You just described the bottom talent in Armorer.
You can commit Force die to give your armor the Cortosis quality at the cost of some strain each round.
This applies to ALL of your soak, Brawn + Armor.
Armorer is an amazing Specialization, everything in the tree is useful. That's the only drawback, your friends will be picking and choosing and you'll still be in your first tree while they might be starting a third.
Edited by VulfI haven't bought all the supplements yet, but that's definitely an improvement over Force Protection, which is a joke. If they ever do a revision of the core books they could change Force Protection to something like "Commit FD FD to give all soak you gain from your Brawn the cortosis quality". That would actually be handy in a lightsaber fight.
(This forum should really have emoticons for the various dice)
Force Protection is especially bad when you compare it to committing dice to increase Brawn through Enhance. That gives you everything that Force Protection does and more.
You just described the bottom talent in Armorer.
Well, I guess my idea wasn't all that bad then, I just don't own that supplement so I had no idea they already did this. Armorer seems like a pretty solid fix of Protector.
Edited by AetrionMy edit to Force Protection is that you can commit any number of Force dice, and you gain soak equal to ranks for each die.
One rank is still "meh," but you can at least get more than +1 soak if you need it. And then 2 ranks is actually competitive with Enhancing Brawn: you don't add to your Brawn, but you get double the soak increase, it's not capped once your Brawn hits 6,and it's a maneuver.
My edit to Force Protection is that you can commit any number of Force dice, and you gain soak equal to ranks for each die.
One rank is still "meh," but you can at least get more than +1 soak if you need it. And then 2 ranks is actually competitive with Enhancing Brawn: you don't add to your Brawn, but you get double the soak increase, it's not capped once your Brawn hits 6,and it's a maneuver.
The issue is there are only 2 ranks of Force Protection currently in any of the specialisation trees. It might appear in other source books, but for now it's probably better to use Enhance.
I will agree that the activation as a maneuver is very handy and it does allow you to get to the bottom of the tree quicker instead of spending XP in the force powers, slowing talent progression.