so one of my players created this power tree and ask if i could cost it for them

" the user may spend ZZ to interact with a single object of silhouette 0 as if It were a person "

Huh. Who'd a thought you need a Force power to make the most of those Toydarian blow-up dolls?

17 minutes ago, HappyDaze said:

" the user may spend ZZ to interact with a single object of silhouette 0 as if It were a person "

Huh. Who'd a thought you need a Force power to make the most of those Toydarian blow-up dolls?

okay so the way he described this to me this that people personify objects, give them human qualities, this would allow him to make social checks against the object with it having the qualities it owners project on to it

he's basically giving sentience to a non sentient thing and getting information out of them with social checks like you would with any other sentient race in star wars

1 minute ago, Stormbourne said:

okay so the way he described this to me this that people personify objects, give them human qualities, this would allow him to make social checks against the object with it having the qualities it owners project on to it

he's basically giving sentience to a non sentient thing and getting information out of them with social checks like you would with any other sentient race in star wars

So what's the Discipline for a rock? How much Cool does a chair have? Can the bar of soap turn the tables and seduce the Force-user with its Charm?

Sorry, but this sounds really lame. Stick to something like psychometry instead.

BTW, you need to indicate which expenditures of FPs can be activated multiple times.

1 minute ago, HappyDaze said:

So what's the Discipline for a rock? How much Cool does a chair have? Can the bar of soap turn the tables and seduce the Force-user with its Charm?

Sorry, but this sounds really lame. Stick to something like psychometry instead.

that would be for the GM to decide but i don't feel characters will be interacting with rocks all that often and even if they did what information would it have other then identifying itself as a rock

this is more for asking a special objects like a ship, a throne, or heirloom

5 minutes ago, HappyDaze said:

BTW, you need to indicate which expenditures of FPs can be activated multiple times.

everything but the base power both controls and mastery

Just now, Stormbourne said:

that would be for the GM to decide but i don't feel characters will be interacting with rocks all that often and even if they did what information would it have other then identifying itself as a rock

this is more for asking a special objects like a ship, a throne, or heirloom

If you are going to make a way for characters to use interactions skills with vehicles, furniture, and gear, you first need to figure out a way to set the interaction skill levels and Characteristics for such things.

1 minute ago, HappyDaze said:

If you are going to make a way for characters to use interactions skills with vehicles, furniture, and gear, you first need to figure out a way to set the interaction skill levels and Characteristics for such things.

well that varies form case to case. my idea of this power comes from the stormlight archives where depending on how much thought is put into any object it becomes sentient in and of itself and can be interacted with by certain characters, while commonly over looked items can only identify themselves due to other sentients only giving them definition and with out people personifying them they a a tick as fork

2 hours ago, Stormbourne said:

well that varies form case to case. my idea of this power comes from the stormlight archives where depending on how much thought is put into any object it becomes sentient in and of itself and can be interacted with by certain characters, while commonly over looked items can only identify themselves due to other sentients only giving them definition and with out people personifying them they a a tick as fork

To me that sounds a bit like creating a Holocron, which there aren't really any rules for but would be something I would say falls under Alchemy. So an easier fix for doing that particular thing is probably to add new alchemical crafting thing rather than inventing an entirely new force power. That also saves a bit on your players experiance expediture since they wouldn't need to invest in an entirely new force tree. Might have to buy ranks in discipline or lore, but that's usually cheaper than force powers.

So this is essentially the Psychometry power, "interacting" with objects to learn what events happened to them.

To be honest, I would just go ahead and alter the Foresee power to be used to view past events rather than just future events as opposed to trying to shoehorn in a new Force power that has a similar effect. The classic Farseeing effect it's based upon has historically covered viewing both past and future events in the RPG and in Legends, though the films have stuck purely with future events.

Perhaps change then base power of the modified Foresee so that if the FP is spent, the PC retains one specific piece of information from the vision, and each Strength Upgrade allows the retention of an additional specific piece of information. The user wouldn't be able to see very far into the past, but as I understand it, Psychometry generally had a limited life span of when it could be used to begin with.

I'd be inclined to add this to Foresee by way of an additional branch down the right hand side. Something like...

[ Control 1 ] You get a vision of the most significant event involving the object (if there has ever been one). You can only do this once. Cost of 1 force point.
[ Control 2 ] You can make that vision be of any one event (it doesn't have to be the most significant) that it was involved in. You can still only do it once.
[ Strength ] You can now get a vision of one extra event by spending 2 additional force points (can be used multiple times).
[ Mastery ] This gives you a (nonstacking) Boost die to any rolls that involve understanding the object or relating to the events witnessed. Can be activated once per event witnessed at a cost of +1 force point each.

Needless to say, this can only be attempted once per object, at least by a given person/group.

4 hours ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

So this is essentially the Psychometry power, "interacting" with objects to learn what events happened to them.

To be honest, I would just go ahead and alter the Foresee power to be used to view past events rather than just future events as opposed to trying to shoehorn in a new Force power that has a similar effect. The classic Farseeing effect it's based upon has historically covered viewing both past and future events in the RPG and in Legends, though the films have stuck purely with future events.

Perhaps change then base power of the modified Foresee so that if the FP is spent, the PC retains one specific piece of information from the vision, and each Strength Upgrade allows the retention of an additional specific piece of information. The user wouldn't be able to see very far into the past, but as I understand it, Psychometry generally had a limited life span of when it could be used to begin with.

i was considering reskining the foresee power but the way he descried it to me is that it was less a single image or impression that you get from foresee and more like watching a holovid where you would be able to see everything but if you wanted to notice anything important you would need to pay attention

1 hour ago, Stormbourne said:

i was considering reskining the foresee power but the way he descried it to me is that it was less a single image or impression that you get from foresee and more like watching a holovid where you would be able to see everything but if you wanted to notice anything important you would need to pay attention

To be honest, I think you might be getting a little too hung up on the fluff description.

So assuming you go with adding this as a third branch of the Foresee power, the player can decide to narrate it however they wish, such as in this case being akin to a holovid, with the "paying attention to notice important things" being a factor of Force points spent on the Control Upgrade and then any Strength Upgrades that get triggered expanding the "important things that get noticed."

OK so I actually really like this idea. Seeing vague impressions/visions is far different to touching something and understanding things about it and it's past.
I agree that it should be a separate tree entirely also.
This is cool in premise. What you've got down i'm unsure on but on surface i'm a fan.

5 hours ago, Luahk said:

OK so I actually really like this idea. Seeing vague impressions/visions is far different to touching something and understanding things about it and it's past.
I agree that it should be a separate tree entirely also.
This is cool in premise. What you've got down i'm unsure on but on surface i'm a fan.

anything in particular that's raising a red flag?

In Dark Disciple, Quinlan Vos could sense things about rare artifacts by touching them. It might be worth checking this out for inspiration.

Edit: I just noticed this power was called psychometry- which was previously mentioned in this thread.

TBH when I saw the Force Power title I imagined using the Force to dig up fossils and lost civilisations

So I'm AFBookshelf... isn't this a version of ... err... umm....Sense? or... you could look at the Time Sphere from Mage : The Ascension for more inspiration

13 hours ago, Stormbourne said:

anything in particular that's raising a red flag?

So for me...this should become Protect/Unleash or Forsee/((Whatever this is called in the end))

Forsee in many ways isn't as powerful as this. So I think it's important to counteract that by looking at that tree and adding what these powers do. My table runs with each force power as seperate. So you get heal ..or ..harm so i'm not contradicting my prior message about it being seperate. I'm more saying that this should more closely mirror the scale of what Forsee is able to do.
So if forsee can only see ahead days..this shouldn't be able to go back years. Do you see what i;m saying?

That said in order to challenge my own beliefs. I believe, narratively, seeing into the future is much more powerful. It's also a giant challenge for the GM if an experienced player uses the power properly. So I can understand having this more powerful than Forsee in terms of how far it can reach. I 100% do not agree with the interaction bit. Personally that's not just exposition that's ..well them being able to create an NPC to help them out whenever they get stuck. Or at least to me that's how I read it.

1 hour ago, Luahk said:

So for me...this should become Protect/Unleash or Forsee/((Whatever this is called in the end))

Forsee in many ways isn't as powerful as this. So I think it's important to counteract that by looking at that tree and adding what these powers do. My table runs with each force power as seperate. So you get heal ..or ..harm so i'm not contradicting my prior message about it being seperate. I'm more saying that this should more closely mirror the scale of what Forsee is able to do.
So if forsee can only see ahead days..this shouldn't be able to go back years. Do you see what i;m saying?

That said in order to challenge my own beliefs. I believe, narratively, seeing into the future is much more powerful. It's also a giant challenge for the GM if an experienced player uses the power properly. So I can understand having this more powerful than Forsee in terms of how far it can reach. I 100% do not agree with the interaction bit. Personally that's not just exposition that's ..well them being able to create an NPC to help them out whenever they get stuck. Or at least to me that's how I read it.

legends calls this flow walk but im thinking hindsight for some obvious reasons

so it's a good idea on paper might be OP in practice?

One question I would ask is: Will this power help of hinder your story? I'm currently planning an Archaeology themed campaign and this is something that I was planning to do narratively. i.e. you enter the temple and immediately you each have a vision of...

So really a power like this would be cool to push the story forward and lead to more player interaction during these scenes. So what I would ask myself as GM is: What do you want the power to look like and how can it benefit your story? And on the other side, will it detract from the experiences of the other players if they do not share the visions?

A flip side to what VMK said is "will this power wind up short-circuiting or otherwise ruining the story I want to tell?"

Powers like precognition and postcognition have a nasty habit of killing the suspense in many RPGs, with a few super hero games even outright saying the GM should consider disallowing such things if they're running a game that's focused on exploration or mystery solving.

Re-reading the original post, it to an extent sounds like the player is after a one-stop shop that they roll for an effect and potentially get several answers based out of a single roll. As Luahk mentioned, Foresee isn't nearly as useful (apart from the boost to initiative) given it only goes a few days out, can be maddeningly vague, and isn't even assured to happen except maybe in very broad strokes as this proposed power.

For an archeology-centric campaign, a power like this would take a lot of the fun out of the exploration aspect if the PC could simply make a Force power check and just suddenly "know" various details even if they're decades, centuries, or millennia old.

21 hours ago, Stormbourne said:

legends calls this flow walk but im thinking hindsight for some obvious reasons

so it's a good idea on paper might be OP in practice?

Yes.

4 hours ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

A flip side to what VMK said is "will this power wind up short-circuiting or otherwise ruining the story I want to tell?"

Powers like precognition and postcognition have a nasty habit of killing the suspense in many RPGs, with a few super hero games even outright saying the GM should consider disallowing such things if they're running a game that's focused on exploration or mystery solving.

Re-reading the original post, it to an extent sounds like the player is after a one-stop shop that they roll for an effect and potentially get several answers based out of a single roll. As Luahk mentioned, Foresee isn't nearly as useful (apart from the boost to initiative) given it only goes a few days out, can be maddeningly vague, and isn't even assured to happen except maybe in very broad strokes as this proposed power.

For an archeology-centric campaign, a power like this would take a lot of the fun out of the exploration aspect if the PC could simply make a Force power check and just suddenly "know" various details even if they're decades, centuries, or millennia old.

More yes.

In effect my issue is that this should be hard constrained. I probably intend to make something similar because, as I tried hard to make clear, i'm a big fan of this idea. But it's the scale and scope I have an issue with.

It could be something as simple as nerfing it to when you pick something up you can learn one specific detail about it. Like...lets say you pick up Revan's lightsaber. At very basic you might only know that it belonged to someone powerful...you could add detail to understand who it belonged to..detail to understand how it came to be here..mastery to relieve the event that lead to it falling into this place.
Being able to talk to Revan because of picking up his lightsaber doesn't make sense lol. Do you see where i'm going?

Like myself and the others said don't be scared to allow challenge to be real man. You want force powers to be helpful but not instantly solve. As I see envision it this power should make the journey easier and be helpful in solving the riddle. With you using seek to find the powerful item easier but it doesn't show you the specific safe path around the traps to it.

I've waffled on enough but i just want to stress again that I really do like this idea and I will be figuring out an version myself.

5 hours ago, Luahk said:

More yes.

In effect my issue is that this should be hard constrained. I probably intend to make something similar because, as I tried hard to make clear, i'm a big fan of this idea. But it's the scale and scope I have an issue with.

It could be something as simple as nerfing it to when you pick something up you can learn one specific detail about it. Like...lets say you pick up Revan's lightsaber. At very basic you might only know that it belonged to someone powerful...you could add detail to understand who it belonged to..detail to understand how it came to be here..mastery to relieve the event that lead to it falling into this place.
Being able to talk to Revan because of picking up his lightsaber doesn't make sense lol. Do you see where i'm going?

Like myself and the others said don't be scared to allow challenge to be real man. You want force powers to be helpful but not instantly solve. As I see envision it this power should make the journey easier and be helpful in solving the riddle. With you using seek to find the powerful item easier but it doesn't show you the specific safe path around the traps to it.

I've waffled on enough but i just want to stress again that I really do like this idea and I will be figuring out an version myself.

let me make it clear an object is separate from its user. if you pick up revan's lightsaber you're not going to talk to him but the weapon, and because of all the loss and sorrow it has caused and it's association with it, it might mourn everyone it has killed. a powerful weapon that cry's at it's use

41 minutes ago, Stormbourne said:

it might moron everyone it has killed. a powerful weapon that cry's at it's use

Moron... I do not think this word means what you think it means.

3 minutes ago, HappyDaze said:

Moron... I do not think this word means what you think it means.

thank you inigo montoya