Hypothetically speaking if you wanted to try playing the Force as a skill based system rather than the Force Rating system currently in place what skills would you use?

Im thinking Control (Willpower), Sense (Cunning) and Alter (Intellect) would be the most obvious choices. But is that enough, is Alter going to be too good and need splitting up to have 4 skills?

Force powers would need to be rewritten to use these skills instead, where previously spending a Force pip would instead increase the difficulty of the check just like Genesys Magic.

eg.

Enhance would somehow use Control, “suffer two Strain to add Success or Advantage up to ranks in Control to any Athletics check”

Move would use Alter, “Make an Easy Alter Force Power Check to move an object of Silhouette 0 from within Short range to anywhere else in short range”

Seek would use Sense, “Temporarily remove 1 Ability dice from all Sense Checks to Upgrade the Difficulty of one incoming combat check each round.”

Talents can then be modified to key off these different skills where ranks in a skill, temporary dice pool reductions, or the results of a skill check, determines the outcome.

Thoughts?

Alter does seem really good, I might break it up into mental alter and physical alter.

Direct or Impose for the mental side?

Alter for the physical side?

Assuming that all "Force Skills" would be "in-Career" for all Force Users, and proceeding from there that each Power as-is currently has well more than a "Skill-tracks worth" of xp to be invested in it, wouldn't the most parsimonious solution/simplest mechanical translation be to just have each Power be a new Skill?

I mean it'd be massive Skill bloat, but isn't that really what is is already? Just a bit different skin.

Whittling all Powers down to 3 Skills would 1.) make Force Users more able to accumulate more power more easily, and/or 2.) necessitate a massive rebalancing of the Power, and/or likely nerfing (where the Powers already have troubles living up to people's vision of canon Force use)?

SWRPGs individual Force Powers are WAY more powerful than Gensys' various Magics. So breaking SWRPGs Force down to 3 Skills like Gensys' Magic is gonna result in MAJOR balance issues.

I would expect different careers to have different Force Skills as career skills. If you don’t have the skill then you can’t train it, Talents or narrative situations can give you the skill as a career skill.

I’m not imagining there being only 3 Force Powers, I just gave three examples. I was picturing every power being converted, but kept separate. Your idea of a skill for each power is interesting, but perhaps too xp intense?

Currently it’s really expensive to have a FR of 4 or 5, something like 300xp at the minimum, with 200 of that xp going to Talents whilst about 100 goes to the actual Force Rating. Then you need to put xp into the powers as well. My thinking was that for a character to be really good with all the Force Powers they need to be good with 3 or 4 skills. Because they are tied to different characteristics that makes it really expensive, especially because you don’t get any talents along the way. So 4 ranks in 4 skills costs 200xp with no talents or powers.

Then the powers themselves cost xp, with all the usual upgrades.

but the main reason to have a smaller number of common skills is so that talents can work with them; Animal Empathy, Saber Swarm, Executioners Shot, they don’t have a power they are directly related to, but could be linked to a more generic skill.

56 minutes ago, Richardbuxton said:

Your idea of a skill for each power is interesting, but perhaps too xp intense?

It's 75xp to take a Career Skill from 0 to 5 ranks, 100 for out. Under your system, that's 225 - 300 xp to be one of the greatest Force Users of all time (depending on underlying Characteristics), isn't that a little, no a crap ton, xp-lite??

In "vanilla" Force Power structure, maxing out the cheapest Power is maybe 105 xp in Farsight. One of the most useless Powers is 105 xp.

Youre proposing to be able to max out ALL Power Skills in 225 xp.

You think my suggestion was xp-intensive? The "vanilla" Force Power structure is what's xp-intensive.

And it should be. The Force Powers - as structured in "vanilla" - are very Powerful.

So to do what you want: cut everything down to 3 Skills, you're either going to have to nerf every single Power, or have massively disbalanced characters.

Seems to me having every Power as a Skill is actually a nice compromise between the vanilla super-xp intensive set up (Bind is 170 alone to max out), and your super-xp lite set up.

The price for Powers doesn’t change, your still spending xp to be able to use the base power, then xp for all the upgrades to that power, this is very different to the Genesys Magic Spells and I’m suggesting it intentionally. But you also have to spend xp of the Skill too.

So to be the best at farsight you need to spend that 105xp, then also spend 75xp on 5 ranks of a Skill, then you also need to be decent at the Linked characteristic, taking at least 1 if not 2 Dedications.

at that point you will be very good at any Force Power Linked to that skill, but you still can’t use them because you haven’t spent xp on it. Farsight is probably the same skill as Enhance, so to be doing all the Enhance stuff you need another 95xp.

But if you also want to be good at Move then that’s an entire different skill and characteristic you need to invest in.

The system would tend towards more focused Force Users, concentrating on one area of the Force rather than the more a la carte of the current system. Xp cost comes in diversity in my idea, you can easily be good at one thing but not at everything. Where as now you can easily be diverse and weak but being amazing makes you amazing at everything you try.

i definitely agree the xp cost of this new system needs to be very similar to the Force Rating system.

How would you model light side/ dark side in this system? I played the WEG version back in the day and as I recall it was more about certain powers and actions giving you dark side points. I prefer the FFG way.

Is there a middle ground?

Honestly I haven’t thought that far.

Would you keep Morality? Perhaps, it’s a solid system if a little easy to power play. If you did then the consequences of being light or dark would stay the same. If there’s another system that works better then it’s worth considering, but keeping Morality simplified the conversion a lot.

But how would Dark/light come into the dice roll? I have a few ideas:

1. Results modification: a Dark Side Character can suffer Strain to add Advantage to the results, a Lightside can suffer Strain to add Success.

2. Difficulty modification: Lightside reduces the difficulty by 1 at the cost of Strain, Dark Side adds an Ability dice at the cost of Strain. If either option are triggered it excludes some of the Force Powers or their upgrades (Eg Heal/Harm).

3. The 4 Genesys motivations would be another good place to start, rename them to more force related stuff. Two representing the light side of your character, the other two your dark side, Selfless/Selfishness, Something/Fear, basicly the two things that make you help others and have positive emotions vs the two things that you do for yourself and have negative emotions. Lightside characters playing to your light side adds boost , playing to your dark adds Setback. Make that same character Dark Side and you reverse it, playing to your dark side motivations adds boost, playing to your light side adds Setback.

37 minutes ago, Richardbuxton said:

The price for Powers doesn’t change, your still spending xp to be able to use the base power, then xp for all the upgrades to that power, this is very different to the Genesys Magic Spells and I’m suggesting it intentionally. But you also have to spend xp of the Skill too.

Ah, I was missing that part of the suggestion.

To me, the whole point of converting it to a Skill-based system would be to unify it with all other mechanics, like Genesys does.

So to me there is no point or value in holding onto the "Power Trees" but getting rid of the Force die.

Given the fundamental disparity in visions, I will bow out of this conversation.

14 minutes ago, Richardbuxton said:

Honestly I haven’t thought that far.

Would you keep Morality? Perhaps, it’s a solid system if a little easy to power play. If you did then the consequences of being light or dark would stay the same. If there’s another system that works better then it’s worth considering, but keeping Morality simplified the conversion a lot.

But how would Dark/light come into the dice roll? I have a few ideas:

1. Results modification: a Dark Side Character can suffer Strain to add Advantage to the results, a Lightside can suffer Strain to add Success.

2. Difficulty modification: Lightside reduces the difficulty by 1 at the cost of Strain, Dark Side adds an Ability dice at the cost of Strain. If either option are triggered it excludes some of the Force Powers or their upgrades (Eg Heal/Harm).

3. The 4 Genesys motivations would be another good place to start, rename them to more force related stuff. Two representing the light side of your character, the other two your dark side, Selfless/Selfishness, Something/Fear, basicly the two things that make you help others and have positive emotions vs the two things that you do for yourself and have negative emotions. Lightside characters playing to your light side adds boost , playing to your dark adds Setback. Make that same character Dark Side and you reverse it, playing to your dark side motivations adds boost, playing to your light side adds Setback.

You could keep the force die mechanic. Roll along with the skill and modify the check by spending light/ dark pips. Dark side being quicker and more seductive.

8 minutes ago, emsquared said:

Ah, I was missing that part of the suggestion.

To me, the whole point of converting it to a Skill-based system would be to unify it with all other mechanics, like Genesys does.

So to me there is no point or value in holding onto the "Power Trees" but getting rid of the Force die.

Given the fundamental disparity in visions, I will bow out of this conversation.

I’m still very interested in your ideas, I too would love to have the really open mechanic of Genesys spells converted to Star Wars, but like you I saw a problem in the xp change.

If you have ideas on how to increase the xp cost of spells without losing the versatility of them it would be great. Potentially you could condense the Force Powers down to a smaller list with more additional effects per power, then have xp costs for each effect, but the power balance of that is going to be a long process.

13 minutes ago, ESP77 said:

You could keep the force die mechanic. Roll along with the skill and modify the check by spending light/ dark pips. Dark side being quicker and more seductive.

I was trying to avoid the Force dice otherwise what’s the point.

With keeping Morality you could have another way of implementing dark/light:

Lightsiders suffer 2 Strain(could depend on the power) to use a Force Power. They may also suffer 1 Strain and 1 Conflict to add a Success or Advantage to the results.

Dark Siders suffer 1 Conflict and 2 Strain (again could be dependent on the power) to use a Force Power. They may suffer 1 Strain to add a Success or Advantage to the check.

Someone else had a similar idea a bit ago, maybe it'll serve as some inspiration:

https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/267006-the-big-star-wars-to-genesys-force-conversion-brainstorm/

5 hours ago, ErikModi said:

Someone else had a similar idea a bit ago, maybe it'll serve as some inspiration:

https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/267006-the-big-star-wars-to-genesys-force-conversion-brainstorm/

Nice, I missed that. Keeping FR as a Characteristic is definitely a functional idea. Some of the other parts sound a little complex.

As far as how to split the powers I think it gets better if you have 5 skills:

Control (power to use the force to enhance oneself): Enhance, Heal (self), Farsight.

Sense (power to feel changes in the Force): Foresee, Seek, Sense, Ebb/Flow.

Alter (power to manipulate reality with the Force): Bind, Heal/Harm, Manipulate, Move,

Influence (Power to manipulate minds with the Force): Battle Meditation, Influence, Misdirect

Edit: Manifest Instead of Release (Power to turn the Force into energy, enhancing or hindering others): Protect/Unleash, Imbue, Suppress

Release is a terrible name, (Thanks Phee for suggesting Manifest, it’s much better) but it’s all I got for now. The idea is Move and Bind wraps a target in the Force and alters it’s Physical form. Unleash and Imbue on the other hand use the power of the Force directly on the target as a form of energy. One is potential/kinetic energy whilst the other is more electromagnetism.

Sense and Alter are still very appealing, but things are spread out enough that most people would want at least two of the skills.

I would expect powers like Unleash to have a base difficulty of 3. With the maximum difficulty of 5 you can’t really do much with that. So if this is an idea that keeps the Specialisation Trees then each Force Rating Talent gets reworded to:

Force Specialist: Choose 1 Force Skill, permanently reduce the difficulty of skill checks to use that skill by 1.

In that way you can get better at and do more with Unleash by investing Force Specialist Talents into Release.

While I disagree with this idea in general (I love the Force dice and would never want to see them go!), I think I can help you out with one thing, at least .

The name of the skill that includes Protect/Unleash, Imbue, and Suppress is clearly Manifest.

7 minutes ago, Absol197 said:

While I disagree with this idea in general (I love the Force dice and would never want to see them go!), I think I can help you out with one thing, at least .

The name of the skill that includes Protect/Unleash, Imbue, and Suppress is clearly Manifest.

Thank you ❤️

5 hours ago, Richardbuxton said:

Nice, I missed that. Keeping FR as a Characteristic is definitely a functional idea.

If you do that you'll need a Force Sensitive talent that gives you FR 1. Then you make Force Rating a ranked t5 like Dedication.

Keeping FR as an attribute ties in to my earlier idea of using light/ dark pips to modify your powers. You could have a chart of light side and dark side additional effects that become more powerful the more pips you get.

So a thought (might be good, might be bad)...

Since you seem to be angling the route of Genesys with how it treats magic, why not have a single skill, such as Force Usage, or maybe even Force? It'd be considered a default career skill for the F&D careers, but not for any of the specializations. Not sure what characteristic to tie it to though; Saga Edition used Charisma, which would be Presence here, though Willpower seems to be the "default" if you consider Discipline to the be go-to skill for Force usage.

However, the catch is that in order to use a Force power, you still have to purchase the "base" power. So in order to use Move, Enhance, and Sense, you'd have to shell out 30XP (10 XP per power). Base difficulty is 1 purple to "activate" the power.

You don't have to purchase upgrades, but triggering them is an increase of difficulty per upgrade used where a Force Point is required, and then spend 2A to trigger that upgrade multiple times.

So for Move, to hurl a Silhouette 2 object that's at Medium Range, you'd be rolling Force skill against 3 purples (1 for base, +1 for Strength upgrade, +1 for Range upgrade) and would need to have 2A for the increase on the Strength upgrade.

For "Commit FD" effects, the PC instead downgrades their Force skill for each committed effect; so having Sense's defense Control upgrade active would change PC's Force skill dice pool built upon 3 characteristic and 2 skill ranks to be 1Y2G instead of the normal 2Y1G they'd otherwise be rolling.

Overall, I think changing it to a purely skill based system and not really using Force Rating is going to wind up making Force users a good deal more powerful, since they probably won't have to spread their XP nearly as far as they do currently, which in turn is one of the balancing factors FFG seems to have employed to keep Force users from ruling the roost as much as they had in prior RPGs.

You summed up exactly what I’m thinking Dono, exactly.

5 hours ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

Overall, I think changing it to a purely skill based system and not really using Force Rating is going to wind up making Force users a good deal more powerful, since they probably won't have to spread their XP nearly as far as they do currently, which in turn is one of the balancing factors FFG seems to have employed to keep Force users from ruling the roost as much as they had in prior RPGs.

And this right here is the problem. But I was hoping the solution was to have multiple skills, making it much more expensive to be good at everything. You could specialise in one power much easier, and being a Lightsaber user would be less of a tax.

Im still even considering that when you buy the base power you get the first rank in a specific skill for that power. That way you can easily get 4 or 5 Powers of your choice at a low level, but being awesome at them all requires significant xp investment... it’s a complex equation to balance.

What about handling Force Ratings and Force talents and powers through something like (this would need additional language further explaining how things work for dark siders):

Force Rating

Tier: 3,

Ranked: Yes

The first time this talent is purchased, your character gains a Force Rating of 1, a Morality of 50 and you are a Light Side Force User. Additional purchases increase the Force Rating by 1. When making Force Checks, you may add Proficiency Dice up to Force Rating. Additional Successes, up to Force Rating, may be purchased by calling on the dark side of the force. For each success purchased in this way, spend 1 strain and reduce Morality by 1. At the end of the session, roll a simple Discipline Check. For each Success and Advantage, increase Morality by 1.

A Light Side User becomes a Dark Side User if his morality is lower than 30. A Dark Side User becomes a Light Side User if his morality is higher than 70. A character's strain threshold increases by 1 if his Morality is greater than 75, and by an additional 1 if Morality is higher than 90.

In addition, the GM may reduce your character's morality based on your character's choices and the moral code of your game. The GM should discuss this with you before you take your actions.

The thread I linked really excited me, for the exact reason that I wanted to include more Force powers in my game, but my players were less enthused, precisely because of concerns that the two Force-Sensitive PCs would easily overshadow the droid PC.

I think 3 skills works. While Alter would have the bulk of powers, I think Sense and Control would have more powerful powers normally. My gut instinct is that paying to unlock each basic power, as well as making the Force skills non-Career always (excepting maybe with Mentor) and basing them on Force Rating instead of an existing Characteristic (so they're a little harder to raise) would be mostly balanced, especially in conjunction with Donovan's difficulty and advantage suggestion.

But my gut instincts are often wrong.

Someone needs to do math.

Or make some Knight Level characters and see how they fare. I suppose a person could create characters with the SW rules and with the proposed Genesys conversion rules and see what happens if they fight and/or face various challenges.

If you were to use a Tier 3 Ranked Genesys talent to gain force dice, here is how XP costs compare to SW (which is an approximation based on my looking at a half dozen specs). Because higher level talents are harder to get in Genesys (taking a T5 Force Die means you are a long way from a dedication, where the opposite is true in SW), I've also included a Tier 2 ranking.

15 hours ago, Richardbuxton said:

Thank you ❤️

No trouble ! Glad I could offer some assistance, at least.

I'll admit, while I was on the playtest for Genesys, and I love the narrative dice system, and I very much appreciate what it's trying to do...It's not really my cup of tea, for all the reasons that a lot of other people seem to like it.