Folks,

So, in our Thursday night SWRPG game at the FLGS, our GM is starting over with an F&D campaign. And we’ve all got characters that are generated using the “Knight Level” rules, e.g., +150xp after initial character creation.

This past game, we had the first scenario where a new PC came in, and he had the Move power. He found a way to get FR2 plus most of the Strength upgrades and the Hurl upgrade, but he didn’t get any of the Magnitude upgrades. At least, not yet.

In the first scene in question, we came upon a room where three large stones were set around a central raised area, and between the images carved on the walls, the GM description, and some good Knowledge (Lore) rolls, etc… we came to the conclusion that we were seeing some of the Muntuur Stones .

We were then “reminded” of the legend of the Muntuur Stones, and how Jedi Master Ferlen Snee was the only one to have ever lifted all seven of them. If you read the page linked above, you may note that Master Yoda was only ever able to move five of the stones in question ¹ .

So, our new friend proceeded to roll and got four white force pips, and easily lifted one of the stones there. A good achievement for a Padawan, according to the legend.

But then we realized that if he had only spent a few more XP on getting the four Magnitude upgrades, he would have been able to easily lift nine Muntuur stones with this many force pips — one force pip to activate the power, one force pip to activate all his strength upgrades (which could take him up to Sil 4), one force pip to activate his four magnitude upgrades (to get five stones), plus a fourth force pip to again activate all four of his magnitude upgrades (and add four more stones to the list).

Everyone at the table, including the player who had rolled four white force pips, agreed that this situation was way OP.

The next scene in question was when we were finally facing the BBEG and his lieutenant. The move-using PC had been imprisoned by them after they lied to him about the reason for wanting to hire him to come do some work for them. So, when it came time for our group to face them down, he walked up to them, and used Move+Hurl to throw one of them into the other. Thus immediately causing Sil*10+successes damage to them. If they had not had a decent level of Soak, that probably would have caused them to exceed their WT immediately, and ended the encounter right then and there.

You can argue about whether or not he should have been allowed to get within range of them. You can argue about how much conflict that he should have taken in doing that kind of action, before they had actually attacked us.

But nearly killing the BBEG and his lieutenant in one shot, by knocking them together? If he had taken one of the larger Muntuu stones that was present in that room, he could conceivably have done Sil 3 or Sil 4 level of damage to each of them, and completely and totally squished them.

I am no longer convinced that I know what the right solution is to this problem with the Move power.

However, now that we have seen it in action, all of the people at that table are now equally convinced that this power is way, way OP.

Unless/until FFG fixes this problem, our only hope is that we can find a way to restrain our uses of this power, so that we don’t just make the game into a cartoon version of squish-a-mole.

¹ — Note that the Muntuur Stones are apparently considered to be Canon, and appear in the book “ The Jedi Path: A Manual for Students of the Force ”.

Quick note on Jedi Path, I'm pretty sure it's not actually current canon. I can't find a more recent saying on it post-Legends split announcement, but for the Imperial Handbook, (which is the same type of book, same author, same publisher), it was confirmed Legends - so I'd imagine that Jedi Path, Book of the Sith, and Bounty Hunter Code, are all also Legends. Original answer on Facebook ; screenshot .

For the Muntuur stones part: It does seem possible that most any force-sensitive would be able to pretty easily do it by RAW. And really, barring changes to XP cost or knocking out upgrades, as long as you've bought out most of the tree, you're going to be able to do it with the 4 force points (or slightly more force points to compensate for less bought upgrades). I would say throw in a Discipline check onto it to highlight the extreme difficulty in lifting them, but that runs into consistency issues where a player could just as well go outside and per RAW, be able to lift the same number of spaceships which are likely heavier, and wouldn't have to deal with Discipline checks. I suppose it would be viable though if the stones had a specific mystical property attached to them I would say up the silhouette to account for the stones maybe being heavier than their size allows; but really that's just asking for 1-2 extra Force Points to reactive the Strength upgrades. In defense of the rules, I could say that similar to what's apparently said about the stones is that only somebody with a mastery of telekinesis can lift them all; and to be able to do that in the game, you've got to have a lot of force points, or most of the upgrades; which would definitely constitute being a master of telekinesis.

I would suggest higher XP costs for the upgrades, but really, Move is fairly expensive as is to be a "master" compared to other Force Rating 1 powers. 150xp to buy the base power and all upgrades, 105xp to grab everything that isn't the "hurl" control upgrade and below it. Compared to 110xp for all of Influence and 95xp for all of Enhance.

Might be best just to leave the Muntuur Stones as a purely narrative thing. Just glance at the player's force rating and how far into Move they are and really just sort of estimate their Move capability compared to Yoda and such.

For the fight: Did you give an opposed check? I know the book suggests doing them automatically for any Nemesis, but a right-hand man would definitely constitute opposed checks in my book as well. Make sure to apply appropriate modifiers like Adversary, range, etc.?

In terms of damage, what would amount to 10 damage + successes before soak is only barely more than if a player shot at them with a Blaster Rifle/Carbine; obviously it does damage to both characters at once and all, but it still isn't a huge amount. Though yes, once you get to the bigger, Sil. 2+ objects, things definitely get more wonky. All I can say for bigger objects is that tossing them in tighter locations can be difficult if not downright impossible and freely using force powers in front of enemies that live to tell the tale, civilians, or security cameras, should probably cause more trouble for the player than it saved them.

As cool as Path of the Jedi is, the book's probably in the Legends category until the new canon makes reference to some or all of the material within.

As for Move being "overpowered as written"? Like a great many things, that's going to depend greatly upon one's point of view.

If you've got a PC that's sunk a lot of XP into the power, buying all four Strength Upgrades, at least two Range Upgrades, at least one Magnitude Upgrade, and all the Control Upgrades (110 XP) as well as gotten their Force Rating to 3 (extremely expensive unless you took Seer or Sage as your initial specialization, and even those are costly in terms of getting both Force Rating talents), then yes it's a very potent ability. But you're also talking a PC that has sunk a few hundred XP into getting there, with no accounting for additional skill ranks (Discipline for hurling the bigger objects, with the difficulty based upon the Silhouette of the object thrown) or even raising characteristics beyond the starting minimum (assuming the player spends all their starting XP on Move and reaching at least one Force Rating talent).

Meanwhile, the other PCs have spent the same amount of XP on raising skills and diversifying what powers and talents they have access to. I've got a Gand Seeker/Hunter with a heavy blaster rifle that's absolute murder thanks to Force Rating 2 and the Instinctive Shot talent that lets him roll his Force dice when making a Ranged (Heavy) check; he's got a pretty good chance at triggering auto-fire that way on top of his pretty solid ranks in Ranged (Heavy) and his Agility. And with Foresee, he's also got a really good chance at getting in the first shot while also enjoying a significant boost to his defenses in that first round. And better still, there's nothing about the Gand doing that sort of thing that would make observers think he was any sort of Force user, only that he's a really amazing shot.

To quote a line from GM Chris in regards to Saga Edition and how they balanced both droids and Force users: " They use the fluff to help balance the crunch ." Droids had a number of edges over organics in Saga Edition, but that was balanced by the fact that a droid was property and didn't have any legal rights; an NPC could walk up and blast the droid without any legal repercussion, and authorities that caught a droid doing something illegal could simply vape the droid and call it day. Force users were much the same, particularly in the Dark Times/Rebellion Era where being outed as a Force user bordered on being a death sentence due to the increased Imperial attention it drew, to say nothing of how the common folk tended to suddenly turn very unhelpful when they realized the guy they'd been helping was one of those "treacherous Jedi that made things so bad that the Empire had to take over!" (amazing how far-reaching Imperial propaganda can be, especially as one gets closer to the Core Worlds). There might be the occasional enlightened individual like Bail Organa or Mon Mothma that knows the Jedi weren't at fault for the Clone Wars or the corruption in the Senate, but to the average Imperial citizen, being a Jedi (or even a blatant Force user) is tantamount to a guy walking around with an armored vest and an M-16 strapped to his back; you see someone like that, you call the authorities because everything you've been told by the respected (Imperial) authority figures says that these guys are dangerous. Consider that for Americans, while our politicians get routinely mocked, their words (right or wrong) carry a lot of weight, especially those of the President of the United States. If the President says that a group of people that adhere to an alternate belief structure are dangerous to the common good and should be reported to the authorities due to having a history that justifies the level of concern, a lot of Americans are going to side with that statement even if they otherwise oppose the viewpoints of the guy currently holding that office.

Personally, I've played Force users that had the ability to use Move as an attack, but I never went whole-hog with it (stopped at the second Strength Upgrade, only had one Range Upgrade, no Magnitude Upgrades, and the first two Control Upgrades to hurl objects and pull them out of hands and secured mountings) and it was not my character's "go-to" attack option; if anything it was a means of last resort since I only had Force Rating 2 and I'd need to drop my Sense power (which was my primary defensive trait) in order to have a reliable chance of pulling the power off. So from that perspective, Move isn't over-powered at all.

Frankly, if you're really so terrified of a player in your group abusing Move, then simply talk with the guy and see what his intents are. The folks I routinely game with are pretty sensible folk, and if I've got a concern, they're willing to listen to what I have to say since I'm the GM; after all, if I get sick of the campaign and decide to deep-six it because a couple of players are twisting the rules to ruin everybody else's fun, then they lose as well since they don't get to play those characters anymore.

Frankly, if you're really so terrified of a player in your group abusing Move, then simply talk with the guy and see what his intents are.

The player in question agrees that the power as written is greatly OP, and he will try to rein things in as much as he can. But he’s also going to need the help of the GM and all the other players to help keep things sane.

We just wish that the game wasn’t so “broken” in this area, so that we didn’t all have to work so hard to rein in the heinous kinds of things that can so easily be done with this power, if you have spent the XP to get the appropriate upgrades.

The folks I routinely game with are pretty sensible folk, and if I've got a concern, they're willing to listen to what I have to say since I'm the GM; after all, if I get sick of the campaign and decide to deep-six it because a couple of players are twisting the rules to ruin everybody else's fun, then they lose as well since they don't get to play those characters anymore.

This is an issue where everyone at the table, the player in question and everyone else alike, all have the same visceral reaction — “Ugh, that is hugely OP!”

No other power in the system is so OP. Bind, Unleash, and Harm are the obvious ones that a darksider would use to try to kill or hurt people, but you have to crank the FR up quite a bit to get to really serious damage, and by then you would be operating at the level of the Emperor or Darth Vader, and maybe you should be able to actually do all those things.

But with Move, because it costs so relatively few pips to active all your available strength upgrades plus all your available magnitude upgrades plus all your available range upgrades, even low level characters can do massive amounts of damage. And IMO, that shouldn’t be possible according to RAW.

For the fight: Did you give an opposed check? I know the book suggests doing them automatically for any Nemesis, but a right-hand man would definitely constitute opposed checks in my book as well. Make sure to apply appropriate modifiers like Adversary, range, etc.?

We’re all just FR1 characters, except for the Sage who is FR2, and has the Move power. So these guys are going to be Rivals and not Nemesis level, and they’re almost certainly not going to have any ranks of Adversary.

When the player described casually walking up to these guys and then slamming them together once he got in range, the GM was sufficiently aghast at the result that he didn’t even think to apply a Discipline check. In retrospect, the player was role-playing the character the way that the character had been written, but no one was ready for that.

In terms of damage, what would amount to 10 damage + successes before soak is only barely more than if a player shot at them with a Blaster Rifle/Carbine; obviously it does damage to both characters at once and all, but it still isn't a huge amount.

True enough, not a “huge” amount. But almost enough to kill them on the spot.

None of the rest of us had weapons that could do much more than about half that damage, so these guys didn’t have much in the way of Soak — they had some Soak, but not much. And that amount of Soak was more calibrated towards what our other weapons could do, and not the Sil*10+successes damage that the Sage could do if he used Move to smash the two bad guys into each other.

Though yes, once you get to the bigger, Sil. 2+ objects, things definitely get more wonky. All I can say for bigger objects is that tossing them in tighter locations can be difficult if not downright impossible and freely using force powers in front of enemies that live to tell the tale, civilians, or security cameras, should probably cause more trouble for the player than it saved them.

This may come back to bite us. We’ll have to see.

To be honest, I almost hope that it does. There needs to be appropriate levels of consequences for doing certain kinds of actions, and I don’t get the feeling that we have yet hit that level with regards to this event.

Again, I quote GM Chris with "this game uses the fluff to balance out the crunch."

If you're playing in the Dark Times or Rebellion Era (the time frames these games are generally set), then there should be consequences for using a Force power that is as blatant in its effects as Move. Unless your PCs are taking the time to ensure that every enemy they face is well and truly dead (remember that the GM has final say on whether a minion or rival that's pushed past their wound threshold is actually dead), then there's a very good chance that your Sage has left survivors. Survivors that are going to inform their Imperial superiors that they encountered a powerful Force user. Superiors that will very quickly relay that information to the Imperial Inquisitorius, much as Agent Kallus did at the end of Spark of Rebellion after Kanan outed himself as a Jedi.

And if they're only facing various criminal scum, again there's going to be survivors (unless your group is incredibly ruthless at which point they should be rolling in Conflict for murdering a helpless individual) and those survivors are going to talk, be it to their buddies, to the guy that hired them demanding an explanation, or even while drowning their sorrows in a cantina. Word is going to spread, and a smart crime lord might very well make an anonymous tip to the local Imperial authorities about these troublesome do-gooders.

In short, if you're not going to employ the fluff of the setting to give some teeth to the idea that outing yourself as a Force user to a large group of people is a bad idea, then you're going to get characters with any of the more obvious Force powers (Bind, Unleash, Harm, and Move, even Enhance with the Force Leap upgrades) that are using their powers without restraint, at which point you're not really playing Star Wars and are really playing a superhero game in a sci-fi setting.

If you're playing in the Dark Times or Rebellion Era (the time frames these games are generally set), then there should be consequences for using a Force power that is as blatant in its effects as Move.

We’re playing just a few months after the events of RotJ. Mon Mothma and Princess Leia are working hard to try to restore the Republic (or the New Republic, or whatever it will be called), but Luke is already showing some interest in trying to rebuild the Jedi order, and we are working with another Jedi master (who managed to survive the purge) to help him do that.

There are still major pockets of the Empire that have not yet fallen, with various Moffs deciding that they don’t care that the Emperor is dead. Hopefully, we won’t be facing any of them for a long time.

Unless your PCs are taking the time to ensure that every enemy they face is well and truly dead (remember that the GM has final say on whether a minion or rival that's pushed past their wound threshold is actually dead), then there's a very good chance that your Sage has left survivors.

Oh, yes — the BBEG and his main lieutenant survived. As Elomin, they and their Elom slaves have departed. And now, one of our tasks will be to go after them to try to free the Elom who have been illegally re-enslaved.

In short, if you're not going to employ the fluff of the setting to give some teeth to the idea that outing yourself as a Force user to a large group of people is a bad idea, then you're going to get characters with any of the more obvious Force powers (Bind, Unleash, Harm, and Move, even Enhance with the Force Leap upgrades) that are using their powers without restraint, at which point you're not really playing Star Wars and are really playing a superhero game in a sci-fi setting.

That’s definitely the sort of thing that our characters would want to avoid, and both the GM and all the players have said that they want to avoid.

But in the heat of the battle, sometimes the best laid plans….

That’s why I would like to see the RAW for these powers modified to at least make it a little more difficult to abuse Move so badly.

Unless/until FFG fixes this problem, our only hope is that we can find a way to restrain our uses of this power, so that we don’t just make the game into a cartoon version of squish-a-mole.

I don't think FFG will fix it, most people like it as is and it does allow more EU-friendly stuff.

For those who prefer something more canon-friendly, here's a first draft:

http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/134430-force-move-canon-edition/

Considering it's only two people out of a fairly sizable community that are actively complaining about Move being far more broken than it truly is, don't expect FFG to make any drastic or sweeping changes to a power that's shown up in two prior core rulebooks (EotE and AoR) and only had a minor tweak in the FaD Beta. There have been replies by other posters to show it's not as bad as feared, but those replies have largely been ignored by the two primary complainers. And frankly, your case is flimsy at best, as Daeglan did a pretty through job of poking holes in your assumption, despite you pretty much ignoring what he had to say.

There are a number of ways to make a "completely broken" character in this system that have nothing at all to do the Force, such as Gadgeteers with insane Soak Values wielding heavy blaster rifles that can trigger auto-fire with a single advantage, or Marauders with a vibro-ax that can hew through bad guys like a hot knife through butter and leave the few survivors of the initial attack with a fairly nasty critical injury. Or the high Brawn Doctor with Pressure Point that can obliterate most enemies through strain damage that bypasses the target's Soak Value. And not a single one of these, which has been around since the EotE corebook was published (and some even before during the EotE Beta), have not been addressed or "corrected." There's a whole thread of a couple folks belly-aching about how starship combat simply doesn't work, and the official response could be summed up as "it works exactly the way we want it to." And there had been numerous requests during each of the Betas that had far more forum support that were also not implemented by FFG for much the same reason, that the game was operating the way they meant it to, not how a group of faceless internet posters wanted it to.

So in that vein, I wouldn't suggest holding your breath in the hopes that FFG will "fix" something that they don't see as being broken in the first place, but instead is "operating exactly as designed."

I played a Jedi PC with a lot sunk into the Move power. I agree that it's very powerful. However, there are also a lot of hidden limitations.

1) the Force Dice - They're stacked against you. They will betray you when you need them most. I had FR 3 and 4 before the game ended, and I still had occasion when they came up all Black and I wasted my turn by refusing to flip them. IMO, the Conflict rules have made it much more palatable to flip Black to White, but you're still burning resources (Destiny and Strain) to pull it off.

2) Silhouette - While I had 3 Strength upgrades, it was rare that I could find a Silhouette 3 object that was available to be thrown around, I often struggled to find Sil 2's. The most common is Sil 1, framing your damage at the same level as the average Rifle.

3) Autofire - IMO, if you're causing damage to more than one target, you are doing an Autofire attack. This requires the standard disads that come from Autofire (increase Dif and 2 Advantage per attack). If you use Magnitude you should automatically apply Autofire changes. If your Discipline skill isn't up to snuff, you're going to have trouble making all those upgrades work for you.

4) XP - It's been mentioned before, but it is that important. Someone with Ranged Heavy could go from 0 to 5 skill with 75 XP (100 if it's not a career skill). They could take a Blaster Rifle with Autofire and do similar base damage, and similar number of targets. The Rifle will hit more often, and likely with greater success (i.e. more bonus damage). Even when they miss, they're likely to generate a lot of Advantage and possibly some Triumph to affect the situation. This is far better than coming up all Black and failing to activate Move at all.

TL,DR - Move is awesome... when it works.

For the fight: Did you give an opposed check? I know the book suggests doing them automatically for any Nemesis, but a right-hand man would definitely constitute opposed checks in my book as well. Make sure to apply appropriate modifiers like Adversary, range, etc.?

We’re all just FR1 characters, except for the Sage who is FR2, and has the Move power. So these guys are going to be Rivals and not Nemesis level, and they’re almost certainly not going to have any ranks of Adversary.

I know this post is about a month old, but this part struck me as odd. Yes, the characters may be FR 1 or 2, but that doesn't mean they're "low-level" characters. As I understand it, this character is already 250+ XP over starting XP (350+ total). That makes them equivalent to a PC that has played through about twelve to fifteen adventures. I built Asajj Ventress as she would be by the time of Ep IV with PC rules as a test and ended up spending around 2,500XP to get her where I wanted (which was pretty terrifying) and she had a FR of 3 by the time I had finished. So a FR of 1 doesn't mean someone is weak and 2 definitely doesn't.