Is Reflect underpowered?

By daedel2007, in Star Wars: Force and Destiny RPG

6 hours ago, whafrog said:

Back to the OP, I agree with most that Reflect is definitely not underpowered, and seems to scale really well. As the PC progresses their skill level will increase, which means the dice pool should start to provide a larger pool of Advantages with which to recover Strain.

And the new Ebb/Flow power provides a great way for a lightsaber user to stay in the fight, even when holding off multiple blaster users.

On 8/2/2017 at 7:01 PM, HappyDaze said:

It's not really all that hard to recover Strain, particularly if you get the right Talents. Even without the right Talents, it's still easy to recover Strain through spending Advantages. This gives the guy laden with Strain the option of spending his Advantages to recover instead of spending them on critical hits, Linked, and other offensive uses. Some would consider this metagame , but this game is narrative and understanding the mechanics as they play out in the world can be helpful. In short, if you don't agree with this thinking, don't hate the player--hate the game.

I'd hardly call using a printed suggestion for a use of Advantage as metagaming. I mean, the people who made the freaking game suggest it as a perfectly valid use of Advantage results.

25 minutes ago, KungFuFerret said:

I'd hardly call using a printed suggestion for a use of Advantage as metagaming. I mean, the people who made the freaking game suggest it as a perfectly valid use of Advantage results.

Yeah but some people are just weird. I had a friend that I used to play Halo with on the original Xbox, and you know how when you play split-screen you will sometimes see where your opponents are in your peripheral vision. Well if he accidentally screen-watched, he would deliberately look the other way and allow the other player to get the drop on him. He said, "I'm just playing as if I didn't know you were there," and I was like, "Dude, you were staring at a wall. You were playing like you knew I was there, but also expecting me to somehow come out of the wall."

So. Some people are weird.

44 minutes ago, KungFuFerret said:

I'd hardly call using a printed suggestion for a use of Advantage as metagaming. I mean, the people who made the freaking game suggest it as a perfectly valid use of Advantage results.

No, the metagame is in inflicting Strain on your enemy specifically to force him/her into using Advantages to remove it rather than using those Advantages to inflict greater harm upon you. Of course, from a certai point of view, this can make perfect sense, but that breaks down when doing lethal damage doesn't give the target the same limits (and options to offset those limits).

13 minutes ago, awayputurwpn said:

Yeah but some people are just weird. I had a friend that I used to play Halo with on the original Xbox, and you know how when you play split-screen you will sometimes see where your opponents are in your peripheral vision. Well if he accidentally screen-watched, he would deliberately look the other way and allow the other player to get the drop on him. He said, "I'm just playing as if I didn't know you were there," and I was like, "Dude, you were staring at a wall. You were playing like you knew I was there, but also expecting me to somehow come out of the wall."

So. Some people are weird.

If a player wants to limit themselves in that way, for some idea of fairness or whatever, that's fine. I'm not going to give them grief for that, and would honestly give them props for not being an online jerk in a multiplayer shooter game. That type of behavior is rare enough it should be encouraged whenever it's found, and made to flourish and thrive. If you're friend had tried to yell at you for doing that kind of thing by accident, I then have an issue with the behavior.

1 minute ago, HappyDaze said:

No, the metagame is in inflicting Strain on your enemy specifically to force him/her into using Advantages to remove it rather than using those Advantages to inflict greater harm upon you. Of course, from a certai point of view, this can make perfect sense, but that breaks down when doing lethal damage doesn't give the target the same limits (and options to offset those limits).

Yeah but I can think of a dozen in game reasons why someone would do this. Heck I'm playing a character RIGHT NOW in a pbp who only does strain damage when combat. Sure, the meta/mechanical benefit of this is that I will often have a lower threshold to hit to stop my foe, but it's also actually part of his character. He doesn't want to kill people. In fact open violence is his last resort to any threat he encounters. He will try and slice or lie his way out of any situation he can. And only if that doesn't work, will he try and beat someone. And then he'll focus on strain damage.

Actually, now that I think about it, I have two characters who operate that way. Though the other one is a fighter character, he just doesn't like killing either.

But I get what you mean. But when the devs of the game themselves say that you can't get past a little bit of metagaming, due to the fact that it's you know....A GAME, I don't really worry about it much.

You could justify the strain attacks as "trying to keep the scary sith death machine from killing me in 2 seconds, by constantly harassing and badgering him with taunts and/or objects, to keep him too busy to cut me in half" There are a plethora of pop culture examples of this kind of thing in movies and tv shows. Usually from the comic relief character, doing things that are basically just tying up the Big Bad, until the Hero can show up to actually kill him. Mechanically, it's the character slapping lots of strain damage on the guy, so he has to keep refreshing it, instead of triggering things like Linked and Aim, and crits, etc. Personally I don't see anything wrong with it. Especially since the GM can do the very same thing back at the PC's to balance out the scales. "Oh, you keep shutting down my awesome talent abilities by draining my NPC's strain pool....well two can play that game buddy." *shuts down all the PC's yummy talents with massive strain attacks left and right*

1 hour ago, KungFuFerret said:

If a player wants to limit themselves in that way, for some idea of fairness or whatever, that's fine. I'm not going to give them grief for that, and would honestly give them props for not being an online jerk in a multiplayer shooter game. That type of behavior is rare enough it should be encouraged whenever it's found, and made to flourish and thrive. If you're friend had tried to yell at you for doing that kind of thing by accident, I then have an issue with the behavior.

Yeah it went both ways. He got real mad when he lost. And he lost a lot.

I got yelled at for "screen watching" when I could see out of my peripheral vision that he had a bead trained on me for like 4 or 5 seconds.

Eventually we just switched to LAN so that he could have his own screen :)

Edited by awayputurwpn
4 minutes ago, awayputurwpn said:

Yeah it went both ways. He got real mad when he lost. And he lost a lot.

I got yelled at for "screen watching" when I could see out of my peripheral vision that he had a bead trained on me for like 4 or 5 seconds.

Eventually we just switched to LAN so that he could have his own screen :)

Heh, and that's why I don't like competitive online games, too much rage and butt hurtness. I've always preferred games that have all the players work on the same team, like Payday 2, or the multiplayer for the Mass Effect games. Less toxicity when we are all aimed against the AI.