I was thinking about a few things in this system that can be a bit weird at times.

For example how when ever I make a force sensitive character who's supposed to actually use force powers, a lot of the early game is just spent rushing for force ratings, because you can't reliably roll white pips till you're sitting on 3+ FR, and how that's incredibly different from playing a non-force character, who pretty much pop into existence fully competent, and if you spend your first 60 XP on buying your primary skill to rank 5 you're immediately awesome at it.

At the same time it always kind of bothered me how once you have a high force rating there is no good reason to keep your powers themed in any way. There are very few powers in the game that require any other skills than Discipline to be good, so once you have a high force rating you're simply good at pretty much all force powers.

Because force ratings are so universally useful force sensitive characters also take a huge hit to their overall power when they dabble in non-force classes. Every additional force rating feeds into potentially a dozen different powers, each one of which can give as much utility to a character as a whole additional talent tree.

Another thing that I find a little dumb is how many powers there are that offer substantial rewards for just buying the basic power, or 2-3 boxes in to unlock. Nobody buys Protect/Unleash base power and just lets it sit there because it's great without any further investment, but with something like Seek, hey, even if the GM only tells you if the thing you seek is in front or behind you that eliminates half a galaxy you have to search.

So here is an idea that popped into my head, not necessarily something that's better than the current system in every way, but something that might be an interesting experiment in a private game:

Force rating doesn't exist as an individual stat at all, instead how many force dice you roll is tied to a characteristic that is associated with the force power you're using.

How many force powers you're allowed to have is determined by how many force ratings your character would have according to the base system, so, one for making a force sensitive class, and then one per force rating box you pick up.

The powers would line up with stats something like this:

Battle Meditation - Presence

Bind - Willpower

Enhance - Willpower

Farsight - Cunning

Foresee - Intellect

Heal/Harm - Intellect

Influence - Presence

Misdirect - Cunning

Move - Willpower

Protect/Unleash - Willpower

Seek - Intellect

Sense - Cunning

Suppress - Presence

The point of running a game this way would be that force sensitive characters would start the game without the pressure of needing to chase force ratings, so they can develop more naturally, but at the same time your force ratings are capped at 6 for any power. By gaining force ratings you give yourself additional powers, which means characters will develop much more differently, because you no longer pick up just 30XP worth of some power just so you can throw force dice at a hand full of skills for example. If you pick a power you basically have to think about if you really want to take that power all the way.

You'd basically wind up with a very different kind of game, where people don't start out as being extremely weak force users who gradually get good at everything, but instead you would wind up with a system that behaves more similarly to Edge or Age where people start out with a character who very quickly becomes highly competent at one thing, and then starts developing sideways, picking up additional abilities.

You'd also have a system that mixes better with the other games, because dedications drive force dice increases, rather than force ratings, so dabbling in non-Jedi trees doesn't immediately disqualify you from being a strong force user for your XP level.

Anyways, just a random thought on how the system could work differently to get a very different feel to how characters develop and differ from each other.

Nope. because even Canon has established that the Force, as a whole, is stronger or weaker in some individuals than in others, and that strength can be nurtured. This is what the Force Rating measures. IT establishes a character's overall strength in the Force, how connected he or she is to it.

That's a nonsensical objection, because the idea of Force Rating contradicts the idea that people have an innate connection to the force in the first place. I mean how would they know that Anakin is super strong in the force if the canon universe followed SWRP rules and this six your old kid at best has 1 or 2 force ratings and only a few ranks in enhance and foresee he's not even actively aware of? Do they know how he's going to spend his XP and how much more XP than everyone else he'll earn? Because that's the only thing that governs your potential in the current system.

That simply doesn't make any sense, because by SWRP rules nobody would be able to say "This youngling has huge potential" or "This kid has no aptitude for the force", because the only thing that governs your power in the force is how long you play and what classes you pick. People who keep pets and live alone are simply better at using the force than people who swing lightsabers in this system, because Hermits get force ratings and Strikers don't. That doesn't represent at all how movies treat people's potential force power.

Besides, it's an idea for an alternate advancement system with force powers if someone wanted to play a game where the advancement of force users follows a more similar path to the advancement of non-force characters, if you don't like that idea you just don't play with it.

I think it could be neat to play with. Right now we (<- my group) just limit which powers can be learned (you need to find a teacher, resource, or have it used against you to even learn the basic), and how fast you can advance through them (there must be some evidence of practice or legitimate reason for the increase). I like the way this gives them some theme though. My only worry is that you may end up with super powered characters pretty quickly. It would need some experimentation to see if it stays in balance.

Whilst I agree it takes a while for Force Users to really feel like Force Users, I don't think this is the solution.

First off I take issue with the explanation of only using Light Side Points. The system is specifically designed to allow and encourage the use of Dark Side Points, especially early on. I think that's a great mimic of the lure of the Dark Side on untrained and inexperienced Force Users. If you want to skip that phase of character development then throw everyone 200 xp post character creation.

I also hear what your saying about Force Dice being very flexible, 4 FR is great with any power... but those powers still cost xp, xp that's not progressing toward another Dedication or FR. Different things can be done with the Force, but talents are unique too.

The other way that Force Powers can be more difficult and particularly unique is in the skill checks that GM's ask for when it's opposed. The rules only say the Discipline is the default, not that it's the only skill. So that Seek power could need a Perception check, Influence could require a social, Battle Meditation a Leadership etc. It's not to say a Gm should do that every roll, but it should encourage pc's to be broader than just Force Powers.

Then there is Morality, excessive use of the Force is supposed to be a trait of the Dark Side even if it's not portrayed with consistency in the movies. But a pc who becomes too reliant on the Force should start to earn a little extra Conflict here and there.

42 minutes ago, Aetrion said:

For example how when ever I make a force sensitive character who's supposed to actually use force powers, a lot of the early game is just spent rushing for force ratings, because you can't reliably roll white pips till you're sitting on 3+ FR, and how that's incredibly different from playing a non-force character, who pretty much pop into existence fully competent, and if you spend your first 60 XP on buying your primary skill to rank 5 you're immediately awesome at it.

The system isn't really designed for that. In many ways it's designed around Luke's journey, or maybe Anakin's journey, they end up following the same process. The best use of FR1 is in powers that allow you to Commit or those that enhance your skills. So Enhance, Sense and others like it are how you should start the game. Part of me wished FFG simply made these powers prerequisites for everything else, but probably they wisely decided not to impose any limits, so-as to avoid snowflake-blowback. So technically you can do what you want, but if you don't follow the plan, it's not going to work that well.

Enhance and Sense on their own are plenty potent, and a Force using character who sticks with the script is just as capable as anyone else. Where they fall down is when they try to be a Move-Monkey at the expense of everything else. The system accentuates that it takes *years* to get proficient with the Force. If you want to play TCW Obiwan, you need ~1000XP, you can't play that out of the box. I consider this a feature of the system rather than a bug. If I want to GM a TCW campaign, I'll be handing out a ton of XP. If I want to GM a fresh-out-of-boot campaign, the Force users should expect to follow the classic journey.

1 hour ago, Aetrion said:

You'd basically wind up with a very different kind of game, where people don't start out as being extremely weak force users who gradually get good at everything, but instead you would wind up with a system that behaves more similarly to Edge or Age where people start out with a character who very quickly becomes highly competent at one thing, and then starts developing sideways, picking up additional abilities.

No, you'd end up with Force users who completely blow away all the muggles.

However...to be my own devil's advocate: if you had a campaign where all the PCs were Force Sensitive, this wouldn't be a bad way of bypassing the need to spend ridiculous amounts of XP at chargen. You might have trouble scaling appropriately, but it would probably work fine.

It would require a lot of homebred balancing, but... might be fun.

The core problem is that it gives the PCs a lot of power in the very early going. And since for a great many species the characteristics cited don't go below a 2, that pretty much makes all the powers accessible right off the bat.

If you're looking to run a game where all the PCs are Force users and start out more powerful than the norm, then just simply increase each PC's starting Force Rating from 1 to 2. That alone puts all but one published Force power into the hands of PCs, and makes them more likely to succeed at activating Force powers without having to resort to using black pips.

However, if any of the PCs are not going to be Force users, then you'll need to do one of two things. The first is give them some other serious reward to significantly boost their capabilities, such as providing them additional starting XP, probably to the tune of 25XP. The other is to do nothing and make sure that those players who opted to not be Force users are okay with eventually becoming little more than supporting cast in the campaign.

Well, it is an idea for alternate advancement in F&D games where people want to play straight up Jedis without doing the whole scramble for force ratings I see F&D games devolve into simply because people who want to play a force heavy character simply have to get higher force ratings before they can do much of anything without taking conflict all day long. I've simply seen this way too many times now with people just going Seer/Sage/Niman just because that's the quickest way to having a high force rating, and the less time you spend mucking about in other trees the more XP you'll have to buy up force powers. With the alternate system you wouldn't see people doing that so much, they would probably go more after classes that make a logical extension of their character and be more willing to pick up non-force classes too.

One thing to keep in mind with this is that it does impose a hard limit on force ratings that currently doesn't seem to exist. If you played with this alternate advancement idea all force ratings would cap at 6. (7 for Int, but you could rule that only natural stats count for force dice, since implants don't understand the force)

2 hours ago, Aetrion said:

I was thinking about a few things in this system that can be a bit weird at times.

For example how when ever I make a force sensitive character who's supposed to actually use force powers, a lot of the early game is just spent rushing for force ratings, because you can't reliably roll white pips till you're sitting on 3+ FR,

1 hour ago, Aetrion said:

That's a nonsensical objection, because the idea of Force Rating contradicts the idea that people have an innate connection to the force in the first place. I mean how would they know that Anakin is super strong in the force if the canon universe followed SWRP rules and this six your old kid at best has 1 or 2 force ratings and only a few ranks in enhance and foresee he's not even actively aware of?

These two statements aren't really correct....

Rushing to FR3 to reliably roll white pips isn't really correct because, well, you don't need to roll white pips, and shouldn't be afraid of using black ones. That's not an error, just a disagreement, and a fairly weak one at that since it likely is based on avoiding conflict over making use of the games mechanics.

And Anakin can be explained in many ways, like all main characters. But here there's a simple one. At 9 years old he's a fully specced player character big gorram hero. He's not a minion npc like the younglings that have been training at the temple for years, he's a backwater slave that's just naturally also a friggin Warrior: Starfighter Ace (or whatever).

Hrmm...What if you could purchase Force Rating like any other Ability with your starting XP?

For example, if you start with a human, your starting Ability line is 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, and you have 110XP to start with. All characters start with 0 FR, and it cost you 20XP per rank, similar to Ability upgrades during character creation - so for 20XP for FR1, 40XP for FR2, and so on.

While that you will give you a higher Force rating at character creation, the downside is that you will sacrifice other Abilities.

An example, the same Human may have a starting FR2 (40XP), and BR3, AG3, IN2, CN2, WP2, PR2, for a total XP cost of 100, with 10-20XP remaining for Force powers, skills, Talents, etc.

1 minute ago, Ghostofman said:

Rushing to FR3 to reliably roll white pips isn't really correct because, well, you don't need to roll white pips, and shouldn't be afraid of using black ones. That's not an error, just a disagreement, and a fairly weak one at that since it likely is based on avoiding conflict over making use of the games mechanics.

Sure, but if you're trying to build a force power heavy character who uses something like Move to attack you need to generate 3 pips every time you want to hurl an object of Sil 1 or above at a target that is at medium or above distance, so this whole notion that you can just always flip pips and take the conflict to make low force ratings work for you is just bunk. It depends entirely on what you're trying to do with your character. If someone wants to play a "force wizard" type character who fights with force powers you can't afford to flip half a dozen pips every single time a fight breaks out. You wind up with two options: spend your XP to learn some other ways to be useful in a fight, and make it take much longer to get the abilities you want, or rush force ratings and get to the point having to flip is the exception, not the rule.

Simply stating that low force ratings don't hinder anyone is simply false. It depends on what powers you're trying to develop and how you envision your character applying them. Especially in games where everyone is supposed to be a full force user it's very easy to come up with concepts that can't just flip every time they use their powers.

Aetrion, I think you're missing the point. No one starts out super good at something. Everyone starts out as a beginner. They need to learn how to be good at something, and no education or experience is in a vacuum. Everyone learns multiple things all the time, and the rules reflect this, that is why the talent trees are set up so that you do have to take your time and work towards the "sought after talent" to get where you want. No character, no matter how specialized, is a one trick pony.

You don't start out super good at something with this system either. You still need to buy all the upgrades to the force powers you have to fully utilize them after all, which is significantly more expensive than buying skill ranks. Also you're acting like people start the game with every attribute at 6, which absolutely isn't the case. Starting the game with a single attribute at 5 is basically your entire starting XP, having a few at 3 is more realistic.

Reality is, with this system your start is a little quicker, but it would take you a lot longer to roll 6 force dice at every single power with the alternate advancement than with the base advancement. With the alternate advancement system you can be an extremely high XP character and still be rolling only 1-2 dice at some of the powers because you just haven't put any dedications in that stat.

To have a stat of 6 in Intellect, Cunning, Willpower and Presence and roll 6 force dice for everything you'd need so many dedications that you'd be rocking a force rating of like 15 if you played that long in the base system. The alternate advancement does make people a little more powerful in the short run, but a lot less powerful in the long run.

No. What it does is allow you to essentially create a one trick pony that can forego taking any other skills or talents, and concentrate on only one thing; using the Force potentially focusing completely on even only one power to the exclusion to all else. That is the problem with it.

There is nothing stopping you from doing that with the base system, except you'll spend a few sessions rushing force rating and then you automatically get good at everything else too.

All your doing is changing the game from a "race to FR" into a "race to Dedication". Right now every FR that a character gains is limiting them somewhere else. But if your Force ability is based on characteristics then Dedication is suddenly far more important that it already was.

The specs may change but the race will still be on to get to the bottom... unless you can encourage role play over roll play.

4 minutes ago, Richardbuxton said:

All your doing is changing the game from a "race to FR" into a "race to Dedication". Right now every FR that a character gains is limiting them somewhere else. But if your Force ability is based on characteristics then Dedication is suddenly far more important that it already was.

The specs may change but the race will still be on to get to the bottom... unless you can encourage role play over roll play.

Not necessarily... it does give you a few strong powers (or affinities) right from the beginning without making EVERY power strong. Encouraging RP or rolls is BETTER... but that's pretty much true for every system ever.

19 minutes ago, Aetrion said:

There is nothing stopping you from doing that with the base system, except you'll spend a few sessions rushing force rating and then you automatically get good at everything else too.

Yes, there is. In order to get to the higher Force ratings, you need to take various different talents, You can't just focus on one thing. You are forced to diversify at least a little. For example, a Sage has to take at least eight different talents in order to get both Force Rating increases. and that's really rushing it. The system encourages the player to branch out and diversify, not be a one trick pony. That is why the talent trees are set up the way they are.

12 minutes ago, Richardbuxton said:

All your doing is changing the game from a "race to FR" into a "race to Dedication". Right now every FR that a character gains is limiting them somewhere else. But if your Force ability is based on characteristics then Dedication is suddenly far more important that it already was.

The specs may change but the race will still be on to get to the bottom... unless you can encourage role play over roll play.

pretty much.

I have two Force Users in the group I run, neither of them have any issue with how the system is designed. In fact they seem to like that each time they pick up a Power, they are potentially running the risk of spreading out their XP too much. The biggest gripe they, and I, have with the Force Rating is the randomness of Light and Dark pips. We understand why it was designed that way, it makes sense the way it is designed, and we still use it that way but we feel a measure of player agency is taken away.

TL;dr version: You're power gaming the system by messing with the designed progression and you're enabling power gamers who already race to the Dedication/Force Rating in the trees.

But honestly most characters don't need more than 3 powers. But the first one can easily be rolling 4 Force Dice in the first session, even 3 is a lot.

Another question would be how do you balance the Force talents, Intuitive Shot for example? Some Specialisations rely on high a Force Rating but don't use force powers.

How many dice can be committed?

Eh... if this were a 'things are broken and this is how they should be fixed!' thread, I'd a free wholeheartedly. But as a 'maybe this would be an interesting way to fiddle with it if someone wanted to do so' thread, I think it's kind of a nifty idea. Mostly because I like the idea that certain characters may have 'strengths' in the Force. Yes, you can portray that by only leveling certain powers or taking certain upgrades... but this might be interesting too.

If I was to implement something along these lines I would allow willpower or presence (depending on power) to be used by force sensitives during skill checks for force based actions. IE, I would allow willpower in conjunction with ranged light/heavy to be used to conduct a ranged attack with the force. I'm also a fan of using attributes, other than the defaults, in conjunction with skills, such as intelligence and gunnery instead of agility and gunnery, if it makes more sense to be using intellect than agility.

Having said that, I think the rules work well enough as is. Use those dark side pips when you need them. A force rating of 3 is pretty darned powerful.

As has been suggested elsewhere, a far simpler solution to the underlying pips problem is to drop the requirement to spend a destiny point. The strain and conflict cost is sufficient by itself.

1 hour ago, Richardbuxton said:

Another question would be how do you balance the Force talents, Intuitive Shot for example? Some Specialisations rely on high a Force Rating but don't use force powers.

How many dice can be committed?

You would also assign them a governing stat.

Committed dice would be subtracted straight from your rating, so if you commit dice you might lose the ability to use powers that are supported by low stats all together. In order to commit dice you need enough of a rating in the power you're committing from to commit the full number of course.