So, I convinced my group to switch to the FFG Star Wars system from Saga Edition. One kind of sticky widget, however, involves Force Ratings. We're in an established campaign (characters are level 4 if memory serves), set in a homebrew setting involving a Second Galactic Empire propped up by an established Jedi Order. One of the PCs is a Jedi, the other is a Force-Sensitive not-Jedi-but-maybe-Dark-Side-leaning-but-maybe-not scoundrel. While I really like what FFG is doing with Star Wars, the Force Rating and its increases seem very limiting. So here's my proposed idea:

Any Force-Sensitive character (so you must already have a Force Rating of at least 1 to do this) can increase their Force Rating by spending XP equal to ten times the Force Rating you would have after the increase. So you can increase your Force Rating to 2 with 20 XP, 3 with 30, etc. The Force Rating Talents in the various Specializations stay as they are. Partly because I'm hesitant to start tugging at the threads of careers and specializations lest the whole thing come unraveled, partly because the specializations with more Force Rating talents are those that focus more on the Force in general, so I feel they should retain that flavor by getting potential cost breaks. For instance: a Specialization that has a Force Rating talent that costs 20 XP could use this house rule to get Force Rating 2 for 20XP, then buy the talent for 20 XP (plus prerequisites, of course) and save 10 XP on Force Rating 3 compared to others.

My major concern is: will I utterly screw over the system if I go with this? I want the characters to be a touch more powerful Force-wise, and want them (and, potentially, their adversaries) to be able to really cut loose with the Force at times, but will this really alter the balance of play and power at the table? The third character is a droid, basically designed as a combat medical unit, so he won't be getting any benefit from this, but having a dedicated healer character is (I'm gathering) a lot more important in this system than in Saga, so he should still have a lot of utility.

It would undoubtably have massive repercussion in the system (i.e. at initial glance it seems HIGHLY exploitable). The way FR works (and Commiting and certain Powers and Talents keying off of those aspects) is one of the Prime Movers of this system. Messing with that is definitely going to mess with balance.

My table didn't like how you had to buy Dedication to up skill points the first time we played EotE so they did this exact scheme but with Characteristics. As a result no one ever bought skills of course.

You really should just except the system for what it is and either a.) grant ~400-500 post chargen xp and play out the last hurrah of these PCs and then start fresh, or...

b.) start over with new PCs

[edit]Might I add that having the mix of Force and Non-Force Using PCs makes this "tinkering" (or rather really sledge-hammering) even less adviseable. If everyone was Force Users and you used the same thing for NPCs, at least everyone would be on the same crazy train, but this will particularly disbalance Force Users from Non.

Your characters will be insanely powerful almost immediately. There are already a number of powers and talents in the game that let you add your Force Rating to certain skills, adding pips as successes or advantages. Influence, for example. At FR 1, this ability is a handy little bump for a "face" character, helping to shore up his skill ranks. At FR 3 or 4, pheh, why bother with the skill? Seriously, with this rule every character will buy straight up to rank 3 at least, and their powers will go from, "Ohh, cool!" to game-breaking.

Remember that Force Rating is only one measure of a person's strength in the Force. It's their conscious, raw power. A Shien Expert may not be able to throw a freighter across a hangar, but he can feel every attack coming at him, and defend himself without thinking, even as his movements guide him toward his target. A Shadow with no "Powers" can still cloud the minds of others, so that they don't notice or even care when he slips past them.

The only thing I really dislike is that the lightsaber-form focused trees don't give you Force Rating. Some may say they would be too overpowered. Then why aren't the other trees made just as useful? If they are really THAT bad that they have to have Force Rating there just to lure people to get them, make the trees more enticing.

That's too cheap. If the PCs are already 4th level in Saga you could start the game using Knight Level rules where each PC gets 150 earned XP (spent after the normal character creation process). The force user will probably still not feel up to snuff (I'm guessing, if they took Skill Focus: Use the Force in Saga, which is way overpowered at lower levels you're not going to maintain that feel without a lot more XP than 150) but they're on their way. With 150 earned XP they should be able to get to FR 2 but won't have much invested in Force Powers yet.

Some things to keep in mind with Force Powers in this system compared to Saga:

* Growth in power is a lot slower but eventually Force use can get very powerful in FFG.

* Beginning Force users will need to spread out XP to a lot of different Force Power trees and Talents to get the broad range of ability seen in the movies. This takes time and XP and will take some judicious use of XP to make growing but effective characters.

* Force Powers can be used as often as the PC would like. They take an action (or a Maneuver if you have the right Talents) but you can use them each turn.

If you want to jump start the force user's ability you can let them start with FR 2 instead of 1 and give the other PCs 50-75XP and a bunch of credits to compensate (another big difference between Saga and FFGs system is how much a difference good gear can make).

Would Knight-level be too high for 4th level characters? Or does the slower build of FFG mean Knight-level is an equal or lower overall competence level than 7th level in Saga (I understand that's kind of like asking if fish is overall better or worse than purple).

I was thinking the increasing cost would be self-limiting, as it would prohibitively expensive to buy Force Rating above 3 or so using this rule (at least, if you want to be good at anything other than Force Rating). Also, my players are not min-max munchkins, so I'm a little less cautious than I would otherwise be. Still, if Force Rating really is such a game-changing ability, I think I'll table this idea for now and come back to it later if, as we actually get some play under our collective belt, the Force-sensitive characters are still feeling underwhelming.

I might give the character actually raised and trained a Jedi a bonus Force Rating at character creation, to reflect her more extensive history with the Force and full, formal Jedi training, and give the other characters bonus XP to compensate (as Jedi Ronin suggested), but I'll talk it over with my players before making a final decision.

Thanks for the input, I really appreciate it.

The "Knight Level" start (+150 xp post-chargen, and 9K cred OR Lightsaber) actually yields what someone familiar with the canon media would probably consider to be a green Padawan.

Well, the Jedi character would have a lightsaber anyway, since Jedi have those (when there's an actually Jedi Order around to give them the things). So yeah, I think I'll start them there, instead of the 90 or 100 XP I was considering starting them at (near, but not quite at, Knight-level). And the 9k Credits for the other two players will be helpful for them.

The Force and Destiny Core book says that a moderate amount of XP for a 4 hour session is 20XP (add an additional 5XP to that if they played up to their characters motivation). Using that as a guide 150XP is about 8 sessions. So probably not quite 4th level in Saga. The word "Knight" in Knight Level can be misleading as it doesn't mean you can create a PC with the abilities of a Jedi Knight.

Another nice option for an actual Jedi character is the Mentor group resource (offered in the last step of character creation) which allows PCs to purchase the Basic level of a Force Power for 5 XP cheaper (each force power has it's own tree with a single basic power at it's base, this node in the tree is 5XP cheaper). This allows Jedi to buy a little ability in a range of force powers at a decent discount. This could be added to granting a FR 2 (as well as an XP/gear boost for the non force users).

I was pretty much assuming the characters would have a Mentor already, the Jedi PCs Master who's in charge of training her. She, in turn, is kind of training the other Force-Sensitive PC, who did get a Dark Side Score increase in an earlier session, so he could potentially benefit from the Mentor as well. This does kind of leave the droid player out in the cold, but once I get Edge of Empire and/or Age of Rebellion, he should have some options available to him to help out.

Knight-level seems about right for where I want them to "start", based on what I'm hearing here, so that's what I'll go with. Thanks!

In the beta there was a table of comparison (that im glad was removed) iirc jedi knights were about FR3 and masters about lksted as 6, just as a reference. So a knight would have 2 specializations and a lightsaber spec which is about 400-500 xp minimum if you also bought into some force powers. Use that as a guide if you like.

2 hours ago, ErikModi said:

Well, the Jedi character would have a lightsaber anyway, since Jedi have those (when there's an actually Jedi Order around to give them the things). So yeah, I think I'll start them there, instead of the 90 or 100 XP I was considering starting them at (near, but not quite at, Knight-level). And the 9k Credits for the other two players will be helpful for them.

Also it's important to note that the Knight Level XP (150+), is only added after they have created their characters. This is to prevent players using this XP to increase their ability scores. They can spend it on talents and skills, as normal.

One further thing to note is that it may take some getting used to playing the system as it is quite different in style and intent to D20 Star Wars. You don't want PCs getting too powerful too quickly, making it difficult for the DM to manage the consequences.

"We must be cautious..." -- Obi-Wan Kenobi

My advice would be to do a couple of one-shot adventures using PCs built on the standard starting XP. The various Beginner Box adventures are good for this, as they come with generally solid pre-gen characters and are set up in such a way as to teach both the player and the GM how the system works in incremental steps. You could probably also adapt a number of low-level d20 Star Wars adventures to suit this purpose as well.

From my own experience, if your players have never really played the system before, there's a very high chance that the first characters they build are going to be woefully inadequate at a lot of things, as there's a strong tendency to spend starting XP on skills and talents, rather than pouring them into characteristics which the designers full intended and suggested as strongly as they could.

One thing worth noting is that lightsabers are far more powerful in this game than they ever were in d20. In rough equivalent to Saga Edition terms, a lightsaber would pretty much score an automatic critical hit on every successful attack, and completely ignores any bonus to Reflex Defense a target might have from wearing armor. So any PCs that are reasonably skilled with a lightsaber are going to find that taking down minions is quite easy, and all but the beefiest of Rivals and Nemeses will go down in a few hits; the Force and Destiny Beginner Box's BBEG is notorious for being a pushover if there's at least two of the pre-gen PCs brandishing lightsabers.

Yeah, I stressed to my players that Characteristics CANNOT EVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES be improved during play, except by purchasing a specific talent which I cannot find in the F&D core book, so make sure your characteristics are where you want them at chargen because that's where they'll be all of your character's life.

Yeah, I was noticing lightsabers seem to be noticeably better than other weapons. However, the players in general are interested in playing a less combat-oriented campaign than I usually run, and the Jedi PC in particular wants to do more non-combat things, so she isn't really going to build a combat powerhouse. I'm comfortable handing out one free lightsaber to start so that, when combat does come, they have a nice advantage over the mooks.

I'll run the "starter idea" past my group and see how it grabs them. I'm planning to get the F&D GM screen anyway, so that'll be a helpful bonus if they want to go that route. Maybe even run the adventure twice, once with pregen characters and once with build-your-owns so they can see how things work both ways. Thanks for the tip.

3 minutes ago, ErikModi said:

Yeah, I stressed to my players that Characteristics CANNOT EVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES be improved during play, except by purchasing a specific talent which I cannot find in the F&D core book, so make sure your characteristics are where you want them at chargen because that's where they'll be all of your character's life.

It's called Dedication. It's in every specialization in the F&D CRB except for Sage and Seer.

Ah, there it is. Thank you.

On 5/14/2017 at 6:40 PM, ErikModi said:

My major concern is: will I utterly screw over the system if I go with this?

Short answer:

Yes, you will utterly screw over the system if you go with this idea.

Force Ratings are limited and expensive for a very solid reason. I would strongly encourage you to play it as written for a while until you get the hang of the system. Study the Force Trees and some Force talents in Specialization trees closely; many of them let you add your Force Rating to skill checks, with the ability to add automatic successes or advantages using Force Pips. Keep in mind Force Pips are automatic; you can use light or dark, it is merely a matter of strain and conflict costs (conflict of course has narrative implications), so every Force Rating is guaranteed at least one success/advantage when used on these checks, assuming a player is willing to possibly burn strain and/or accept conflict. Other Force Powers allow you to commit Force Rating to boost attack or defense (Enhance Tree), or can be used to significantly degrade their enemies abilities (Bind, Harm, Unleash)

Real in game example of Force Rating 4:

PC wants to demonstrate to an obstinate Rebel Admiral about his power level, despite the simple brown robe. So he invites said admiral to the hanger bay of the Neb-B frigate they are all on, asks for a portion of it to be cleared, and proceeds to use Move to juggle four (unoccupied and powered down) X-wings without breaking a sweat (or the X-wings). Had this player wanted, he could have used these X-wings as missile weapons, chucking them out to extreme range. And this is a pretty minor show of the power he can really wield when he wants.

6 hours ago, Magnus Arcanus said:

Real in game example of Force Rating 4:

and proceeds to use Move to juggle four (unoccupied and powered down) X-wings without breaking a sweat (or the X-wings).

Wow. So Force Rating is very effective even at small amounts of dice? My main hangup was that it seemed like you really needed significant amounts of Force Points to accomplish anything (in my less-than-thorough first readthrough, was trying to grok the system enough at first blush to explain and sell it to my players). If Force Rating is pretty powerful at the official numbers, I'll definitely leave it as is. Just seemed like, in skimming the Force Powers, you'd need to generate 6+ FP to use more than the basic and two or three upgrades.

But if even 4 FR is as potent as you say, that's more than enough for the kind of game I want to run.

The limitation of the power rating is that when the die is committed (representing maintaining focus over an elongated period of time), you can't use that die for other things. Once a character gets his second force die (FR 2), he can start to really use the force to advantage, using a die to boost his characteristics (which is already a huge increase) and using another die for any other purpose.

The FR 3 is when things start really to get broken (Force Rating 3 is if I recall the equivalent of a full-trained Jedi Knight). You can deal massive amounts of damage with the Move force power (throwing small starships, boulders, debris chunks, etc), vastly boost your combat abilities with the Enhance force power or manipulate the battlefield with Bind, Heal/Harm and Protect/Unleash. Each additional force rating - as insignificant as it looks - represents a huge increase in raw power (for those of you from a DnD background like myself, the difference between a level one character and a level three). Not to mention in the time it takes to reach the point where you can buy these increases you [should] get plenty of credits to really soup up your gear (fully modded weapons, high soak and defence armors) and you will buy plenty of other talents on your applicable specialisation trees which already beef you noticeably.

53 minutes ago, ErikModi said:

Wow. So Force Rating is very effective even at small amounts of dice? My main hangup was that it seemed like you really needed significant amounts of Force Points to accomplish anything (in my less-than-thorough first readthrough, was trying to grok the system enough at first blush to explain and sell it to my players). If Force Rating is pretty powerful at the official numbers, I'll definitely leave it as is. Just seemed like, in skimming the Force Powers, you'd need to generate 6+ FP to use more than the basic and two or three upgrades.

You've read the rules wrong. For example, to take the benefit from the 'Move' force power "strength" upgrade, you only spend one force point to increase the silhouette as much as you want up to the maximum silhouette permitted by however many strength upgrades you have purchased. Don't worry, I initially made this mistake too; it is not well worded.

For example [using Move]; I have a force rating of 3: I roll [two white, one white, two black]. In exchange for a destiny point, a point of strain and a point of conflict I can use one of the black. I have purchased all four magnitude, all for strength, the first two range upgrades and the first control upgrade.

I spend ONE force point of four to activate the power. ONE force point of four to allow me to move five objects (magnitude). ONE force point of the four to allow me to throw these up to long range (range) and ONE force point to allow me to pick up objects of up to [and including] silhouette four (strength). Voila, I can now lob five Millenium Falcons at an opponent for a damage of 40 x 5 (that is 200 damage / 20 planetary scale damage) assuming the Ranged combat check I roll produces enough advantage to do so. For a grand total of four force points spent (which assuming every force die is worth 1.5 force points [average roll] is an average roll; and the great thing about force powers is you always generate at least one point per die, but it can screw you over should you roll all blacks and you lack the destiny points.

Woah. Okay, I'll read the Force Powers more in-depth. But that makes sense, thank you.

The main thing about force dice is that they are fairly inconsistent; a lightsider has a 5/12 chance of triggering, 3 of those dice give a double result which means, typically a lightsider user can have stronger turns when fortune favours that one. Not being able to use dark pips without drawing on conflict presents some interesting situations in that they want to generate a particular result, but their dice completely fail them. By spending a destiny point they can use all pips, but take conflict and strain.

That being said, move is one of those rare skills that is absolutely insane. The power scailing is nowhere near insane for the other skills I find.

Yeah, my other issue was that, in the few test rolls I did, I got a lot more dark than light, and I suspect some of my players are going to try and avoid Conflict. I think I'll sell it less as "you can draw on the dark side for power when you need to" and more as "it's only really strong and wise Jedi (with high Force Ratings) who can completely avoid the Dark Side at all."

29 minutes ago, ErikModi said:

Yeah, my other issue was that, in the few test rolls I did, I got a lot more dark than light, and I suspect some of my players are going to try and avoid Conflict. I think I'll sell it less as "you can draw on the dark side for power when you need to" and more as "it's only really strong and wise Jedi (with high Force Ratings) who can completely avoid the Dark Side at all."

The force die are mostly for use of powers under pressure, where drawing on the dark side (or at least pulling on your emotions) may be the only way to ensure success, when its not a life and death situation, you as the GM can waive needing to roll for it, particularly if it is mundane. It is almost certain you will have to take some conflict over the course of the game; and alignment shift (unless you are playing full murder-hobo) is designed to be very gradual. If you are trying actively to end up as a paragon of the lightside, with a force rating under 3 and trying to use force frequently you are going to get very frustrated very quickly.

5 minutes ago, ErikModi said:

Yeah, my other issue was that, in the few test rolls I did, I got a lot more dark than light, and I suspect some of my players are going to try and avoid Conflict. I think I'll sell it less as "you can draw on the dark side for power when you need to" and more as "it's only really strong and wise Jedi (with high Force Ratings) who can completely avoid the Dark Side at all."

One big difference in game philosophy between this system and previous Star Wars RPG systems, is that players are expected to get some conflict every session from using Dark Side pips. Previous incarnations made it very, very bad to ever 'tap the dark side.' It can be a hard concept for new players to initially understand that is it is OK to use dark side pips to fuel their powers on occasion and they won't turn into a mustache twirling Dark Lord of the Sith instantly. In fact, dark side pips are less about 'tapping the dark side' and more about giving into emotion and inward passions. You aren't Dark Side until your morality drops below 30. Assuming they started at 50 like most Force Users, they have a good buffer before they have to worry about going Bad.

Its important to understand this dynamic, because if all your players are going to do is look for Light Side points, they will get frustrated with the Force mechanics in this game pretty quickly.

Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. It takes great wisdom and strength of character to totally control one's emotions like that.