Alright, asking this for a friend (fellow player, I am not GM in the game):

Can you attempt a Force Power check if your character functionally has FR 0 because they have their rating committed to other ongoing effects? Essentially rolling 0 dice for the check with assumed failure.

In this situation, a player has an Ascetic/Martial Artist character. He currently plans on committing FR on the use of some various talents (I believe its Force Protection or something, commit per round to gain Soak, the economy of it is a bit wonky but he wants to use it). He is eyeing the Ebb/Flow force power, especially for its ability to give advantages on checks.

Ascetic has the talent called Empty Soul that gives free light/dark pips on Force Power checks, assuming they meet a few requirements. The plan is to be able to utilize Ebb/Flow regularly, while usually committing the FR to other abilities.

I've tried to read over the section and I don't see anything requiring that Force Power checks require a positive FR, just that you do need a FR to buy Force Powers (check), and the assumed inability to get any use of Force Powers if you don't roll any Force Die (bypassed by the use of Empty Soul). I don't recall Empty Soul having any requirement that the power have a non-zero amount of Force Die being rolled.

To me, this clearly is something the GM should likely be on-board with, but it does seem like an acceptable advantage for the expenditure of XP it would take (as well as the restrictions on possessions).

What are the communities thoughts/is there something in the rules I'm missing?

4 minutes ago, Kommissar said:

Alright, asking this for a friend (fellow player, I am not GM in the game):

Can you attempt a Force Power check if your character functionally has FR 0 because they have their rating committed to other ongoing effects?

No you cannot. You have committed that die for the time being, and thus have no die to roll for any other powers. Basically you are spending all of your connection to the Force to sustain that ongoing effect.

You can always drop the ongoing, do the other power, and then turn it back on with another action if you wish, but until you get FR 2, and thus have 2 die to play with, what you asked isn't possible.

Yes, there is no restricting on using Force Powers that requires you to have Force Dice to roll, specifically, to use those powers. You only need to have a Force Rating, and the Force chapter fairly explicitly says you don't lose your Force Rating by committing all your dice. Force Rating 0 is still a Force Rating, as opposed to a non-sensitive character's Force Rating of --.

The only obvious restriction is that if your Force Rating is 0, you have no dice to roll to generate Force points, which in most cases means you can't possibly generate force points to power your, well, powers. But there are multiple ways to generate Force points without rolling dice, such as the One with the Universe and Empty Soul talents, as well as the bonus points from vergences. Your potential will be naturally limited to only the "free" generated points, but sometimes those one or two are all you need .

I personally might require you to have an effective Force Rating equal to the minimum requirement to learn a power in order to use that power, representing a base amount of supernatural "oomph" to put behind the attempt to succeed, but that is not a rule given in any book, but my personal (potential) houserule.

But what mechanic other than the assumed failure prevents the check in the first place? Am I just forgetting something from chapter 1 that says you can't perform a check if you don't have a positive pool?

Again, the idea here is the player is trying to use Empty Soul to get free pips with which to activate a power. So in this case, there will be force points generated as a part of the check, just no dice rolled.

15 minutes ago, Kommissar said:

But what mechanic other than the assumed failure prevents the check in the first place? Am I just forgetting something from chapter 1 that says you can't perform a check if you don't have a positive pool?

Again, the idea here is the player is trying to use Empty Soul to get free pips with which to activate a power. So in this case, there will be force points generated as a part of the check, just no dice rolled.

Ah, ok so you are talking about a talent that allows you to do say, a Discipline check for example, and if you succeed, you get a certain number of pips to use at a later time on a Force power? I don't have any books with me, at work, so I can't read up on Empty Soul, but if you are talking about something like that, yes I would think that is totally fine if I were the GM at that table. As Absol said, your Rating still says the same, despite how many die you have committed. It's not like you are now a 0 Rating person because you have used a die. Your rating is still there.

However, if the roll requires you to include a Force die in the roll to generate some result, then no, you couldn't do that while your one die is committed.

Empty Soul is an Ascetic talent that automatically grants you one Light Side and one Dark Side pip on every Force power check, so long as you are not caring more than 2 Encumbrance worth of equipment. So, for example, if you have a Force Rating of 2 and roll to use a mind trick, let's say your results are a double Light Side and a single Dark. With Empty Soul, you would generate 3/2 Force points on that check.

Where this gets tricky is if you've committed all your dice, but it still works. You roll your dice and get...no results. Then you add your free 1/1, for a final result of 1/1 Force points, to be spent as you like.

The thing that trips people up a lot regarding Force Rating and committing is that when you commit a Force die to an effect (be it a power or a talent), your Force Rating literally decreases . So if I have Force Rating 3, then commit 2 dice with the Enhance control upgrade to increase my Brawn, my Force Rating is literally 1 now. It is not 3 (commit 2), it is 1. When the effect of the control upgrade ends, however, my Force Rating increases by the 2 dice committed to it, and it's back up to 3.

This means it's possible, if you commit all of your Force dice, to have a Force Rating of 0. However, this does not prevent you from using Force talents or attempting Force powers because, as I've said before, a Force Rating of 0 is different from a Force Rating of --. You'll simply be unable to generate Force points without any dice to roll, unless you have a way to generate bonus points.

This distinction is important for two talents: Knowledge is Power and Survival of the Fittest. These talents let you, for one Force power check, treat your Force Rating as if it's equal to your ranks in a specific skill. If your Force Rating did not decrease when you commit dice, these talents would be useless if your Force Rating was equal or higher than your ranks in the skill, as even with committed dice your Force Rating would still be 3 (to use the example from above).

But, since your Force Rating does decrease when you commit, a character with an uncommitted Force Rating of 5+ can still benefit from those talents, as long as they've decreased their Force Rating below their skill ranks by one or more commits.

Going back to Empty Soul for a moment, there is an important distinction to be made, which I'd need my books to verify. If Empty Soul says that if adds the bonus pips to any Force power checks, it would not apply to any Force talents you may possess that require Force dice, as those are not power checks. I personally discount the distinction, but technically that's how it works by the rules.

Eh... I don't have the book, and so can't say what RAW is for the wording of the Talent, but if the wording is, it adds pips to a "Force Power check" as Absol summarized, you're not making a check if you're not rolling the dice.

I do have F&D which pretty explicitly describes Force Power Checks (there's a whole section on it), and it's defined as "rolling one or more Force dice".

So no roll = no check = no Talent benefit. Based on the "known" wording so far.

That definitely is the sort of definition I was looking for then if it says something to the effect of "rolling one or more Force dice." I'd still run it by the GM because in this case its a pretty heavy expenditure of XP to basically get one or two advantages on checks.

Alright, let's get some exact wording up in here!

From the Force and Destiny Core Rulebook , page 280:

Quote

Force powers and Force talents generally work in one of two ways:

* First, the PC can make a Force power check , rolling a number of Force Dice <F> and using the results to generate Force points <f>. The character can spend these <f> to activate and enhance abilities in a variety of ways, as described in the individual Force power or Force talent.

...

FORCE POWER CHECKS

Most Force powers and Force talents provide the user with a temporary effect--they accomplish something and then end. What they accomplish is detailed in the description of the power or talent. However, most powers and talents that provide a temporary effect require the character to spend one or more Force points <f> to activate the power or ability.

Characters generate <f> by making a Force power check, rolling one or more Force dice <F> and generating <f> based on the results. ... The ability sometimes specifies how many Force dice he uses; however, the number of Force dice he adds to the pool can never exceed his current Force rating.

This is interesting, and tells us a couple of things. First, that emsquared is right and I was wrong, in that a Force power check is technically defined as rolling one or more Force dice. This would mean that, for an effect that requires a Force power check to activate, it must use one or more dice, meaning you cannot have committed your Force rating down to 0.

The other thing it confirms, however, is that I was wrong again ! Force power checks specifically apply to both Force powers and Force talents, so abilities that effect Force power checks do work on Force talents just as easily as they do on Force powers. Nifty!

This all said, my personal houserule will continue to be that Force power checks can be made with a pool of 0 dice. This is generally useless, but allows characters with the rare ability to add bonus pips to continue to use those bonus pips even if committed down to a current Force Rating of 0.

Hopefully this has been helpful!

Hope this helps. And that it isn't an infringement.

That is actually an interesting question. I would say that you need to have a force rating, but having a force rating of zero would be fine.
So tools like the empty soul or a corrupted kyber crystal should allow you to activate force powers even when not having a positive force rating.

But I am not 100% sure to be honest, it possible that you can not force jump anymore after committing all your force dice into enhancing your brawn. Thematically I think you should be allowed to try to activate force powers even when you have no dice avaible. Your pool is just zero dice in those cases.

2 minutes ago, SEApocalypse said:

That is actually an interesting question. I would say that you need to have a force rating, but having a force rating of zero would be fine.
So tools like the empty soul or a corrupted kyber crystal should allow you to activate force powers even when not having a positive force rating.

But I am not 100% sure to be honest, it possible that you can not force jump anymore after committing all your force dice into enhancing your brawn. Thematically I think you should be allowed to try to activate force powers even when you have no dice avaible. Your pool is just zero dice in those cases.

While I have been convinced that this is not the case per the RAW, it IS the case of how I'm going to run it at my table(s) .

Yes, I do find myself thinking there isn't enough power-creep in the game.