Hey all! You may have seen my thread on the Edge board about a tweak to the Linked quality; long story short, it's a bad idea ! But I do love to tinker, so I've taken a look at a couple other abilities that might benefit from a tiny change: the Feint talent, and the ever popular Move power.

Let's start with Move. So, I feel the general consensus is that Move is a fairly potent Force power, to the degree that it might actually be broken. My classic fix was to change the difficulty of Move attacks, so that they're built like skills: take the Silhouette of the object being thrown, and the range of the attack. The larger number is the Difficulty, the smaller is number of upgrades. So far, this has worked well for me in game: of you're close up, you can drop a starship on an enemy without much worry, but once you're tossing that ship across half a kilometer, the chance of it rolling and causing some collateral damage you maybe don't want becomes not-insignificant. So characters tend to throw smaller objects, which keeps the damage from getting too ridiculous.

But I was thinking: what about a simpler fix? What would people say if we have the Hurl upgrade of Move a cost of 1 Force point to use? That would mean you can still throw telekinetic projectiles at Force rating 1, but you'd be limited to Silhouette 0 at short range. And at bigger Force ratings it gets easier, but you'll still need to invest some spiritual energy into enough "oomph!" to get the object moving fast enough to cause damage. It should help reduce the crazy amount of flying YT-1300s out there, no? What do you folks think? By itself? Combined with my Difficulty change? Or neither?

The second thing I want to look at is Feint, one of the (currently) unique talents for the Makashi Duelist. Now, on the surface Feint looks good: of you miss a melee attack but have three Advantage to spare, you were actually feinting the whole time! The target upgrades their next attack against you a number of times equal to your ranks. Coolio!

But the issue comes in with that first stipulation: the attack has to miss. Now, "miss" isn't very clearly defined in this game, but generally it means the same as "failed" for combat checks. If you cancel Successes and Failures and net 0 or fewer Successes, you've missed. But especially for Lightsaber combatants (and those are really the only ones who can get the talent currently), failed Lightsaber checks are fairly rare. Typically you'll hit, but your opponent will reduce the damage with Parry. So if you never miss, the talent is worthless.

I mean, the general answer would probably be "Great! I never need it because I always hit and am awesome!" But a hit with 1 Success could potentially be entirely cancelled out by your opponent's Parry, or at least to such a degree that you would have been better off getting the double defensive upgrade rather than the 2 wounds and the Discouraging Wound crit you got. So my idea was to make Feint work as follows:

"You may spend [AAA] or [R] on a melee combat check to upgrade the difficulty of the next combat check the target makes against you once per rank of Feint. If you do, your combat check deals no wounds."

Thoughts? Giving you the choice might make the talent more useful. I was considering making the use of Feint come after the target chooses whether or not to use Parry, but that seemed a bit too good.

Okay, thanks for humoring me, everyone!

2 hours ago, Absol197 said:

Hey all! You may have seen my thread on the Edge board about a tweak to the Linked quality; long story short, it's a bad idea ! But I do love to tinker, so I've taken a look at a couple other abilities that might benefit from a tiny change: the Feint talent, and the ever popular Move power.

Let's start with Move. So, I feel the general consensus is that Move is a fairly potent Force power, to the degree that it might actually be broken. My classic fix was to change the difficulty of Move attacks, so that they're built like skills: take the Silhouette of the object being thrown, and the range of the attack. The larger number is the Difficulty, the smaller is number of upgrades. So far, this has worked well for me in game: of you're close up, you can drop a starship on an enemy without much worry, but once you're tossing that ship across half a kilometer, the chance of it rolling and causing some collateral damage you maybe don't want becomes not-insignificant. So characters tend to throw smaller objects, which keeps the damage from getting too ridiculous.

But I was thinking: what about a simpler fix? What would people say if we have the Hurl upgrade of Move a cost of 1 Force point to use? That would mean you can still throw telekinetic projectiles at Force rating 1, but you'd be limited to Silhouette 0 at short range. And at bigger Force ratings it gets easier, but you'll still need to invest some spiritual energy into enough "oomph!" to get the object moving fast enough to cause damage. It should help reduce the crazy amount of flying YT-1300s out there, no? What do you folks think? By itself? Combined with my Difficulty change? Or neither?

The second thing I want to look at is Feint, one of the (currently) unique talents for the Makashi Duelist. Now, on the surface Feint looks good: of you miss a melee attack but have three Advantage to spare, you were actually feinting the whole time! The target upgrades their next attack against you a number of times equal to your ranks. Coolio!

But the issue comes in with that first stipulation: the attack has to miss. Now, "miss" isn't very clearly defined in this game, but generally it means the same as "failed" for combat checks. If you cancel Successes and Failures and net 0 or fewer Successes, you've missed. But especially for Lightsaber combatants (and those are really the only ones who can get the talent currently), failed Lightsaber checks are fairly rare. Typically you'll hit, but your opponent will reduce the damage with Parry. So if you never miss, the talent is worthless.

I mean, the general answer would probably be "Great! I never need it because I always hit and am awesome!" But a hit with 1 Success could potentially be entirely cancelled out by your opponent's Parry, or at least to such a degree that you would have been better off getting the double defensive upgrade rather than the 2 wounds and the Discouraging Wound crit you got. So my idea was to make Feint work as follows:

"You may spend [AAA] or [R] on a melee combat check to upgrade the difficulty of the next combat check the target makes against you once per rank of Feint. If you do, your combat check deals no wounds."

Thoughts? Giving you the choice might make the talent more useful. I was considering making the use of Feint come after the target chooses whether or not to use Parry, but that seemed a bit too good.

Okay, thanks for humoring me, everyone!

These are much simpler tweaks to the system than what I've done. They're perfectly reasonable, and I wouldn't say there's anything wrong with them.

Once I get home, I'll post my tweaks to the Move power.

Alrighty, so my custom version of Move:

Basically, I added a Discipline check requirement, which grows more difficult as you use the Strength upgrade to lift larger items. I made it harder to get the Hurl upgrade (by far the strongest part of the Move tree, in my opinion), and gave a second damaging option, the Force Push. I reduced the number of Strength upgrades to just one, so to lift an item, you basically need to spend Force Points=Silhouette+1, making it harder to abuse the Hurl upgrade (two pips to lift a Silhouette 4 item and throw it at someone? No thanks). I also took a couple of the suggested options in the sidebars (being able to commit Force Die to continue levitating an item after you've lifted it, and being able to spend a Destiny Point to perform Move out-of-turn to catch someone who is falling or something) and made them into actual upgrades. I also added in a weaker version of Move that can be used as a Maneuver instead of an Action, that can only be used on Silhouette 0 items. This is mostly with the intent of doing things like pulling a lightsaber to the player, or other such small things.

I’m at the point where I can effectively get feint - and I’m currently unsure about it

Im rolling 4Y1G (thanks Sense!!!!) to attack - so I feel I’ve got a good chance to hit, so is it really worth it

it doesn’t unlock anything from a tree point of view

These seem like nice, easy, precise changes, something I'm always in favor of when it comes to house rules.

Though I'm also liking that alternate Move power. I think I'll show it to my group next time we meet.

39 minutes ago, Random Bystander said:

I’m at the point where I can effectively get feint - and I’m currently unsure about it

Im rolling 4Y1G (thanks Sense!!!!) to attack - so I feel I’ve got a good chance to hit, so is it really worth it

it doesn’t unlock anything from a tree point of view

Sadly Feint is one of those talents that looks awesome on paper, but is far less so in application.

Easiest tweak to make it viable is to allow the talent to be used regardless of whether you hit or miss. Adds a bit of power in melee combat (which makes sense as that's what Makashi is all about), but a PC with just this spec is extremely vulnerable to ranged combat attacks, which comprises the majority of attacks a PC is going to be dealing with in the setting.

For Move, I've been toying around with a revised version these past few days, which provides a minor buff early on but waters down the overall damage output in the longer run.

As things stand, I'm removing the "hurl objects" control upgrade and just rolling that into the basic power, with the caveat that hurling a Silhouette 0 object to attack is a Discipline ranged combat check against an Easy difficulty. Said control upgrade is replaced with one that adds the Knockdown quality and the ability to inflict a critical injury for 3A (since by RAW you can't inflict a critical injury anyway, though allowing it on a Triumph is a fairly common house rule). Magnitude upgrade description is tweaked to include the note of using the autofire rules since hurling objects to attack no longer requires a separate upgrade.

In trade-off, Strength Upgrades will only add Silhouette times 5 damage to the base; a Silhouette 2 object under this revision would deal 15 damage instead of 20, and a Silhouette 4 object only inflicts 25 damage instead of 40. One part I'm not settled on is that the difficulty of the Discipline check to attack with the hurled object is increased by Silhouette but off a base difficulty of Easy instead of Simple; hurling a Silhouette 1 object would roll against an Average difficulty, while a Silhouette 4 is Formidable, and trying to attack with anything bigger than Silhouette 4 falls into the realm of an impossible task. Part of me wants to say the reduced damage is enough of a trade-off that I can just keep the Discipline ranged combat check's difficulty at equal to Silhouette (minimum of Easy though even for Silhouette 0 objects), and while I've been fortunate to not have players try to abuse the heck out of Move, there's still an element of trepidation at inadvertently ramping up what is probably the strongest Force power of the lot.

I had thought about a difficulty tweak not unlike Absol's, but with reducing the damage from Move I thought that was a bit overkill in "nerfing" Move and added an extra complication in figuring out the combat difficulty.

Feint is really poor as it stands, I've found, which is really unfortunate when you consider it's one of Maskashi's few interesting abilities that set it apart. Upgrading once on a miss is theoretically a nice boon for someone who misses a strike, but the reality of it is anyone who takes Makashi tends to put a decent bit of effort (and XP) into never missing. I feel like it should be triggered through Parry, or even be an active talent with a lower strain requirement (1 strain per upgrade limited to ranks in Feint?). The only way I can see it being more useful on it's current Despair/Threat trigger is if it increased , rather than upgraded, the difficulty. Even then, it's tough to see it's value with that trigger.

I feel like part of the problem is how massively strict the conditions are.
First, you miss. Feint is an insurance policy that gives you something back if the worst happens. I get that, but as I mentioned, Makashi users generally sink points into never missing.
Second, you generate Despair, or 3x Threat. Immediately this feels bad, as generating 3x Threat from 2x Difficulty die means you almost definitely hit a minion or rival, and probably even hit a nemesis with Adversary 4. A useful Despair result is likely only going to trigger against a high nemesis, and I feel like you'd get much more out of spending that Despair on almost anything else (not to mention you can spend the Despair to upgrade that character's next check, even without Feint anyway).

The idea is thematic, but the execution just feels like a waste. If I had my way, I think I'd reword the first rank of it to increase the difficulty instead of upgrade on a miss (regardless of Threat/Despair), and replace the second rank with a sort of Supreme Parry that reduces strain for Parry. A duelist should be an expert at such things, so I've always felt it a bit odd that they pay the same strain cost as others. Failing that, upgrade difficulty after using Parry talent.

With regards to fient I dont think that its worthless the chances of rolling success on a check with 4 yellow and 1 green positive dice against the simplest check you can get ie 2 purple is 90%. That is a boss lightsaber skilk backed with a high characteristic, against a nemesis 3 opponent this drops to 75%, So fient is not entierely useless , obviously its more useful at lower skills, but at higher skills the chances are if you failed you have a lot of advantage in the roll.

Note that adding 3 setback to the roll will knock off another 15% off your chance of rolling success.

4Y1Gv2P

http://game2.ca/eote/?montecarlo=100000#proficiency=4&ability=1&difficulty=2

4Y1Gv2R1P

http://game2.ca/eote/?montecarlo=100000#proficiency=4&ability=1&challenge=2&difficulty=1

4Y1Gv2P3B

http://game2.ca/eote/?montecarlo=100000#proficiency=4&ability=1&difficulty=2&setback=3

So while only 10% useful against mooks with such a large level of skill in some unusual situations where you are maybe fighting in low light against someone with armor or guarded stance it becomes more relevant as you fail 25% of the time, with a similar probability against nemesis 3 opponents, which at thaf level of skill neither should not be unexpected.

Edit here is a nemesis type opponent, this same check against a soresu defender nemesis you quite possibly have upgraded checks as well as multiple setback in fact so much so that having 4 setback as well as 5 upgrades each time is not beyond the realms of possibility. So take a nemesis 3 with force dice committed to sense and 4 setback you now have only a circa 39% chance of success

http://game2.ca/eote/?montecarlo=100000#proficiency=4&ability=1&challenge=3&difficulty=1&setback=4

before you think that this is an obscure case here is another nemesis example of a lightsaber specializations that you may not think is as good . imagine the same nemesis as an armorer/warden with 3 melee defense(upgraded temple guard armor with improved armor master) and the sense force power , generating 7 upgrades on the check also adding another 2 setback with sense advantage. (circa 24% chance of hitting with 5 LS skill with 4 in chosen characteristic)

http://game2.ca/eote/?montecarlo=100000#proficiency=4&ability=1&challenge=4&difficulty=1&setback=5

My simple Move fix is to make Strength a 2 Force Pip Upgrade. If you want to go a step further then delete two of the strength upgrades from the tree.

I did some tweaking of the Move power as well. I simply ruled that the various upgrades (Strength, Magnitude, etc) don't stack but has to be activated individually for one Force pip each, and cannot be activated multiple times. So far it seems to have solved the problem of Force rating 3 characters throwing YT-1300s around.

Or just tell your players to not abuse it and you won' abuse them... the most my hunter has done was to use one trooper against his own squad and knock over an at-st... although he has thought about using it to steal a ship from a spaceport... he really doesn't like the pilot's g9. Admittedly our gm did house rule that the damage inflicted was devided by the recipients... So instead of dealing 10 damage to each of the thrown trooper and his squad it was 5 to the thrown trooper and 5 to the squad and when taking soak into account it dealt no damage... Just knocked everyone down and made a spectacle of himself.

Just realized I'd forgotten to change the XP costs on the version of Move I posted.

Base Power 10XP

Magnitude 1 - 5XP, Magnitude 2 - 5XP, Magnitude 3 - 10XP, Magnitude 4 - 10XP

Manipulate - 5XP, Duration - 10XP, Snap Move - 15XP, Incidental Move - 15XP

Range 1 - 5XP, Range 2 - 10XP

Strength - 10XP, Force Push - 10XP, Pull - 10XP, Hurl - 20XP

Total XP cost of this tree stays the same as the original tree (150XP for the whole tree). I've found that only having a single Strength upgrade that can be multiple times greatly improves the feel of Move. It now no longer feels like The Force Unleashed gameplay and feels more like the movies, the Clone Wars tv show, and Rebels. Sure, super powerful characters can occasionally do something like move an AT-ST or a shuttle, but it takes a lot of work to get to the level where you can do that consistently.

Our GM has a very simple system - we escalate against him, he escalated back!

On 2/7/2018 at 3:12 AM, Underachiever599 said:

Alrighty, so my custom version of Move:

Basically, I added a Discipline check requirement, which grows more difficult as you use the Strength upgrade to lift larger items. I made it harder to get the Hurl upgrade (by far the strongest part of the Move tree, in my opinion), and gave a second damaging option, the Force Push. I reduced the number of Strength upgrades to just one, so to lift an item, you basically need to spend Force Points=Silhouette+1, making it harder to abuse the Hurl upgrade (two pips to lift a Silhouette 4 item and throw it at someone? No thanks). I also took a couple of the suggested options in the sidebars (being able to commit Force Die to continue levitating an item after you've lifted it, and being able to spend a Destiny Point to perform Move out-of-turn to catch someone who is falling or something) and made them into actual upgrades. I also added in a weaker version of Move that can be used as a Maneuver instead of an Action, that can only be used on Silhouette 0 items. This is mostly with the intent of doing things like pulling a lightsaber to the player, or other such small things.

The biggest problem I have with this is that the Push and Pull abilites are already covered in another Force power: the Bind movement upgrade.

1 hour ago, Tramp Graphics said:

The biggest problem I have with this is that the Push and Pull abilites are already covered in another Force power: the Bind movement upgrade.

Just now, awayputurwpn said:

It's true.

Push and Pull are not covered by Bind.

1. Bind movement only works on people

2. Bind Movement only works on a single range band

3. Bind Movement does zero damage.

Other then that totally covered by Bind...

Not quite.

The Pull Upgrade is the one from the original Move power, covering pulling things loose from secured mountings or from people's hands. Something that Bind doesn't do.

The Force Push is using Move to attack without the need for hurling an object, something that Sam has said the original Move power could do, simply by slamming the target of Move into the ground and narrating it as a "Force push." Which again, Bind doesn't really do, as the option to 'move' folks with Bind exists, but the movement isn't the source of damage, and 'moving' with Bind can be done without inflicting a single point of damage, provided the user doesn't spend any black pips to generate Force points.

1 hour ago, Tramp Graphics said:

It's true.

Is not.

Can't wait to see the minor tweaks that fix Shi Cho/Ataru doing 40 damage easy no soak...

9 minutes ago, Decorus said:

Can't wait to see the minor tweaks that fix Shi Cho/Ataru doing 40 damage easy no soak...

I do have a semi-fix for that as well. Linked and auto-fire type abilities require spending success instead of advantage in my game.

Yeah that makes it worse

9 hours ago, Decorus said:

Can't wait to see the minor tweaks that fix Shi Cho/Ataru doing 40 damage easy no soak...

And exactly how much XP does it take to be able to pull off this combination reliably?

Saber Swarm is Linked = Force Rating, and neither Shii-Cho Knight nor Ataru Striker give you the option of increasing your Force Rating. So that's at least one additional spec (assuming the character selects Seer, Sage, or Hermit for 2 Force Rating boosts). So that's a couple hundred XP just on getting to Force Rating 3.

And then you've got the cost of not only getting the Lightsaber skill to 5 ranks, which isn't as expensive as the above but still a cost to be paid. As well as the various talents needed for the combination. Plus Dedication to get Agility to at least a 4, if not a 5 or 6.

Plus there's needing to spend Advantage to trigger Linked. Multiple Opponents helps a bit, but only against minion groups or when actively engaged with multiple foes; if you're facing only one foe, then both Multiple Opponents and Sarlacc Sweep are useless.

Then you've also got the fact that Sarlacc Sweep only gives you one hit per target, and you need to spend 2A (same cost to trigger on extra hit per rank of Linked) in order to hit a second target.

Lastly, modding a lightsaber to have that much damage that you can easily break 10 damage without a sweat, especially given neither of those specs has much use for Intellect, which is tied to Mechanics, the skill that's used to modify attachments such as lightsaber crystals. Granted, if you've got a GM willing to hand out the high-damage crystals like a Krayt Dragon Pearl or Mephite (which has it's own drawbacks), getting the base damage value that high isn't too major of a concern.

So reliably getting 40+ damage on a single target is a pretty tall order unless you've spent hundreds if not thousands of XP on pulling off that combination. Which is in and of itself a balancing factor, as with the amount of XP required anyone can probably make an equally disgustingly "rules breaking" build; heck, just give the build either heavy repeating blaster rifle or an disruptor rifle and it'll very likely be just as brutal if not more so and do it for much less XP.

How Much XP does it take to throw sil 4 objects?

The same amount as it would take to do make just about every other 40+ damage attack.

The move fix is for a problem that only exists once you hit about 1000 xp to do it with any real reliable chance of success.