply exists in the character's memory, it's an object to be targeted at will. And there's nothing really wrong with the 2nd one, but I don't really care for it, since you can probably start arguing that Sense's (right) Control Upgrade can be used to grab the thought of something from somebody else and just start tracking that too.

I made a GM judgement call to allow it...

I agree that allowing the combo on a routine basis is fishy. Thus why I started this thread, so that the FFG folks will see it and at least give the matter some thought.

I think one other stumbling block in having this combo work, or even be truly reliable, is that Foresee is very much dependent on what information the GM is willing to reveal to the player. I remember there being a rather large argument over the basic power being trash during the AoR Beta because it was entirely subject to what events the GM chose to reveal (as well as not offering a chance to look into the past, which is something that Farseeing has generally allowed since the WEG days). The GM could very easily hand out a bunch of red herrings if they didn't want the character with those two powers to take a massive short-cut through a mystery-themed adventure.

Of course, using those visions as the basis to go assault someone would probably generate a lot of Conflict, since you're attacking someone for an act they haven't committed yet. To quote Yoda, "always in motion, the future is." Palpatine got pretty reliant on his future visions according to the EU, and it finally bit him in the blubber when an action he didn't foresee (Luke refuting the temptations of the dark side) occurred, with Mara Jade even snarking to the BBEG of the story (Joruus C'boath in The Last Command) about how the Emperor put so much faith in his dark side visions and still wound up dead.