Hi,

I'm playing a bit of a support character as a Colonist Doctor. He has a pistol, but I rarely use it. I feel like something besides shooting would be a useful way to spend my character's action.

What options do I have to support my combat orientated teammates during a fight?

Is there a way (maybe houseruled?) to make a Leadership check to inspire them (almost like a fantasy Bard?), maybe use the successes as advantages to give boost dice or something?

Check out the various commander trees in Age of Rebellion. They are just what you are looking for!

That sounds good, maybe like a Warlord in D&D 4th. But what about just in core EoTE?

If you purchase the Politico tree and work down the left hand side you can have Improved Inspiring Rhetoric for 45 XP plus the cost of the specialization.

Inspiring Rhetoric allows you to make an Average Leadership check. For each success, you choose an ally at short range and they recover one strain. In addition, you can spend 1 advantage to have one of those allies recover a second point of strain. So 3 success and 2 advantage means 2 allies can recover 2 strain and one can recover 1.

Improved Inspiring Rhetoric gives those affected characters (anyone that was chosen to recover strain) a boost die on ALL skill checks for a number of rounds equal to your ranks in leadership. Only catch is that any one ally can only get 1 boost die from using Inspiring Rhetoric, so you can't double up the next round if you take the action again.

For 20 more points you can turn Inspiring Rhetoric into a maneuver, but then you are back to needing actions to perform!

If you want to attack others with your words, you can choose the talents on the right side of the Politico tree for Scathing Tirade. Its the opposite of Inspiring Rhetoric, causing strain to opponents, giving them setback dice, and potentially using the talent as a maneuver instead of an action.

Thanks rowdyoctopus, I'm not much of a system master so I don't think I've even looked at multispecializing into Politico. I'll definitely have to consider it now, the Inspiring + Scathing seems like a pretty neat mechanism actually.

I wonder if you can even end up with comparable damage via strain with a super specialized Scathing Tirade. Maybe by using it twice (once as a maneuver from Supreme Scathing Tirade) and then again as an action?

So do people have experience with using Leadership during combat? Does it basically translate into the Assist maneuver? I like the idea of my character making a Leadership check and using the advantages to give free maneuvers and boost die to allies. But I don't know what the Successes would do in that case.

Thanks rowdyoctopus, I'm not much of a system master so I don't think I've even looked at multispecializing into Politico. I'll definitely have to consider it now, the Inspiring + Scathing seems like a pretty neat mechanism actually.I wonder if you can even end up with comparable damage via strain with a super specialized Scathing Tirade. Maybe by using it twice (once as a maneuver from Supreme Scathing Tirade) and then again as an action?So do people have experience with using Leadership during combat? Does it basically translate into the Assist maneuver? I like the idea of my character making a Leadership check and using the advantages to give free maneuvers and boost die to allies. But I don't know what the Successes would do in that case.

Hmm yeah it's a bit unclear, since the "spend 1 advantage" seems to be written as a max, not as a stackable use of advantage. Makes for a light area-of-attack ability in some ways, since it can "hit" a lot of targets with enough successes. And it would ignore Soak (I think?) which helps.

I guess compared to a similar XP combat character with Autofire it's not that thrilling. But an interesting exercise in design.

I wonder if you can even end up with comparable damage via strain with a super specialized Scathing Tirade. Maybe by using it twice (once as a maneuver from Supreme Scathing Tirade) and then again as an action?

Comparable damage is not possible.

(Sorry for going on so long below, but my first character tried to fight with only Scathing Tirade and I have some thoughts and opinions on the talent. I wrote this with Scathing Tirade in mind, but it's all useable if you're looking at being able to heal strain through Inspiring Rhetoric. The math is the same.)

To clarify, I made a character who tried to do this. The problem is how Scathing Tirade uses the dice is unreliable and skewed towards successes over advantages. You get a number of targets per successes and can buy an extra point of damage per advantage. The problem I would run into would be that I'd commonly get uncanceled results of several success and only 1 or two advantage. Since Scathing Tirade is only short range, as a non-combat character who didn't like getting shot, I was typically only within range of a couple bad guys. All but 1 or 2 successes went to waste. I'd typically do two damage to one character and one to another.

Note that if your dice were flipped and rolled 1 success with 5 advantages, you would do 5 damage to one target that bypasses soak. Also, my character was mostly ok with not doing much damage because giving the setback die to those he hurt was useful too. Just don't look to Scathing Tirade for damage. Even with Force powers to improve the roll, rolling the Force die and picking success or advantage per white pip, only got me so far. It was a huge XP expenditure for little gain. Using Scathing Tirade is good for role playing, but don't expect to do as much damage as even a light pistol.

There is actually a reason why getting advantages is hard. Scathing Tirade is an average difficulty roll. Take a look at the dice. On the green, four sides have successes and four sides have advantages. Which means you have a 50% chance to roll either a success or advantage. Looking closer you see that 3 sides are only successes, 3 sides are only advantages, and one side is both. So the odds of rolling at least one advantage or success on any given green die are the same.

For the yellow, 6 sides have advantages while 8 sides have successes (including the triumph). While this means you still have a 50% chance of rolling at least one advantage on the yellow die, you also have a 66.7% chance of rolling at least one success. When you look at the distribution you see that 5 sides only have successes (including the triumph) while three sides have only advantages and three have both. All of this put together means you are more likely to roll successes on a yellow die.

At this point, as far as rolling advantages are concerned, green and yellow dice are the same. Both have a 50% chance of rolling advantages. In fact, yellow has a slight boost because two sides have double advantage as opposed to one side on the green, which works out to 16.7% and 12.5% chances to roll two advantages on a single die. Results just look weird because the yellow will give you more successes in addition to the same number of advantages. Rolling 6 green dice you could expect 3 success and 3 advantages while Rolling 6 yellow dice would expect 4 success and still only 3 advantages. This is what results in the perception of only successes being rolled.

All this is fine and good, but the real issue is where the difficulty dice come into play because they are skewed towards disadvantage. Scathing Tirade has a set average difficulty, so unless the GM is flipping destiny poits (or has an extremly liberal interpretation of the adversary rules) you will be only rolling 2 purple dice. A purple die has 3 sides with failure and 5 sides with disadvantages. That is a 37.5% chance of failure and 62.5% chance of disadvantage. Math isn't my strong suit, but those two purple dice should net 0.75 failure and 1.25 disadvantages.

What this shows is that the more yellow dice you have the more successes you'll roll (when compared to advantages) and that you'll be canceling out more of the advantages. The result is that the success to advantage ratio is skewed towards rolling more un-canceled successes than advantages.

What's funny is that the odds of doing damage with Scathing Tirade actually go up when a purple is upgraded to red. Red has 7 failure sides and 6 disadvantage sides. This means the odds of getting at least one disadvantage per die dropped from 62.4% to only 50%. (alough the purple to red comparsion for two disadvantages is the same as the green to yellow for advantages, which is to say red is 16.7% while purple is 12.5% likely to roll a double disadvantage.) You are more likely to roll more failures, but since you're rolling more successes with yellow dice they should balance out and not impact Scathing Tirade too much.

Now, if you wanted to weaponize Scathing Tirade, there are a few options. One option is to figure out a way you add boost dice. Three of the blue die sides have advantages while only two have successes. This is 50% for advantage and 33.3% for success. Since 1 in 6 sides have double advantages, the odds of rolling two advantages is the same for the blue and yellow dice at 16.7%. There is only one talent to gain a blue die on Coercion checks, that is Sense Emotions in the Force Sensitive Exile tree. Outside of asking for a blue die for good role playing, your only other option is to ask your party members for blue dice from their advantages from combat checks. You could also ask if you could use the Aim maneuver for Scathing Tirade, but since it's not a combat check or weapon attack, this would be a house rule.

You could look at picking up Intimidating from Gadgeteer, Enforcer, or Agitator. Suffering a strain to reduce the difficulty to easy does help for where cancelations come into play.

The Unmatched Expertise ability would help once per session for an entire encounter in the same way as Intimidating. This works for all skills, so for your medical stuff and Inspiring Retoric as well. You can even buy it up so that you can make the checks simple.

More than just Sense Emotions above, Force powers help too. There are two ways to roll a force die to be able to spend a white pip. Overwhelm Emotions can help, but I think it can only add successes, is deep in the FSEx treel, and gives failure if a black pip is rolled. The way to go is to pick up the Influence power with the Control on the left side, this allows you to roll force dice and can choose either success or advantage for each white pip. (Keep in mind that you can't use both Overwhelm Emotions and the Influence Control upgrade at the same time, you can't spend one white pip to buy the effects of both. With that in mind, never pick up Overwhelm Emotions.)

You could look at picking up Smooth Talker from Performer, Trader, or Quartermaster, but that helps with successes and that's not the issue. In my opinion, you should be rolling enough successes. It's the getting advantages that's the issue.

One last option is to talk to your GM. The Coercion skill has a Scathing Tirade like ability in the long skill description. These rules lets you spend two successes to buy a point of damage or two advantages to buy an extra target, which is the revers and more costly than Scathing Tirade. When I asked if you could use both rules at the same time, as to if you spend successes through the Coercion skill rules to deal more damage on a Scathing Tirade check, Sam's response came back as no. (The question and answer is posted in the developer question thread.) However, you can ask your GM as to if you can house rule in the ability to use both. I really wish there was a mechanic where you could buy successes with advantages, even if it was a 5 to 1 ratio.

Note that there has been some discussion on here as to if it's viable for a character to use Scathing Tirade three times in a single turn. It is possible, but I don't feel it's worth it. In a turn you can have an action and two maneuvers. The second maneuver costs you 2 strain. Supreme Scathing Tirade lets you do it as a maneuver for a strain. So, to use Scathing Tirade three times in a turn, it'll cost you 4 strain. What's your Strain Threshold? Typical seems to be in the 12 to 16 neighborhood. Which means you can do this for 3 to 4 turns in a single fight. After that, you need to roll on darn impressive cool/disipline check to get back all of that strain you just spent and hope the enemies aren't using stun weapons. I just don't feel it's worth taking 4 strain for 3 attacks at 2-3 expected strain damage each. That's only 6-9 stun damage. Against Soak 3, a standard Blaster pistol does 6-9 wound damage with 3-6 successes. That's without talents, attachments, or modifications to improve the pistol shot.

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I'm playing a bit of a support character as a Colonist Doctor. He has a pistol, but I rarely use it. I feel like something besides shooting would be a useful way to spend my character's action.

To speak to the original question, I'd look at taking Stim Application from the Doctor tree. When you max it out you can pop up a characteristic for only 1 strain. Running around to all the party members in a fight to bump their combat skills will keep you busy.

Field Commander from Mercenary Soldier, Squadron Leader, and Tactician is pretty cool too. It lets you grand extra maneuvers or actions through a leadership check.

Otherwise, as mentioned already in this thread, I'd look at Politico (or AoR Agitator and Ambassador) for Inspiring Rhetoric and Scathing Tirade. I think that Doctor + Politico + Unmatched Expertise is a very powerful combination for role playing. There is a lot of fun talking stuff you can do.

Overall, I think Politico is an amazing tree for a talking character. Inspiring Rhetoric and Scathing Tirade are both great abilities to have access to. The blue and black die from the Improved versions of these talents last for a number of rounds equal to your skill rank. Which means you can do Inspiring Rhetoric at the start of the fight and not worry about it for 5 rounds, if you have maxed out skill ranks. Politico also gives you Well Rounded, so if you wanted to get good at using that pistol, or some other skill such as brawl for your Doctor's Pressure Point, you can. Having access to Dodge makes you that much harder to hit when you are attacked. (My character picked up a Gaffi stick and re-fluffed it as a walking cane. He never attacked with it, but using it for the melee defence was helpful since Scathing Tirade brings you close to the enemy.)

Politico and Doctor together means that you can be extremely useful to a party and never touch a weapon again. You can even talk your way out of an arrest and let your fellow party members fend for themselves. "Sorry Mr. Stormtrooper, sir. I don't know who these gun toting thugs are. I'm just a simple doctor with a medical kit. You can search me, I'm not armed." The only "problem" between taking these two careers is that it gets very XP expensive because you'll have a lot of skills to buy up in addition to the talents. Which isn't really a problem, it's more of a growth oppertunity.

Inspiring Rhetoric allows you to make an Average Leadership check. For each success, you choose an ally at short range and they recover one strain. In addition, you can spend 1 advantage to have one of those allies recover a second point of strain. So 3 success and 2 advantage means 2 allies can recover 2 strain and one can recover 1.

Extra maneuver goodness! "Come on, you CAN DO IT!"

I am imagining a whizened old man berating his troops to victory.

''You call that an advance? Why back in mah day we had to beat off thugs twice as mean as these guys, uphill both ways!"