On 8/22/2018 at 4:27 PM, Archlyte said:

Hi I was wondering if you guys can give me some feedback on this custom Universal Spec I finally got around to making. Any game mechanics suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks for any help.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ey3029e7yryxkhv/TKM specialization.pdf?dl=0

You do know that teras kasi means steel hands in Finnish right? What's wrong with the "steel hand adept" warrior spec in FaD knights of fate combo'd with the enhance force power? And you can mix that with warden and or martial artist for good measure, shii cho knight has a lot of useful talents, then there's force adherant, marauder, infiltrator, etc.

I'm not seeing the need for a third force sensitive martial artist spec.

28 minutes ago, EliasWindrider said:

You do know that teras kasi means steel hands in Finnish right? What's wrong with the "steel hand adept" warrior spec in FaD knights of fate combo'd with the enhance force power? And you can mix that with warden and or martial artist for good measure, shii cho knight has a lot of useful talents, then there's force adherant, marauder, infiltrator, etc.

I'm not seeing the need for a third force sensitive martial artist spec.

@Archlyte something that I missed on the first pass and I think that you did too but in the opposite sense... you're essentially trying to make a force sensitive martial artist without them actually being force sensitive. A lot of those talents have the flavor of force talents without being force talents. 8m surprised that you didn't put pressure point in there.

1 hour ago, EliasWindrider said:

@Archlyte something that I missed on the first pass and I think that you did too but in the opposite sense... you're essentially trying to make a force sensitive martial artist without them actually being force sensitive. A lot of those talents have the flavor of force talents without being force talents. 8m surprised that you didn't put pressure point in there.

I didn't make up the TK I am just using it. I fully support you in having design differences with the original writers of this stuff (I do all the time), but it was a part of a game I loved and I have fond memories of it.

I like to have very few Jedi running around in the Galactic Civil War era, and I figure this discipline flies under the radar somewhat. I'm putting it in my campaign regardless so I probably should have stated in my OP that the inclusion of it wasn't something I wanted to debate, and I was more interested in the mechanics. I can count the number of FaD characters we have had in our game one hand, so the miscibility of this spec with those isn't too much of a concern for me (is TK going to make X Spec feel like its thunder was stolen).

18 hours ago, EliasWindrider said:

What's wrong with the "steel hand adept" warrior spec in FaD knights of fate combo'd with the enhance force power?

Going by his earlier statements, the "problem" is that none of the existing specs are "one stop shopping" for his particular character concept, and that ultimately he'd prefer to weasel out of buying multiple non-career specs and instead just have one uber-spec, and that any one that wants to be a bad-*** martial artist just has to buy a single universal spec instead of combo'ing one or two out-of-career specs.

Which as whafrog noted earlier in the thread, is very much the intent of the system, in that one spec is going to cover "everything" that a player might want their character to accomplish, and thus acquiring multiple specs is pretty much a necessity for all but the most linear character concepts. Which is probably one of the drivign reasons why the "can't have more than three specializations" restriction from the EotE Beta very quickly went away (the other being that having to remove talents for a spec you dropped was a right pain in the hindquarters).

In way, it's not unlike your past obsession with creating a singular "Jason Bourne" spec for the Spy career and how no single spec allowed you to build a Bourne-esque character at starting (or even Knight Level) XP.

4 hours ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

Going by his earlier statements, the "problem" is that none of the existing specs are "one stop shopping" for his particular character concept, and that ultimately he'd prefer to weasel out of buying multiple non-career specs and instead just have one uber-spec, and that any one that wants to be a bad-*** martial artist just has to buy a single universal spec instead of combo'ing one or two out-of-career specs.

Which as whafrog noted earlier in the thread, is very much the intent of the system, in that one spec is going to cover "everything" that a player might want their character to accomplish, and thus acquiring multiple specs is pretty much a necessity for all but the most linear character concepts. Which is probably one of the drivign reasons why the "can't have more than three specializations" restriction from the EotE Beta very quickly went away (the other being that having to remove talents for a spec you dropped was a right pain in the hindquarters).

In way, it's not unlike your past obsession with creating a singular "Jason Bourne" spec for the Spy career and how no single spec allowed you to build a Bourne-esque character at starting (or even Knight Level) XP.

Actually, I NEVER tried to get everything in 1 spec for starting/knight level xp, I actually went with 2 custom specs to create Jason Bourne, neither of which perfectly fit my Jason Bourne concept because Jason Bourne is at least 2 concepts (soldier:spec-ops and spy:agent) and I was trying to distill/and fill out the essence of those 2 concepts in a more generally applicable way separately, so it's not a perfect analogy, also that was several years ago when there were a lot fewer official specs out there (in particular the soldier/spy/bounty hunter/dawn of rebellion books weren't out yet, and they have character options lot more appropriate to my concept)

Then on my own I discovered demolitionist which I had previously passed over without really looking at simply because of the name "demolitionist" but actually had a mix of talents and skills and signature abilities that I think did an early career Jason Bourne pretty well in a single spec (much more in line with my Jason Bourne concept than either of the 2 custom specs i made), so again it's not exactly an analogous situation.

I think mechanically I was very much on the wrong track initially and so I have changed the spec quite a bit and increased the XP cost for every ability. I didn't want the spec to be a career spec because I wanted it to be its own thing but not a career so that a character could devote to it or just have some ability in it. Having every Martial Artist come from Bounty Hunter wasn't my favorite approach. I also haven't written out the talents yet but most are non-ranked.

I did indeed want a quasi-force sensitive aspect to this to represent a spectrum of Force Sensitivity as the Force is kind of in everything so even if you are ignorant to it you still have some amount of the Force involved with your life. If you have enough to manifest for whatever reason you get the attention of the dark side guys, but they can't eradicate the presence of the Force as it is an energy field present in everything. Assuming no one is as Force dead as a droid, then it seems to me that there would be shades of Force awareness. This sort of everyman's level of Force awareness as attuned by a philosophy was what I envisioned for the TK.

Bumping up the Force Sensitivity, I had hoped, would emulate someone like Chirrut Imwe where minor uses of force powers would be complimented by the spec.

I'm not sure why you felt the need to characterize the idea of one spec to accomplish the goal as "weaseling" as I am using this in a game I run.

Is your assertion is that the mark of a great player is that he hunts around through all the specs listed and builds a concept out of the parts, and this honest and forthright piecemeal approach is somehow inherently a better way to go? The Build aspect seems very important to you, and judging by the way the podcasts treat the subject it's obviously a tenet of the game. But to me it seems like the purchasing of talents you don't need or want simply justifies the cumulative trip to the 1000XP range and beyond, and thus the progression mechanic itself is guarded.

Thanks everyone who gave constructive criticism on the mechanics, with your help I was able to rebuild it based on the suggestions, and think I have a good balance for my campaigns. I have increased the deadliness of ranged combat in my games so this Spec ends up still being situational but gives a few good abilities for someone wanting to do a Melee/Martial Artist (something along the lines of Chirrut Imwe) and be effective but be less conspicuous and effective as a Jedi/Full Force Sensitive. I also noticed how many mistakes there were in the pdf I put up on here, which was pretty embarrassing because I was trying to hurry off to work when I posted it and didn't look it over well enough.