New guy seeking character help

By JayDako, in Star Wars: Force and Destiny RPG

Hey folks. New to Force and Destiny. I MIGHT be getting into a game, but not sure as they are hard to find and the GM is sorta absent. I would still like to have a character or two on the backburner. I have only played a Gadgeteer in the EotE beta way back when it came out and it lasted one or two sessions.

What I am thinking is, because I like the idea, is a force user that works with the move/push power. I'm thinking a Twilek mainly for fun, male, Lethan because why not. I THINK the way to go is with a Mystic Seer for a guy that isn't a formal jedi per-se. More about powers than the beat stick, cause why not try something different. I am sitting here, looking at the skills and I am thinking maybe Charm, Perception, and Vigilance for career and Discipline and either vigilance or lore for specializations. I am taking this step by step so I have not even gone into exp spending but I think the rule is to spend as much as possible on attributes as they don't really increase without great expense.

Edit: I was thinking maybe Advisor but I dunno. Willing to listen to any advice.

I'm also considering, if this guy doesn't pan out, someone that works with the force manipulation stuff to make people do what I want, but I dunno. Primary focus is on the move guy for now. Yes I am thinking of personality and background too, but I need to get the mechanics working and planned out so I am not a useless lump or a burden on the group. I only know one other player is a hunter, but, I still want this guy built even if I don't get to play that.

Oh, I do skim roll20 constantly but I never am able to find a newbie friendly FFG Star Wars game really that doesn't end during character creation. Same goes for the 40K rpgs but lets focus on Star Wars.

Edited by JayDako

First off nice concept.

So the biggest conceptual thing to get your head around when new to FaD is that everything is written as if the PC's are NOT Jedi. It is assumed there are no Jedi left and they are a myth, all the training a character has is either self taught or from a non-Jedi force tradition.

So onto your character, with Seer your probably going to end up with more than 1 Force Power, but move is a great place to start. The ranged combat check to attack with move is a Discipline check, so your going to want that to be your main skill. With Twi'Lek the idea of having Move in combat and Misdirect or Influence out of combat is great. in that case you get to utilise the natural Twi'Lek Presence.

What would i do? Brawn 1, Agility 2, Intellect 2, Cunning 3, Willpower 3, Presence 3. that leaves you with at least 40 xp to spend on Move, Talents and Skills. Probably 30xp to get Move, 1 Strength, 1 Range and the Control for attacking. then Uncanny Reactions and Grit. Last 10xp on a second rank in Discipline.

If you want to be a bit more powerful then Bump Willpower up to 4, then take the extra XP option and buy the basic Move power. Until you earn XP your mostly the face of the party, but after a couple of sessions (15xp) you will be effective with that power. In a long game this is the more powerful build, but in a shorter campaign it limits you in the bells and whistles quite a bit.

When throwing a Sil 0 object you only do 5 damage + Success, so it does pay to get a strength upgrade to do more damage, unfortunatly at FR1 your best is going to be 2 pips to spend, so you can choose between throwing more than 1 item, increasing the size of that 1 item or throwing that 1 item further than Short. by the time you have spent at least 150xp on your talents and more on Move then you will have FR3 and you can auto-fire with bigger objects from at least Long quite regularly. but thats a long way off. think first about the relatively cheap FR2 and the big object you can drop on peoples heads!

Interesting but control costs 10 so it is 5 points too many.

Sorry, editing on the go and didn't fix that! so choose between 1 range or 1 strength, then go with the rest.

So what extra xp option? I don't see that.

Oh. ok. When you have to choose the Morality options on FaD p49 your given the choice of any 1 of the following:

  1. Morality 50 with +10xp.
  2. Morality 50 with +2500 credits.
  3. Morality 50 with +5xp and +1000 credits.
  4. Morality 29.
  5. Morality 71.

so i was sugesting taking the first option to get the extra boost to your character.

Then Twi'Leks start with 100xp, so you get a total of 110 to spend on improving the character

Edited by Richardbuxton

Okay if I buy willpower to 4 and basic move, that means no skills at all. Also for the first set, are you sure about grit? I was thinking of going down the middle to beeline it to force rating. Also I am not at the part in the book where it explains what force rating actually does. Also don't know what flipping pips means because I never did it in the beta as a gadgeteer.

A beginning character receives some skill ranks for free, as you had mentioned in your first post, for AoR and EotE each character gets a total of 6 ranks in skills, for FaD its 5, just as you said. i thought the different skills you chose where a good mix, fitting both the social side of the character and the Force User side.

Each Force Rating lets you roll 1 more Force Die when making a Force Power check, such as using Move to throw rocks at an enemy. Since the most dots(pips) on any side of a force dice is 2 you need more than 1 die to be able to do more with the Force. but just keep reading, there is a whole chapter on using the Force, it covers everything better than i can here.

thanks, you are being really helpful. So I don't have to actually pay for the starting skills then? Also I just noticed that Twileks get to start with one free in charm or deception. Any suggestions? I can't decide between diversity and focus.

Also, if silhouette 0 is for items, what happens if I use it to throw a lightsaber at someone? I just can't decide between willpower 4 and basic move or willpower 3 and move plus giving it some strength. Cause at the game start, I am clearly, 100% not able to do anything other than hide in combat which is fine for now.

Edited by JayDako

One thing to keep in mind is this is not a Combat Simulator. so combat encounters make up (in our group anyway) less than half of all encounters.

So i would go with diversity for the skills, choosing the Deception rank is nice since its not a career skill and probably wont get many increases later on, but its handy to have (non career skills can still be used as normal, but gaining ranks in them costs an extra 5 xp each rank, so 10,15,20,25,30 instead of 5,10,15,20,25).

Throwing a Lightsaber is possible with move, but there is a Talent in some of the Specialisations thats much better for it. Generally Move is more for blunt force from nearby objects.

Oh is there a cost to just using move to just have fun with idle things? Like say my character is bored and feels like using move to stack golf balls. Or is there some great cost to using a power?

So Twilek deception. Career skill Charm, perception, and vigilance. Specialization skill Discipline and lore. Don't double up right now and have them at one?

Just to throw a spanner in the works you could build a very similar character with the Consular Sage specialisation, except you get talents that help a lot with the social side of things. in particular the Smooth talker and Natural Negotiator talents. It also puts you in the same Career as Niman Disciple which lets you use willpower for the Lightsaber skill, Handy when thats also what you rely on for the Force.

Oh is there a cost to just using move to just have fun with idle things? Like say my character is bored and feels like using move to stack golf balls. Or is there some great cost to using a power?

So Twilek deception. Career skill Charm, perception, and vigilance. Specialization skill Discipline and lore. Don't double up right now and have them at one?

Doubling up does sabe more XP in the long run, but you do it at the cost of variety. in this case you could double up on vigilance and forget about Knowledge Law, initiative skills are great to have!

With either career getting Niman disciple around 200-300 xp into the character would be a good purchase, since it is the only lightsaber tree with the +1 Force Rating talent. Also the Force Assault Talent is awesome if your heavily invested in Move. But I'm going beyond the scope of character creation here, thats a long way off there.

If you are making an Advisor you probably want Influence more then Move. It improves your I talk to people and stop conflicts from happening abilities pretty drastically. Its especially handy for telling Minions "We are not the Jedi you are looking for"

I guess. Not sure why but I just like the idea of a mystic. Rather than tied to any rules or code, just some guy that sees his powers as just a useful tool.

If you are making an Advisor you probably want Influence more then Move. It improves your I talk to people and stop conflicts from happening abilities pretty drastically. Its especially handy for telling Minions "We are not the Jedi you are looking for"

I'm going for Seer I think. Talking is something I plan to do as a minor but I was really looking into move at it seems fun.

Seer also happens to be an Initiative Monster, something this system has as a unique feature due to the entire initiative system.

It is? I am not seeing that. Also how do you use this to push people?

Edited by JayDako

For Initiative Vigilance is one of the skills, combined with a higher than average Willpower, Uncanny Reactions, Rapid Reaction, and Forewarning. this will give your party a high initiative slot almost guaranteed.

with your characters higher Presence they are good at Cool too, the other initiative skill. Rapid reactions works with cool too, so no matter what you can have 2 success on any initiative check for 2 strain, before even rolling the dice. You may not be good at combat yourself, but that nice high initiative slot will put a grin on all the combat PC's faces.

Move can definitely move people, you just have to activate the strength upgrade to be able to lift Silhouette 1 objects (A Humanoid is Silhouette 1). there are some Narrative dangers to this, mainly that dropping someone to their death is generally seen as excessive use of force, gaining the PC conflict and leading to the dark side. but simply re-locating the NPC's to help you escape is fine. Also the Move power is supposed to represent physicaly moving something, while the Bind power is how you hold someone still and stop them doing anything.

I think I definitely need to invest a lot into move for what I want. Out of curiosity, does moving one silhouette 2 equal multiple silhouette 1 or 0s?

No, if you want to move multiple things you need to activate the "Magnitude" upgrades, if you want to move bigger than Sil 0 you need to activate the "Strength" upgrades and if you need to move something further away you need to activate the "Range" upgrades.

Each time you activate an upgrade when using Move it activates all of that type of upgrade you have put experience into. So if you have 4 strength upgrades then spending a single Force pip on Strength will let you move a Silhouette 4 object. Each type stacks too, so say you activate Strength and Magnitude then you can move multiple objects that are all bigger with only spending 2 additional pips.

keep in mind that you must always spend a single pip just to activate the power in the first place.

Edited by Richardbuxton

Basically, to move larger objects you need to buy upgrades to the Move power. If you buy enough upgrades, you can move very big things for 2 force pips. As a beginning character, you will usually only get one Force pip, so buying a bunch of upgrades won't help you very often. You might try buying several basic powers instead. Some folks have suggested Influence, which is very good, I also highly recommend Sense. It isn't flashy, but I think it might be the best power in the game. If you can feel a person's emotions as you manipulate him, you can figure out what will work best to get what you want. You can also interrogate him by reading his mind as you ask him questions. It's like telling someone not to think about elephants.

"Who are you working for?"
"Lady O-Ren, of course!" Ha! Boss Tanaka trained me in the art of lying!

"Why does Boss Tanaka want to kill me?"
"I don't know what you mean." ****, he's onto me! Don't mention the diamonds!

"If you were looking for diamonds, where would you look?"
"Er... what? Why?" In your droid. CRAP!
"Hey, R5, open up your chassis. Let's see what's in there.

Or spend the XP getting to your first Increase Force Rating talent so Move is more useful. But that is a very 1 trick pony, Influence or Sense would work very well for you as a secondary power.

Move is a bad idea its not very subtle and is pretty much a guaranteed conflict generator.

The first three powers should be Enhance Sense and Influence.

Enhance lets you add your force dice to athletics, coordination and most importantly resilience checks. 3 very important combat and non combat skills you need and will not be good at.

Sense lets you detect life forms, read surface thoughts and has some good combat defensive/offensive abilities.

Influence lets you control emotions, jedi mind trick and most importantly add your force rating to all your social skills. (Believe me this is pretty much required for characters designed to be a face)

Move requires a 2 or better force rating to work 3 or 4 to actually be useful in combat on a regular basis. It also has a very hefty xp cost to that level beyond force rating.

Yes its a classic jedi power, yes it can be good in combat, but thats a long road with lots of xp and really diverts you from what you need to be able to do.

If you want to be a move wielding Force Wizard you will want to go Sage to Niman to Seer.

Move requires willpower and discipline you also get more out of Sage and Niman for that pathway.