TL;DR at the bottom

Forgive me if this has come up before, I couldn't find anything. For those of you familiar with the Genesys rules, I have been slowly converting the powers into "spells" much akin to the magic spells in Genesys. The intent is to play Star Wars but within the Genesys rules. So far my plan has been to remove the Force Die entirely, make the cost 2 strain exactly like the Genesys magic cost and separate the Force Powers into three categories, based off of the three areas of Force ability categories from Legends (Control, Sense, Alter).

The majority of this is easily done, what takes the longest is converting each individual power into a magic spell with the upgrades becoming additional effects. Most of them can be converted without much at all being altered drastically. When an effect required a Force Point to be spent, I have altered it to needing a difficulty die instead. For instance, powers with multiple "range" upgrades, you could just spend a single point to activate all of your upgrades. With this conversion it requires an added difficulty die for each range band increase. Limiting in the sense that you won't activate as many additions to the base power as in Star Wars but freeing in that you aren't beholden to the amount of Force Points on the dice or the amount of upgrades you have purchased. (Also you could technically still add in as many effects as possible but make an "Impossible" difficulty check per the GM's discretion).

An example: the base power of Sense needs an Easy (1) difficulty check, using the appropriate skill. Conversely, moving a silhouette 2 object to medium range with the Move power would be a Hard (3) difficulty check.

What I am stuck on is how to appropriately convert the effects that require you to commit Force Dice to sustain them. I have come up with a few options thusfar and would like input.

1. The concentrate maneuver can sustain effects. Going off the Genesys rules, it only sustains a single effect, so that would have to be altered to allow the maneuver to sustain as many effects as you activate (activation would still cost an action).

2. Committing dice is still a thing but instead of Force Dice, you downgrade your ability to use that specific Force skill once for each effect you sustain. This puts a cap of 5 commit effects for each of the three Force skills, if you had 5 ranks in each skill.

TL;DR

converting Force Powers from Star Wars into Genesys spells, unsure how to convert the duration upgrades and commit effects.

Committing a FD means it's that much harder (if even possible) to use other powers while it's up. So allow augments (or whatever) to be committed with the cost of additional difficulty dice for further casting while committed.

Aside: why not just port the Force sub-system over to Genesys? All you'd really need is some talents to grant FR and maybe a career that gives Force Rating 1 to start with.

8 minutes ago, Lorne said:

Aside: why not just port the Force sub-system over to Genesys? All you'd really need is some talents to grant FR and maybe a career that gives Force Rating 1 to start with.

The idea is to be more free-form than Star Wars is about the Force. In SW, every power and every upgrade is locked behind an XP cost. This conversion is with the same idea of the Genesys magic rules, that you can attempt anything you like but with consequences, without requiring hundreds or even thousands of xp (in SW each power is roughly 100-150xp, maxing Discipline is 75 at the minimum, you need a minimum of 3 Force Rating to purchase any of the powers in the game which requires buying into multiple specializations and working down those trees).

There is still a cost in terms of increasing ranks of the 3 Force skills and I'd likely ensure that only one of the three could be a career skill for characters, meaning to max all of them would cost 275xp (75+100+100) if you had one as a career skill. The abilities have a harder difficulty in this conversion since everything uses the narrative dice but that's offset by being able to use anything that falls under the Force skills you take ranks in.

I think you're trying to mirror how everything works in Star Wars to Genesys. Just focus on making Force powers fun to use in the Genesys system and worry less about whether you're duplicating the control, duration, commit effects etc in the Star Wars core system accurately.

I think it's a lot easier to just ditch some of the Force specific Talents in the Star Wars mechanics and make ones more suited to Genesys, than to shoehorn the mechanics of one into the other. Clean slate approach.

32 minutes ago, 2P51 said:

Clean slate approach.

Yeah actually I could probably add or adjust the additional effects for the attack spell and cover the move/bind/unleash powers that way.

5 minutes ago, GroggyGolem said:

Yeah actually I could probably add or adjust the additional effects for the attack spell and cover the move/bind/unleash powers that way.

Much easier than wrapping your head around options that are built on a special die and a stat that don't exist in Genesys.

Honestly, I wouldn't try to mimic how FFG built Force powers, and instead would go a route similar to how WEG or Saga Edition handled them.

WEG gives you three skills (Control, Sense, Alter) and you could probably build effects around that, with Control being linked to Willpower, Sense iinked to Cunning, and Alter linked to Presence. Yes, it gives Force users serious M.A.D., but seeing as how the WEG system was very free-form and each skill covered a very broad array of effects, it's a bit of a game balancer, especially if the Force users can pretty much whip up effects "on the fly" like magic users can in Genesys.

The Saga Edition approach gives you a single skill (like how most spellcasters in Genesys operate), but to be honest I wouldn't treat it as a normal skill; instead Force users use Willpower as their characteristic, and their Force Rating as their skill ranks. Again, it's balanced out by the fact that Force users can (under the Genesys mindset) create "on the fly" effects as opposed to having pre-established effects that they can't really change.

A lot of the non-combat stuff can be easily covered as Utility spells with a narrative description; pretty much so long as it doesn't negatively impact or directly affect another character you can probably keep a lot of effects under the Utility heading, which cuts down on the grunt work of covering all the minor stuff that we've seen Force users do. Such an approach works out pretty well in the Harry Potter Genesys theme that GM Chris wrote up last year.