HI

So I've gm'd a few games ( a long time ago) and my friend going to run a game.

I'm gonna start Politico then reach Makashi Duelist. I'm starting as human. with 2's across stats expect cunning:3 and Presence:4.

I'm not unto meta gaming, but curious is it worth starting with 4 in a stat. I could drop it and get 3 in intellenge or willp[ower. I'm curious what people think?

P.S. I tempted by presence 4 because my party have a history of being AWFUL in social situations.

Well you well need to take either force emergent or exile to get a force rating if you don't start in an F&D career or you won't have a force rating.

I think it's often more interesting to have a 4, but really it depends on the character as I've rolled a mostly 3's ewok and loved it just fine.

What's the personality of the character?

4s are overall great. 5s are early awesome, but fall off in efficiency later on. 3s are fine too, but you start as a jack of all trade, master of none, a few ranks of dedication later things look pretty good.

2 2 2 3 2 4 sounds like a great plan for your build. Though a 3 in willpower instead of cunning might be nice as well. Coercion, Vigilance, STRAIN!, discipline are pretty useful for your concept (and vigilance and discipline don't come as career skills), while out from the cunning skills you seem mainly interested in deception, which is a career skill and get raised just fine with xp later in the game.

Either way, force exile and force emergent seem to be good universal specs to increase your force rating and push for dedication, you need at least one of them to make your Colonist force sensitive. though the Makashi tree itself is quite good even for non-force users, but Makashi technique is a force talent.

Yes its important to note that jumping from a non F&D spec to an F&D spec means you dont gain force rating 1 , so all the force talents in Makashi wouldnt work for youth u!

Only the F&D careers or the force senstive emergent/exile specializations give you the force rating you need. Also note that the talent Force Rating which inreases your FR is a force talent itself and requires you to have a force rating, so you cant just buy an F&D spec then drill to the Force Rating talent as you would still be at 0.

So you need to work backwards and start Makashi if you want to take advantage of the force talents, or you have to jam in either force sensitive X special as others have pointed out. As for starring with 3s or 4s its up to you, you can with Human take a bonus 10xp and start with 4 stats at 3 or you can have 1 of 3 and 4 each. That first gives you the majority of your skills at 3 green default difficulty, or you can specialise and get that 1 stat so that the default skills are 4 green, an extra green can add 10% chance to your probability of success on a check. So do you want 20% on one stats skills and 10% on 1 stat, or 10% on 4.

My personal preference is for 3s but there is no denying that having a starting 4 in your speciality is better.

Dont listen to me as I dont practice what I preach , I started as a guardian warden with 3 brawn 3 willpower 1 presence (30 starring xp spent) and drilled for dedication via baleful gaze (started with +50xp and took two sessions to get dedication) to net me 4 willpower and a force rating of 2 shortly after starting play and while I dont necessarily think it was the best plan I don't feel hampered by it. Im now about to get my second dedication and third FR in protector. Buying into skills you use often can shore up the shortfalls. If I were ro do it again Id start with 4 in Brawn and 4 in Willpower (nikto to srart with 3 Brawn) but the warden plays heavy on those 2 stats with only 2 skills (cool and knowledge underworld) outside them.

I forgot to say I will be taking force exile/emergent, but thanks for confirming it.

8 hours ago, TheShard said:

Well you well need to take either force emergent or exile to get a force rating if you don't start in an F&D career or you won't have a force rating.

I think it's often more interesting to have a 4, but really it depends on the character as I've rolled a mostly 3's ewok and loved it just fine.

What's the personality of the character?

2

My character is a basically a charmer and a bit of a spoilt brat (came from nobility). But I realised I'm gonna have to a lot of charming to make up for the rest of my party.

7 hours ago, syrath said:

So you need to work backwards and start Makashi if you want to take advantage of the force talents, or you have to jam in either force sensitive X special as others have pointed out. As for starring with 3s or 4s its up to you, you can with Human take a bonus 10xp and start with 4 stats at 3 or you can have 1 of 3 and 4 each. That first gives you the majority of your skills at 3 green default difficulty, or you can specialise and get that 1 stat so that the default skills are 4 green, an extra green can add 10% chance to your probability of success on a check. So do you want 20% on one stats skills and 10% on 1 stat, or 10% on 4

2

I considered starting as Makashi but my gm would prefer I discovered my force powers. Which I prefer as well. Works better as the story and I can do the moment's of my character going "WHAT THE **** DID I JUST DO?"

7 hours ago, SEApocalypse said:

4s are overall great. 5s are early awesome but fall off in efficiency later on. 3s are fine too, but you start as a jack of all trade, master of none, a few ranks of dedication later things look pretty good.

2 2 2 3 2 4 sounds like a great plan for your build. Though a 3 in willpower instead of cunning might be nice as well. Coercion, Vigilance, STRAIN!, discipline are pretty useful for your concept (and vigilance and discipline don't come as career skills), while out from the cunning skills you seem mainly interested in deception, which is a career skill and get raised just fine with xp later in the game.

3

I could put the 3 in willpower, I was in a rush as forgot that Deception is a career skill. My party do also have someone with deception and someone without it who has no talking skills but wants to be a talker through sheer RP... we'll wait and see how that goes. could be quite funny.

Anyway thanks people.

Yes, yes you should

The politico has well-rounded. so you could go with cunning as well and just make two of the missing willpower skills career skills that way, which would work out as well. Force Exile comes with a 5xp talent to make Perception and Discipline career skills too . Though naturally well-rounded could give you a few more combat skills as well or could give you gunnery and piloting in case you run often into space combat. Personal preferences apply here most imho.

5 hours ago, BionicRope said:

I forgot to say I will be taking force exile/emergent, but thanks for confirming it.

I considered starting as Makashi but my gm would prefer I discovered my force powers. Which I prefer as well. Works better as the story and I can do the moment's of my character going "WHAT THE **** DID I JUST DO?"

For the "WHAT THE **** DID I JUST DO?" effect Ebb/Flow is actually quite awesome as force power. It works great with the Makashi and the Politico spec as well.

And, as I found out recently , taking both Force Exile and Force Emergent should work out great for character concepts like this one, as you get access to to two ranks of dedication and force rating 3 for just ~215 xp. (+40 extra for the second universal spec itself), that is a pretty good deal and the talents you get work pretty fantastic with your build as well as they improve your abilities as a face type character and increase boost stealth and initiative rolls, which comes pretty handy too. On top is intensive focus for 10xp a mega bargain and quite fantastic and universal talent.

Starting with a 4 is a bit of advice I give all my new players. Most players want to feel heroic and starting with nothing higher than a 3 will significantly stifle that.

Start with a 4, 100%.

Start with Makashi Duelist and take from Politico after. If you don't start with a F&D career, you're going to get stuck behind an expensive curve when it comes to Force Rating.

Or, better yet, start with Makashi Duelist and take a Consular specialization. They're the Charisma career for Force Users.

Whether you start with 3 or 4 depends very much on the difficulties the GM will set, and what the other players have. Have an open discussion about it.

For me it also depends on number of players you have. If you have 2-3 players, then 3's in areas the other players have 2's or 1's in could be good. With 4+ players 3's probably means you will be outclassed for most things if you don't have a 4 in area of speciality.

Characteristics power three things you want to look at from a mechanical standpoint: Skills, Talents, and Derived Attributes.

Going in reverse order, we start with Derived Attributes. Brawn and Willpower determine your starting Wound and Strain thresholds, respectively, and Brawn also determines your Soak. As others have alluded to, starting with a higher than average Willpower is good if you have a strain-hungry character type, though Politico/Makashi Duelist isn't necessarily all that strain hungry apart from Parrying.

Some talents use characteristics to determine their effects, so this can be important to take into account. If you're going to be picking up (Improved) Field Commander from a tree, for instance, it can help to make sure you have enough Presence to be able to apply the benefit to your entire group. This isn't a big concern for your build, however.

Then there's skills, which is probably the biggest consideration. Take a look at the skill list and take note of all the skills you want your character to be really good at, then group them by characteristic. If you have more than two or three skills associated with a single characteristic that you want to be good at (especially if some of them are non-career skills), you probably want a higher than average value there. If you only want a couple of skills associated with a characteristic, you can afford to keep it low and just buy skill ranks instead. This doesn't take into account whether you want lots of Triumphs, but that mainly applies to combat and crafting.

All of which is to say that based on the character you have in mind, I think 4 Presence is the way to go, and I agree with other commenters that a 3 Willpower might not be a bad idea. It doesn't sound like you really need higher stats in the other characteristics to do what you want to do. There are some characters for whom a bunch of 3's makes a lot of sense, but yours isn't one of them.

1 minute ago, Darzil said:

Whether you start with 3 or 4 depends very much on the difficulties the GM will set, and what the other players have. Have an open discussion about it.

For me it also depends on number of players you have. If you have 2-3 players, then 3's in areas the other players have 2's or 1's in could be good. With 4+ players 3's probably means you will be outclassed for most things if you don't have a 4 in area of speciality.

True, but if you are running 2-3 players with no NPC's the players should really be coordinating their character builds or the GM should be modifying the types of encounters you have. If 3 players coordinate its possible for everyone to have a 4 and for most skills to be covered by a 3. This is just my opinion, but I feel that having a few better pools is better than having a lot of bad ones for small groups.

2 minutes ago, Concise Locket said:

Start with Makashi Duelist and take from Politico after. If you don't start with a F&D career, you're going to get stuck behind an expensive curve when it comes to Force Rating.

Or, better yet, start with Makashi Duelist and take a Consular specialization. They're the Charisma career for Force Users.

Basically this. Force and Destiny is a book about Force Users, mostly untrained ones finding their own way. There are specific rules for mentoring a character to become a member of a specific Force Tradition... your character won't have that at all.

A 4 in a characteristic sets them above most in that area. They can accomplish hard tasks with a better than 60% chance. A 3 on the other hand means your above average, contemplating hard tasks is within your scope even though you only succeed half the time.

Basicly you always want more positive dice than negative dice in the pool, and the easiest way to do that is pump up a characteristic at the start.

1 hour ago, Darzil said:

For me it also depends on number of players you have. If you have 2-3 players, then 3's in areas the other players have 2's or 1's in could be good. With 4+ players 3's probably means you will be outclassed for most things if you don't have a 4 in area of speciality.

This ^ My current group has 3 players, so it's nice to have a bit of overlap and broad capability. Plus, they took forever to decide which stat got the 4, and they kept wanting to switch it. The downside to having a 4 is all those 2s. In the end they were much happier starting with four 3s, and now that they have a couple Dedication each they are *really* happy. It's much nicer to be able to spend Dedication on pushing a 3 to a 4 instead of a 2 to a 3.

The next is just MHO, so take with a grain of salt, but the monolithic approach comes from D&D and a style of RPG I'm no longer interested in. With D&D, if you don't excel at your selected class, you will pretty much suck at everything else anyway, so there is no point in being a jack of all trades (Bard notwithstanding). Star Wars feels different to me...it's not that each character isn't good at what they do, but they all seem capable of jumping in for roles other than their specialization. So I'm really happy to throw away that "you need a fighter, cleric, wizard, and thief in every party" kind of play style.

If you think your GM would go for it, you could start as a Makashi Duelist and still have your "WHAT DID I JUST DO?!" moment. The Force talents in Makashi Duelist aren't all that flashy and there are only four of them, three of which are in the bottom row! Makashi Technique doesn't scream Force user. Gaining an actual Force power (i.e. Move) screams Force user and, when you finally get that, you can have your in-game eureka moment.

Assuming your GM is cool with that.

I'm kind of undecided on this topic.

I've only run two characters so far and I really like having the one characteristic maxed out to 4 early on.

But the character that was tailored to be more well rounded and had mostly 3 rated characteristics worked out really well too.

And as Wafrog pointed out, Star Wars doesn't necessarily require you to super specialize. I think what you should do is build out the characteristics that will best define your character as you envision that character.

Pantorans can start with 4/3/3/2/2/2 (arrange in any order, except that Presence must be 3+) if you take the +10 starting XP option.

For this build I would recomend a pantoran basically a good looking blue skin human whow likes cold weather... a 3 in presence 1 in wisdom and 110 xp (and I free rank cool or maybe negotiations I forget, it's in endless vigil) taking 10 bonus xp you could put 50 into willpower to get you up to a 3, 30 xp in brawn to get you to a 3, and 40 in presence to get you to a 4, which is great for a makashi duelist.