The new Marvel Star Wars comics are indeed considered canon.

And are pretty awesome, for the most part.

I read just past "Vader Down"...extremely boring stuff, but then I've never really been interested in the "Other Adventures of Luke, Han, and Leia".

And canon or no...it's debatable whether Vader...one of the icons of Force power...was lifting the AT-AT, or preventing himself from being crushed (Protect?)...but a comparative noob in the game could have easily lifted it, and even thrown it with relative ease. I not interested in a game where noob > Darth Vader.

Vader down wasn't my favorite either, but check out Lando and Star Wars, they're both good reads. The Vader comic is pretty good for the most part as well, although but don't expect Vader to be the protagonist of the title, as Dr. Aphra occupies that role for most of the run.

As far as the move power is concerned, it's overpowered for sure. Took too much influence from the force unleashed which was absolutely ridiculous as far as force telekinesis is concerned. It's hard to blame ffg though as George Lucas touted it as canon at the time. FFG probably should've taken note that the explanation was that the balance was tilted towards the dark side during that period, allowing for the ridiculous feats of Starkiller and his move power. Under force unleashed canon a lightsider shouldn't be able to pull a Star Destroyer from orbit. I'm glad it's no longer considered canon, but that wasn't the case when they developed move for edge.

The new Marvel Star Wars comics are indeed considered canon.

And are pretty awesome, for the most part.

I read just past "Vader Down"...extremely boring stuff, but then I've never really been interested in the "Other Adventures of Luke, Han, and Leia".

And canon or no...it's debatable whether Vader...one of the icons of Force power...was lifting the AT-AT, or preventing himself from being crushed (Protect?)...but a comparative noob in the game could have easily lifted it, and even thrown it with relative ease. I not interested in a game where noob > Darth Vader.

Fair enough, but Luke was a noob and > Vader. He kinda got stunted in the force when he got hacked to bits and burned with lava.

Tbh, the Darth Vader comic was kind of the worst of the new canon comics to come out. The artwork was straight up traced images from the films and the plotline was boring at best. Anyway...

Fine, then disallow it in your game. But there's your cannon proof (he's clearly lifting it enough to get at least 3 out of the four feet off the ground), so I'm fine with it as-is in RAW.

So how hard would it be to use Move to grab ahold of a blast door (Silhouette 3, maybe 4) and rip it out of its secure mountings? If it's not all that hard we have to wonder why Q-GJ didn't try that instead of stirring it with a lightsaber.

For that matter, it should have been easy for Anakin to use Move to force Zam's (Silhouette 2) airspeeder to the ground (gently, since he was riding on it).

Because they are changing the power of the force after the fact. It's your typical card game power creep, except it's in the canon media.

Actually, I'd say the Autofire weapon quality, especially when combined with the Jury-Rigged talent and used at short range would nab the top spot for worst written rule in the game, with vehicle encumbrance being a very close second. Most Autofire weapons have a base damage of 10 or more, then apply Jury-Rigged to reduce the advantage cost to 1 per extra shot, and you've got a PC that's a bonafide murder machine. And at least one dev (Andy Fischer) said this combo was perfectly rules legal to the point of (jokingly) encouraging it. Now your PC can mow down minion groups with ease, and BBEGs can be mowed down almost as quickly.

The Auto-fire rules are kind of bad, they would be a lot better if you had to spend successes instead of advantages to get additional hits, because that way auto firing wouldn't allow you to generate high damage hits at the same time as a high volume of hits. You'd just do base damage if you use all your successes to trigger additional hits, so there would be a tradeoff where high soak targets aren't easily mowed down with autofire.

Cover is also just not effective enough. One measly defense that doesn't even stack with anything doesn't in any way create the kind of tactical interplay between suppressing fire and maneuvering at is at the core of all modern firefights. Maybe there should literally just be a rule that says if you are in cover you cannot be the target of autofire. That way you'd actually see people coordinate covered approaches, carefully maneuvering on heavy weapons, and autofire would be a lot more realistic in the sense that, yes, it's insanely devastating against people who are out in the open, but the primary thing it does once your opponents have taken cover is keep them in cover.

Weapons that are extremely lethal, like automatic weapons or disruptors with huge crit bonuses just don't have a very good counterplay in this game outside of just cheesing them before they cheese you. You need a ton of ranks of Side-step or Dodge to even be able to make the roll difficult, and those ranks are very hard to come by.

That said, at least the rules on those weapons are perfectly clear. The issue is lack of good counterplays, not lack of clarity what you can do against it.

Actually, I'd say the Autofire weapon quality, especially when combined with the Jury-Rigged talent and used at short range would nab the top spot for worst written rule in the game, with vehicle encumbrance being a very close second. Most Autofire weapons have a base damage of 10 or more, then apply Jury-Rigged to reduce the advantage cost to 1 per extra shot, and you've got a PC that's a bonafide murder machine. And at least one dev (Andy Fischer) said this combo was perfectly rules legal to the point of (jokingly) encouraging it. Now your PC can mow down minion groups with ease, and BBEGs can be mowed down almost as quickly.

The Auto-fire rules are kind of bad, they would be a lot better if you had to spend successes instead of advantages to get additional hits, because that way auto firing wouldn't allow you to generate high damage hits at the same time as a high volume of hits. You'd just do base damage if you use all your successes to trigger additional hits, so there would be a tradeoff where high soak targets aren't easily mowed down with autofire.

The dice themselves give this tradeoff. Faces that produce Successes don't tend to produce Advantages (or at least not two of them) and vice versa. The beauty of an Auto-fire weapon is that both types of results are effectively damage adders.

The dice themselves give this tradeoff. Faces that produce Successes don't tend to produce Advantages (or at least not two of them) and vice versa. The beauty of an Auto-fire weapon is that both types of results are effectively damage adders.

The important bit in a tradeoff is trade. Sure, if you roll mostly successes you won't roll mostly advantages at the same time and vice versa, but that's just a random result that informs what you can do that round, not intentionally trading damage for more hits, or hits for more damage.

There is a lot of weirdness with the way combat rules work, in the regard that low crit weapons are super good at shredding minions and autofire weapons are super good at killing nemesises, and the game would simply be more interesting if there was a more vital distinction between weapons that are great at killing lots of little things and weapons that are great at killing single big things.

The blast rules are a heck of a lot more sensible than the autofire rules in that regard, but blast seems kind of pointless purely because the way the rules are written makes it really easy to kill lots of little enemies with single big hits even if those hits don't explode.

How about the whole dual weapon fighting means you either hit with both weapons or with neither?

The blast rules are a heck of a lot more sensible than the autofire rules in that regard, but blast seems kind of pointless purely because the way the rules are written makes it really easy to kill lots of little enemies with single big hits even if those hits don't explode.

Only if you're talking about grouped minions. Otherwise, a non-Autofire, non-Blast attack is pretty much limited to dropping a single opponent per turn.

Only if you're talking about grouped minions. Otherwise, a non-Autofire, non-Blast attack is pretty much limited to dropping a single opponent per turn.

Yea, same goes for low crit weapons, they only produce multi kills against minion groups. Still, the whole point of minion groups is to make mass enemies manageable for the DM, but in this system AoE attacks aren't uniquely more capable of destroying swarms of enemies than any other weapon unless you literally have so many enemies in play that multiple minion groups end up at short range from each other.

Only if you're talking about grouped minions. Otherwise, a non-Autofire, non-Blast attack is pretty much limited to dropping a single opponent per turn.

Yea, same goes for low crit weapons, they only produce multi kills against minion groups. Still, the whole point of minion groups is to make mass enemies manageable for the DM, but in this system AoE attacks aren't uniquely more capable of destroying swarms of enemies than any other weapon unless you literally have so many enemies in play that multiple minion groups end up at short range from each other.

Critical Injuries and Minions

Question asked by Braendig :

When hitting a minion group with enough advantages to activate a critical on a weapon twice, should the player choose to activate both critical effects (the initial critical and the second for +10 to the critical result), how many minions should be eliminated from the group?

Answered by Sam Stewart :

Since you can only inflict one critical per hit (the “second” that you mention is just enhancing the ability of the original critical, and is not actually a second critical hit in its own right), activating a critical multiple times on a weapon that only inflicts a single hit would not eliminate any additional minions from the group.

So how hard would it be to use Move to grab ahold of a blast door (Silhouette 3, maybe 4) and rip it out of its secure mountings? If it's not all that hard we have to wonder why Q-GJ didn't try that instead of stirring it with a lightsaber.

Perhaps Qui-Gon simply hadn't invested all that much in the Move power?

Although for ripping out a blast door, I wouldn't say it's a case of needing to activate Strength Upgrades (at most 2 for the size of the door) as the GM asking for a Discipline check with the difficulty set at Formidable with upgrades. Qui-Gon's player figured that it'd generally be easier to just literally slice the lock as his Discipline dice pool wasn't all that hot. The doors themselves probably weren't vehicle scale (they'd only need to hold off personal scale weapons such as blasters) and Qui-Gon had nearly destroyed even the blast doors' locking mechanism by the time the destroyer droids rolled in.

Of course, the real life answer is the script writers and director thought it would fit the "Godzilla on a rampage" vibe a lot better if Qui-Gon was to gradually slice his way through the door and this make the Neimodians even more afraid of what a Jedi could do.

Critical Injuries and Minions

Question asked by Braendig :

When hitting a minion group with enough advantages to activate a critical on a weapon twice, should the player choose to activate both critical effects (the initial critical and the second for +10 to the critical result), how many minions should be eliminated from the group?

Answered by Sam Stewart :

Since you can only inflict one critical per hit (the “second” that you mention is just enhancing the ability of the original critical, and is not actually a second critical hit in its own right), activating a critical multiple times on a weapon that only inflicts a single hit would not eliminate any additional minions from the group.

Oh, ****, I need to bring this to the attention of our group. These question and answer threads are so big I must have overlooked this one.

Critical Injuries and Minions

Question asked by Braendig :

When hitting a minion group with enough advantages to activate a critical on a weapon twice, should the player choose to activate both critical effects (the initial critical and the second for +10 to the critical result), how many minions should be eliminated from the group?

Answered by Sam Stewart :

Since you can only inflict one critical per hit (the “second” that you mention is just enhancing the ability of the original critical, and is not actually a second critical hit in its own right), activating a critical multiple times on a weapon that only inflicts a single hit would not eliminate any additional minions from the group.

Oh, ****, I need to bring this to the attention of our group. These question and answer threads are so big I must have overlooked this one.

The actual RAW is on pg 165 F&D

The actual RAW is on pg 165 F&D

Well, if someone had to write in for clarification it's not all that clear. I was just introduced to the game like "crits kill a minion immediately, if you have advantages left over you can trigger a crit on another minion." I never even questioned this. The rules also only say it's one crit per target, so how you read that entirely depends on whether you think of a target as a minion group or as a single minion. When it comes to a lot of force powers I tend to treat minion groups as multiple targets rather than a single target, because to me magnitude makes sense as "Affect an entire minion group for +1FP", but seems out of line as "Affect pretty much every single enemy in the scene for +1FP"

Crits are designed to drop Nemesis and vehicles by stacking up to the point where they just die.

Autofire and blast are supposed to wipe out minions.

How ever if you want to see something that makes Move look like a tinker toy take a look at the new Martial Artist talents...

You can now parry light sabers unarmed with a reduction in the strain cost to parry.

Parrying a lightsaber is obviously not accomplished by parrying the blade of it, but by stepping into the attack and blocking the arm. There are also cortosis gauntlets that would make parrying even the blade possible.

I think the big issue with autofire is that it doesn't just kill minions, unless the enemy you're shooting at has huge amounts of soak they will simply run out of HP if they take 5-6 hits in a single go. Also most of the weapons that have autofire are particularly big blasters that are scary even on single hits. Also, the kind of soak ratings you need to withstand autofire would also shut down crit weapons, since they wouldn't be able to deal damage either.

Tramp, it's pointless to argue with these guys, they will just keep insisting that because Move is super broadly written it can do everything, and not understand that making people use Bind is a good idea precisely because Move is one of the worst written components in this system. It is absurdly broad in its uses for how much XP it takes to learn and how ridiculously low its activation costs are, and it's a total joke that if you want to play a Jedi who uses the force to sense things you have to learn 4-5 different powers to get the full range of applications, or if you're a Jedi who influences people's minds you have to learn at least 2-3 powers to be able to do that in every way, but with Move one single power is supposed to cover it all, and that power is far more destructive and versatile than all those other powers where you need to learn multiples are.

Making people who want to be masters of Telekinesis use Bind instead of just letting them dominate the whole game with one cheap, badly written power is just good GMing, screw what you see in the movies.

No, its pointless for Tramp to argue that Bind is Force Push/Pull when the developers have freaking said Move is Force Push/Pull! And don't give me the crap about "that Dev post was years ago, before F&D came out and is thus not valid" because the F&D Beta was out (to say nothing of the F&D Alpha test that took place months before that).

Aetrion, we all get you have misplaced anger about the Move power. Have abuses actually come up in your games? I am talking actual games, not hypothetical situations? I would encourage you to post your finds in this, or another thread for discussion. Honestly (and I say this with sincerity) I'd love to hear your feedback.

No. Just no. Magnus, if you really read the Bind movement upgrade, it specifically says, that it allows the user to immediately move a target one range band closer or farther away. That is a high speed shove or tug which launches the target back or forwards . That is Force Push and Force Pull by every description. The Move hurl Upgrade, by contrast, specifically picks up objects to use as projectiles . That is not what Force Push and Force Pull were ever designed for in any previous source. Any damage inflicted from those powers was incidental to their primary effect of pushing targets back or pulling them forward. Move is the defacto Force Push/Pull for EotE and AoR only because Bind isn't even an option in those two games. IF Bind (with its movment upgrade) had been written for EotE an AoR , then, without question, it is what would have been the defacto Force Push/Pull for those games. With F&D's introduction, of the Bind p ower, with its movement upgrade, it is definitely a better, and more accurate emulation of the Force Push and Force Pull powers.

No. Just no. Magnus, if you really read the Bind movement upgrade, it specifically says, that it allows the user to immediately move a target one range band closer or farther away. That is a high speed shove or tug which launches the target back or forwards . That is Force Push and Force Pull by every description. The Move hurl Upgrade, by contrast, specifically picks up objects to use as projectiles . That is not what Force Push and Force Pull were ever designed for in any previous source. Any damage inflicted from those powers was incidental to their primary effect of pushing targets back or pulling them forward. Move is the defacto Force Push/Pull for EotE and AoR only because Bind isn't even an option in those two games. IF Bind (with its movment upgrade) had been written for EotE an AoR , then, without question, it is what would have been the defacto Force Push/Pull for those games. With F&D's introduction, of the Bind p ower, with its movement upgrade, it is definitely a better, and more accurate emulation of the Force Push and Force Pull powers.

I have read the bind upgrade talent. You know what it says? That you move the target one range band closer or one range band further away. That is it. Nothing else. It does not at any time use the words Force Push or Force Pull. It does not in any way give ANY guidance on the possible damage a target would take if it were to impact an obstacle that blocks movement along the way. It is completely silent on the issue. In fact, it is questionable if you even can use the bind upgrade to move the target into an obstacle, as that would mean you are not moving them to a closer/further range band relative to the user.

We do have a developer clearly stating that Force Push and Force Pull are abstractly part of the move tree, and the answer came out during the Beta test of F&D (at least as far as I can tell; it was certainly during the Alpha Playtest). Neither the Move power nor the Bind power were changed (other than some minor clarification wording) prior to the official release of F&D in 2015. If the intent of the developers was to move some of the abilities of the Move tree into the Bind tree they had the perfect opportunity and they chose not to.

I get there is a vocal population on these boards that would like to see the Move power nerfed, and those views are certainly valid, as Move can be abusive (just as other powerful abilities can get abusive). There is also a vocal population that says the Move tree is but one more arrow in the quiver of powerful abilities the players can and should use, and there is no need to fix it. There are some who say that while the Move Tree may or may not be broken, it simply does not give a good canonical representation of the Move power we see in Movies and TV shows. However, trying to say that you can't use the Move Tree control: Hurl upgrade to Force Push/Force Pull RAW is just plain wrong.

People can be used as projectiles.

The damage is incidental unless you are hurling them up into the air and then stepping back to watch them fall splat on the ground.

In regards to the timing of Sam's answer, bear in mind that none of the three core rulebooks were designed in a vacuum, and as such the developers had at least a basic idea of what Force powers were going to show up where.

That he didn't say "for now, just use Move until something else comes out" is a pretty clear indicator that the answer is indeed to use the Move power, no matter what lingual gymnastics a couple folks try to employ. After all, they've pretty much planned out what species are showing up in which sourcebooks, even if the books themselves only have general titles such as "Consular book" or "Solider book" or "Hutt Space book," so they'd certainly have a solid notion of what kind of Force powers were going to be in the core books (EotE has the stuff you see Luke and Kenobi doing in ANH, AoR is the stuff Luke and Yoda do in ESB, with Move included in both simply because it's such an iconic Force power) long before the material even gets to preliminary playtesting.

Of course, either Aetrion or Tramp Graphics could ask themselves to see if the answer's changed since the release of the FaD core rulebook (Beta or otherwise). But I doubt they will, since they'd be running the risk that they would have to fess up to the notion they've been wrong on the matter the entire time.

In regards to the timing of Sam's answer, bear in mind that none of the three core rulebooks were designed in a vacuum, and as such the developers had at least a basic idea of what Force powers were going to show up where.

That he didn't say "for now, just use Move until something else comes out" is a pretty clear indicator that the answer is indeed to use the Move power, no matter what lingual gymnastics a couple folks try to employ. After all, they've pretty much planned out what species are showing up in which sourcebooks, even if the books themselves only have general titles such as "Consular book" or "Solider book" or "Hutt Space book," so they'd certainly have a solid notion of what kind of Force powers were going to be in the core books (EotE has the stuff you see Luke and Kenobi doing in ANH, AoR is the stuff Luke and Yoda do in ESB, with Move included in both simply because it's such an iconic Force power) long before the material even gets to preliminary playtesting.

Of course, either Aetrion or Tramp Graphics could ask themselves to see if the answer's changed since the release of the FaD core rulebook (Beta or otherwise). But I doubt they will, since they'd be running the risk that they would have to fess up to the notion they've been wrong on the matter the entire time.

Actually, I have already done that. Still waiting on a response.