HI All,

Sorry if this has already been brought up but i was unable to find a topic on this. Our party has a bit of a rules problem that unfortunately is a bit of a complication as it would drastically affect how well a player could fight. The question is if you take a lightsaber forum what skill governs the growth of the light saber skill.

The exact wording of the skill in question is:

Ataru Technique: "When making a check using the lightsaber skill, the character may use agility instead of brawn"

from how I read this it means that whenever you would role a light saber attack (brawn) you can instead replace the brawn with agility and use its higher value (going to assume you would not bother with this if brawn is higher).

Therefore, if your brawn is 2 and your agility is 4 and your lightsaber skill is 2 then by using this ability you would role 2 yellow and 2 green.

Up to this point everyone agrees on this. Now comes the main issue: If you have "ataru technique" can you increase your lightsaber skill to 3 as your agility is 4 even though your brawn is still 2.

From one side the argument is that since all the ability does is let you use agility when making a check the answer is no. The reason being that brawn still governs the skill. All the talent does is let you use something else during the check.

On the other side of the argument is that what is stated above is false because that would mean regardless of what forum you took you would still need to dump points into brawn to become "skilled" at lightsaber combat. The entire point of the forums is that it lets you become good at combat without having to invest heavily in the melee focused brawn stat. The person fully admits that going full brawn will still lead you to a much better combat character because of encumbrance and how that works but that is just a side note.

To further complicate the question there is the following passage:

"Although the Lightsaber skill is linked to the Brawn characteristic, many characters may have access to talents that can link the skill to a different characteristic instead, representing unique forms and fighting styles. The Lightsaber skill governs melee attacks made with lightsabers as well as the derivative weapons such as lightsaber pikes, shotos, and training sabers"

The above passage implies such talents exists but it is not clear what linked means in this case or how it functions. It also seems to defer to the talents which stated above does not actually say anything about it replacing as the governing characteristic.

Thoughts?

Thanks,

Stephen

edit: grammar

ok i feel stupid now. Thanks.

Edited March 22, 2015 by randre

Well, the value of any characteristic does not stop you from increasing any skill using it beyond that value (i.e. you can have a cunning of 2, with a deception skill of 4). So you can increase your lightsaber skill to 5 with a brawn of 1 if you so please (without any talents to change what characteristic you use this would be a dice pool of 4 greens and 1 yellow). Now say you have an agility of 4 with the lightsaber skill of 5 and if you have a talent like Ataru Technique, you would then build the dice pool using your lightsaber talent of 5 and 4 from agility (instead of brawn) to be 1 green and 4 yellows.

You always take the larger of the characteristic or talent for the number of dice (greens) and the smaller of the two to upgrade those dice (green to yellow). There are other talents that allow you to use a different characteristic with a skill under certain circumstances (usually a once/session thing), so that would work the same way.

Edited March 22, 2015 by agentc13